The leaders in the first category are the lowest level adventures – The Sunless Citadel and The Forge of Fury. This is normally where I would put a “spoiler” warning in a campaign or adventure review, but with seven adventures and no overarching story, this review is not going to delve into the particular surprises in a given adventure, or spoil any story points. This is part of what makes Tales from the Yawning Portal easily playable as a greatest hits album – the higher-level, super-tough, “grinder” dungeons weren’t designed to be parts of story arcs, anyway (and weren’t really designed to have all of the characters survive). All of the entries are true “dungeons” – it may not be literal dungeon, but each adventure features some grouping of interconnected rooms (dungeon, castle, cave, fortress, whatever) that the characters must make their way through. There’s some overlap, to be sure, but some are very clearly in one category or the other.
When I look at the seven included adventures, they vaguely fall into two categories – dungeons that are “good” from a more modern roleplaying perspective, and old school dungeons that are classics of their era, but don’t really serve the same function one would usually expect from a modern adventure/dungeon.
The dungeons do, however, nicely cover most of the levels, allowing a group to play through them like a deliciously geeky greatest hits album. Rather than presenting an overarching story for characters to roleplay through, it presents seven independent adventures, each a re-implementation of a much-lauded dungeon from years past. Uniquely, however, Tales from the Yawning Portal is an adventure supplement, rather than a campaign supplement.
Tales from the Yawning Portal is like most other Dungeons & Dragons 5E books in that it is a supplement that will let the DM run the characters from first level until somewhere in the teens.