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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 8336334" data-attributes="member: 3586">Princes of the Apocalypse, for me, still sits near the bottom of the hardcover Wizards adventures. But it sits well above the line of "would never play again".There's only one that sits below that line - Descent into Avernus - which I consider unbelievably horrible.Princes has two basic structural problems:The first is that it doesn't finish the initial hook well. That hook is "find the missing delegation". And while it starts strongly, it then sort of sits around while you go through encounter after encounter that don't progress that quest. There need to be more clues about the fate of the final few delegates.The second is that it has too big a level jump between when you might discover the temples and when you can enter the temples. Some groups can find the first of the Keeps, then immediately discover the Temples. Which are written for level 7+, but the PCs are level 4. Story-wise, there's no reason to enter the Temples - in fact, the story demands it. And so getting slaughtered when you try to go in is a bad look.It's this problem which you can get with a sandbox design while overlaying a structured quest on top of it. You really need to be careful, and Princes doesn't manage that well.Against that, there is a lot to like in the adventure. I love the Keeps. The Temples have lots of interesting encounters. And I absolutely admire how the cults you don't deal with keep causing problems in the world above as the story progresses. There is so much good material here!(I just wish I had a better handle for what they're doing when the adventurers aren't disrupting their plans).I'd happily run the adventure again, and try to ameliorate the problems I have with it, which is more than I'd say for Descent. The problem is that I'm not entirely sure how to fix those problems. I think Dragon Heist has a host of problems, but I can fix those easily by making up more stuff and I have run it several times successfully. Princes? I'm not quite so sure.(Out of the Abyss? Most of the problems I have with that adventure can be fixed by "rocks fall, the NPCs die"!)Cheers!</blockquote>

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