Dreadful Realms: Caverns of the Wise Minister is, effectively, a campaign setting and inspiration sourcebook. With maps and tables it clocks in at over 120 pages, making it a hefty sourcebook. Designed as a tribute to the design era of TSR in the '90s and the "exploration of the weird," it is a current take on what an Underdark campaign setting might look like as a realm rich with political and occult exploration opportunities, modern messaging and design, and characters divorced from the mundane both in appearance and in motivation. It is a love letter to settings like Dark Sun and The Night Below, dripping with the macabre sensibilities of its designers. It's a product for 5th edition D&D.
Form Factor and Layout. I purchased this product in PDF, which includes the sourcebook and four full-size color maps. The maps tend to a blue-and-gray color palaette, as befits a sourcebook about caverns deep below the world near a vast underground lake that is home to a ruling aboleth (the titular Wise Minister). Text in the sourcebook uses a very readable typeface and typically takes the form of black text on a very light gray background, so readability is not an issue; headers are in all caps to improve readability as well. Text layout is a standard two-colum left-justified format. Pages include chapter name and page number on the bottom, making it easy to know where you are in the book. Box-out text is in white on dark blue-gray. Most of the art follows the same blue-and-gray palette.
Content. Dreadful Realms: Caverns of the Wise Minister is a campaign setting more than an adventure. It includes a calendar and timeline, creation myths, religions, cultures, and the backstory of Sepulchre, the central city that serves as a likely adventure hub. It includes several new character types, such as the batlike cave elves, the mer-alligator nix, and the soul-eroded rootless, as well as rules for new subclasses with abilities that fit into the setting. The setting also includes notes about interlopers and travelers from outside, for player who want to participate as more "conventional" D&D characters.
The city of Sepulchre is the nexus of adventure for this setting, as it's the metropolis overseen by the Wise Minister. As with the "strange and dangerous" campaign settings of the '90s, the city is a place to refresh resources, look for allies, and seek opportunities, but it's also a place of danger, not the safe haven between dungeon runs found in some settings. Indeed, the politics of the city are quite deadly, and characters can easily find themselves roped into factionalism or revolutionary or counter-revolutionary activity that can make the city itself a site of dangerous adventure. Some adventurers may go out into the Underworld simply to escape the hazards of the city! Though the typical D&D motivations apply—earn experience, find treasure, acquire magical goodies—characters are also encouraged to seek answers; Sepulchre runs upon layers of intrigue crafted specifically to prop up a tottering status quo of oppressive propaganda, and as with settings like Dark Sun and Planescape, characters may unravel these lies and confront the problems of a crumbling society in between delves in to deep caves, undersea grottoes, and lost ruined dungeons.
The caverns of the region are called the Underworld, and with the Rootless character types—literally lost souls whose identity slowly fades away over time—there are strong call-outs to the notion that this may be a transitional space, a realm of the dead, a sort of Purgatory or perhaps even a trap where the Wise Minister has waylaid souls on their way to the afterlife and kept them here for its own inscrutable purposes. The entire Underworld of the Wise Minister was created in a war against a god, with the Wise Minister a pre-Creation titanic monstrosity, in a mythology that echoes the Greek Titanomachy. To the inhabitants of the caverns, the World Above is a myth, a place that might not even really exist; travelers who claim to be from there are simply delusional, like the travelers confronting the Queen of Underland in the Narnia story of The Silver Chair. These kinds of liminal themes run through the material and give rise to questions for players' characters to investigate about their own existence, their spirituality and cosmology, and the relevance of their actions (is revolution in an oppressive society even fruitful if that society is just an illusion and you are a dead soul waiting to fade away into nothing? Is it possible to overthrow the Devil in Hell?)
Every location in the city of Sepulchre comes not just with descriptions of its form and function, but also of adventure hooks and a sentence or two about notable people in the neighborhood. This gives you a ready-made list of ideas for problems and people to engage with in every part of the city.
Finally, the book includes several notable new rules: Changed rules for darkvision and the cloying, soul-obscuring darkness of the Underworld; a bestiary of new monsters; rules for perfumes, both magical and otherwise (which can strongly emphasize scenes by placing a scent memory on them, which works especially well in scenes in which the characters can't see); and a brief system for tracking social standing, which integrates with the political themes of the city so that players can become notable and gain all kinds of new enemies based on their actions.
Art. The art for the book has the aforementioned color theme of gray and dark blue to emphasize the setting material of watery caverns, with a few notable pieces that break from this to display something that is "outsider" material (a picture of a traveler from outside or of the mythical World Above). New monsters and character types are almost all illustrated, in color, so that you can immediately see "This is what a cave elf looks like" or "Players, you see this goatlike biped." Illustrations for monsters are typically in static poses so that you can readily tell what the creature is, without dynamic perspective that might make it hard to tell exactly how the creature's body is arranged; flavor pieces in other areas are more active. Following the best practices for game layout, there is typically art every few pages, so that as you become familiar with the book, you can associate specific pieces of art to nearby pieces of text, which makes it easier to look things up—"Ah, I'm on the page with the elves fleeing the disaster, I know I'm near those setting notes I was looking for." The art style is generally serious and leans toward baroque and horrific at times.
Personal Notes. I am a big fan of the settings of TSR's '90s era, such as the aforementioned Dark Sun, Planescape, and Night Below, and Dreadful Realms: Caverns of the Wise Minister feels like the kind of softcover 128-page sourcebook that TSR might've releasd in that era, but with modern sensibilities that eschew the problems that plagued early game designs. As with many sourcebooks of that period, this isn't an adventure in and of itself, it's a setting that gives you hooks for adventures. It is so distinct from "typical" D&D games that it is the sort of setting that calls for a special session to discuss its options with your players and decide how they want to make characters for it, in the same way that Dark Sun makes characters so different from typical D&D that players benefit greatly from understanding the setting before they start playing. The machinations of the Wise Minister mean that it's a simple matter for the DM to make every adventure, every challenge part of some unfathomably long master plan in which the PCs are pawns who have the chance to reach the end of the board and become queens who might challenge the malevolent minister. The games that this book suggests will have the usual spells-and-swords of D&D adventures, but also lean into political and social problems. In some ways the material is reminiscent of Vampire: The Masquerade, in that there is an established ancient social hierarchy, your characters may be social climbers or malcontent rebels, and your adventures happen in and around this framework of a dystopian social ladder that hampers your progress while you and your allies work toward goals that shift as you change contexts by unearthing new secrets.
In short, this is a merging of the baroque, Gothic conventions of political and story-heavy gaming with D&D's magic and melee. How far you lean into one direction or the other is up to the DM and the group, but the setting affords opportunities for both styles of play, which you can combine to taste. It is not a stand-alone dungeon or an adventure to pop down as a one-shot or an add-on to an existing campaign, though the caverns could exist far beneath the surface of some other campaign setting if you so chose, serving as a place of strangeness for your players to visit.
I greatly enjoyed this setting material and it immediately suggests many ideas for juicy adventures to me.
I received no promotional consideration for this review.
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