Crothian
First Post
Eyes of a Lich Queen
Eyes of the Lich Queen turned out to be the best Eberron adventure in third edition. It is at time a tough module and for the levels suggested for the module and at the same time it is easy for the things that get accomplished here. It does not have the strongest plot but it works for a D&D adventure. The best thing though it is fun and there is plenty of action.
Eyes of the Lich Queen is a fifth level adventure written for the Eberron setting published by Wizards of the Coast. The softbound book is about one hundred and twenty pages and in full color. It has Wizards of the Coast’s high product values and it is very simple to read and follow. There are designer notes and plenty of side bars to help out experienced and inexperienced DM’s alike. I found it all very useful when I ran it.
Spoilers, Spoilers, and more Spoilers. You are warned!
The adventure takes the players to quite a few interesting and remote places. What I like about the adventure is it is four smaller adventures that are all tied together. It flows pretty well and there is not huge dungeon crawl for the players to get bored or frustrated with. Each places is maybe a dozen or so encounters and the whole things too my group about seven sessions to complete. It could take a bit longer if the DM wants to make traveling more of an issue. The adventure starts in Q’barra. The adventure has some cool lizard folk and things to fight and ends with a nice battle against some smart but young black dragons. There us a great side bar for using the dragons effectively. There are some fun trapped rooms after the dragon brothers and it made for a great change of pace from fighting lizard men and some tough combat oriented encounters. The room traps are involved so mapping them out and showing the complications they added to the battles that took place there was really fun and a good use of monsters and traps. It ends weirdly though with the characters gaining unknown Dragonmarks. This is mostly to force the characters along with the adventure which I really didn’t like. If the players do not finish the last leg of this module within a year they die. That’s plenty of time for them to do this all with traveling around but I would have preferred a carrot approach to keeping players characters in the story then the stick. I ignored that part of the section and I never had to keep the players on track so I would recommend not forcing the PCs along the path like that.
Each encounter is nicely mapped out and given about two pages of stats and tactics. I really like this approach and it made the adventure very easy for me to run. The second part is a race with the Emerald Claw as each group is after the same information. The second part has the player characters traveling a bit and accomplishing different tasks. One odd think is the invasion of Dreadhold. In Eberron Dreadhold is the maximum security prison and not an easy place to break into. There was a great article in one of the Dragon Magazines that has a great write up on the security and guards of Dreadhold. It is too bad all of that was ignored and for this module getting into and back out of the prison is really not that difficult. The module matches the difficulty with the level the PCs should be instead of making it as tough as the place seems to be to accomplish what it is.
The third section has the group on an haunted island. There are plenty of oppurtunities for random encounters for people that like that kind of thing. I’m not sure if it was on purpose but the random encounter table is arranged by encounter levels from highest to lowest so the weakest monsters on the higher numbers. There are some neat encounters on the island that are staged but not really important. They feel like random encounters that the writer just wanted to include to make this part of the module a little thicker. The climatic battle though in this part is really cool against a nasty Quori. It was a very tough battle worked out really well for us.
The last section takes the player characters all the way to Argonnessen. This is the dragon continent and a place of great danger but once again like Dreadhold the encounters are set up to be appropriate for the Player characters and not give the feeling of danger that the continent is known for. A lot of the encounters here do take advantage of many books so there are a wider variety of opponents. I like to see options from other books being used and all the information is here so that other book is not needed. The adventure ends with a great tower and their new dragonmarks give them additional advantages as they get higher in the tower so they can face a few tougher encounters. But it makes it too easy. For the great encounter with the Blue dragon the players are also given the abilities of Fast Healing 5 and Improved Evasion. It was a neat idea but either the Dragon needed to be tougher or the powers given a little less powerful.
Eyes of the Lich Queen is a fun multi adventure adventure. I like the going to many places that are way off the beaten path. The encounters are mostly creative and fun and challenging. It is a rail road giving the players no options of what to do next, but it works for the module since there is a pretty tight plot that glues it all together. It does make some things a little easy for the player characters so they can do things they probably should not be able to do. That fits the pulp genre well but it might make players and DMs wonder. For us using different characters that were many levels higher then what the module is for I had the players too scared of the defenses of Dreadhold to go there. And then a year later with much lower level characters they go in and out of the prison with little issues. Overall though, this was the best Eberron adventure that we played including many of the ones that appeared in Dungeon.
Eyes of the Lich Queen turned out to be the best Eberron adventure in third edition. It is at time a tough module and for the levels suggested for the module and at the same time it is easy for the things that get accomplished here. It does not have the strongest plot but it works for a D&D adventure. The best thing though it is fun and there is plenty of action.
Eyes of the Lich Queen is a fifth level adventure written for the Eberron setting published by Wizards of the Coast. The softbound book is about one hundred and twenty pages and in full color. It has Wizards of the Coast’s high product values and it is very simple to read and follow. There are designer notes and plenty of side bars to help out experienced and inexperienced DM’s alike. I found it all very useful when I ran it.
Spoilers, Spoilers, and more Spoilers. You are warned!
The adventure takes the players to quite a few interesting and remote places. What I like about the adventure is it is four smaller adventures that are all tied together. It flows pretty well and there is not huge dungeon crawl for the players to get bored or frustrated with. Each places is maybe a dozen or so encounters and the whole things too my group about seven sessions to complete. It could take a bit longer if the DM wants to make traveling more of an issue. The adventure starts in Q’barra. The adventure has some cool lizard folk and things to fight and ends with a nice battle against some smart but young black dragons. There us a great side bar for using the dragons effectively. There are some fun trapped rooms after the dragon brothers and it made for a great change of pace from fighting lizard men and some tough combat oriented encounters. The room traps are involved so mapping them out and showing the complications they added to the battles that took place there was really fun and a good use of monsters and traps. It ends weirdly though with the characters gaining unknown Dragonmarks. This is mostly to force the characters along with the adventure which I really didn’t like. If the players do not finish the last leg of this module within a year they die. That’s plenty of time for them to do this all with traveling around but I would have preferred a carrot approach to keeping players characters in the story then the stick. I ignored that part of the section and I never had to keep the players on track so I would recommend not forcing the PCs along the path like that.
Each encounter is nicely mapped out and given about two pages of stats and tactics. I really like this approach and it made the adventure very easy for me to run. The second part is a race with the Emerald Claw as each group is after the same information. The second part has the player characters traveling a bit and accomplishing different tasks. One odd think is the invasion of Dreadhold. In Eberron Dreadhold is the maximum security prison and not an easy place to break into. There was a great article in one of the Dragon Magazines that has a great write up on the security and guards of Dreadhold. It is too bad all of that was ignored and for this module getting into and back out of the prison is really not that difficult. The module matches the difficulty with the level the PCs should be instead of making it as tough as the place seems to be to accomplish what it is.
The third section has the group on an haunted island. There are plenty of oppurtunities for random encounters for people that like that kind of thing. I’m not sure if it was on purpose but the random encounter table is arranged by encounter levels from highest to lowest so the weakest monsters on the higher numbers. There are some neat encounters on the island that are staged but not really important. They feel like random encounters that the writer just wanted to include to make this part of the module a little thicker. The climatic battle though in this part is really cool against a nasty Quori. It was a very tough battle worked out really well for us.
The last section takes the player characters all the way to Argonnessen. This is the dragon continent and a place of great danger but once again like Dreadhold the encounters are set up to be appropriate for the Player characters and not give the feeling of danger that the continent is known for. A lot of the encounters here do take advantage of many books so there are a wider variety of opponents. I like to see options from other books being used and all the information is here so that other book is not needed. The adventure ends with a great tower and their new dragonmarks give them additional advantages as they get higher in the tower so they can face a few tougher encounters. But it makes it too easy. For the great encounter with the Blue dragon the players are also given the abilities of Fast Healing 5 and Improved Evasion. It was a neat idea but either the Dragon needed to be tougher or the powers given a little less powerful.
Eyes of the Lich Queen is a fun multi adventure adventure. I like the going to many places that are way off the beaten path. The encounters are mostly creative and fun and challenging. It is a rail road giving the players no options of what to do next, but it works for the module since there is a pretty tight plot that glues it all together. It does make some things a little easy for the player characters so they can do things they probably should not be able to do. That fits the pulp genre well but it might make players and DMs wonder. For us using different characters that were many levels higher then what the module is for I had the players too scared of the defenses of Dreadhold to go there. And then a year later with much lower level characters they go in and out of the prison with little issues. Overall though, this was the best Eberron adventure that we played including many of the ones that appeared in Dungeon.
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