Product Description
The Demon Prince of Undeath is calling you out!
This epic-level
D&D® adventure is designed to take characters from 27th to 30th level. In this adventure, the demon lord Orcus tries to usurp the Raven Queen’s power over death using a shard of evil plucked from the depths of the Abyss. Only the world’s most powerful heroes have the slightest hope of stopping him.
This adventure can be played as a stand-alone adventure or as the final adventure in the “E” series of adventures that began with E1 Death’s Reach™ and continued with E2 Kingdom of the Ghouls™.
James Leivers @ 3:12 pm
Essentially, I view written adventures like plays, or instruction books for inexperienced DMs. When reviewing these, I imagine if I handed this to a young kid and he ran it just like the book says how fun would it be? I don’t assume the DM is going to add background, and fluff etc. It is the author’s job to get that across, knowing that someone else is going to be reading their work outloud. Some DMs are authors too, but the two are separate responsibilities.
This is fourth edition, and while they are re-inventing the wheel and I love it, there is a vast history of flavor that already exists to be mined and it should be used! The writers have all grown up reading about Orcus and know all about him. They left a lot of that history out of this adventure.
If the name Orcus is enough for you, you get it here. You face him twice, once as an aspect and once for real. If your players don’t already know who Orcus is or why he is cool, then it will take some work on your part.
WARNING SPOILER:
Plot Synopsis: You start in the Abyss after having defeated Doresain. You break into Orcus’s stronghold in the Abyss and steal one of Orcus’s boats (chaos ship). You take that flying boat to the heart of the elemental chaos chasing after Orcus. He went there to steal part of the shard of the Abyss. There, you witness devils and demons fighting as part of the “Blood War” but arrive too late to stop Orcus. You learn that he is headed to Latherna and you face him down after witnessing him commit deicide on the Raven Queen.
It’s slightly a hack-fest: you fight on the boat several times, fight through a generic stronghold in the abyss with little abyssal flavor, then fight in a forge in the elemental chaos, then face Orcus.
This adventure has a lot of potential. The plot is the best thing about it. Steal something from Orcus, travel to the heart of the Abyss, get involved in the Blood War, stop a deicide from happening (or commit your own ha ha!). That’s all totally awesome. My complaint is that they managed to make it a dungeon crawl with no flavor. The only thing in the adventure that lets you know you’re in the abyss is the red maps, which the players will most likely never see. Epic adventures in past editions made you travel through hell to face Orcus, this one does not capture much of any exploration feel. It needs more descriptive writing. As well as imaginative NPC’s. The only NPC’s you meet are some Raven Queen angel lackeys who can assist you a little, but aren’t interesting. One Pit Fiend barely gives a clue that you could negotiate with it, so 90% of the time parties will probably wind up killing it.
:END SPOILER
I can’t help but compare this adventure to both “Throne of Bloodstone” and “A Paladin in Hell” and notice that those two adventures include much more flavor of the the Abyss within them. They include everything, you don’t have to refer to any other sources. In those, you travel through hell and see a variad of different environments and even meet with all the major demon lords. You get to witness lakes of fire with demons pushing people back in with pitchforks. In `Bloodstone’, there’s an angel who smokes cigars(memorable and cool), theres a mephit who dresses in plaid suits and tags along offering help. Orcus’s stronghold is detailed as being made of bones. The front of which is guarded by two giant talking skulls who confront you. In “Savage Tide”, another epic abyssal adventure, when the party gets to the Abyss they meet an insane crippled madman who is cursed to live forever, dying over and over. That stuff is cool, there’s none of that here. They even missed out on a narrational opportunity to describe the chaos ship lurching through the elemental chaos. What’s Orcus’s stronghold look like? I don’t know it’s not detailed anywhere. Please WotC; put in more text that sets-the-scene and npc dialog. “Pyramid of Shadows” had excellently laid out NPC’s with motivations, so you know how to do it.
If you were to play through “Prince of Undeath” as a player; you could tell people “My character went to Orcus’s stronghold in hell and then went to where the heart of the Abyss was.” Other people could ask you “What was it like?” and you would reply “I don’t know, I don’t remember any descriptions, all I remember was fighting.” “Who did you meet?” you would reply “We didn’t talk to a single thing, we killed it all.”
A book called “Plane Below” was released after this adventure was published. It contains more flavor of the Abyss which can and should be added. Especially: locations, hazards like elemental storms, risks of insanity etc. Note: a lot of that book was copy-pasted straight from “Fiendish Codex I: Fiends of the Abyss” which is a tremendously flavored book on my favorite location.
In this adventure almost every single monster comes from new sourcebooks like the “Monster Manual 2″, and “Open Grave” etc. The adventure itself includes no physical descriptions or pictures of most of the monsters, so if you don’t know where that monster was published and don’t have an D&D insider subscription; good luck trying to guess what the hell the thing the party is fighting looks like. They don’t even help you by telling you where the monster was published.
How’s the combat? If people are going to focus on just combat it had better be good. There’s some really tough fights, a lot of them involve fighting around very dangerous hazards. Orcus himself is surrounded by traps and minions and can easily be a TPK waiting to happen. The lich Harthoon can turn out to be extremely deadly as the party is overwhelmed by auras and area effects. There’s extensive use of minions in a third of the battles. At epic level, minions are usually wiped out in the first round by any controllers.
Woah, epic can be broken. There are several TPKs waiting to happen. Two beholders in an encounter can be pretty devastating as their auras auto-effect everyone, every round. The Retriever Solo wow, guaranteed TPK, also an extreme grind fest. It’s a lvl 30 solo soldier with some of the highest defenses in the game. It resists 10all (this has a huge effect on its lasting power). The designer gave it controller powers. At-will move: teleport 10 and blind everyone(save ends). As a higher level Solo it misses on a 4. The entire party stands around blind, unable to hit the thing, unable to do much dmg past it’s resist 10, while it never misses. The only tactic is to stun it and hope it never saves. will add more later…
Best things about it: The plot, and the fact that they incorporated the “Blood War”.