Dragon Delves - Part 3
While I Read
A tradition from RPG.net where a person reads through a book and gives first impressions as they go through the book. This is Part 3. Part 1 has my thoughts on the Cover, Introduction and first two adventures while Part 2 reviews the next 3 adventures. Beware that this While I Read contains spoilers.
The Forbidden Vale
This adventure is 18 pages (taking the title as the longest adventure in the anthology to this point) and has incredibly striking black and white line art by Luke Eidenschink. There are 3 half page illustrations and one smaller one. I love this art. The full page piece in the same spread as the one page description is an epic piece of a humanoid mounted on a dragon. There appears to be a hag coven, overgrown ziggurat, and a fallen statue as well. There are five Dyson Logos maps, 4 of them are keyed and the last is a hex map. They are all 4 color: black, white, red and blue. This adventure has fantastic visual style.
Alright, this is the red dragon adventure. The art is setting a strong mood. What do we have here? The one page description notes this as a 3-4 session adventure. Every previous adventure has noted 1-2 sessions making this the meatiest in both content and page count if we believe the description.
The one page description is the least interesting so far. There's a red dragon and it's starting wildfires. The dragon is hanging out in magical gardens made by Githyanki. The twist is you might be put the dragon into a magical slumber. The prep section tells us to read the adventure and bookmark a lot of monsters which is minimally useful. The NPC table is very self-referential (is blank's bodyguard, is blank's unwilling servant) and gives a pretty bizarre cast of characters.
Now we're into the adventure background. A splinter sect of Githyanki and a red dragon settled down here and conquered the land. Eventually this splinter sect splintered and the conquered peoples overthrew the Githyanki and slew their dragon. The ancient dragon's young now slumbers in the garden and razes the surrounding countryside every 200 years to keep the valley clear. Well, 200 years have happened and the town of Arborean Springs is the spot all of the dragonfire refuges are heading too. They introduce 3 factions here: traditionalists, nature lovers and merchants.
Next up is a whole page devoted to the nature lovers, also known as the Burning Circle. They believe the dragon is a natural part of the environment and should be preserved. Its wildfires are necessary for the region's health and it must stay in place to keep the gardens from being plundered. The Burning Circle's leader is an old elf that has witnessed this phenomena twice. This is a lot of text for a small amount of game-able information. To satisfy the circle the player's obtain ingredients from this magic garden and create the sleeping poison. At which point you coat your weapons with it and go fight a dragon. Huh. You don't try to get the dragon to drink it, you just do whack 'em with your weapons because that's what you do with a dragon, right? Disappointing.
Next up, the merchants. They want you to put the dragon to sleep as well, but without the fetch quest in the gardens. The dragon shouldn't wake up again as well. Oh, sorry, I meant kill, not sleep.
Finally, the traditionalists. They also want the dragon to die, but old lore tells them that going into the Forbidden Vale means things will get worse. Please kill the dragon but don't go to the dungeon.
So, there's your 3 versions of this adventure. Go into the dungeon and make sleeping poison and then almost kill the dragon. Option two is kill the dragon. And option three is kill the dragon, but do it over here, please and thank you.
Next up is a hex map of the region. It's beautiful. Despite all those hexes, this adventure is setup as a point crawl and there is only a few points. You'll head to a river crossing and then move north (if you're going to the gardens). There's a few scheduled encounters with flaming skeletons/skulls, a roc, and fire elementals at the points.
So far, there isn't a single monster stat block in this book and that's disappointing. But here the adventures calls out using the rules for Infernos in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Somehow, that feels more galling than the missing monster stat blocks. Those rules are not in the SRD if a Control+F can be believed.
The remainder of the points of interest are: a scripted encounter with the dragon, a resort that might be an okay place to rest and the dungeon/dragon lair. I'm disappointed that the dragon is here as a scripted encounter only. It highlights that there's no random encounter table. This map is the perfect place to have a flavorful encounter table: fleeing farmers, a bunch of rich resort vacationers pursued by fire elementals, the roc flying away with a wagon, the dragon. Seems like a wasted opportunity to me.
The ziggurat itself, the core of this adventure, is pretty nice. It has several ways to navigate it and a variety of monsters inside of it. My favorite are the coven of green hags that provide some non-combat interest. I am annoyed they live in a "bog" which doesn't fit the description of bog by a long shot. Know your wetlands. While the adventure hints at what these hags might be doing, the actual work of this is on the DM. Another place where a random encounter table would really shine!
Before the Storm
This adventure is 9 pages with 2 maps by Jared Blando and 3 half page art pieces by Matt Stikker. The art is good. It's doing something with color choices that I can't really speak on as a non-artist but it gives it a distinctive appearance. Maybe Risograph or wood print-esque? The maps are great. They are vibrant and have a ton of little flourishes like dragons in the border or skulls in the walls. The full page map recalls Dungeon Crawl Classics maps, but not quite that level of 70's airbrushed van-ness.
The 1-pager isn't too special: dragon attacks town, you go investigate this dragon. The Preparation section has an interesting note crammed between the normal bookmark these stat blocks and read the adventure: check out details on the Plane of Air. I'm curious to see how necessary that will be.
Our background information for this one is very simple: village is affected by the Plane of Air and gets bad storms. A Djinn made a magic Macguffin that protects the village from said storms. The dragon pirates raided and stole the Macguffin's magic doohickeys: a pair of sapphires.
Then we're off and running with another building fire. I feel like this book should get a demerit for two adventures starting with the same inciting incident. The heroes can help with the fire in a few ways outlined here, which is nice to see. Then there's an exposition section where the rescued NPCs tell the heroes about the (formerly non-violent?) pirate gang and the black dragon which they suspect is now the captain.
Then the heroes are bundled off to talk to the mayor and receive some more exposition and a quest to defeat the dragon. If the heroes let the whole tavern burn and the town folk die, the mayor tries to guilt them into slaying the dragon otherwise he offers payment. It's a bit funny, honestly.
One neat thing about this dungeon: it has a time limit. If the heroes don't recover the gems within a day a massive elemental storm will demolish the town. Got to move fast!
Heroes get to see the effects of a dragon's lair on a region for the first time as they approach the pirate's cove some 6 miles away. Neat. The dungeon itself looks to have a lot of black dragon aesthetic with acid pools dotting the landscape. The pirates are incredibly loyal (except for one) and fight to the death. Sort of boring, but fits with this sort of adventure.
The dungeon itself is pretty small, traditional but well executed. I like the ring and chainmail of acid resistance 20 feet deep into a pool of acid, a cruel whimsy of the dragon captain. The 1 day time limit is improves this dungeon and gives it some heft. Time pressure will explain why the dungeon doesn't adapt and keep the PCs moving.