My reformed tabletop group (see the last post for that story) just finished the D&D Encounters season called "The Elemental Eye". In a lot of ways, this adventure is quite a bit different from "Beyond the Crystal Cave", the Encounters season I began running for my tabletop group and am currently running at RpgCrossing. The Crystal Cave focused on roleplaying elements and a fairy tale feel. The Elemental Eye is more of an old-fashioned dungeon crawl as a great deal of the adventure is the exploration of an ancient temple of Ghaunadaur and a hidden shrine to Tharizdun.
This review will not be spoiler-free, so if you are planning on playing this adventure and don't want to be surprised, you have been warned.
The Good:
The adventure uses the Abyssal Plague, which was a multi-campaign setting event that Wizards of the Coast did to try to tie all their products into one crisis, much like DC and Marvel do every couple of years. Though I never read the novels, I did read the short story introducing the concept (which can be downloaded as a free ebook on the WotC site).
I like threats that could possibly infect the players and change their bodies into something horrifying. It is basically what makes the zombie genre so scary. This one features a plague that turns its victims into horrifying plague demons. Thanks to lucky saving throws, only one of my players ever got infected despite numerous bites. The disease was cured before it got too scary.
This also presents good opportunities for tough moral decisions. Do we kill the infected villagers or tend to them, even though even if only a few of them turn the village might be overrun?
There is also a really interesting nightmare sequence where the characters return to the town to find that they had failed and it had been destroyed by plague. Creepy clues slowly let the players know that what they are seeing isn't real, but the entire sequence was suitably scary and had a great ambiance. It is hard to do horror in a tabletop rpg, and this felt genuinely ominous.
The encounters were very tactical, emphasizing cover and using the maps to their fullness. There was height, concealment, cover, environmental hazards, and elemental effects to really challenge the players.
The Bad:
I really don't get the nostalgia for dungeon crawling. You explore rooms meticulously, step by step, looking for traps and listening at doors for monsters. Bleh. So, there was a lot of that. And a LOT of dwarves with crossbows. My party of three didn't have any really ranged characters so that was pretty painful.
The story also wasn't too surprising. For the most part it was 'kill insane dwarven cultists and their elemental allies' with few deviations.
Final Thoughts:
Overall it was a fun way to get a group of players from levels 1-4. The player concepts were a lot of fun. They played shifters built around the Pack Outcast theme from the Neverwinter book. Essentially, Uthgardt werewolves who had been exiled from their pack when it got corrupted by Netherese agents. An arena fighter and a scout, they traveled from city to city taking odd jobs and fighting in pits until they got the job that started them on this quest. Of course, with only two player characters, I had to introduce a leader (the class, not an actual leader) as an NPC. Luckily, the Silverstars are a group of Selunite priestesses who hunt evil werewolves so that fit perfectly. After convincing her that they were here to help and not the cause of any diseases, the werewolf PCs were joined by Cerridwen, a half-elf warpriest of Selune.
Eventually, I managed to work another player into the party as an eladrin illusionist and we had all the roles properly filled.
Overall, I think everyone had a good time. We're set for the Shards of Selune adventure next, designed to take characters who are levels 3-5 through an adventure in Neverwinter. This works out well geographically and also puts more focus on Selune, who is a patron of good lycanthropes. Cerridwen hopes to gain at least two new converts for her goddess out of this! :D
I've read a few of the Abyssal Plague novels (the short story you mentioned was fun, Erik Scott de Bie's _Shadowbane_ was good, and Don Bassingthwaite's _Temple of Yellow Skulls_ was decent), so I was interested to read through this adventure when it came out in Dungeon.
ReplyDeleteIt seemed ok, but after the events in those novels--epic, or at least city-wide destruction that seemed ready to destroy the entire world--I was a little disappointed in the adventure. It seemed like a pretty basic delve, without much to really set it apart beyond the fact that it featured some plague demons. I missed the nightmare sequence you mentioned (I was skimming by that point), which sounds great.
Anyway, it was very interesting to read your impressions of it. I also found this recap, which largely seemed to echo your impressions: http://dungeonsmaster.com/2012/05/dd-encounters-the-elder-elemental-eye-report-card/
Yeah, I really don't understand why people are so nostalgic for dungeon crawls. I like 4e's earlier focus on just narrating most of the exploration parts of the game 'You work your way through the caverns and eventually come to an open chamber' where the battlemap comes out and the encounter happens. That's a lot more fun for me than
ReplyDelete'the tunnel goes 30 feet to the north and then branches east or west...which way do you go?'
'I don't know...west I guess.'
'Okay..you follow it for about 50 feet and then you come to a door.'
'I listen at the door'
'Roll a listen check'
'14'
'You don't hear anything.'
'I open the door.'
'You're in what looks like a kitchen.'
'I search the cabinets'.
'You find plates and spoons.'
That old school style, along with random, illogical traps is what led an entire generation of gamers to start carrying ten foot poles that they carefully used to poke every five foot square in case of traps before they went forward. YAWN.
That's my biggest problem with the adventure, and with the general direction WotC seems to be going with the brand these days. After a few years of embracing modern game design, they really seem to be trying to recapture the essence of that 1970's D&D feel. I just don't have the same nostalgia for it that they do.