Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall will be Level 11-20 adventure

Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall will be a high-level Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Today, Wizards of the Coast officially made the upcoming adventure and its companion rulebook Arcana Unleashed, available for pre-order. The listing for Deadfall reveals that it will be a Level 11-20 adventure, pitting players against the undead lich Szass Tam. The new adventure is billed as a "magical spy thriller" with Tam set to unleash a demonic undead horde upon the Forgotten Realms.

The adventure will also feature 20 dedicated maps, a Thay gazetteer, 6 "high-CR" creature statblocks, including Szass Tam, and 14 magic items.

Historically, Wizards of the Coast has shied away from high-level adventures for its 5th Edition campaigns, although there were a few exceptions like Dungeon of the Mad Mage and Vecna: Eve of Ruin. It's interesting that, for the first official campaign adventure for 5.5E, Wizards is opting for a high-level campaign as opposed to an entry level campaign.

Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall will be released on September 15th.

 

[Remathilis]

I am curious what you fear will be missing.

My personal fear is rapid fire leveling. Sometimes you gain a level after only a few encounters and don't even have a chance to try out what abilities you just gained before you're gaining another. And the skeleton system used in the past few books feels very much like it's continuing that breakneck pace. I just want each chapter to involve more than a night's play before you're leveling again.

 

[Reynard]

My personal fear is rapid fire leveling. Sometimes you gain a level after only a few encounters and don't even have a chance to try out what abilities you just gained before your gaining another. And the skeleton system used in the past few books feels very much like it's continuing that breakneck pace. I just want each chapter to involve more than a night's play before you're leveling again.

I totally get that. Especially in a game like 5E that explicitly worked to solve the "dead level" issue, too fast levellinhcan be a real problem.

But isn't level rate (in numbers of sessions) a GM concern more than designer concern?

 

[Remathilis]

I totally get that. Especially in a game like 5E that explicitly worked to solve the "dead level" issue, too fast levellinhcan be a real problem.

But isn't level rate (in numbers of sessions) a GM concern more than designer concern?

Both. I'll give an example.

Light of Xarysis (the Spelljammer module) was supposed to be episodic and end on a cliffhanger. Unfortunately, most of the chapters were small and only had a few encounters (combat or otherwise) before they moved to the next session and you gained a level. I was playing a lunar sorcerer and found I barely got a chance to even try my new spells before I was gaining even more. And unless the DM added side quests, expanded the dungeons with more encounters or basically ignore the cliffhangers, it really felt rushed.

That is absolutely a flaw in the structure of the module and while a good DM could fill in the gaps, it required the DM to basically restructure the module to slow it down, which feels like it hurts the purpose of using a module.

And that module covered levels 5-9. This is 11-20 in the same size book. I wager there is going to be a lot of "2-3 fights and then level" style chapters. But I'm hoping to be wrong.

 

[mamba]

I am curious what you fear will be missing.

could literally be anything… no new monsters, fewer locations, no gazetteer (which most previous adventures had).

I would not mind a more concise description, but WotC going that route is not high on my list of expectations for what causes the reduction in page count. I find gaps / missing content with leveling after each session more likely than them going the OSE adventure route

 

[ECMO3]

My personal fear is rapid fire leveling. Sometimes you gain a level after only a few encounters and don't even have a chance to try out what abilities you just gained before you're gaining another. And the skeleton system used in the past few books feels very much like it's continuing that breakneck pace. I just want each chapter to involve more than a night's play before you're leveling again.

I agree. Sometimes it is one encounter.

 

[mamba]

But isn't level rate (in numbers of sessions) a GM concern more than designer concern?

if there is not enough content it might be a design issue. I for one believe that an adventure should provide enough content to cover its level range rather than forcing the DM to triple the content just so characters do not level after every 2 hours of play

 

[Mistborn]

I totally get that. Especially in a game like 5E that explicitly worked to solve the "dead level" issue, too fast levellinhcan be a real problem.

But isn't level rate (in numbers of sessions) a GM concern more than designer concern?

The issue isn't just the leveling pace—it's the amount of story you can realistically fit into 128 pages.

A campaign covering levels 11–20 is expected to deliver an epic, high-level narrative with memorable villains, complex locations, meaningful NPCs, and room for the players' choices to matter. That's an enormous amount of material.

For comparison, Vecna: Eve of Ruin is over 200 pages long, and one of the common criticisms it received was that it still felt rushed. Many people felt it jumped too quickly between major locations and didn't give its story or setting enough time to develop.

If a 200+ page campaign struggled with that, I have a hard time seeing how a 128-page adventure covering the same level range can avoid feeling even more compressed.

And that's really why I buy published campaigns in the first place. I don't mind customizing them, but I don't want to have to write half the campaign myself just to make the story feel complete. If I have to fill in major gaps, expand the plot, and create additional content, then the published adventure isn't doing the job I paid for.

 

[R_J_K75]

An adventure spanning 10 levels plus a Thay gazeteer in just 128 pages is suspicious.

Which begs the question how much of the "new" gazeteer will be a rehash of parts from the "Dreams of the Red Wizards", "Spellbound" and "Unapproachable East" sourcebooks from previous editions? My guess is a good portion, but maybe I'm wrong.

This part left me pretty underwhelmed; "The listing for Deadfall reveals that it will be a Level 11-20 adventure, pitting players against the undead lich Szass Tam. The new adventure is billed as a "magical spy thriller" with Tam set to unleash a demonic undead horde upon the Forgotten Realms." The undead horde premise seems overdone and uninspired. There are other villainous groups and regions in the Realms to explore, and not every adventure needs to be an epic length earth shattering one. If this were scalable for different levels, set in a region that's not been detailed before in 64-96 pages I'd buy it in a second.

 

[Zaukrie]

I actually may want to buy this one eventually. Support for high-level play in D&D is lackluster so every little bit of it is needed.

That's fair, and I might adjust my answer if I read it's great and people want a one shot....

 

[GMMichael]

a loosely defined one that leaves plenty of room to the DM for details to fill out on his/her own.

That sounds like, at mid- to high-level, it could go off the rails REAL fast.

let’s see it first before jumping to conclusions…

I'm not sure "pre-order" permits that.