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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8393203" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I've had reasonable success with Out of the Abyss as a sourcebook for the Underdark, but of the several published campaigns I've used or looked at it is by far the least supportive of the DM. There is no real summary at the beginning of what happens, you have to read the whole thing to figure out what the plot is and what the overall narrative looks like. The other official adventures I've run or looked at gave me a decent overview of what they were about. I've been running an adventure partially based on the book for over a year and I still don't really feel like I know what happens in the actual adventure except from other people's summaries online.One thing that particularly irks me is that the central figure in unleashing the Demon princes is Gromph Baenre, now-exiled Drow archmage of Menzobarranzan. Fair enough, except that he then doesn't appear in the actual adventure, he's just incorporated because he's a Forgotten Realms lore character and people who have read every Drizzt novel or whatever might think its cool. And then another high-level exiled, Drow wizard character, Vizeran DeVir, is introduced to present the players with a plan of how to deal with the Demon Princes. The second guy is clearly just a stand-in for the first guy, except one whom the adventure can mess with the character of without messing with Forgotten Realms continuity and established characters. So what should be an adventure where the semi-villain who accidentally started the semi-apocalypse through his own hubris has to recruit the party to help him stop it, becomes one where the whole plot is set in motion by an offscreen character whom our heroes never meet and an unrelated-but-similar character of near identical background, status, and abilities forms a delicate and duplicitous alliance with them instead, resulting in less interesting tension, and more need for elaborate exposition. If you're going to run the adventure just make them the same character (as I'm guessing they were at some point in some draft). Then let the players kill him at the end for all the untold suffering he caused.</blockquote>

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