I met AAW Games at Gen Con this year, and we talked a lot about adventure design and helping players and DMs get the most out of the books they buy. I was already familiar with their individual mini-dungeon releases, but had never actually used one of their Mini-Dungeon Tome collections.

Disclaimer: AAW provided me with review copies of some of their work: Rise of the Drow, Rultmoork, and the topic of this post, Mini-Dungeon Tome II.

What AAW Games has done with their mini-dungeons is to boil everything you need to run a session into a 2-page spread. Each one includes an original map, hook, and details that need significantly less prep time than just about any other kind of pre-written adventure module.

Also, before we get too far, I want to give a shoutout to AAW's upcoming crowdfunding campaign Adventure Arcs. It's a print magazine that breaks adventures down into parts so you can build them back up into whatever you want. I'm really excited for this one.

140 Dungeons! That's So Many!

Intended to make a dungeon master's job easier, Mini-Dungeon Tome 2 has 140 different dungeons with unique stories and maps for you to use. The dungeons are standalone and setting agnostic, so you can slot them into any campaign you're running, whether it's Spelljammer or Avernus or whatever.

The image above is from the free preview of the Mini-Dungeon Tome 2 which includes 3 free dungeons.

Each one is digestible (even scannable) in just a few minutes, and they all take up only a 2-page spread. That's it. Open the book, and you see a numbered map, the key, background text, and room descriptions. Everything you need is right there. (Except for monster stat blocks, which I will touch on later.)

This isn't a campaign book, so you aren't meant to go from dungeon 1 to 140 in order (because holy cow 140 dungeons with a single party would be insane!), but if you do want to string them together, you can.

Talking to Stephen Yeardley at Gen Con about his contributions to the book, he said that while all of his dungeons are entirely standalone; however, if you want to use them as a longer arc, there are elements within each of the stories that can be used as a throughline to create an overarching story.

Unfortunately, there's no index or reference in the actual book for this, but looking at the ToC and seeing which adventures list “Stephen Yeardley” as the author is easy enough. The traditional index and other appendices that are there, however, are really nice.

Breaking It All Down

140 dungeons is a lot to search and sort through, too. Luckily, the book is divided into sections with multiple ways to find what you want.

By Level

The first, and maybe most useful, is by level range. There are dungeons for levels 1-4, 5-10, 11-16, and 17+.

Of these, levels 1-10 have the most mini-dungeons. That makes sense because that's the level range that almost every person who plays D&D is in. Sure, there are some who are 11+, but those are in the vast minority.

I am happy, however, that AAW Games included level 17-20 content in the book. While most people will never reach that high during their normal campaigns, high-level D&D one shots are relatively common.

The Mini-Dungeon Tome is truly perfect for this kind of thing. A ready-made, two-page spread for an endgame adventure is pretty spiffy.

By Environment

Secondly, the adventures are sorted by environment and terrain. There are urban adventures, as well as dungeon, planar, coast, desert, forest, mountain, arctic, grassland, swamp, and underworld ones.

Each of these has its own entry in the back of the book, with an index of the mini-dungeons that go along with it. Additionally, the pages have encounter tables, hazard tables, and even monsters and weather effects. There's a lot packed into those pages.

Picking Nits

It's safe to say that I love this book. I've run dungeons from it, and they're easy to follow, fun to run, and the cartography and art are pretty. The design is well done, and the whole thing is easy to follow and use.

But if I have one nitpick about the book, it's that the monsters used throughout each dungeon are often from books the reader may not have. That's not uncommon with this kind of title from third-party publishers (3PP), but there's no substitute offered for them.

That‘s technically my nit to pick, not that the Mini-Dungeon Tome II itself suggests you buy the (admittedly amazing) Tome of Beasts series from Kobold Press or other (also fantastic) books from AAW Games.

That said, there are a lot of monsters used in the book that come straight from the D&D basic rules (also called the SRD), which everyone has free access to, whether you use D&D Beyond's digital tools, a VTT like Roll20, or just download the PDF directly from the website.

But the monsters that come from other 3PP titles are all marked with a unique symbol to let the reader know where to find them. So it's easy for a DM to see where they might need to swap in a pinch hitter. (Did I get that sports metaphor right?)

Wrapping Up

I have been a fan of the AAW mini-dungeons for a while, even before I had the chance to pick their brains about stuff at Gen Con. Heck, the mini-dungeons that I got from DTRPG were so good that they even motivated me to start doing some standalone short dungeons I call Quick Quests.

Having the time to dig in on this book and play around with this many mini-dungeons solidified my opinion of how consistently good the content is. A lot of love was put into these dungeons, and it shows.

Final Rating: 5 out of 5

Remember: don't miss AAW's upcoming BackerKit campaign for Adventure Arcs, an 88-page magazine with monsters, settings, dungeons, items, rules, side-quests, factions, and story that you can piece together to make your own adventure without hours of prep.

This article contains some affiliate links. If you purchase something through one of these I may earn a commission.