16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good ideas, but you're going to need to spend a lot of time making changes, March 1, 2011
This review is from: Death's Reach: Adventure E1 for 4th Edition D&D (D&D Adventure) (Paperback)
Death's Reach is a adventure module designed for epic-level characters of approximately 20th level. It is set in the generic "points of light" world of 4E D&D, primarily dealing with an ongoing feud between Orcus (Demon Prince of Undeath) and The Raven Queen (Goddess of Death). For reasons that should be obvious, these two don't exactly see eye-to-eye on their afterlife philosophies.
The plotline of Death's Reach is rather interesting, though unfortunately the module is extremely combat-heavy. You will need to be extra vigilent during the very few times the characters will encounter NPCs in order to convey the back story to your players. I will not go into the actual story arc here to avoid spoilers, but suffice to say the general conflict revolves around Orcus attempting to make The Raven Queen a less powerful god so that he can finally "win" their rivalry.
In terms of physical contents, you get two adventure books and a few battlemats, all in a convenient carrying folder. The folder is well made, and the books are nicely printed in full color. The battlemats however are somewhat flimsy. They only need to hold together for an encounter or two, but I would have preferred some heavier paper, or ideally dungeon tiles.
The organization of the module, like all the modules I have bought from Wizards, is horrid. As mentioned, there are two books. One book gives the overall plotline, the other gives the encounters. However, maps are scattered between the two, as are new monsters and treasure. You need to constantly be looking in both books or you will very easily miss things. Due to the layout, you need to read through both books at least two or three times before you understand everything well enough to go back a fourth time and start actually planning how you will run the module.
In terms of the combats (encounters) within the book, they are well done. Almost every fight has some interesting combation of monster powers or terrain features designed to test the creativity and teamwork of your players. As opposed to earlier modules in the series, very few fights are straight-out grindfests, which is a very welcome change. (Gone are the phasing, incoroporeal, regenerating creatures... And good riddance!).
The biggest issues that I have with this adventure is that since its release PCs have gotten much more powerful. New classes, feats, powers and equipment have been introduced, which means that if you run these monsters as written the PCs will pretty much curb-stomp everything in sight. Additionally, these monsters were written back in the early days of 4E and thus suffer from the "high HP, high defenses, low damage" problem that was prevalent at that time.
Thus, if you want to make the combats snappy and dangerous you are going to need to go through pretty much every monster and downgrade defenses, raise damage, and lower hit points. It's not particularly challenging to do this, but it is tedious. In addition, you'll need to fix most of the solo encounters so that the PCs don't simply stun-lock them into oblivion. The easiest way to do this is if you have access to the online compendium. You can glance at the solos in the "Monster Vault" and apply some of the new solo powers. If you don't have access to the online compendium, I would suggest that you simply give every solo a save (at their normal +5) at the start of their turn against any condition affecting them, regardless of whether or not they should be able to save against it.
Overall I give the product 3 stars. It's a good starting point to run an epic-level adventure, but it will take about 75% of the effort that you'd need to do anyway if you just made up your own adventure. Ideally, Wizards would go back, update this adventure, re-organize it, and make it downloadable for a small fee. If they did that, I'd happily buy it again to avoid having to rework every monster.
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