A DM's honest look at the biggest 5e anthology yet
The Yawning Portal is Barovia's most famous tavern, and in 2016 Wizards of the Coast decided to build an entire sourcebook around it. The result is Tales From The Yawning Portal, a collection of eleven adventures that were either new material or reimaginings of classic D&D settings. It covers everything from the original Keep on the Borderlands through to Planescape's Nightside. The premise is straightforward: adventurers gather at the tavern to hear about open jobs on the walls, pick one that fits their level, and run with it. The book is organized with a loose framing device rather than strict chapter breaks. Each adventure comes with a full stat block section, maps, and loot tables embedded throughout. There are no separate compendiums. The adventures are: Dead Gods - a high-level planescape excursion involving a dead deity's corpse
Ghosts of the Tomb - a classic-style dungeon crawl in a netherese tomb Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords - the infamous B2 reworking Waterdeep: Dragon Heist interlude hooks - brief scenarios tied to the larger module
Princes of the Apocalypse - adventure hooks for that campaign The Sunless Citadel - reimagined from the original Greenest adventure The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan - a reworked version of the classic jungle dungeon
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Tomb of Annihilation preview content River of Blood - a darkwater adventure The Temple of Elemental Evil rework
Palace of the Purple Emperor - a Planescape adventure One thing people consistently miss about the formatting is that the stat blocks are distributed within each adventure rather than collected at the end of the book. This means you are flipping between sections constantly during a session. It works fine in a PDF where you can search. It is annoying in the physical book.
How to actually run these in your game
The book was clearly designed with multiple audiences in mind. Some adventures are beginner-friendly one-shots. Others like Dead Gods assume you are comfortable with planar travel mechanics and multi-layered dungeons. Before you pick anything up, check the recommended level range printed at the top of each adventure's opening page. It is not a suggestion. The encounters are balanced around those levels. Here is the practical workflow I use when running anything from this book. I read the adventure once cover to cover before the session. Then I create a separate one-page reference sheet for that session containing only the NPC names, room descriptions, and monster stats I will need on the table. The book gives you everything, but you do not want to be searching for a single goblin stat block while three players are sitting in silence waiting for you to find it. That usually costs five to eight minutes of dead air per lookup. The physical book itself is decent quality. The paper is thick enough that ink bleed-through is minimal. The map inserts are on sturdier cardstock. But the layout has a consistent flaw: important combat encounters sometimes place the map adjacent to the stat block with no visual separator. At the table, your eyes will drift between them repeatedly during initiative. I always photocopy the relevant pages and tape them together so the map and stats sit side by side. Takes ten minutes and eliminates that entire category of disruption.
For digital play, I scan the PDF and import each adventure's content into Foundry VTT as a separate scene. The built-in search function makes stat retrieval near-instantaneous. This cuts preparation time roughly in half compared to the print version. The tradeoff is that some of the atmospheric artwork gets lost when you strip it out, which matters less if your group cares about mechanical efficiency over immersion.
Adventures that actually hold up after repeated plays
Not every piece in this collection succeeds equally. The Sunless Citadel rework is tight and clean. It works as a single session or stretches comfortably across two if you let the players investigate thoroughly. The original module had some pacing issues that this revision fixes by adding meaningful choices at each decision point rather than railroaded encounters. Dead Gods is ambitious but demanding. It assumes your players understand planar travel, alignment-based mechanics, and how to navigate a city that operates on dream logic. Running it with a new group is possible but requires significant prep time. I ran it with an experienced Planescape campaign and it took about four sessions to complete properly. Cutting it shorter makes the narrative fall apart because the dungeon's puzzles are woven directly into the story structure rather than sitting alongside it. Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords deserves special mention. The original B2 is legendary for a reason, but it is also notoriously difficult to run faithfully in 5e. The rework by Will McDermott does a reasonable job of balancing the later sections, which in the original were wildly harder than the first half. The slave-pit sections can still overwhelm a low-level party if you do not adjust encounter frequencies. I reduce the number of encounters by roughly thirty percent for groups below level 5.
Common mistakes when using this book
The biggest error I see new DMs make is treating every adventure as equally suitable for their group. A level 1 character cannot meaningfully participate in Dead Gods. A level 20 party will breeze through The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan in a single session unless you inflate encounter difficulty significantly. The recommended level ranges exist for a reason. Another issue is underestimating how much time each adventure requires. The book lists approximate playtime for most sections, but those estimates assume smooth sessions without debate, rules questions, or players finding every hidden door. In practice, allocate double the stated time. An adventure marked as one session becomes a three-session arc with most groups. This is not a flaw in the writing. It is just the reality of how tabletop play actually unfolds. Some adventures reference characters and locations from other published modules without full context. If you pull The Sunless Citadel from this book without knowing the Greenest region from the original module, you might miss small narrative connections that enrich the experience. The book stands on its own, but those details are worth noting if you have access to the source material.
When to skip this book entirely
If you are running a strictly narrative-focused campaign where combat encounters are rare, most of these adventures will feel bloated. They are designed around traditional dungeon-crawl structures with encounters, traps, and treasure. The book does not include many social or roleplay-heavy scenarios outside of Palace of the Purple Emperor. If your players prefer system-light games, the stat density might feel overwhelming. Each adventure assumes you are comfortable looking up and running monsters with full 5e stat blocks. There is no simplified version included. For groups that want quick, drop-in scenarios without heavy mechanics, consider something like Waterdeep: Dragon Heist standalone modules or the various one-shot books that Wizards has released more recently. Those are more streamlined and easier to run with minimal preparation. The book also does not include a unified index. If you are searching for a specific monster type across all eleven adventures, you will need to use the PDF search function or manually scan the appendices. The physical copy has an index at the back, but it covers general topics rather than cross-adventure monster listings. This is a minor inconvenience but one that adds up during long prep sessions.
Overall, Tales From The Yawning Portal is a solid collection that serves both new and experienced DMs well. The adventures are variably strong, the production values are adequate, and the level range coverage is broad. Just read each adventure before running it, prepare reference sheets, and pick scenarios that match your group's actual experience level rather than assuming the book will self-select appropriately.
