D&D History, Relics, One-Shots, And More In This Week’s 5E Supplements

A Honest Thief

A Honest Thief is an adventure full of mystery, intrigue, and a race against the clock as you unravel a city’s worth of corruption and secrets. Dars uncovered a massive secret before he was arrested, and you need to figure out what to do with this information when everyone may be compromised and nobody can be trusted. This one-shot game is very approachable for lower-level players.

For eleven years, Dars operated as a meticulous, low-profile professional thief, taking care never to harm anyone who didn’t threaten him first. His luck ran out three days ago when he made a fatal error: instead of simple loot, Dars stumbled upon a massive secret—Mern’s hidden secondary ledger system detailing seven years of falsified weights, systemic tax skimming, and direct bribery. Though Dars hid the documents, Mern immediately realized what was missing and began fiercely tracking down his stolen secrets.

Now locked in a cell and scheduled to hang at dawn, Dars has realized that delivering this evidence to compromised local authorities is suicide. Needing individuals entirely unentangled in the town’s corrupted network, he summons your party of passing strangers with an urgent, time-sensitive contract: retrieve the satchel of ledgers and deliver them to someone uncorrupted.

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1100 Relics of Ruin

Add some powerful relics and cursed items to your game with this book. Each item has the potential for an immediate plot hook or a future problem to unfold. But until all of that happens, what player can resist a shiny new magical item to wave around?

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Cursed Compendium: 100 Relics of Ruin is a collection of cursed magical items designed for D&D 5th Edition, built to add danger, mystery, and meaningful consequences to your adventures. Each relic offers something useful, tempting, or powerful, but never without a price. These are not simple treasures to be looted and forgotten. Every relic is a story seed, a moral problem, and a future complication waiting to happen.

Whether you are running a grim fantasy campaign, a gothic horror adventure, a cursed dungeon crawl, or a morally complicated sandbox, these relics can be dropped directly into your game as rewards, threats, plot hooks, or the beginning of something much worse.

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D&D: An American Institution

For players who enjoy all of the history and lore behind D&D, this book will dive deep and uncover secrets. Included is rarely seen art, details about the game’s various editions, and it is presented in a way that’s focused on being fun and interesting to read.

Will you declare your independence from corporate historians? Independently funded, D&D: An American Institution takes an old-fashioned approach to the history of the hobby, where Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are great men in a great tradition. It begins with modern research about 18th century warfare, winds a path through the wargaming hobby after World War II, then goes into detail about the various editions of the beloved game. Along the way, the author makes many arguments against Jon Peterson and Ben Riggs, across just about every point of contention.

With many new great pieces of art in the older style, this book is written to be read, and so has opted for brevity. You will also find a complete bibliography of sources used, along with endnotes keeping with professional history writing. The RPG hobby is greater than we’ve been led to believe!

Three Questions of River’s Gate

This adventure is written for a setting full of rebellion, resistance, and smugglers. And it could just as easily be fit into your existing adventure. Forces clash over the future and leadership of the city. Will your players help the cause in the streets, or take a more by-the-books approach in court?

Conquest comes in many forms. While Samorael’s military strength remains focused on the nations of Bridgemoor and Bishal, his more cunning lieutenants have turned their machinations towards the small but critical city of “River’s Gate.” Situated at the confluence of over a dozen shallow waterways, the city has long been the key to trade through the delta and out to the sea. With a full-scale invasion of the region unfeasible (for now), Samorael’s agents are forced to try a more subtle approach. Through careful manipulation of public perception, targeted privatizations of public services, and dubious legal arguments, they seek to annex River’s Gate and unlock the path to the heart of the Southern Alliance.

Assault on Emberash Hold

This short adventure is for level-7 adventurers, and is the final chapter of a longer series of modules, but will also work as a standalone story. It includes three adventure hooks, a dwarven stronghold complete with combat, social interactions, and problem-solving opportunities, and a new custom item. Will your players be able to stop the Ashen Dwarves before they invade?

Deep beneath the mountain, beyond a cavern vast enough to swallow cities, stands Emberash Hold: an ancient dwarven stronghold now claimed by the Ashen King and his elite followers. While the armies of the Ashen Dwarves gather for war, their king remains within his personal fortress, surrounded by loyal guards, invasion plans, and the burning certainty of conquest. If he is not stopped, his invasion will soon begin.

The adventurers must cross a lava-cut cavern, breach the compact halls of Emberash Hold, navigate old dwarven defenses twisted by ash and flame, and confront Varruk of the Ash before his war consumes the lands beyond the mountain.

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