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Ambitious but broken
"Dragons of Hope" is the third module in the original Dragonlance adventure path, following on from DL 2 "Dragons of Flame", and covering events that the novel series skipped over between books. It sees the players guiding refugees through the wilds south of Pax Tharkas, and then delving into the ruined tower of Skullcap to locate the gate to the dwarven kingdom of Thorbardin.
I love this module in theory. It aims for a lot of things rarely seen in D&D module design, either during the 1E era or, really, ever - deep social and political interaction, decisions that constantly have real consequences for others, a demanding external timeline forcing players to keep moving to stay ahead of events. But none of it really works, and in practice the module just isn't fun.
The first half of the module concerns the voyage of the Pax Tharkas refugees south to the Hopeful Vale. The intended gameplay here sees the players guiding and defending their refugees, and interacting with the Council that the refugees have chosen to guide them. It could be great, but it's not. The reality is that the included wilderness map offers the players few genuine choices of route south - there are realistically three paths, and one of them would likely see all the refugees starve to death within a few days. Moreover, there is simply not enough information available to make the choice of route an interesting or informed decision. There are very few things to meaningfully interact with on the way - an encounter with hill dwarves is a rare exception - and the process of having to take decisions to the Council is frustrating, as it offers the possibility of the players being overruled in the few decisions they actually get to make in this section.
The Council is emblematic of another problem that dogs all the Dragonlance adventures - too many NPCs. There are five meaningful NPCs on the Council, three of them completely new, that the module encourages players to get to know and significantly interact with. This is in addition to a now epic retinue of named characters who will be present, including Tika, Otik, Gilthanas, Laurana, and others, all of them theoretically important to later plot points. The module doesn't use any of these characters to build depth or provide interesting interactions - they're just there to police the players and steal their thunder. Fizban makes a reapparance here as well, and in the absence of players knowing his secret, it makes for a goofy and random non-sequitur.
This overland portion suffers from yet another ongoing Dragonlance problem - wasted content. Depending on the route chosen, there are significant parts of the module players will never see. Our group skipped an entire mini-dungeon without knowing it was there. Others may miss the Hill Dwarf village or the Eye of Elar. It's frustrating to see good encounters going to waste when there are so few of them in this module to begin with.
There's a final problem with the refugee portion, and that concerns player motivation. It's taken for granted that the players will hang out with the refugees, despite the refugees being annoying, generally hostile to the players, and clearly possessed of their own leaders and warriors. It is also taken for granted that the players will quickly settle on the idea of Thorbardin as a place of safety, despite frequent references to historical events where Thorbardin dwarves have gone to war rather than allow refugees in their kingdom. There's little provision for what to do if players don't buy into these ideas, beyond deus ex machina visions from the gods basically ordering the party to get with the program.
The second half of the module offers a dungeon delve into the shattered tower of Skullcap. There are some interesting encounters here but it's another of these poorly designed Dragonlance dungeons where the path to the goal is short, obvious, and skips more than half the dungeon. Players quickly focusing on descending the interior staircase miss out on two dragons(!) and a host of other interactions. Expecting them to be motivated by the 1E desire to slay every monster and loot every treasure for precious XP seems contrary to the general narrative thrust of the modules. (It should be noted the 3.5E rewrite of this module in "Dragons of Autumn" significantly improves encounters in Skullcap, but doesn't fix the overall problem with the dungeon layout.)
Overall, this is a clear low point in the Dragonlance modules. It's hard to blame it for trying something new - particularly something in keeping with the story's epic scope - but the execution here falls woefully flat.
DriveThruRPG's version: The PDF version on sale here is as good as could be expected. It's based on a fairly low-resolution scan, but at least all the pages have proper vertical alignment. The original text has been re-entered to make it searchable, with proper care taken to preserve the original fonts and styles. As far as I can tell, no text is missing. Two places where the original module used text boxes with a grey background look a little strange in this version, but it's not a big deal. Chapters are PDF-bookmarked for easy digital use. The map from the interior cover is presented in the PDF in colour, in its proper aspect ratio, which is nice but may present minor problems for printing.
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