Tales of the Yawning Portal Revives Dungeons & Dragons History

Tales from the Yawning Portal is the new book of adventures for Dungeons & Dragons from Wizards of the Coast, but the adventures themselves aren’t new. It’s a compilation, a greatest hits album, of the most iconic and interesting modules that have been released over the course of the history of the game.
If you’re not familiar with the idea of “modules,” it’s pretty simple. Since the dawn of the game, there have been two broad ways of playing. The first is creating your own campaign, and the second is playing through a pre-written campaign or module. In reality, many players of Dungeons & Dragons end up somewhere in between. A dungeon master (DM), who is basically a referee for the game, will often take elements from published adventures and create new and specific work for her players.
Tales from the Yawning Portal compiles seven different iconic dungeons from throughout D&D’s history and makes them available for DMs and players of the game’s newest version, 5th Edition. This means that anyone who is currently running a D&D campaign can either run these dungeons as a complete adventure or, if they prefer, merely take ideas, set pieces, monsters, and items from these worlds.
There are lots of interesting things to take from the dungeons in Yawning Portal, and one of the more interesting ones is the namesake inn. The structure of the book is not a linear adventure with several planks, and is therefore nothing like last fall’s contained Storm King’s Thunder. Rather, the creators of this compilation have given us a “hook” in a tavern called The Yawning Portal. Within the fiction of the Forgotten Realms, the central world of D&D’s 5th edition, The Yawning Portal is a tavern created by an adventurer who braved and looted Undermountain, one of the most brutal dungeons in the history of the game. The book contains some characters and charts to fill out that tavern, and it suggests that the compiled dungeons are places that players might hear about (or overhear) in this bustling tavern of adventurers.