D&D 5E D&D 5e Adventure Reviews

[Jacob Lewis]

And this is the key problem I've seen over and over. When you get a pre-gen, to run it well you need to:

1) Read it through.

2) Understand it - which often requires taking quite a lot of notes, because a lot of pre-gens are really badly written, and really badly organised. Vital description or information that gives a scene its entire context can be a dozen pages away (often later!) in a text box, or worse, in the middle of a paragraph about something else!

3) Make any changes to make to make it "not suck". Hopefully there is no 3. A lot of smaller adventures, there is no 3. They're just solid little adventures, and you do little or nothing to make them work (maybe change a town name or something, or otherwise recontextualize them). With big adventures? There's almost never not a 3, and sometimes 1+2+3 here is significantly more than writing your adventure, often for a lesser outcome.

Does that make sense?

Yes it does. What you describe as problematic to you, I find to be a fun, rewarding part of what I do. You see obstacles. I see opportunities. But then again, I've always been one to enjoy putting in more work than necessary.

 

[Lanefan]

Forge of Fury is a great dungeon set piece, but I agree it need better context for why the players are there.

That's what the DM is for. Ideally, the module itself doesn't try to build in clear reason why the PCs are there (the players themselves are never there, one hopes!), so as to allow the DM to seamlessly work it into her campaign however suits best without the extra work of having to strip out the module's own backstory. (this is why I find nearly all Pathfinder adventures poor for conversion: by the time you've stripped out all the backstory there often isn't much left)

Some of the rooms could use a little more fleshing out, or at least some more dynamic encounters to bring it to life rather than just room-to-room exploring.

It has a lot of potential though.

It's one of the best 3e-era modules, period. But it does assume a party of dedicated dungeon-crawlers...