While I Read - Dragon Delves - Part 1
While I Read?
A tradition from RPG.net where a person reads through a book and gives first impressions as the poster reads through the book. Be aware that this While I Read contains spoilers.
Cover
Folks, this is why I picked up this book. I'm not going to lie. Am I curious about how 2024 D&D changed their module design? Yes. Do I want a special edition cover by Justine Jones in bright colors? Hell yes. Gimme that Lisa Frank/Death Metal purple dragon.
Introduction
This starts with a quick introduction that describes how to use this book which I like. There are three options that have a few paragraphs each for their implementation: use an adventure as a one shot, filler in your continuing campaign or as a campaign itself. For the campaign there are 3 framing devices:
- Bahamut is your patron.
- You are on a quest to hatch a magic egg
- You're after hoard loot. The egg is the most fascinating of these but the other two are serviceable.
Some adventures even have duet play in mind which is neat including a bonus blessing for that single player to power them up.
Neat thing I was not expecting, each chapter begins with a history of that dragon type! We start with the green dragon and there's some neat history about Dragonlance and then some designs throughout the years including 4e and 5e and 5.24. The 2024 revamp has some really interesting features where they add cobra like details to the green dragon. I really dig this. There's a fantastic art piece where a green dragon swims beneath a boat full of adventures that I find extremely striking. Including concept pieces here is a great idea.
Death at Sunset
Here's the proof in the pudding. How much easier are these adventures to run? This adventure demonstrates the new layout which begins with a single-pager that lays out key plot points and NPCs as well as a prep guide that includes monsters that will be used. Following that is an adventure that fills 10 pages with 4 half page art pieces from Dominik Mayer that fill the forest theme and I really like. There are 2 keyed maps as well.
This first adventure is fine. Both of these maps aren't great spaces to explore. One is a large clearing with 6 huge trees. It doesn't feel like the separate encounters on this map make sense? There are some annoying things such as exploring side areas of the dungeon only "awarding" the players with combat and the overall design being pretty linear. There's not really a lot of interaction here but a pretty straight forward slay the dragon quest. It's elevated by some of the cute details and I don't think it's bad. For level 1 it's also a good dragon adventure. Interesting that there are no monster stat blocks in the book. You are required to own the Monster Manual. I expect most of these are in the SRD as well.
An odd bit here. This is a level 1 adventure but it has you level up almost immediately. You run one fetch quest to get antitoxins and then you receive enough XP or receive a milestone to make it to level 2. This is effectively a Level 2 adventure despite being advertised as level 1.
Baker's Doesn't
This adventure is 13 pages. The art, by Andrew Kolb, is all bright cartoony, flat and fits the fairytale vibe of this adventure. It has 3 keyed locations.
From the one pager at the beginning of these first two adventures, I'm not so sure the Preparation section has a ton of value. The monster stat block part seems to be the most useful and the rest is pretty generic, know the NPCs, background and adventure.
This adventure starts with large multi-paragraph reviews of the key players, Edith, Fill and Uncle Nibblecheek. I'm not sure this level of detail is super helpful. It's spread out between too many words that will make it hard to reference at the table.
The call to action in this adventure is a little weak: you're walking through town and everyone is smiling and nodding at you until you arrive at a building that's burning down. It just doesn't really track? It's fine but it's shocking that no-one else noticed or that Edith, trapped inside the burning building hasn't shouted for help. It seems like this could be punched up a bit. Then things move into an investigation where the heroes poke around and solve the mystery of why the confectionery burned down. This section is short but feels forced.
The adventure itself picks up after the initial portion. I'm not sure the mystery setup adds a lot. It's pretty rote and only has a few details. The dungeon itself seems fun. It's got some interesting options to make, exploring is rewarded and there are a few ways to play out the final confrontation with the hag. I think it nailed the whimsy of a fairy tale with this dungeon. I'm pretty into the idea of running this as a one-shot. The options on what could happen after the adventure (especially if Uncle Nibblecheek lives) are great.
I'm going to take a break here but expect more while I read of Dragon Delves in the future