D&D 5E Justin Alexander's review of Shattered Obelisk is pretty scathing

[Ancalagon]

You're right that it seems to look like that's the method. Having a store, I always laugh at Google Out-of-Five Reviews, too. Most of the time, we get 5-star reviews: "Great Selection well organized!" or we get 1-star reviews, "The guy at the counter was eating his LUNCH! AIIEEEE!!" (True story).

But, I mean, c'mon - we probably deserve 3's and 4's, really don't we? To me, 3 oughta be "perfectly fine" and 4 oughta be "better organized than most places, staff helped me out". 5 really oughta be "Above and Beyond". But that's not how the world works these days! If it's not 10/10, IT'S CRAP.

That's a big problem IMO of a lot of online reviews, I've noted the same. A restaurant with a 3 star review is one to avoid, and a 4 star is probably pretty ordinary... 5 start should be reserved for the best of the best.

 

[Staffan]

You’re right, PotA is basically “One Huge Dungeon” (well, 13 large dungeons all directly linking to each other). But that fact by itself is compounded a couple of ways: 1) it’s an elemental adventure, so a lot of the enemies are the same flavour in each segment, which gets repetitive; and 2) 5E doesn’t (or at least didn’t) have much in the way of specific mechanics to support prolonged delves. Altogether it was just too repetitive; visiting the dungeons in a different order doesn’t change the experience much.

I'd consider them levels of the same dungeon, but that's a rather small distinction. POTA was actually the adventure that turned me off from large-scale dungeon-delving.

Compare it to Dragon's Crown. In Dragon's Crown, the plot is based around world-wide (well, at least the small portion of the world that's the focus of the Dark Sun setting – IIRC, the Tablelands is about the size of Spain, so significantly smaller than even the Sword Coast which some FR fans are complaining is hogging all the FR attention) field that's making psionics use a lot harder. Since psionics is a cornerstone of Athasian society, that's a problem, and the PCs get sent to investigate. During the adventure, the PCs will:

1. Fight a raider tribe and explore the moderately large dungeon below their camp to find clues to the effect's origin.
2. Travel to the city-state of Urik, where they try to find out whether its sorcerer-king is involved. This includes exploring ancient sewers, a deadly football-esque game in the arena, and an audience with the sorcerer-king.
3. Join with some agents of Hamanu and journey across the Tablelands and eventually set sail upon the Sea of Silt. At some point, you get captured by giants and get betrayed by Hamanu's agents, and you need to escape from the giants and pursue your new enemies.
4. Travel further onto the Sea of Silt and explore an ancient fortress for more information on the artifact at the heart of the adventure, and in the process learn more stuff about the world's ancient history.
5. Once done with that, go aaaall the way back across the Tablelands and across the Ringing Mountains into the Forest Ridge, a jungle populated by man-eating halfings. As it happens, you run across one tribe which has a member of the organization of super-powerful psionicists that's behind the whole thing, and deal with them (and learn that he ate one of your powerful NPC allies).
6. Travel further into the savannah beyond where you deal with hordes of thri-kreen who are getting their brains scrambled by the anti-psi field.
7. Reach the Dragon's Crown valley and get through it and its lethal flora.
8. Finally assault the stronghold where the Bad Guys are located.

So, numerous different locations, each of which is more than just a dungeon and many of which require exploration and social stuff. In addition, the adventure comes with a number of side treks – stuff to spice up the long journeys. POTA has some of those too, but POTA's side treks are more like side quests: someone comes to the PCs and asks them to deal with something (as if they aren't busy enough with the honkin' big dungeon full of elemental cultists trying to destroy the world). The side treks in Dragon's Crown are more along the lines of things you run into along the way.

Imagine a POTA done in a similar fashion. The introductory part with the Haunted Keeps works fine, except they should not be physically connected to the next step but instead hold clues to locating the elemental temples, which should be in fairly distant locations. Maybe to spice things up, have the elemental temples each work with two different elements (which would make it easier to find thematic locations). You could have the fire/air temple in the desert of Anauroch, the air/water temple out at sea (perhaps in the Sea of Floating Ice), the water/earth temple in a swamp, and the earth/fire temple of course in a volcano. In each location, you can learn some stuff about what the cult/cults are up to – something which is in pretty short supply in POTA as written. The Fane and the Nodes can work more or less the same, but should maybe be smaller – the Nodes in particular should be a single day's work each.

 

[Lanefan]

Person who is pushing their own book right now uses extreme hyperbole about a "bad" WotC product to get extra attention -- we keep falling for this.

Keyed and unkeyed dungeons are a philosophy difference.

An unkeyed dungeon - where you'd get a map and a bunch of room write-ups but without any reference as to which write-up goes with which room - seems like pure DM-side aggravation. What would be the point?

 

[MerricB]

I'm having fun running Shadow of the Dragon Queen. JA did a review of it and (if I remember it right) I think it was pretty spot-on on the problems with the adventure, but expressed more severely than I find those problems to be when running it. No surprise there!

I think there are a few times in recent D&D adventures (Avernus being another) where a large part of the adventure is designed as non-linear, but then gets repurposed into a linear format, leaving large sections on the cutting room floor.

I feel that is the case with Chapter 5 of Shadow of the Dragon Queen, where there is this potentially rather nice hexcrawl (which lacks clues), and then a strange linear storyline with Dalamar (that has the clues). And they feel like a mismatch.

With The Shattered Obelisk, I don't get that feeling. I don't think it's ambitious or inspirational enough at times, but I think the original structure is probably what we ended up with.

Cheers,
Merric

 

[Clint_L]

And then you gotta think: Did the DM MAKE it play well, using their own skills, and did the adventure actively fight them doing it - but they pulled it off anyway? Or did it help them? AND what part of THAT can be properly objectified (and not just DM-preference or Table preference).

And vice versa. It's an art, not a science, I guess is what we're saying.

I used to consider Lost Mine the gold standard for introductory adventures. But then I ran "Frozen Sick" from *Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. It's my new gold standard.

Also, I think it's free on DDB.

 

[Lanefan]

In this case, it isnloke complaining that the cookbook says to have the cookies in the oven at 15 degrees for 300 minutes, when the cookbook actually says to have the cooking in the oven at 300 degrees for 15 minutes.

I've got adventures here where it might as well say put 'em in for 15 footballs at 300 meters, for all the use the write-ups are.

 

[Parmandur]

(I hope you will not take this as an "aha, got you!" but a frank attempt at discussion.)

The criticism that @MerricB have listed for this adventure (the factions/NPCs from the early game don't matter, the adventure is uninspiring), and which you agreed with (please, correct me if I misunderstood your post!), are criticisms that the Alexandrian review also had.

I also thought MerricB had a very good point about how an inspiring but flawed adventure* is worth rescuing, which is a way of thinking that seems to be shared by Alexander, given the massive efforts he's given in reworking some of these adventures. And that's his final assessment - not worth fixing, better to homebrew the continuation of the campaign yourself.

*a great example of that I've done personally was the Lost Laboratory of Kwalish - it has several problems, but they are worth tackling given the pretty good material there is in there too.

I did say in my initial post that the Alexandrian had some good points mixed in with the basic errors of fact (though the basic errors of fact token up a lot of rhetorical real estate) and disgusting vitrol. The factions aren't really used later on: part of thst is LMoP was written in 2014, when theybthought AL Factions would be a Big Deal, but they gave up on those years ago by now. So the diajuncture of old and new is a very legitimate issue at hand.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

And vice versa. It's an art, not a science, I guess is what we're saying.

I used to consider Lost Mine the gold standard for introductory adventures. But then I ran "Frozen Sick" from *Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. It's my new gold standard.

Also, I think it's free on DDB.

I have it on DDB, but I've never read it. I run A LOT of Intro Adventures for new players - I'm probably approaching a thousand people that I've taught to play D&D (various editions) over the years! I should check it out!

 

[bedir than]

An unkeyed dungeon - where you'd get a map and a bunch of room write-ups but without any reference as to which write-up goes with which room - seems like pure DM-side aggravation. What would be the point?

well, it's not pages upon pages of info.
It's at most four rooms, clearly described

And this means those maps are player facing maps, simple to integrate at a digital or in-person stadium

I don't create keyed maps at may table.

 

[Parmandur]

An unkeyed dungeon - where you'd get a map and a bunch of room write-ups but without any reference as to which write-up goes with which room - seems like pure DM-side aggravation. What would be the point?

There is no unkeyed dungeon: they included battlemaps for a few non-Dungeon encounter spaces.