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The Good: The encounters do a good job of evoking the senses, taking advantage of the scenery, and stressing certain themes. There’s a lot of adventure here. The adventure has an epic sort of feel to it while involving only mid level characters. These dungeons make a better deal of sense than many, featuring lots of ancient towers and cities. Clear opportunities for scholarly and social characters to shine along with combat characters.
The Bad: It’s a little difficult to appreciate the adventure without having read the previous two, despite its claims of being perfectly viable as an independent adventure. Some clues and background information should probably just be handed to the characters rather than requiring difficult roles. Sand Storm is really needed to make full use of this product. Back cover claims that “this book contains detailed source material on the realm of Anauroch” should be ignored as this is strictly an adventure, not a setting book.
The Physical Thing
A 160 page full color hardcover for $29.95, Anauroch represents the same standards of quality that I’ve come to expect from Wizards of the Coast. Beautiful and appropriate artwork, detailed encounter maps, and solid formatting and editing result in a fun and easy to use product.Under the Cover
This adventure for level 9 – 13 characters includes a variety of unique artifacts and monsters in order to provide the DM with everything she needs.Longer adventures are often broken up into sections that can be run one after another or spaced out with intervening content. Anauroch does a good job of this, though the immediacy of the threat means that only related DM created content is likely to be appropriate to place inbetween the adventure sections. Below I will discussion each of the major steps of the adventure, what sorts of material is included, and comment on some of the exceptional material.
Part 1 Windsong Tower
A part of the legendary Myth Drannor, Windsong Tower is a former magic academy now ruled by a disembodied wizard. The thrust of this portion is that the characters are trying to get information from this wizard, Darcassan, and that in order to do so they have to explore the ancient tower and very likely fight the wizard several times. Darcassan sends different shadow avatars of himself, such as a warrior version, to confront the PCs at different times and when combined with magical properties of the tower the result is a variety of interesting encounters all connected around dealing with a single opponent. With appropriate use of description the exploration of this tower could be beautifully haunting as a disembodied voice questions and taunts the PCs and adversaries appear out of nowhere.
It’s about a single evening’s worth of adventure at most, especially if the DM includes social encounters in and around Myth Drannor as well. It seeds several items and clues that can be important later on in the adventures and, in this way, is a great first step along the adventure path. My favorite part of this portion of the adventure is Darcassan. I like the idea of a disembodied opponent who in a way is the voice of the DM, challenging the PCs and fighting against them until ultimately relenting and providing useful information and assistance. It’s an unusual set of encounters and, when combined with the tower itself, should easily become a memorable adventure.
Part 2 The Crypt of Augathra the Mad
Here the characters initially search through the Stonelands until they discover the Crypt of Augathra the Mad, a tomb partially incorporated into the ruins of an ancient Netherese city. The ultimate goal here is to meet and communicate with Augathra, though getting to her involves a classic dungeon crawl complete with gelatinous cubes, floor traps, and nonsensically organized corridors. These could easily provide several sessions of play, especially if the DM wants to spend more time finding the entrance to the Crypt. Adding in other nearby ruins is an easy way for the DM to incorporate her own creations as well.
On the whole the best I can say for this portion of the adventure is that it’s likely to please players who want a standard dungeon crawl. Sometimes that’s exactly what we all want out of D&D, and in this respect the Crypt certainly provides that. The hoops jumped through and ultimate information gained are a little on the silly side in my view, but the final encounter can easily involve epic visions of the destruction of the Realms. If played up in the right way, this portion of the adventure can do an excellent job of communicating to the players that there’s nothing less than the fate of the world at stake here.
On the encounter end I do have to say that I enjoy how unusual many of the monsters are. Dragonflesh Golems, Living Holocausts (Fire/Air Elementals), and dream entities are a few of those to be found here. They’re interesting, break the standard mold, and generally infrequent enough that a DM could easily add in more creatures if the PCs are having too easy of a time with the adventure.
Part 3 Research and Development
The thrust of this portion of the adventure is that the characters need to do research and so they’re off to Candlekeep and other locations in order to get it done. It’s a lull in the action portion of the adventure, but I think it’s pretty well done. The best parts include detail on gaining admittance to Candlekeep and stress on the importance of rare and fantastic books to the library there. Strong XP awards are provided for gaining information through research and discussion, and it’s an excellent set of scenes for scholar characters to shine in.
Part 4 Beneath the White Towers
A trip across a desert without the aid of magic to catacombs buried under a lost city is what you get here. The loss of magic is tough on spellcasters, but the adventure does seem to go out of its way to provide alternatives (Shadow Weave items, areas where magic functions) so that those characters are only moderately inconvenienced. This is probably a single focused evening’s adventure, but it could easily be several more depending on how many desert encounters are faced and how quickly the characters locate the ruins.
The encounters here are just as interesting and varied as earlier, but there aren’t many of them. At this point the pace of the adventure notably picks up and after this section the PCs are spurred onward to the final goal. Adventure pacing is tricky business, so color me impressed that the adventure as presented seems to develop excellent pacing.
Part 5 Shadow Seashore
The characters head forth to their final destination, armed with the knowledge and artifacts they needed. A variety of seashore encounters are included here, though there’s nothing of any great note to them. They seem included mostly to build a frantic pace to the end and to drain some PC resources, though the final ECL 22 encounter seems tough enough as it is. I quite like the final battle. It has an epic feel to it, it seems like it should be hard, and the mechanics are being used in interesting ways. On the whole it strikes me as a fine conclusion to a solid adventure.
