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This is the first in a project to review every adventure in the Scales of War adventure path for D&D 4e by Wizards of the Coast. I'm going to start at the beginning with the first adventure, Rescue at Rivenroar by David Noonan. It appeared in Dungeon 156 in July 2008.
About the Scales of War
You'll only find Scales of War online as part of DDI on the Wizards site, specifically Dungeon. You don't need to be a subscriber for the first few adventures. It's an adventure path (that's a campaign to you and I) which covers all three tiers of play, taking your party from level 1 all the way to 30. Each month sees a new episode which covers between 1 and 2 levels, and there are extras available in Dragon such as side treks and backgrounds.As Dungeon is a PDF, the formatting is different to something you'd usually see in a deadtree. The pages are landscape, which I like as it fits better at the gaming table. It can be updated and errata'ed as needed. I can already see that the skill challenges have been updated since original publication. Printing off the pages you need is simplicity itself, so you can get the most out of stat blocks and images. Watch out though as the pagination assumes you're looking at a whole issue of Dungeon, so Rescue at Rivenroar runs from page 4 to 44.
The by now standard Delve format of putting tactical encounters all in one place remains, but as you don't get two facing pages in this format, many encounters are organised slightly differently, down to one page in most cases. This seems to work just fine. On the downside however, a PDF simply isn't the same as paper when it comes to flicking back and forth. The way the first adventure is written it needs the DM to bounce around slightly too much for me to say you could run it straight off the screen. Printing it out is a must, and to be fair, the margins are spacious enough for you to add your notes to it. I reckon you could probably track initiative and hits on it too. What a shame WotC hasn't really taken advantage of this electronic format, I'd have liked to have seen hyperlinks included at least. Check out Monte Cook's Dungeon a Day project for an example of what this could so easily have been. Dungeon is essentially a landscaped magazine on your screen, don't expect any more than that and you'll be fine.
You can't help but compare and contrast with Keep on the Shadowfell, a traditionally published module that hit the shelves a short while prior to Scales of War. I'm going to guess that most groups were getting stuck into KotS when this was released, certainly online APs suggest as much. I wonder if there was less take up for this campaign on that basis? I'm skipping to the end here but, to be honest, this is a much better adventure, in nearly every way. The rest of this review will explain why. ..
About Rescue at Rivenroar
Rescue at Rivenroar is an adventure for level 1 characters. I'm telling you this straight out because the adventure doesn't. Seriously, it's hidden away on the second page in a one liner. There's a nice icon on the front page that says its for the heroic tier, but it's not obvious (certainly in hindsight) what level it's for. Never mind, let's see what your party will be up against.But first, let's see what your players know. Did you ever play through the Red Hand of Doom for 3rd ed? I didn't but I get the feeling it was a pretty popular adventure. Well, this adventure is set (nominally) 10 years after the events of that module. Don't worry, it's just for deep background, I don't feel I've missed anything by not playing it.
The setting for this is the Elsir Vale centred on the town of Brindol. It's not the same as the Nentir Vale, but it's almost a carbon copy. I see no reason why you couldn't drop it right into that particular Vale if you wanted. Essentially you are presented with a town with a dungeon nearby, so it's not permanently glued into anyone else's world. The idea here is that a Hobgoblin warchief has been getting ideas way above his station and wants to exact revenge for the defeat of his forefathers, and at the same time make a name for himself as the local big bad. His name is Sinruth. If your party does it's job, Sinruth won't be seeing level 3. What a loser.
To be fair, he has somehow managed to forge a few alliances in order to swell the ranks of the new Red Hand, which he's calling Sinruth's Hand. He's made a bargain with some evil gnomes (it's not clear what the nature of that bargain is), as well as a mysterious emissary from another descendant of the old Red Hand. He's also fallen in with some undead in a nearby dungeon. He keeps them sweet with human sacrifice, which is a convenient way of hooking the party, as townsfolk are being abducted for this very reason.
Here the adventure skips forward quite a bit and talks about how the party are to deal with the prisoners taken by the Hand. This forms a kind of puzzle-like spine to the adventure. There are a half dozen abductees to be found, and each has some vague knowledge about their surroundings and clues that point towards the location of the other prisoners. You'll need to read this section carefully and have it to hand when they are encountered later on. I really like this concept. It's simple, yet it sprinkles a healthy dose of roleplaying all over the later dungeon crawl, and helps cement a few relationships with the party too. I'd want to link some of these NPCs to the party just to help link the party into the setting, and it's easily done.
Don't get carried away though, the adventure hasn't started yet. We start in Brindol, which has a very nice map. This is, I presume, recycled from Red Hand as it's keyed but there's no explanation of the numbers in this adventure. Brindol has a 'Hall of Great Valour' which holds trophies from the last battle, and Sinruth will be looting these soon.
Again, we still haven't started. We get to see the treasure sytem first. Unlike the deadtree modules like Keep and Thunderspire, Scales of War uses the treasure parcel system so that you can spread out the loot in a way that suits your group. There are blank slots for 14 parcels in this adventure, and you are expected to use your players wishlists to populate it. This is officially a good thing. Well done Mr Noonan.
Starting in ... A Bar
Finally we are ready to begin, and in the grand tradition of D&D we start in a bar. For once, there's no dark stranger in a cloak with a parchment, instead we have a bunch of humanoid raiders who want a punch up. Bar fight! Totally concocted in order to get your players used to the rules, we have minions, we have goblins with 25 hp and other stuff that players from 3.x and earlier will not be used to. Clever DMs will also want to get p42 of the DMG out and encourage stunting. It's a move that will pay dividends throughout the whole campaign. Take care to read the sidebar on handling NPC on NPC fighting, it's not immediately clear if the rabble are on the goblin's side or not (they're not). There's a potential for fire and explosion too, which is always a pleasant way to start the day. Ideally, if you like action movies, you'll want to see PCs airswimming as they are blown out of a window with a fireball blossoming behind them.Things are taken outside where the party will find that this is not just a simple punch up, but part of a larger town raid by Sinruth and his mates. There's an interesting encounter with an ogre and some archers. You read that right, an ogre, all 8 levels of brute. The author includes some good advice here about the monsters bugging out when the fight turns against them. Heed it, or you've got a certain TPK in your first session.
Obviously these encounters assume this is the first 4e game for a lot of players, and to be fair, I like the way that assumption is handled. You get to use lots of interesting parts of 4e early on, and this training also gives the party an 'in' to the city to help them fully engage with the rest of the adventure.
Having driven off the monsters, the party will be invited by the town council to step up and be real heroes. The quests are simple, rescue the prisoners, and return the trophies. There's a skill challenge set out for those groups who want to formalise the negotiations with the council. Again, an early showing for a 4e subsystem, good to see. The party have a chance to interrogate a captured hobgoblin too, and the author has the sense to provide advice for when the players get all bloodthirsty. It's a second skill challenge, and the consequences actually matter.
When the party head out of town there's another skill challenge to track the Hand (they'll be getting used to these by now), as well as some on the road encounters with the local wildlife. At this point the DM has access to a seriously old school Wilderness Encounter table. I thought 4e had done away with this kind of thing, but it was heartwarming to see it if I'm honest.
Castle Rivenroar and its Dungeons
Castle Rivenroar is long ruined, but the catacombs beneath them endure. Old families are interred there along with a nasty breed of squatters, who don't all share the families penchant for Vecna worship. Sinruth and his buddies have taken over and made the place into an ersatz jail, as well as using some of the original guardians to keep pesky adventurers at bay. But I'm getting ahead of myself.Page 22 has a map of the complex that will make dungeon fans swoon with delight. It's got a couple of levels, lots of staircases and some iconography that makes you want to skip ahead to see just what those glowing runes mean. Now, take care with the numbering, it threw me first time. The rooms are all numbered, but the encounters will often include more than one room, and the tactical encounters are not numbered. You'll need to clip page 22 to your screen or something or run the risk of getting lost. The overview gives the DM a decent sense of the scale of the dungeon and how everything links up. It finishes with an XP tracker which is very handy indeed (does anyone ever really remember where they are with milestones?).
I'm not going to go through every single encounter (sorry). I'd rather pick out some highs and lows. You get 15 fully detailed tactical encounters here. They are all either level 1 or 2, even the big boss rooms. Despite that, there's plenty of variety on offer and I think it's a fine example of a low level dungeon. Not every encounter needs to be dealt with. There's a shortish route to the bad guy (and Sinruth himself is not necessarily the final encounter), but don't forget the quests. The party are actually here for prisoners and trophies, even if the players are here for treasure and xp. This device keeps the dungeon going even if the party get lucky and 'win' too early.
One of my fave encounters is the Portal Room. The set up is that this is a destination portal from another castle in another age. Sometimes monsters come through. In one sentence we have a reasonable justification for the ochre jelly and his specter allies. Nicely done. Similarly, I really like how the author includes advice on having the bad guys make a break for it whenever the fight goes against them. It's almost as if Dave Noonan could sense the future 'grind' complaints. Often these stragglers will join up with other encounters, giving a veneer of versimilitude to the whole complex. In the same vein there's a section of the dungeon that has roaming undead on a kind of sentry route that the PCs can scout out. It's nice to see monsters who are prepared to get up and leave their keyed locations.
I even like the read aloud text. It's succinct, getting the info over quickly. Most of the encounters are worth reading closely as there are occasional nuggets of info that may come in handy later. Given that there's no overview of Scales of War, and I've not yet read the other adventures in the path, I have no idea whether the following info is vital to the campaign, or just flavour;
"Here lie the Rivenroars until the Day of the Black Sun. If you seek their monument, look at the lands around you."
Sounds like foreshadowing to me. I could well be wrong.
Not every encounter is a winner. One of the early ones has a magic circle that need breaking to free a prisoner. It's not set up as a skill challenge, so with bad luck on the dice, it's a fail and that's all there is to it. Seems out of kilter with the 4e philosophy generally and the rest of the adventure too.
Similarly, there's the encounter with Sinruth himself. Ok, it's not a wizard waiting in the last room of the dungeon (see H1, 2 and 3 for examples of this) but it always seems like a shame to me that the big bad is first met about 6 rounds before he dies. He's a combat beast though, so maybe you'll have more than a minute in his company after all. Not to worry, Sinruth is actually only a lieutenant in the grand scheme of things. Rather than him controlling the undead in Rivenroar, it's more like the other way round, and there's another end of level fight for the party at the end.
