{"id":4083,"date":"2018-03-03T07:13:31","date_gmt":"2018-03-03T12:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4083"},"modified":"2018-02-20T11:05:57","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T16:05:57","slug":"mission-to-thay-nethwatch-keep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=4083","title":{"rendered":"Mission to Thay: Nethwatch Keep"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nBy Jon Gilliam
\nSelf Published
\n5e
\nLevel 12-15<\/p>\n

Here is the Episode 8 that Rise of Tiamat should have contained! Thay in all it’s horrid and far-reaching power and might. A society dark, alien, at odds with itself, and at the boiling point of explosion.<\/p>\n

This 130 page adventure (in five parts, with part five being an appendix) offers an alternative to chapter 8 of Hoard of the Dragon Queen\/Rise of Tiamat, but could also stand alone. While the original chapter 8 was just some general throw away content, this is specific, evocative, and, more than ANY product I can recall, revels in flavor of Forgotten Realms. Look, I\u2019m not an expert in FR, but I do know every adventure I\u2019ve seen is generic and lacks flavor. All of the designers seem to think that stupid 50 character-long names are what \u201cflavor\u201d is. That\u2019s not flavor. THIS adventure is flavor. It brings home the evil of Thay, and will no doubt focus the PLAYERS angers, without going off the deep end in to being puerile or vile, at least according to my midwestern tastes. It\u2019s got some issues with being \u2026 long? Whatever, while it does a decent job with organizen & reference sheets it\u2019s also going to take some work to prep. It\u2019s ALMOST worth it to me \u2026 and since I have high standards \u2026 maybe it’s worth it to you.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s some pretext to make this fit in to Hoard\/Rise. You go to Thay to see what the contact has to say about the Cult. It\u2019s pretty generic in Hoard\/Rise. Not so here. There\u2019s one little slave boy in a keep of undead (intelligent & not) who complains of a monster under his bed. Gladiator games are held, with the winners taken to be euthanized and turned in to an undead army. There are zombie infant submission baskets hanging from the ceiling. The \u201cslaves as chattel for necromancers\u201d is just on the edge on being uncomfortable. It\u2019s enough to make the PLAYERS hate Thay, but not so much to generally evoke real-world darkness too hard. At one point you have a dinner with a dragonborn tribe which plays out a little like the Riker dinner with the Klingons. This place FEELS different. It\u2019s not a hand wave. In one of the official adventure, Into the Abyss maybe, the drow guards had \u201csleeping pallets.\u201d I bitched that it was lame and didn\u2019t conjure an alien culture. Not so here! This place is alive, both with \u201cevil culture\u201d, \u201cevil necromancer culture\u201d and \u201cnonhuman tibres culture.\u201d That\u2019s REALLY good.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a \u201cbest way\u201d through the adventure, but it\u2019s not exactly linear. The designer outlines alternatives and flowcharts out the adventure so you can help understand how the locations work together. There\u2019s an explicit section at the end of each to show you what could come next, both from the hints in the location and in things characters might do like \u201cwhat if they lead a slave rebellion?\u201d and stuff like that. That\u2019s good for these mutliepart things. Both where the adventure naturally leads and how to handle the players choosing other options. I was struck by the hook here also. The inciting event is the kidnapping of a wizard you need to talk to. I was fully expecting a railroad and the wizard to get kidnapped no matter what. I guess that\u2019s ok, I\u2019ve come to accept that the hook is allowed a little more of a railroad. But, NO! In this adventure can you save the victim and there are still ways the adventure can go forward! A delightful surprise!
\nThe NPC\u201ds are well done. They get little offset boxes with a few words describing their physical\/personality attributes. Short, evocative, and focused on helping the DM run them. That section is followed by a few bullet points that describe their goals. \u201cGet more Druge. Find some kids to kidnap.\u201d and so on. It\u2019s an effective way to communicate an NPC to the DM effectively. <\/p>\n

There are a decent number of non-standard magic items also, which I love. A book that can copy pages if left on top of another over night. A pair of balls that will gently \u201ctug\u201d towards the location of the other one. Not just boring old mechanical attributes but DESCRIPTIONS of effects. Perfect. <\/p>\n

The maps are also quite interesting, at least a few for the major locations. They show a scene and can be used as a battle map, but then there\u2019s a second, for the DM, with notations all over it. They describe what\u2019s on the map, almost like a one page dungeon. It\u2019s a great example of leveraging the map for communicating additional information to the DM beyond \u201ckey number.\u201d<\/p>\n

They are also great reference sheets for rumors (divided by the type of person, like slave or wizard) and for some of the more complicated spell-casters. Good choices.<\/p>\n

But \u2026. It\u2019s also got some pretty serious issues.<\/p>\n

First, it needs a better summary. There is some long text, that I might say is background, but a small section laying out how the entire thing works together would have been VERY helpful. There are a few sections that try to do something like this but they are all either WAY too specific (the backgrounds) or very general (the flowcharts.) There needs to be something in the middle. AT one point there\u2019s a village where people are sometimes VERY clearly compelled to say things (I love that telegraphed stuff) but you could EASILY miss the reason why. That\u2019s the sort of thing for a general summary. The \u201cone page outline\u201d does a decent job but is missing some important things and still doesn\u2019t feel like an \u201coverview.\u201d<\/p>\n

More importantly, I find the text \u2026 conversational. The What’s Next and NPC sections are GREAT, as are the reference sheets, notations for rumors, etc. But the adventure falls down over the core text. One of the first sections is when the party teleports to Thay and are greeted by their hostess. There are three paragraphs of text, longish even, taking up a column, that describes the scene. How they are greeted, by who, what they do, etc. The paragraph format, or maybe the \u201clong text paragraph\u201d format doesn\u2019t really work here. Scenes run in to other scenes or other text descriptions without much delineation. More whitespace, bolding, bullets, etc would help A LOT. It’s this, far and away, which drags the adventure down from the lofty heights it achieves in other areas.<\/p>\n

Like I said, it\u2019s VERY flavorful, and probably the best FR thing I\u2019ve seen. I love the NPC\u2019s and it would work as both a standalone and as a replacement for chapter 8. But you\u2019re going to need time to prep it and a highlighter. It\u2019s VERY hard for me to recommend it based on that. Better summaries and a reworking of the DM text\/scenes would make this magnificent.<\/p>\n

This is $5 at dmsguild.
\nhttp:\/\/www.dmsguild.com\/product\/234490\/A-Mission-to-Thay–Nethwatch-Keep<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jon Gilliam Self Published 5e Level 12-15 Here is the Episode 8 that Rise of Tiamat should have contained! Thay in all it’s horrid and far-reaching power and might. A society dark, alien, at odds with itself, and at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/thay.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4083"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4085,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4083\/revisions\/4085"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}