DriveThruRPG.com
Browse Categories
$ to $















Back
pixel_trans.gif
Other comments left by this customer:
You must be logged in to rate this
pixel_trans.gif
Xanathar's Extraordinary Vault
Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/01/2020 05:57:55

Xanathar's Broken Thought Bubbles

REVIEW UPDATED / REWRITTEN APRIL 2020.

This is an attractive, creative book from talented creators. It's a shame, then, that the actual rules it presents are ruinously broken.

==

Let's start with the good:

  • There's more than 100 pages of content here, very little of it "filler".
  • There's magical items, there's foreign and exotic non-magical weaponry, there's new mounts, new rules for piecework armour, and more.
  • It's all laid out with the professional, attractive graphic design found throughout the author's more recent DM's Guild releases.
  • It's overflowing with gorgeous original artwork.
  • The writing is clear, well-proofed, and easy to read.
  • And possibly most importantly, there's a LOT of creativity that's gone into this book. It's bursting with ideas.

For some players of 5E, this is all I need to say. I know a lot of groups handwave the rules. They're here for the ideas and the roleplaying, and the deep tactical battles that 5E offers aren't a feature that attracts them. For this group of players, I can be very clear - you will probably love this book. Go for it.

==

For everyone else - let's talk about the bad:

This is a broken pile of nonsense that has clearly not benefited from playtesting, editing, or reference to the design principles underpinning 5E.

It will break your game. You will not have fun with these items because you'll be too busy adjudicating rules disputes about them and having them trivialise your encounters.

You'll find armour that will take your AC well outside the principle of Bounded Accuracy and ensure nothing in the Monster Manual will ever lay a finger on you again. You'll find +3 non-magical shields. You'll find non-magical Thrown weapons that do 1d8 damage or more. You'll find mounts with climb speed, poison immunity and/or multi-attack. You'll find armor that turns all single-target heals into multi-target heals. You'll find armor that boosts the AC of allies and isn't subject to stacking limitations.

I could go on but there's so much in here like this - items that aren't so much creative within the bounds of 5E so much as ignoring the design decisions that make it work. Very little of this stuff should be allowed anywhere near a table, and certainly not at the suggested levels of rarity in the book.

I simply can't recommend this book to anyone for whom the quality of the ruleset is one of the things they enjoy about 5E.

==

DEVELOPMENTS: In late March / April 2020, creator MT Black very kindly responded to my review, and did so in terms far more generous than I might have used if someone had given my work such scathing criticism. As a result of that communication, they have made a downloadable errata available at the book's product page. (Not one of the files in the purchasable package, but rather linked to in the product description.)

However, as at this writing (1 April 2020), the errata are very brief and do not substantially address any of my concerns with the book's contents. I thank MT Black for the additional material but it does not alter my view of the product.

I will, however, strongly recommend MT Black's other work and suggest you not let this book dissuade you from exploring it. I'd particularly like to single out their adventure "Beneath the Ruins of Firestone Keep" as a particularly great example of a traditional 1st level dungeon crawl delivered with excellence, and one that I enjoyed immensely when my partner ran it for me. Go check it out!



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
Xanathar's Extraordinary Vault
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Creator Reply:
Hi Greg, Thanks for taking the time to review our book. It continues to sell well more than 2 years after we released it, which has been a pleasant surprise to us all. From feedback, I know that a lot of folks have had great fun with these items at table. Thank you for acknowledging the creativity that went into the collection! With regards to balance, of the nearly 500 items in the book, I think a small number of them need some modification. You touch on a couple of items that I'd change, though some things (such as powerful mounts at higher levels) we've probably got a different approach. Unfortunately, the current platform policies make it impossible for us to change the POD file, which has prevented any revisions. I have thought about doing a single page sheet of errata as a standalone file, like WOTC does with their core books. I may still do that if there is interest. best wishes! MTB
pixel_trans.gif
Hi Greg, There is now a link to an errata document on the main product page where I've applied some fixes to a few commonly raised issues. I'll update the document further if and when further feedback comes in. kind regards, MTB
pixel_trans.gif
Player's Handbook, Revised (2e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/01/2020 05:34:30

The Almost-Definitive AD&D 2E Player's Handbook

If you're looking for a review of AD&D 2nd Edition generally, then this is not for you. There's no reason to experiment with 2nd Edition if you're not already familiar with it. This is a product for those with nostalgia, not for new players seeking a thrill.

Okay, so assuming you're already familiar with 2nd Edition - should you buy this product?

The original product:

  • This is the 2013 WotC reprint of the Revised 2E PHB.
  • As a result it DOES feature the best version of the 2E PHB rules text, with clarifications, fixes, and other improvements.
  • But it does NOT feature the gorgeous painted art or line drawings of previous 2E PHB editions, and new interior art is not nearly as attractive.
  • The many, many tables that characterise 2E are particularly well-presented in this version, both at the point where they appear in the rules, and in extensive and easy-to-use appendices, which will be a boon to DMs and players alike.
  • For whatever reason, this edition does NOT include a template for a blank character sheet, but that shouldn't be a barrier to the modern player.

The DM's Guild PDF version

  • The PDF copy available on DM's Guild appears to be drawn from WotC's master files for the 2013 republication, and does NOT appear to be a scan - so that's good.
  • File size is about 40 MB.
  • It's text-searchable - yay.
  • It is thoroughly bookmarked - right down to individual spells.
  • The original product made a lot of use of red text in its layout. This was probably to discourage photocopying at the time - and it will likewise frustrate attempts to print the PDF today. This is NOT a printer-friendly file.

The print-on-demand hardcopy

  • The POD version is an oversized softcover of the same dimensions as a modern 5E PHB.
  • The spine is about 1.5 centimetres thick. The cover wraps around onto the spine, including spine titling consistent with the presentation of the 2013 release it's based on.
  • The book is perfect-bound, and the binding appears to be strong.
  • It is printed in colour. I'm not able to compare the colour depth to the original 2013 release but it's clearly printer-quality colour, not publisher-quality.
  • The cover is made of very thin card, easily damaged in normal use.
  • Interior pages are relatively thick and stiff.
  • Interior text is crisp and properly aligned.
  • Pages have appropriate gutters and there is no gutter loss.
  • The interior artwork is a little grainy but I'm not in a position to tell whether this is consistent with the original publication - it may simply be how the original images looked.

Verdict:

This is pretty much as good as could be expected from a DM's Guild retro product. It's usable, contains no meaningful errors or flaws, and accurately presents the original content in an attractive format.

If you're buying the hardcopy to actually use at your table, be aware that it WILL get wrecked. This is NOT a tough book, and certainly not remotely as bulletproof as the original hardcover 2E PHB. But it's probably cheaper to buy a second copy of this POD version than to get an original book off Ebay at this point.

If you were looking for a digital copy of the 2E PHB, this will meet your needs, and is easy to recommend for that purpose.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Player's Handbook, Revised (2e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
I6 Ravenloft (1e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 02/26/2020 16:06:06

A classic module, a decent PDF release, a disappointing print edition

(EDIT, 27 Feb 2020 - The publisher has updated the product with an improved PDF scan of the original module. The downloadable version is now significantly better quality, and I would assume that PoD versions are similarly now of higher quality.)

(Original review: As of 6 Feb 2018)

About the PDF: The PDF release comes with two files, both presenting the same book in slightly different ways. "9075_Ravenloft.PDF" (the "printable" version) is a faithful and unaltered scan of the original book, admittedly in quite low resolution, accurately showing the original text and typography. This will delight collectors and historians. Unfortunately, the formatting of the original book doesn't lend itself to a readable scan, with the use of light grey ink for text, and some pages showing black text on a grey background. This version has useful PDF-format bookmarks, but is not searchable. Maps in this version are broken down into A4 pages with white gutters, which suits an A4 printing but is not quite faithful to their original presentation.

Conversely, "DDI_I6_Ravenloft" is an edited scan, with the original text replaced by a searchable transcription. This version replaces the original light grey typography with a darker, more readable version, making the whole book significantly more usable in its digital form, although sadly the bookmarking was not included in this version. The maps here are presented in their correct asepct ratios as single images.

Both versions feature scanner alignment issues throughout, making many pages slightly skewed off true vertical. This could creatively be said to fit the "wrongness" of the Ravenloft setting, but it's a niggling issue which will annoy many customers. Both versions have colour covers and colour maps.

About the Print On Demand (PoD): The Softcover Color Book (Standard Heavyweight) is outwardly a gorgeous product that will look good on a shelf, with a disappointing interior. The physical object is the same width along the bottom edge as the original module but is about a centimetre taller than original. (In my printing that represents an additional centimetre at the top of the cover, extending the orange banner, but on the interior pages the extra centimetre is at the bottom of the page, appearing as white gutter.) This makes it a comparable size to the 1E/2E core books and will fit flush on the same shelf. The cover is a beautiful full-colour glossy print on thin card that feels very faithful to the quality and texture of the original book. The perfect binding creates a thin true spine (unlike the original module which merely came to a point) but, both in keeping with the original and the thinness of the volume, there is no name or other printing on the spine, merely a continuation of the wraparound cover.

This is a 40-page perfect bound single volume. (I.e., the interior portion is NOT detachable the way the original module was.) Maps are included in colour at the rear of the book but are again NOT detachable. Customers are advised to include the PDF in their purchase and print their own maps from that. The PoD print is based on the "printable" PDF described above, which is perhaps unfortunate, as the low resolution is clearly visible and combines with the light weighting of the original font to give the whole book a "1990s home printer" feel. Text looks faded and blurry. Full page black and white images have visible printing artefacts where the printing has struggled to keep up with the colour density. Most buyers could probably achieve a better result on their home printer or by photocopying the original module. Maps at the rear appear to be coloured faithfully to the original book but again have a very unprofessional look. The problems of the black text on grey background pages are even more pronounced, and in addition these pages do not have the full bleed effect of the original book and instead have white gutters.

Overall it's adequate to run the adventure from, and a little easier to safely store than the original module, but collectors will still probably want to get their hands on the original

About the module content: Ravenloft is an absolute classic, by the standards of AD&D 1E, although perhaps not by today's measure. It departs from the standard 1E adventure in several important ways - it's true gothic horror, it makes excellent use of its villain throughout the module and not just as a final boss fight, it's relatively sandboxy, and key plot points are randomised to keep players who already know something about the content on their toes. In addition to all that, the villain, Count Strahd von Zarevich, went on to be a D&D icon, featured in many adventures up until the modern day, and the module spawned its own setting, Ravenloft, heavily supported in the 2nd Edition era and frequently referenced thereafter.

By today's standards it's a little lacking. The conflict is heavily rooted in the relationship between one NPC and another NPC, rather than, say, an NPC and the players. It has all the weird idiosyncracies of the 1E rules. And for all the sandbox feel, at the end of the day it IS a dungeon crawl. Still, it's easily one of the best official adventures of the 1E era and is hard to go past for anyone wanting to play with that ruleset.

The module is tuned for 6 to 8 1E characters of levels 5 to 7. A reasonably experienced GM could easily use this content with 2E, 3E or 5E, although of course those editions have their own remakes or interpretations of this material.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
I6 Ravenloft (1e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX2-08 Foulness Beneath Mulmaster (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2020 16:59:40

Not your average sewer-crawl When I saw this was a sewer adventure, I sighed, assuming I'd been there and done that already. But Foulness Beneath Mulmaster is a step above the generic - a short step, maybe, but that's a welcome treat in the context of Adventurer's League. It makes excellent use of flumphs, of all things - spoilers for the first 10 minutes of the module, I guess - treating them with real heart, not just as a joke. It's also packed with memorable NPCs - although they're maybe a little too memorable, in the sense of having a lot of quite deep characterisation provided for people that the module encourages you to move on from quickly or, in one case, who PCs of any reasonable intelligence are likely to just kill outright. As with most Adventurer's League entries, this is more of a short snack than a three-course meal, but it's a tasty one, and it will be of particular value to players and DMs who like to delve a little deeper into the characters they encounter and hope to discover they're more than just genric archetypes. Meat-and-potatoes adventuring done well - recommended.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX2-08 Foulness Beneath Mulmaster (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX2-06 Breath of the Yellow Rose (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2020 16:53:28

Lots to work with, but requires DM finesse to make it sparkle The strong investigative focus of Breath of the Yellow Rose would be more welcome if the module immediately preceding it, Flames of Kythorn, hadn't also spent most of its time knocking on doors. Nevertheless, BotYR's implementation is strong, and somewhat different to the AL standard, offering a wide range of locations and names to interact with in brief terms, giving players a lot of freedom (but giving DMs a lot of improvisation to do). There are a number of genuinely memorable NPCs (including the first official return of Alleyd Burral and other NPCs from Phlan), and the adventure is strongly connected both to previous adventures in the season and to future ones, make it feel meaningful and consequential. I love the amount of content the module gives me to work with. But I do wish it all came together in a more powerful way for the finale, which involves a standard "assault the villlain's HQ" dungeon, and a regrettable incentive to literally drag unwilling young women back to their (well-intentioned) fathers. Still one of the better adventures of AL Season 2.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX2-06 Breath of the Yellow Rose (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX2-05 Flames of Kythorn (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2020 16:48:16

All investigation, no payoff If your players love rambling the streets of fantasy cities knocking on doors and asking questions, they're going to love Flames of Kythorn, which presents one of the most sprawling investigative arenas in an Adventurer's League module to this point (although its immediate follow-up, Breath of the Yellow Rose, does it one better). Unfortunately, there's little to the adventure other than the investigation, and there's no real mystery to solve through all those questions - the villains have no real motivation, and it's merely a matter of locating them so that the combat can begin. Flames of Kythorn deserves credit for an unusual and memorable premise - magical fiery paintings, an inexplicable act of terrorism, a journey through the Mulmaster art scene - but none of it really adds up to much, resulting in an unsatisfying conclusion. Too many red herrings in the investigation can also leave players spinning in circles or mounting complicated and unnecessary heists, and setting them straight can require explicitly telling them that they're heading down the wrong path. Promising but flawed.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX2-05 Flames of Kythorn (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX2-04 Mayhem in the Earthspur Mines (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2020 16:43:03

Some of the best of AL Season 2. In giving this five stars, I don't want to imply it's revelatory or mold-breaking or something to write home about. But it's among the best adventures of the first two seasons of Adventurer's League, and if that's not worth rewarding, then what is? Mayhem in the Earthspur Mines presents an adventure of uncommon scope for Adventurer's League - you certainly won't be finishing this one in three hours - starting in a pit-fighting arena, moving into an overland journey, and finishing with a dungeon delve filled with multiple set-piece encounters. It makes good use of uncommon opponents from the Monster Manual, it has characters with real complexity and pathos, it provides multiple ways for players to approach the content, and it's great at set-up and pay-off of plot points, both for and against the players. The biggest disappointment is probably not the fault of this module, but of later ones - a major plot point for the AL season that's set-up at the module's conclusion is then ignored until the season's climax, at which point the players' decisions here are ignored and irrelevant. Overall, highly recommended.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX2-04 Mayhem in the Earthspur Mines (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX2-03 The Drowned Tower (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2020 16:37:51

Solid Elemental Evil adventuring - The Drowned Tower fulfils the season 2 promise of delivering a full-scale Elemental Evil campaign in bite-size chunks. It's chained to the typical AL pattern of recruitment->investigation->dungeon->boss fight, but it does it as well as it can be done. Characters are engaging, the dungeon is substantive (and surprisingly large for an AL module), and it again makes good use of Mulmaster and its inhabitants. There's nothing particularly memorable here, but nothing particularly bad either. It gets the job done.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX2-03 The Drowned Tower (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX2-02 Embers of Elmwood (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2020 16:34:40

Substantive and memorable. Embers of Elmwood presents the sort of content you'd hope every Adventurer's League entry could be - a substantial story combining investigation, combat, conversation, and a memorable set-piece encounter. The characters introduced here are developed and used later in the season. There's a real sense of importance and high stakes. Mulmaster is used well, with key areas and locations introduced. Encounters are dynamic, with good reasons to move around the physical space and interact with the environment. And it lays out some sense of a plan for the season overall. It loses points only for the main plot being a little over-complicated, with no clear way for players to learn or understand some key parts of it.



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX2-02 Embers of Elmwood (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX2-01 City of Danger (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2020 16:29:45

A solid start to Mulmaster. City of Danger follows the same format as AL season 1's intro, with five one-scene scenarios that players can play one, some or all of. They vary in quality quite dramatically, but they're memorable, surprising, and introduce key aspects of Mulmaster in an effective way. They're great for new players or new level 1 characters looking to adventure in Mulmaster during the Elemental Evil events. It suffers a little (as did last season) from being written without a clear view forward to where the season was going, and not everything introduced here is followed up on in meaningful ways later. And not every encounter is gold. But it basically does what it sets out to do.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX2-01 City of Danger (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX2-07 Bounty in the Bog (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/30/2020 16:26:22

Generic and incomplete. If you've played a swamp adventure with lizardfolk and bandits before, you've already played this. Bounty in the Bog is a technically competent module that offers nothing new or memorable to players. Its connection to the Mulmaster season is tenuous at best, and the adventure is disappointingly self-indulgent. It arises out of the adventures of someone else's characters 100 years ago in Raven's Bluff - presumably someone's Living City adventures - and ends with hints of a villain that won't appear anywhere in the core Adventurer's League seasons, leaving your players feeling that they've been drafted to play a supporting role in somebody else's fanfic. A disappointing low point in the Mulmaster AL season.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX2-07 Bounty in the Bog (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Murder in Baldur's Gate (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 09/08/2019 21:10:10

A superb product - D&D at its best.

Murder in Baldur's Gate is a fantastic start to Dungeons & Dragons' 5th Edition, and remains one of the best adventures AND best campaign supplements ever published by TSR or Wizards. It contains a full-fledged fast-paced low-level campaign in the city of Baldur's Gate that combines a political sandbox with a constant stream of high-stakes events. It engages with a surprisingly political theme - class warfare - with genuine teeth. It's the sort of story where, by design, players can't interact with everything and are constantly asked to make choices about what's important to them. The finale has wide-reaching consequences for the Forgotten Realms. It's absolutely my dream format for a D&D adventure. Plus, players familiar with the Baldur's Gate videogames will appreciate regular tasteful callbacks, while those who are not won't even notice them.

Combined with that, you get an exhaustive guide to the city of Baldur's Gate and surrounds, sufficient to run a year's worth of games. There's more useful detail and compelling plot hooks here in this one adventure than there was in the entirety of the 4th Edition Forgotten Realms material. It is absolutely a worthy purchase as a setting book even if you have no intention of running the adventure. The whole thing is in full colour, and dotted with maps, character portraits, and just a really attractive presentation throughout.

The flaws are relatively few. The largest is that the adventure all but forces players to take sides with one of three factions, each of whom are equally and obviously villainous, and players are likely to resist this railroading. The second note is not really a flaw, but it's worth saying this isn't a play-by-play adventure - DMs will have to do a lot of creativity on the fly around and between the adventure content to support the player freedom that this sort of sandbox promotes, and therefore more experienced DMs will get more out of this product. Third, it's an adventure that requires the players to fail to save everyone and to be less than perfectly heroic for the plot to advance, and that may irritate some players. And fourth, this product was created before the Monster Manual and PHB were settled, and therefore the combat encounters are almost entirely limited to generic non-spellcasting humanoids - DMs will need to do a little extra work to keep combat interesting for a combat-heavy party.

The original physical edition came with one of the most gorgeous DM's screens ever produced for D&D, and while the graphics are included in this purchase sadly the production values of the original item are not. But to make up for that, the DriveThru release comes conveniently packaged with all the bonus content that Wizards released online for this adventure, including an expanded opening encounter, additional events, and monster conversions for 3rd and 4th Edition.

All told this is a must-have for 5th Edition collectors, or for anyone interested in great D&D adventure design. Highly recommended, from someone who's rarely generous towards Wizards products.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Murder in Baldur's Gate (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX1-11 Dark Pyramid of Sorcerer’s Isle (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 05/15/2019 19:48:07

A confusing mess, best avoided

Dark Pyramid of Sorcerer's Isle has a good idea - revisiting the Pyramid of Yarash, previously featured in the Pool of Radiance videogame and novel. It's a semi-iconic location, and an Adventurer's League set in Phlan is a great time to do it. Unfortunately, almost every aspect of the actual module doesn't work.

(1) The adventure simply doesn't make sense given its placement in the Adventurer's League season. Phlan has just fallen, and in the immediate previous adventure (and in the season finale) getting out of the city is now hard, requiring an entire adventure to achieve. But players here are able to pop out and back for a leisurely jaunt upriver to check out something of marginal relevance to anyone in Phlan.

(2) The trip up the river is pointless busywork, best skipped.

(3) The lower level of the pyramid features an unmappable maze where players must face a certain number of random encounters to progress. This is lazy design, and is transparently frustrating to players. Some of these random encounters are interesting; most are not.

(4) The module theoretically features substantially different pathways depending on which entrance players make use of to the pyramid. In practice, these pathways are only marginally different but require double-printing many encounters. The reality is that there's a path that favours talking and a path that favours fighting, and a good GM should be orienting the adventure to their players' preference anyway.

(5) The adventure features (spoilers) Slaads, a rarely-used and interesting foe, but it doesn't use them terribly well. They're one faction in the pyramid, along with lizardfolk, Red Wizards and cultists, but the adventure is overly prone to fights featuring a single class of enemy, leaving them vulnerable to having their weaknesses exploited rather than demonstrating their strengths. (The wizards don't have any tanks, the slaads don't have any range, etc.)

(6) There's a weightless sense about the whole adventure, that none of it really matters or has consequences for anyone. Plus, there's just too much going on in the pyramid - too many factions, whose motives are too poorly explained, even in GM text, and moreso once you consider how to impart what information exists to the players.

In the end, this turned out to be the weakest adventure in Season 1 of Adventurer's League for our group, and one we were eager to hurry through and be done with. Not recommended.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX1-11 Dark Pyramid of Sorcerer’s Isle (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
The Hangman's Due
Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 01/05/2019 21:18:06

Horror Done Wrong: In theory, the Hangman's Due presents a short horror-themed interlude to use while players are travelling between other locations. In practice, it demonstrates a lot of the ways that horror can go wrong in a roleplaying setting.

The adventure's structure is set over three nights, of theoretically escalating terror, culminating in a final confrontation. However, as a player, it's an intensely frustrating adventure, because the players simply have no way to meaningfully interact with the material. There's no way to meaningfully prepare for these encounters, there's no way to provoke the final confrontation early, there's very little to learn that can't be learned almost immediately, and the central conflict of the module is between two NPCs, neither of whom are particularly deep or evocatively described. The player experience will be twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the next thing to happen, and repeating until it's over.

In addition, the printed material departs from the PHB and Monster Manual in weird and unexplained ways. Monsters have different stats from identically-named versions in the Monster Manual, and cast spells that use different damage dice from the PHB. None of this is explained. (Plus the monster stat blocks have bracketed alternate numbers next to some stats - I don't know what these mean; am I missing something?)

A better version of the same story would have involved two NPCs to protect, one more blameless than the other; or it would have had the curse fall on the PCs directly, and offer atonement as an alternate resolution for them; or would have been set in a village rather than on a road, with innocent bystanders endangered and an ability to meaningfully investigate the events underlying the backstory.

I don't want to be overly harsh to this adventure, which, after all, only costs a few dollars, and which I see some other players have enjoyed, but it's probably not the horror adventure you're looking for.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
The Hangman's Due
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
DDEX1-10 Tyranny in Phlan (5e)
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
by Greg T. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 12/19/2018 16:16:14

The Pinnacle of AL Season 1

Tyranny In Phlan is as good as it gets for Adventurer's League Season 1. It's the module that encouraged me to run the entire season as a traditional campaign. After nine modules of build-up, it smartly ditches the traditional investigation phase, preferring to get straight to the action, offering significant changes to the state of the campaign world and meaningful opportunities for players to lead those changes.

The module is pure payoff for earlier modules, reusing characters and locations previously established to potentially great emotional impact. The individual encounters are well-written, and easily reshaped by GMs for different player groups. There's an epic scale here that the first season of Adventurer's League simply hasn't previously reached, even in the ostensibly epic "Corruption in Kryptgarden".

That said, it's not flawless. It suffers from the Adventurer's League format, being both internally constrained by its requirements to run in a short timeframe for essentially random groups of players, and externally constrained in that none of the previous AL adventures were written with this module in mind, and so few of its key concepts are foreshadowed, and none of its NPCs are as well developed as they could have been. The impact of certain NPC fates obviously has much less impact if players missed meeting those NPCs, haven't been given reason to care about them, or (in a worst case scenario) got them killed in a previous outing. The lack of any real support for the Phlan setting - no modern maps, no location guides, no detailed history - also makes this less than it could be.

On top of all that, it's a little inconclusive. The villain of the story isn't defeated here - and in fact isn't even defeated at the end of the season. The plot doesn't wrap up for another three years, and when it does, it takes place in an Epic module that's difficult to scale to standard tabletop groups. A great experience for players attending Adventurer's League in the day, perhaps, but frustrating for groups wanting to experience it at home.

Still, this is what D&D should be - memorable moments, epic stakes, real consequences. Enjoy.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
DDEX1-10 Tyranny in Phlan (5e)
Click to show product description

Add to DriveThruRPG.com Order

pixel_trans.gif
Displaying 16 to 30 (of 56 reviews) Result Pages: [<< Prev]   1  2  3  4  [Next >>] 
pixel_trans.gif
pixel_trans.gif Back pixel_trans.gif
0 items
 Gift Certificates