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Out of the Abyss
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<blockquote data-quote="fuindordm" data-source="post: 6701376" data-attributes="member: 5435"><p><strong>5 out of 5 rating for Out of the Abyss</strong></p><p></p><p>Out of the Abyss is the first WotC product that has inspired me to write a review. </p><p></p><p>This review has no spoilers.There are several things I'd like to talk about in detail, but beforehand I should day that I'm a DM who writes 95% of my own material. It's not that I disdain published adventures. I just feel I do a better job keeping all the conditional events in mind during play when the story has come out of my own head, and that writing settings and adventures is a fun activity for me. So I seldom buy adventures, but I do buy campaign settings to mine for ideas. </p><p></p><p>I was interested in this adventure path for the promised insanity and whimsy, not for the demons. I wanted to see how WotC went about creating an adventure with these moods. I was not disappointed, and I learned some things from this book, so I consider it money well spend. And I ended up loving the demons too!</p><p></p><p>OK, off we go!</p><p></p><p> <strong>The Good Stuff</strong></p><p></p><p>The book is beautiful, with evocative interior art. A lot of this art is exotic locations and NPC portraits, so you can use it to get your players into the setting. The adventure path is well organized. Some of these describe Underdark communities with a handful of encounters and mini-dungeons. Some of these give guidance to the DM: How to get the PCs from one location in the Underdark to another, how to get them back into the Underdark after they escape. Some of them are almost mini-settings: the drow city and dwarf city, which I will not attempt to spell correctly.</p><p></p><p>The adventure is advertised from levels 1-15, but the first half (escaping the Underdark) takes players only to level 8 and holds together very well as a smaller campaign. And it need not take the players even to level 8; depending on the choices they make they could escape earlier. So you shouldn't hesitate to run this for your players--you don't have to play out the whole thing to create a satisfying story. Likewise, if your players are already high level, it's easy to skip the early parts of the adventure and introduce them to the Underdark later in the story. This aspect of the adventure design is very nice.</p><p></p><p>The book has some innovative suggestions for increasing player agency and getting them into the mood. For example, I think it's no secret now that the players start (at level 1) as prisoners of the drow. Rather than have the DM act out all the unusual NPCs imprisoned with them, which would take the spotlight from the players, it suggests assigning each player one NPC to run alongside their PC. And there are lots of places in the book where these initial NPCs play a role, and lots of opportunities for other NPCs to join the party. I like this approach because players are often very conservative playing their own PCs (to keep them alive!), and giving them the NPCs to play with will encourage them to act out and take risks they might not otherwise. </p><p></p><p>The book contains a wealth of information that can be used to enrich any campaign, including descriptions of natural features, Underdark geography, portable communities, encounter tables, and more. Even if I never run the adventure, I do not regret buying it; I can use it to greatly enrich any dungeon adventure.</p><p></p><p>How about the adventures themselves? Well, I can definitely say that the encounters are well-designed, evocative, and inventive. There are lots of them, and they look easy to run. The large maps (like the cities) are clearly subdivided into smaller encounter areas, and these fragments are reprinted near their room descriptions which is very helpful. Your players will have a lot of fun.</p><p></p><p>Whimsy is an important element of the adventure, but it can be easily emphasized or downplayed. If you and your players have fun improvising dialog and acting out quirks, then you'll find plenty of hooks for that in the NPCs and plenty of opportunities for the players to go insane themselves. If you want a more serious game then you can easily ignore the whimsical quirks/insanities and focus on the grim and deadly types of madness.</p><p></p><p><strong>Caveats</strong></p><p></p><p>The story is deeply embedded in the Forgotten Realms. There is a ton of material that you can easily pull out and rebrand to your own campaign, and you don't need to be a FR expert to run the game smoothly because the really important information (such as brief descriptions of the major factions) is given in the book. But some of the encounter areas cite FR history (e.g. Blingdenstone) and the high-level half of the campaign relies on this history heavily to motivate major NPCs. </p><p></p><p>The adventure relies on random encounters to deliver a large portion of the XP. This is neither good nor bad--the Underdark is supposed to be a dangerous place, and the book succeeds in making travel from one location to another dangerous. There are plenty of random encounter tables to spice up the travel, and these do a good job of making the endless tunnels less monotonous. For example, in some areas you roll for both a terrain feature and a monster. Another good design idea. </p><p></p><p>The high-level chapters are less fleshed out than the low-level chapters. This is not a problem for me, because it's harder to predict the capabilities of high-level PCs, and I think it makes sense to ask the DM to carry more of the load in the second half. The book also offers lots of suggestions to keep the second half from being a railroad--player agency is clearly important to the writers. But if you're a new DM and hoping for an adventure path that doesn't require a lot of effort to prepare, the second half doesn't meet that criterion.</p><p></p><p>The encounter areas are all very small, with only a handful of rooms. For example, Blingdenstone has over 40 major caverns, but its 4 mini-adventures are all tightly contained in groups of 4-5 rooms each. The writers clearly wanted players to complete one or two story milestones per evening. But this approach has some side effects--it undermines the sense of sprawling majesty that I want to convey in an Underdark campaign, and on a more practical level I think the players will be able to take a long rest after nearly every milestone. </p><p></p><p>Finally, the encounters strike me as rather easy--the number of opponents is usually small, or they arrive in waves. This is easy to adjust in play, of course, just by adding a couple more creatures or simply by using monster intelligence and tactics ruthlessly. One nice thing is that a lot of the encounters involve intelligent monsters.</p><p></p><p><strong>Summary</strong></p><p></p><p>I highly recommend this book to all DMs interested in running an Underdark-style campaign, whether or not they like the Forgotten Realms and whether or not they intend to write their own adventures and campaign arc. There are lots of interesting places to see and things to do here, and the book has made it very easy to take what you like and leave the rest. And the overall story is well constructed and satisfying.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="fuindordm, post: 6701376, member: 5435"] [b]5 out of 5 rating for Out of the Abyss[/b] Out of the Abyss is the first WotC product that has inspired me to write a review. This review has no spoilers.There are several things I'd like to talk about in detail, but beforehand I should day that I'm a DM who writes 95% of my own material. It's not that I disdain published adventures. I just feel I do a better job keeping all the conditional events in mind during play when the story has come out of my own head, and that writing settings and adventures is a fun activity for me. So I seldom buy adventures, but I do buy campaign settings to mine for ideas. I was interested in this adventure path for the promised insanity and whimsy, not for the demons. I wanted to see how WotC went about creating an adventure with these moods. I was not disappointed, and I learned some things from this book, so I consider it money well spend. And I ended up loving the demons too! OK, off we go! [B]The Good Stuff[/B] The book is beautiful, with evocative interior art. A lot of this art is exotic locations and NPC portraits, so you can use it to get your players into the setting. The adventure path is well organized. Some of these describe Underdark communities with a handful of encounters and mini-dungeons. Some of these give guidance to the DM: How to get the PCs from one location in the Underdark to another, how to get them back into the Underdark after they escape. Some of them are almost mini-settings: the drow city and dwarf city, which I will not attempt to spell correctly. The adventure is advertised from levels 1-15, but the first half (escaping the Underdark) takes players only to level 8 and holds together very well as a smaller campaign. And it need not take the players even to level 8; depending on the choices they make they could escape earlier. So you shouldn't hesitate to run this for your players--you don't have to play out the whole thing to create a satisfying story. Likewise, if your players are already high level, it's easy to skip the early parts of the adventure and introduce them to the Underdark later in the story. This aspect of the adventure design is very nice. The book has some innovative suggestions for increasing player agency and getting them into the mood. For example, I think it's no secret now that the players start (at level 1) as prisoners of the drow. Rather than have the DM act out all the unusual NPCs imprisoned with them, which would take the spotlight from the players, it suggests assigning each player one NPC to run alongside their PC. And there are lots of places in the book where these initial NPCs play a role, and lots of opportunities for other NPCs to join the party. I like this approach because players are often very conservative playing their own PCs (to keep them alive!), and giving them the NPCs to play with will encourage them to act out and take risks they might not otherwise. The book contains a wealth of information that can be used to enrich any campaign, including descriptions of natural features, Underdark geography, portable communities, encounter tables, and more. Even if I never run the adventure, I do not regret buying it; I can use it to greatly enrich any dungeon adventure. How about the adventures themselves? Well, I can definitely say that the encounters are well-designed, evocative, and inventive. There are lots of them, and they look easy to run. The large maps (like the cities) are clearly subdivided into smaller encounter areas, and these fragments are reprinted near their room descriptions which is very helpful. Your players will have a lot of fun. Whimsy is an important element of the adventure, but it can be easily emphasized or downplayed. If you and your players have fun improvising dialog and acting out quirks, then you'll find plenty of hooks for that in the NPCs and plenty of opportunities for the players to go insane themselves. If you want a more serious game then you can easily ignore the whimsical quirks/insanities and focus on the grim and deadly types of madness. [B]Caveats[/B] The story is deeply embedded in the Forgotten Realms. There is a ton of material that you can easily pull out and rebrand to your own campaign, and you don't need to be a FR expert to run the game smoothly because the really important information (such as brief descriptions of the major factions) is given in the book. But some of the encounter areas cite FR history (e.g. Blingdenstone) and the high-level half of the campaign relies on this history heavily to motivate major NPCs. The adventure relies on random encounters to deliver a large portion of the XP. This is neither good nor bad--the Underdark is supposed to be a dangerous place, and the book succeeds in making travel from one location to another dangerous. There are plenty of random encounter tables to spice up the travel, and these do a good job of making the endless tunnels less monotonous. For example, in some areas you roll for both a terrain feature and a monster. Another good design idea. The high-level chapters are less fleshed out than the low-level chapters. This is not a problem for me, because it's harder to predict the capabilities of high-level PCs, and I think it makes sense to ask the DM to carry more of the load in the second half. The book also offers lots of suggestions to keep the second half from being a railroad--player agency is clearly important to the writers. But if you're a new DM and hoping for an adventure path that doesn't require a lot of effort to prepare, the second half doesn't meet that criterion. The encounter areas are all very small, with only a handful of rooms. For example, Blingdenstone has over 40 major caverns, but its 4 mini-adventures are all tightly contained in groups of 4-5 rooms each. The writers clearly wanted players to complete one or two story milestones per evening. But this approach has some side effects--it undermines the sense of sprawling majesty that I want to convey in an Underdark campaign, and on a more practical level I think the players will be able to take a long rest after nearly every milestone. Finally, the encounters strike me as rather easy--the number of opponents is usually small, or they arrive in waves. This is easy to adjust in play, of course, just by adding a couple more creatures or simply by using monster intelligence and tactics ruthlessly. One nice thing is that a lot of the encounters involve intelligent monsters. [B]Summary[/B] I highly recommend this book to all DMs interested in running an Underdark-style campaign, whether or not they like the Forgotten Realms and whether or not they intend to write their own adventures and campaign arc. There are lots of interesting places to see and things to do here, and the book has made it very easy to take what you like and leave the rest. And the overall story is well constructed and satisfying. [/QUOTE]
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