Customer Reviews

King of the Trollhaunt Warrens: Adventure P1 (D&D Adventure)

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I'm editing this review. I've run half of the adventure so far. The plot of Trollhaunt Warrens is really well done. It was written by Richard Baker one of the author's of "Red Hand of Doom" which is in my opinion the best module ever written. Only problem is there's a lack of characters with depth in the story. That part is up to you.

This adventure has plot, encounters, and tactical fun. It's pretty long and basically split up into three parts. Each one taking probably 3 sessions. I'd estimate 45 hours to finish.

SPOILERS -- please don't read unless you're a DM - I'm still not giving everything away though.
A large group of trolls under the leadership of one who obtained a powerful artifact are growing in strength. The story starts out with some trolls throwing the head of a prince over a wall saying "Ha ha, your hero is nothing we will soon own all of this land!". The city sends for help, the party intercepts the message, and responds.

They head to the Warrens and slog through the caverns with all sorts of interesting encounters. In the Warrens are several factions vying for power or bullied into servitude. We all know evil turns against evil at the drop of a hat. There's even a black dragon who is allied with the trolls. They can fight it or avoid fighting and negotiate with a skill challenge. .

Killing the troll leader is just the first step as trolls do not so easily die. The town gets attacked by more enemies. Creatures riding manticores bring "death from above" as they strike the middle of town from the air. I always enjoy defending towns. I will leave out a major spoiler but the party has to quickly return to the troll warren.

After a second major enemy battle they must pursue another enemy through a door into the feywild, awesome. The last part of the adventure takes place in the feywild against all manner of alien creatures native to the feywild; from briar hags to tree blights to quicklings to feymire crocodiles. There is some exploring of the alien world that is the feywild and one more climactic battle that ends the adventure.

There are multiple interesting encounters. There's one I think it's called the "Death Spiral" in a cavern where there are a series of progressively higher platforms like a gigantic spiral staircase. On the levels there is a Galeb Duhr that can push players down the levels. There are lots like that, they are just playing with the tactical possibilities, it's great. Each encounter is set up to explore a different tactical twist. Not every single one is perfect but some are really fun. There are several big bad evil guys and even some recurring ones ;)hint hint.

The module is similar to all WOTC and TSR adventures and has little to no role-playing. This adventure is basically fight after fight. The locations change from in a dungeon to a city and back to the dungeon and then in the feywild. It would be nice if some of the characters in the town had more built out goals and motivations. My players wound up not caring a bit about the town or anyone in it, but that could be because they are all unaligned.

Ever since Oct,2010 where WotC released some errata stating monster target damage should be Level+8 instead of (1/2*Level)+8. This means on average every monster in this adventure is doing about 5 points of damage too less on every attack! This whole adventure, needs updating. Since all of WotC adventures are mostly just a book of encounters, this renders this book completely out of date. It is a tremendous amount of work to go through boosting Brute's attack bonuses (which all of the trolls are) and adding damage to every single monster. Plus they never gave a clear math quick fix you can apply on the fly. They also haven't even bothered to update the monsters in the online compendium. The regeneration mechanic of Trolls is now much cleaner in the Monster Vault. My players complained that the main villain seemed a little too easy.

While I'm a fan of the 4E system in general, the published adventures for it have been so dissapointing that I stopped buying them after Demon Queen's Enclave. Unfortunately, this adventure is another lengthy, formulaic outing that provides interesting tactical encounters but little else to involve players.

This is a shame, because the idea behind the adventure is pretty good. A troll chieftain has discovered an ancient fomorian artefact that has allowed him to unite the feuding trolls of Vardar, and now threatens the peaceful town of Moonstair. The adventure shows some subtle influences from celtic myth and legend, most strongly in the troll cheiftain's evil eye power and his magical stone cauldron that returns the dead to life. Sounds interesting, right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, the background serves as little more than justification for adventurers to go on a very long, tedious dungeon crawl. Encounters are stocked with interesting monsters and complications, but the adventure as a whole is little more than "fight monsters, rest, move to next area, rinse, repeat." There are very few parts of the adventure concerned with the lore of Vardar or the feywild, and the plot is unrelentingly linear. Troll threatens town, adventurers kill him, whoops, he's not dead, you'll have to go into the feywild and kill him again. This is the type of plot appropriate for video game level design, not an interactive tabletop game.

In short, it shares in a stable of flaws common to most of the published 4E adventures so far: linear, boring plots, overemphasis on combat encounters, little real player choice in determining the direction the adventure takes, and background that could be interesting but fails to be deployed to any real effect. I can't understand why wizards writes adventures this way-they've demonstrated in the DMG and the DMG II that they understand good storytelling and adventure design principles, but they consistently fail to apply them to their own modules.

As the previous posters said, the module is extremely combat heavy, but the combats are very cool and varied, so no problem there. As for the maps, the best current option is to scan them from the book or download them from WotC. If you've got the time to wait, artists online will undoubtedly post their own renditions of the maps for download, but that might take months.

If only WotC would allow printing of tactical scale maps from DDI, which would be the best service they could provide through the medium aside from the Character Builder.

Im currently playing through this adventure and I have to say I am impressed with D&D 4e modules. They are extremely challenging. While I am fairly new to 4e I can say that this module takes me back to my 1st ed days of dungeon crawl adventuring. Very classic D&D feel and the encounters are carefully planned and laid out. This module is part of a series (as in the old D&D module system) that forms part of a greater epic quest. Wizards of the Coast is really impressing me with the level of quality and production values of their D&D products and in particular with 4e. Btw, you need the Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide and Monster Manuals to play this. You may also want to pick up some D&D mini's and Dungeon tiles too to maximize the visual components of combat, which in D&D 4 is incredibly cinematic and fast-paced (compared to older editions). Bravo to WotC for another fun adventure!!

Good story, good encounter variety. Players should like it.

But making the maps for this one is simply brutal. Compared to this, making the maps for THUNDERSPIRE LABYRINTH or PYRAMID OF SHADOWS was a vacation. As other commenters have noted, you'd basically have to be a trained draftsman to accurately reproduce what you see there. The rest of us are gonna mess up a lot, and then later when you actually run the encounter areas, you'll realize you made tons of mistakes you didn't realize at the time (e.g, something was supposed to be a choke point but you made it 4 squares wide.)

True, you can get the maps digitally through the WOTC website, but those are not high-quality -- I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with them. Possibilities:

1. You could blow them up and print them out, but this would of course involve the expense of going to a printer's service because you'd need an oversized printer. Even then, though, since the images are not high-def, they're gonna look like crud even if a printer has them printed for you.

Alternatively, you could play around with your graphics program until you know how to print the images out section by section so that the final result is one-inch squares. But that's gonna involve quite a lot of trouble and scotch-taping.

In short, there is no simple way I know of of enlarging those free images to gaming size.

Great story...but the adventure is loaded with encounters which are basically impossible to recreate with a hand-drawn battle grid. The caverns are awkwardly shaped so dungeon tiles are not really an option either; plus the terrain features would be hard to create with tiles. You would have to be an artist to recreate the terrain of these encounters and it would take hours to to do so. We all know how important maps are for combat in 4e. The terrain is also important for things like cover and concealment. The only solution would be to scan each encounter map and enlarge it which is a pain in the a$$. A published adventure shouldn't require that much extra work. The adventure comes with only one large map which has VERY limited use.

I haven't had a chance to run the adventure yet, but it's got quality components and looks pretty thorough.