13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
It's just OK, March 11, 2009
This review is from: Demon Queen's Enclave: Adventure P2 for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (D&D Adventure) (Paperback)
I admit I was really excited to hear of this when it first came out. I was hoping for a re-incarnated adventure combining "Queen of the Demonweb Pits", "Kingdom of the Ghouls"(from Dungeon#70), "Expedition to the Demonweb Pits", and possibly some other Drow adventures etc.
At first, things looked good because they start off describing the many factions that are vying for control in a drow enclave deep in the underdark. There are 3 or 4. The enclave has been decimated by undead and demons. The factions are holed up trying to survive. The party gets to encounter each faction, and can choose to parlay or they can kill them outright. The problem is the NPC characters are not very well fleshed out. They are the stereotypical drow matron, drow wizard, drow fighter, etc. They just tacked on "motivation A" to the matron who wants...guess what... more power. Considering that the only contact you get with them is a 5 minute encounter maybe they didn't need to be fleshed out. The characters fall very flat and an average DM would need to be an expert at improvisation to give them any personality that made them memorable. Luckily the DM that ran it for me put a lot of work into that. There's no intrigue, there's no subterfuge other than: meet matron, she asks you for something, you do it, she rewards you, you kill her anyway for the XP. Repeat with the other 3 factions. There's never any fear or feel of drow society since the city has been sacked. SPOILER ALERT: none of the factions ever sell the party out. It would have been awesome if the party was relying on a faction only to find out they sold the party out to another faction and betrayed them at a pivotal time. END SPOILER ALERT.
I think it would have worked better if the factions weren't just shells of their former selves. It would have been better if defeating the main undead faction were impossible unless you got help from at least one of the factions. Then there would have been more moral discussion on who to ally yourself. The party would have to discuss taking the lesser of two evils and also have to investigate the factions more to find out who they want to join; who's the strongest, who's the most evil. That investigation could have opened up lots of role-playing etc. It also would have been better if the factions had more of a backing. For example, if you walk into a gang leader's house in Chinatown and kill him. He's not the supreme leader so you know that the gang will not just fall apart. The gang has thousands of members that will take retribution on you. It makes for a more scary negotiation with them. Even adding a non-drow faction would have been cool, like a trek to negotiate with the Kuo-Toa like in the old-school modules. As it is, you can walk through and kill everything in the adventure all on your own including the main bad guy and his faction.
A lot of the fights are in really tight quarters. 4th edition is more fun when the battles are in places with tons of tactical possibilities. It seems a lot of the fights just got stuck in some doorway or in a small 4-by-4 room. My rogue wouldn't have been able to maneuver even if he was an artful dodger.
I would recommend a 3.5 adventure:"Endless Night" published by paizo. They captured drow and the flavor of their society very well.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ok module, but feels very incomplete, July 24, 2010
This review is from: Demon Queen's Enclave: Adventure P2 for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (D&D Adventure) (Paperback)
Like many pre-published adventures, this one feels like it hasn't been play-tested much, if at all. The main point of this review is to warn DMs that it can potentially be a fun module, but you'll have to spend a decent bit of time reading and re-reading the module, establishing what's going on(sometimes major plot points are mentioned off-hand or in obscure places), and a basic mindset of what you kind of imagine what the PCs should be doing and when they should be doing it. I think the main people whom it would benefit are DMs who are very creative and able to come up with storylines at the drop of a hat but are looking for someone to come up with the combat encounters for them.
There are two books. The first includes the basic storyline, list of items and new monsters, NPC personalities. The second includes all of the encounters. The problem is that while the second book seems fairly complete, the first book feels like they dashed it off to the printer and left half of it out. The basic storyline premise is this:
"A rebel group of Drow secretly began worshiping Orcus, and went to a pocket dimension where a former Exarch of Orcus once held sway. Rousing his abandoned legions, they swept back into the Underdark and sacked their former Drow city of Phaervorul. When the PCs arrive, there are three main Drow NPCs who wish for the city to be reclaimed from the demons and undead, but do not trust or like each other. The first night the PCs sleep there, they also have a dream about the vampire leader of the rebel Drow, who taunts them and invites them to challenge him in his pocket dimension. The PCs can eventually find the portal to this dimension, carve through his army of minions, and finally challenge him."
This is not a bad premise for the storyline, but my issue was that the book never goes much more into detail than that. Here were some of the problems I had:
1. Lack of motivation. There are a few suggested motivations for the players, but they're not well integrated into the story and don't seem to serve much purpose other than "Get the PCs to the start of the adventure". In my experience, this can potentially result in bored players who ask "Why are we here again?". One of the suggested motivations for good parties is that a local seer has seen ominous omens about the rise of a new Exarch of Orcus. Unfortunately, this is a weak motivation because said Exarch isn't really an immediate threat to anyone besides other evil creatures so it's basically boils down to just kill this evil guy that's in this other dimension because.....well, he's evil and he, um...exists? If the PCs find out that he can't even become an Exarch unless he kills them, they'll feel doubly cheated.
Motivation becomes a really big issue when it comes to dealing with the Drow NPCs, the supposed meat of the adventure. Much is made about why the Drow would condescend to working with the PCs because they're in a weakened state, the PCs can impress them with Skill Challenges, etc. However, it seems to have completely escaped the writers as to why the PCs would actually *want* to help the Drow. After all, they're evil, will likely backstab the PCs and really don't have much to offer them. The only reward the book mentions is possibly sending an NPC or two along to help.
2. There's almost nothing to the NPCs. With three main NPC factions vying for power, you'd think they'd get at least a page or two of background write-up. While they get a decent blurb about their motivations(which pretty much translates into screw everyone else and kill the main villain), there is only about a paragraph or so apiece about some of their history, and little to nothing about their personality or what they actually know about what's going on. This can be a big problem, because the PCs already won't have much of an idea of what they're supposed to be doing, and the NPCs won't be of any help. For example, the second half of the adventure takes place in the pocket dimension which involves traveling through a portal, but will the NPCs even know to tell them?
3. The PCs arrive in a CITY. Where should they go? Although it's a clue that the Temple of Lolth is a prominent landmark, the rest of the city is just abstract groups of buildings that give PCs little clues about where they should go. Couple this with the lack of NPC knowledge, and you can easily run into a problem where the PCs have no clue about what to do next, other than randomly searching buildings. Some people may call this open-ended. I think of it as unfocused.
4. For being an intrigue based adventure, all of the encounters are written up to be combats. While this is understandable, it's problematic when the NPCs attack the PCs first and/or attack them from surprise when these encounters are supposed to have the option of diplomacy. One egregious example is the first encounter, where the PCs run into undead chasing down a drider. The encounter description even describes the drider lunging straight for them, and the tactics section describes his allies as also attacking the PCs as well. Given the above issue with lack of motivation to help the drow to begin with, the PCs will be even less likely to help the drow if they're attacked by them.
5. There's almost a complete lack of an ending. They can kill the final villain, and for no discernible reason Orcus shows up with an image of his eye and his hand and asks for the villain's sword, all for the binary choice of giving him the sword or sticking it into his eye.
Before anyone responds with something to the effect of "Well, any creative DM can surmount these issues by..."
Well yes, yes they can. For example, I would suggest having a quest motivation that involves the PCs being sent to meet with the Drow Matron and knowledge of where to find her. When they get there, she should have a background story of what's happened(from her perspective) along with some designated areas in the city that the PCs should go(for example, meet with the General to see what he knows, kill the rebellious wizard Jhaelant, check on our slaves, etc.). The PCs could then go to those areas, meet with the other NPCs who have their own goals (which may run counter to those of the other NPCs). These mini-quests should be to help accomplish certain plot McGuffins which then culminate in the first Act climax of taking on the Drow Vampire Lieutenant who guards the portal to the pocket dimension. All the while, the PCs should be finding out information about the soon to be Exarch of Orcus that makes them want to defeat him.
HOWEVER, I believe that this is requiring a lot of work out of a DM who paid for a pre-written module rather than just taking the time to create someting unique themselves. It's just unfortunate that no example like the one I gave really rests in the module itself, so DMs should be prepared to do some work to achieve the story that the writers had conceived in their head, but not really put down on paper.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Undead Underground, April 4, 2009
This review is from: Demon Queen's Enclave: Adventure P2 for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (D&D Adventure) (Paperback)
I am currently taking my team of players through this module, and I have gotten multiple compliments from the group, saying they are some of the best sessions that have ever played.
The encounters are built superbly well and are a real treat to run. It helps when you have creative players that take complete advantage of every piece of terrain given to them. Each fight is different since there seem to be 4 or 5 factions vying for power, between demons, undead, spiders, and drow.
The material given makes it easy to tie it into your homebrew campaign. We've been running these characters from level 1 in a homebrew world, and now that they are level 14 they are carving through the Underdark like they were born to do so.
My one complaint is that it comes with 1 two-sided poster map while some of the others seem to come with more. A good thing about it is that the encounters flow pretty logically, so before the session begins I draw two or three detailed maps on my wet-erase battle grid assuming that they will go there. Sure enough, the characters pick where they feel they need to go next, and they manage to go to each drawn location.
There is enough material to last months if you are doing weekly sessions like I am. Pick this one up!
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