Dragon Delves Dedicated to Chris Perkins

The new Dragon Delves anthology is dedicated to Chris Perkins, who recently retired from Wizards of the Coast. The new adventure anthology is officially out in early release today. The new anthology contains a brief dedication to Perkins in the credits, acknowledgind his "decades of contributions" to Dungeons & Dragons. Perkins is also credited as a designer for the book.

Perkins had worked for Wizards of the Coast since 1997, holding a variety of design-related roles with the company and spearheading much of the work for D&D's popular 5th Edition. Perkins announced his retirement back in April, following the release of the final 2024/2025 Core Rulebook. However, his retirement was a brief one, as Critical Role's Darrington Press announced that he was joining the publisher as Creative Director, a role similar to the one he held at Wizards of the Coast.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Any pre-written Adventure is going to have some failure points thst cabn go sideways: failing forwards through thst is a bug part of the magic thst makes TTRPGs different from computer fames for me.

I’m not a fan of “failing forwards”. Sometimes a fail is just a fail, especially when the fail is a consequence of player decisions and not bad dice rolls. Try and do better next time, and the questgiver can try and recruit some smarter adventurers.

 

[Parmandur]

I’m not a fan of “failing forwards”. Sometimes a fail is just a fail, especially when the fail is a consequence of player decisions and not bad dice rolls. Try and do better next time, and the questgiver can try and recruit some smarter adventurers.

Sure, but something will happen next. A prewrittem adventure can't account for every possibility, and if it took no risks wouldn't be much fun.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Sure, but something will happen next. A prewrittem adventure can't account for every possibility, and if it took no risks wouldn't be much fun.

I would have slotted it into something. There will be other stuff around for the players to do. Adventures from books still exist in a world, its not blank pages if the players go in a direction that wasn't included.

 

[Zaukrie]

I haven't read it, is there a reason the silver doesn't kill or scare off the cultists?

 

[Nikosandros]

I haven't read it, is there a reason the silver doesn't kill or scare off the cultists?

I think the idea is that he's just a wyrmling, he can't really tackle the cultists on his own.

 

[Zaukrie]

I think the idea is that he's just a wyrmling, he can't really tackle the cultists on his own.

Ah, that was my other thought, that I forgot to type. Thanks.

 

[Burnside]

The fourth adventure in the book is called For Whom the Void Calls, for level 5 characters.

The adventure ingredients: a brass dragon is denning in an abandoned high-tech githyanki creche staffed by modrons. Unbeknownst to the dragon, its horde includes a sentient, telepathic bag of devouring that reaches out to the adventurers claiming to be a sentient bag of holding in need of rescue.

It sounds really interesting, but this one mostly doesn't work for me unfortunately.

The Good

This is the adventure that uses the psychedelic art style featured on the alt cover. It's great; I wish the maps carried through that theme.

The dungeon's physical layout is varied and interesting. Also, it's inclusive. The books never mentions it, but this dungeon, like The Canopic Being in Candlekeep Mysteries, is totally wheelchair accessible due to the use of elevators and a ramping bridge. It also has lots of opportunities to communicate using common sign language, and one trap which would have no effect on deaf characters.

There's an amusing greedy winged kobold character secretly living in an abandoned luxury suite in the complex. Why githyanki have luxury suites in their creche I'm not sure.

Brass dragon, modrons, a bag of devouring, and githyanki are all generally fun creatures to put in an adventure.

Complaints

The designer provides creatures who have agendas, an interesting location, and takes a "see what happens" approach. Normally, I am a big fan of emergent play and adventures that don't lean into expectations of how things will turn out - the players effectively create the story by how they interact with the various toys in the toybox provided by the designer and narrated by the DM. Great.

Unfortunately, there are dramatically inert creatures here, and choices that lead to narrative dead ends.

The biggest issues probably are:

- There's no particular reason for this to be set in an abandoned githyanki creche, and the fact that it is a githyanki creche frankly just doesn't matter. It has a planar portal, but that was destroyed a long time ago and can't be repaired, so nothing happening there. The modrons summon a githyanki knight (we're not really told how she arrives, or, for that matter, why the githyanki would even still be interested in the place at this point) to save them from the dragon, but the githyanki knight pretty much refuses to participate in the the action completely - she won't help the modrons, and she also really won't help or hinder the characters. She just notes down anything told to her for her "report" she'll be sure to file with headquarters, and the adventure tells us that nothing will come of that. Literally the only thing she will do is attack the adventurers if they attack her first, or attack a modron in her presence (there's no reason they would do either of these things). Why include this character? I suspect it might be a satire of real-world police, but if so this character needs to have more impact or just not be there at all.

- The central villain of the piece is the sentient, telepathic bag of devouring. This is a cool idea but unfortunately it just doesn't really go anywhere during the course of the adventure. In fact, the adventurers are unlikely to discern the true nature of the bag until...presumably sometime after the adventure ends, when they notice that they can't retrieve stuff from it. This might work if the adventure is dropped into an ongoing campaign. As a one-shot, it's kind of disastrously flat. The bag contacts the adventurers telepathically on two occasions; it would be good if the bag was both funnier and more of a bastard.

Verdict
I wanted to like this one because I like the art style, I like the accessibility aspect, and I like a lot of the ideas and creatures. But it just doesn't add up to the sum of its parts at all imo. I give this a C.

 

[Parmandur]

I would have slotted it into something. There will be other stuff around for the players to do. Adventures from books still exist in a world, its not blank pages if the players go in a direction that wasn't included.

Yup, exactly, that's the fun.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I have read the first one, Death at Sunset, and agree with @pukunui about the brainwashed elves issue. A good DM will fix that without too much trouble, but yeah the adventure doesn't handle it particularly well. Worse, it goes to that same well twice, and you can tell the first time that it's gonna be awkward for the DM to handle.

It's not a bad adventure by any means, but it's a bit generic. The wyrmling living inside its mother's skeleton is a great touch, as well as the poisoned bandit zombies, and the dragons' names - it could use like 2-3 more things like that. It has a tendency to punt to the DM for some moments when the designer could have really helped the DM out - especially novice DMs. There are some ghosts who give "cryptic warnings" - come on, throw us a bone and include a few suggested dialogue lines there.

The maps in Death at Sunset are really nice visually (full color, atmospheric and evocative, and at 5' scale thank God), but there are some map/text continuity issues as well as some physical design issues. There's a rather large treasure horde visible on the map that is , according to the text, in a different location. In the dungeon map, because of the spatial layout, most parties are going to beeline to the boss fight and either skip the side encounters or else handle them post-boss in rather anti-climactic fashion (hard to get excited about killing some centipedes right after you slew your first dragon).

Oh and it feels like it's really generous with magic items at the end, for a level 3 party - much more so than most 2014-2023 5E adventures would be. I wonder if the new adventures are taking a more Monty Haul approach to magic item placement.

I give Death at Sunset like a B. There are flaws, but I think most tables would have fun with it.

I'm running Death at Sunset next week. But my first change was to get rid of the brainwashed elves (my objection was more that I didn't buy the brainwashing and wasn't looking forward to roleplaying it, I didn't even think about how the information would be conveyed). I think I'm going to have some angsty village youths who have become dragon cultists instead, and the village elder can just be dead.

I'm also throwing out the maps, because I feel like both of them packed too much into too small of an area in order to cover everything with two maps. Having a seven tree grove with encounters around different trees that are like 25 feet apart seems like a mess (I'm going to spread the ancestral redwoods around the forest and have them roll to find each one), and I don't like the design of the cave with side encounters with blights and millipedes that one would naturally be more likely to encounter futzing around after the big fight than before (and again it seems too small of an area).

 

[Distracted DM]

I’m not a fan of “failing forwards”. Sometimes a fail is just a fail, especially when the fail is a consequence of player decisions and not bad dice rolls. Try and do better next time, and the questgiver can try and recruit some smarter adventurers.

I think "fail forward" sometimes is seen as "fail into success," but I think the intent is just to keep momentum going. Falling to pick the lock doesn't mean that theyll automatically find another way through, but it does mean that instead of standing around thinking about what to do next, guards heard the fail so they show up to harass.