The Dark Hunt
The village near Oreclasp Keep has been reporting brutal owlbear attacks that have left people
missing or dismembered. Lord Oreclasp has placed a bounty for every owlbear beak brought to
Oreclasp Keep. The villagers don’t suspect the deeper problems brewing in the hunting preserve
of Oreclasp Keep.
I was surprised to see the rave reviews on DMsGuild. I played the Dark Hunt today and it was OK. I give it a C+. First of all, there is too much to do for a 2-hour mod compared to other 2-hour Tier 2 mods like In Dire Need. We had five experienced players with 8-9th level characters and it still took us over 3 hours to complete it, and we even cleared the second encounter in a single round thanks to having 3 casters and a series of amazingly poor saving throw rolls by the DM. The main issue I had with the mod is that it presents like there is a mystery to solve in connection with some owlbear attacks, but there really isn't anything we did to solve it. We just kept travelling down the railroad to fight the next creatures we met and after each encounter there was some exposition that explained some bit of the mystery and pointed us to the next encounter. My experience with this mod is so different than the reviews that I'm starting to wonder if our DM misread the mod or missed some vital element. He runs a lot of mods so I doubt it.
SPOILERS? (Only if you didn't already figure out that this mod has owlbears.) Right at the beginning you get enough information to know where to go to solve the problem but then you have to go somewhere else because that's what the NPC's say you should do. So off you go until you've found enough McGuffins to lead you back to the place you knew you had to visit right from the start. There are of course dark forces operating behind the scenes but we never really found out why or what they were up to or what any of it had to do with owlbears. There are NPC's to talk to but only for exposition. In short, it didn't seem like there was a way to affect the story with our character's non-combat skills or our player skills outside of just managing spells and attacks. I'm sure our barbarian liked the mod better than I did with my warlock. The combat wasn't challenging either and didn't have any terrain or room features to interact with during combat. The final encounter takes place in a barren square room. Owlbears? Tier 2 characters should hit an owlbear about 75% of the time. They don't have ranged attacks, special abilities or resistance. I thought about just flying up into the air and eldritch blasting them from above but it seemed too easy-cheesy so I stayed on the ground where they'd at least have a chance to do some damage to me and make things interesting. To top it all off the magic item that drops at the end is very underwhelming Fai Chen trade fodder.
