Magustrate's Curios

Secret of the Dragon Emperor - Module Review

Secret of the Dragon Emperor is the included adventure in the Dragonbane Core set, published by Free League. It's a 120 page softcover, perfect bound book in A4/Letter size with a full color interior.

What's my perspective?

I've played through the entirety of the Dragonbane Core Set Adventure book with my crew of 4 players. We played 2 hour sessions every 2 weeks for 33 total sessions. Most sessions were online using Foundry VTT, but a few sessions were in person with paper character sheets. I was the gamemaster and ran the Adventure book, and its included campaign Secret of the Dragon Emperor, as written with as few changes as possible.

What's in the text?

Overview

The Secret of the Dragon Emperor campaign included in the Dragonbane Core Set contains an opening scene, 11 adventure sites, the village of Outskirt and three factions.

The Secret of the Dragon Emperor is a pretty simple campaign overall. The players are on a quest to recover the legendary sword Um-Durman, the only weapon capable of slaying the immortal necromancer Azrahel Koth. To recover the sword they'll need to find four pieces of a statuette of the Dragon Emperor, Eledain.

Three factions are looking for the statuette and sword. These factions, the Demon Cultists, the Keepers of the Immaculate Flame and the Orcs, will be the heroes antagonists and allies on their journey, figuring in to many of the adventure sites. The Demon Cultists are evil by default but the Immaculate Flame and Orcs leave room for interpretation.

The Adventure book begins with the party entering the Misty Vale through the mountains and getting introduced to Orcs, finding one of the statuette pieces and picking up some other clues to mysteries in the Vale. From there the Adventure book goes completely wide open before eventually ending on the Isle of Mist and a confrontation with Azrahel Koth.

Adventure Sites

Each of the adventure sites is written so that it can be dropped into any game or linked together to form a campaign connected by the factions and an overarching quest to collect statuette pieces. These adventure sites all follow the same format and are a reasonable 5-11 pages. The format for each site has these parts:

Each of these adventures is written in such a way that you could read the Situation, which is usually a third of a letter size page, and run the adventure room by room with little issue.

Maps are all well made and easy to read. The keying of rooms is very strong, allowing a GM to understand a room with only a moment's attention. Each keyed entry follows this format:

The Random Encounter table for each Adventure Site is flavorful, containing more than just "d6+1 wolves." It gives the GM context for the entries and makes the sites feel alive and dynamic. Often the tables will have you roll different dice or add modifiers to reflect changing danger levels. Not all of these entries are combat, many set the mood for a site, for example this entry:

Vision. A player character gets the feeling of being watched and has a vision of two staring ice-blue eyes, which terrifies them. The victim must roll against WIL to resist fear

Outskirt

The point of light in this campaign. Outskirt is the only bit of civilization and is a well defined space with filled with enticing NPCs. Each has a portrait and is either staffing a shop or representing a faction.

Random Journeys

Dragonbane puts a lot of weight on journeys. Asking you to roll for pathfinding, count rations and otherwise adding mechanical weight to this process. I found this to work quite well when combined with the five Journey tables.

These map onto the regions of the Misty Vale and give you interesting things that happen on the road as you travel between Adventure sites. Again, these tables add dynamism and make the Misty Vale feel alive and sometimes give natural hooks into other Adventure sites.

I'll also mention the Demonic Omens table which is meant to signal Azrahel Koth's expanding power and worked great for reminding players what the overarching goal was when they got lost in the weeds.

At the Table

The Secret of the Dragon Emperor was fantastic to run. The story itself won't win an award for its originality, in fact at several points the comparisons to Lord of the Rings were so strong the table commented on it. In the moment to moment of play we were all engaged. My party consistently went to these strange adventure sites, engaged with traps, met interesting people and defeated horrible monsters. No adventure site felt single note. Even the smallest of them, the Tower of Sighs, was interesting and felt open-ended.

As a gamemaster I really enjoyed playing all these NPCs who felt like they had clear goals and were easy to step into. I played an old herbalist troll, a ranger willing to risk demon corruption for the best basil in the Vale and a blind farmer who lost her family in a monster attack.

The system of factions created some excellent play and led to great decisions for the players. The Orcs are enemies of Azrahel Koth, generally at odds with other kin, and one of the first foes that the heroes will face. The Immaculate Flame, as the militant remnant of an ancient empire, showed up as both chivalric knights and assholes. My party was naturally suspicious of this "cop" faction so I leaned into that when I played the Immaculate Flame. My player's were careful to pick no sides until late into the adventure, carefully assessing each faction. Eventually an alliance was forged with the Orcs and together the final statuette pieces were secured and a war party set out to the Isles of Mist to defeat Azrahel Koth.

I ran this basically out of the book and didn't need to add anything to have a strong game. I felt no need to take notes, the villain was a strong presence throughout the game and the Misty Vale felt like a cool place to explore. I strongly recommend this adventure.

#Dragonbane #PlayReview #adventure