COMING SOON! The Weather Outside is Frightful: Chilly D&D Resources! Chilling monsters, cool sublasses, dangerous encounters in the frigid wastes, and a cold-hearted adventure for DnD 5E.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8713016" data-attributes="member: 907">I've been running this adventure, nearly to completion before the pandemic hit and we started playing online for a while. It's the adventure I credit with finally killing off my enthusiasm for big dungeons.The early part is fun, when you travel around the Dessarin Valley trying to gather hints about the missing expedition. The Haunted Keeps are also interesting little dungeons, although the Earth one is still too big for my tastes.The problem comes when you hit the actual Temples. Those sections are way too big, and at the same time too small. Let's start with the "too small" bit first. The Temples, collectively, are supposed to be the once-mighty dwarven fortress of Tyar-Besil. Parts of the dungeon are the former city gates in multiple directions, so what we see is the actual extent of the city. And... it covers an area of 860 x 660 ft. Which, coincidentally, is about the geographical size of Red Larch (although granted, Tyar-Besil is significantly more dense). It would have made more sense to have Tyar-Besil itself be a much larger area that is largely ruined and treated as wilderness, and have the temples set up in those ruins but quite far apart. That would have made them feel more like separate dungeons. Even better would have been to actually make them separate dungeons, and put them in entirely different locations.At the same time, each individual Temple is too big. Each map covers 430x330 ft, with 20-30 locations. That's huge, and will likely take multiple sorties to deal with, but at the same time there's very limited information on how they deal with incoming attackers. In some cases they say things like "If these guards are slain, the ogre from room X moves here instead", but that's very limited.On the plus site, the Fane and the Nodes are pretty cool. The Water node is a bit confusing though, but having access to water breathing and water walk made it significantly easier to handle.Another problem is that there's too little information about what the elemental cultists are actually up to. There's nothing in the adventure that actually tells the PCs that the Prophets are working to summon the Princes of Elemental Evil, that they are doing so from the Nodes below the Fane, and most importantly, that the way to close a node is to throw the associated weapon into a portal. That's information you probably want to seed somewhere. I eventually had one of the PCs' factions send them to talk to the Dark Lady in Rundreth Manor and had her lore-dump on them, but it would be better to have things seeded in the adventure itself. Perhaps archives in Tyar-Besil describing how they found the Fane and learned of its history.</blockquote>

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