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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Burnside" data-source="post: 9693790" data-attributes="member: 6910340">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 GoodThis 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.ComplaintsThe 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 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.VerdictI 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.</blockquote>

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