It it enough for an adventure to be a hook, a map, and some monsters?

Wizards of the Coasts thinks so. In their recent free adventure, The Tenebrous Stone, released on D&D Beyond, they give us a minimalist, half page adventure, one of the dozens in the recent Forgotten Realms Adventures in Faerûn book. The adventure boils down to:

A monk went missing recently, somewhere down in the cursed quarry, and the party can have 300gp if they find him. Here’s a map of the quarry. The quarry contains zombies, ghouls, ghasts, a wight and a succubus who will make you relive your most profound fear, and the body of the dead monk with a periapt of health. Behind an illusory wall is a stone that turns workers into undead.

I have compressed it, but this is basically all the information you get in this short adventure, plus a map.

It certainly has the virtue of brevity.

Other observations:

• It’s more of an encounter than an adventure; that is, a short one off without built-in connections to other things.
• It does not contain lore – about the village (Helmsdale), quarry, workers, monk (Brother Trasig), or succubus, although it gives proper names associated with some of those things.
• The evil stone (Tenebrous Stone) was apparently left there by a cult (of Orcus, a Greyhawk deity, which is strange since the village is in the Forgotten Relams).
• There’s no one to talk to here to get information, only monsters, unless the characters have “speak with dead”.
• There isn’t any dungeon “dressing”; that is, details or objects that characters might use or figure out.
• There are no surprises – no random events nor potential for the monsters to be other than their predetermined locations.

So, is it enough? I think the answer depends on whether you generally strip down adventures to add your own lore back, or whether you lean on adventures to give you details. It also depends on whether you also like social interactions, skills, and exploration to be a large part of your D&D session in addition to or instead of combat.

Using my own variant of the dungeon checklist:

• Something to kill — yes, the succubus and the wight and all the ghouls and ghasts. Much murdering to be done here.
• Something to steal — yes, periapt of health is good treasure
• Something to kill you — yes 2100 XP in enemies is a hard encounter by D&D 2024 encounter building standards.
• Someone to talk to — the dead monk? iffy. Can’t tick this in good conscience.
• Something you don’t know what it is? iffy. Maybe the Tenebrous Stone since I don’t know how they could really figure it out. But I usually use this to mean something that could be a link to another adventure, like a locket bearing the visage of an unknown man around the succubus’s neck.

My additions

I enjoy lore, and my players do too. To play this, I would add a list of secrets and clues, answering all the questions that I have about the scenario and maybe giving leads to other adventures, and I would probably add a friendly NPC (maybe a kobold named Skitters, who has been spying on the place and adding traps), and I would put some set dressing around and some objects which could potentially solve the situation without combat but only with trickery.

And finally for atmosphere and variety I might add a little random table of d4 or d6 effects, rolling every exploration turn:

d6	Quarry Random Encounters
1	wave of despair from the stone, WIS save or disadvantage on next roll. (I might also turn this into an environmental action where you take damage during combat, and if you die to it you rise again as undead).
2	illusory rock manifests near PC
3	the spirit of the dead monk beckons towards his body, or towards the illusory wall
4	encounter with the kobold spy, Skitters
5	a new undead animates near a PC
6	one of Skitters’s traps goes off, DEX save to redirect it to hit a target of your choice

So my verdict? monster, map, hook, NPC, encounters, and a few secrets will get you a long way and it’s a pretty good framework to improvise from.