D&D 5E Boing Boing reviews Princes of the Apocalypse and calls it D&D's killer app.

[Henry]

While it would be nice for them to release pdfs where the monsters are organized by encounter, it's not that much of a hassle for me to cut out the statblocks I want in photoshop, copy them into Word, arrange to taste, and then print them out.

Not a bad idea, i could use Irfanview or Gimp to do similar and prep them in quickedit on my iPad - I'm just used to Paizo, Monte Cook, and others putting stats in-line or in margins for easy reference; it's just another unnecessary hassle for me if I'm trying to prep and adjust encounter strength before the game, or if i need a less-used stat at game time. I haven't used printed pages for game prep in maybe two years now.

 

[Remathilis]

Exactly.

I have never understood the nostalgia that attends ToEE as anyone I know who has enjoyed playing it has had a DM who basically rewrote it both to finish it and to make it actually feel elemental.

The bits that were finished were, in large part, designed by random dungeon generation (I kid you not) and involved simply encountering monsters in increasing order of hit dice difficulty. It was crap, and delayed/late crap at that. After ToEE, my group refused to play long dungeon-based adventures ever again... and I refused to DM them.

But it had a great cover.

Princes is very different, and I otherwise agree with the review. Princes is complete. Princes makes an effort to actual put the elemental into the adventure. Princes is written by a really good adventure designer.

Put "Return to..." in the front of the title and you have my review of that module also.

 

[teitan]

The ToEE has a mystique to it in d&d, a romance to it that no other module possesses. Much of this is based on legend as opposed to fact and with the right DM it is a damn fine adventure and quintessential dungeon crawl adventure. The set up in Hommlet is the best part, agreed, but the back story is inspired myth making. Return to was a much better module than the original and added to the story, increasing the legend. Behind this single module is the foundation of what could be amazing stories for d&d and the original module failed to deliver on that but it is still there and still ready to be tapped in beautiful ways. I haven't read PotA yet, I'm ordering it soon but based on reviews I get the feeling it finally delivers what Return to almost succeeded in accomplishing. Then, Return is my all time favorite module but like all modules requires work.