Go to Table of Contents

Storm King’s Thunder begins with the shattering of the Ordning by Annam. The giants, freed from their bonds by the destruction of their society and driven by a desire to claim lordship in the Ordning-yet-to-come, are suddenly more active — and more violent — than they’ve been in generations. Giant attacks run rampant across the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier.

The PCs get sucked into this morass and the question of the hour is: How can we stop it?

Logically, therefore, Storm King’s Thunder should conclude with the PCs resolving the crisis. Their actions should stop the giant attacks and restore the peace.

Oddly, however, as we discussed in Part 2B, this is not how Storm King’s Thunder ends. The book instead wraps up with the PCs rescuing Hekaton (he didn’t disappear until after the Ordning was broken) and then helping him slay the wyrm Iymrith (whose schemes also didn’t begin until after the Ordning was broken).

To complete our remix of Storm King’s Thunder, therefore, we need to conjure forth the missing ending.

THE ORDNING

In the real world, the divine right of kings was the belief that a king’s right to rule was granted by God. In practice, it was fairly circular logic: Everything in the world is the way it is due to God’s plan. Therefore, the fact that I’m in charge means that it’s God’s plan that I should be in charge. And because it’s God’s plan that I should be in charge, no one has a right to question my authority.

I’m in charge because I’m in charge. QED.

(“Hey! What about free will?” “I said no questions!”)

But what if you lived in a world where the gods were real? And you could just call them up and ask, “Who do you think should be in charge?” In fact, maybe your god is more than happy to tell you who’s in charge.

That’s the Ordning.

Annam, the god whom almost all giants worship, has decreed a divine hierarchy for giant society for more than 30,000 years. This hierarchy applied not only between the giant races (so that the cloud giants, for example, had dominion over the hill giants, but were subservient to the storm giants), but also to each individual giant.

The giants sometimes speak of this as skarra, the light of Annam:

• The light of Annam is upon him.
• Her skarra is brighter than mine.
• May the light of Annam shine on you.
• She burns with fiery skarra.

Annam’s light was a guide, a spotlight, a purpose, a blessing, and so much more.

And then the lights went out.

The result was the sort of total societal collapse you often find in failed states. Touchstones from the real world might include the dissolution of the USSR, the rise of ISIS, Rome after the assassination of Caesar, or the Communist Revolution in China.

The giants are a society now riven with strife. Paramilitary organizations struggle for power and/or survival, while the common folk desperately seek protection after aeons of having it assured. In fact, it’s not one conflict, but many different conflicts, all spilling out and affecting the other races and nations of Faerun.

Go to Part 5B: Solutions

Bedlam in Neverwinter is a D&D-themed escape room board game for 2-6 players.

Which is a lot of stuff for designers George Feledichuk, David “Duvey” Rudow, and Leo Taylor to cram into one box.

If you’re not familiar with the escape room board game genre, the basic format is a box filled with hidden cards and sealed containers or envelopes. Players are presented with a series of puzzles, and the solution to each puzzle will indicate which card to draw or sealed box to open in order to find the next puzzle.

In the case of Bedlam in Neverwinter, this primarily takes the form of a card deck and map boards. Each card has a three-digit number on the back. The map boards, on the other hand, depict different locations that the players can explore, each labeled with a three-digit number which indicates which card to draw when you go there. In addition to advancing the narrative of the story, each card may also include instructions (to draw additional cards, for example) or a puzzle (the solution of which will be a three-digit number indicating which card to draw).

If you’re not familiar with D&D, then… Wait. Really?

In any case, D&D is a fantasy roleplaying game in which players create characters by selecting their race, class, and ability scores. The actions taken by these characters are resolved by rolling a 20-sided die, adding a bonus from a relevant ability score, and comparing the result to a target number. There’s also a combat system in which damage is tracked and characters die if they lose all of their hit points.

All of these elements are also found in Bedlam in Neverwinter, albeit in a heavily modified form: Players will create their characters by selecting from a familiar range of races and classes, each of which will grant them proficiency in one of the six ability scores. Each class also has a unique, themed skill/power and will gain additional abilities as they level up at the end of each adventure.

Various cards will require either solo checks (which the current player rolls) or group checks (everyone rolls and at least half the group must succeed). Each check has one or two ability scores associated with it, and if you have a matching ability score you add +1d6 to your d20 roll.

Combat is resolved via round-robin skill checks against the monster’s target number. Weapons and other items can be equipped, granting additional bonuses if your attack roll is high enough. (For example, if you roll 17+ with a Sword of Sharpness, you deal +1 damage.)

And that’s basically it: Bedlam in Neverwinter consists of three adventures, each with a separate deck of cards and map boards. As you play through each deck, you’ll discover and overcome puzzles and monsters. The box states that each adventure takes about 90 minutes, but our experience was closer to 2 hours. (But we did have an ultra-excited 7-year-old playing with us, which may have prolonged things a bit.)

IMPRESSIONS

There will be ONE MINOR SPOILER in the discussion that follows. It will have no impact or insight into the puzzles or other hidden secrets of the game, but ye have been warned.

My overall takeaway from Bedlam in Neverwinter is that it’s an extremely easy game. The box lists a difficulty of 4 out of 5, but at no point did the group I was playing with feel remotely challenged: The puzzles were all trivially dispatched and the combat never once made us feel in danger for our lives.

As a result, it really felt more like an activity than a game. I mentioned that we played it with a fairly young child, and that may be an ideal use case: A pleasant way to pass some time with your friends and/or family. We certainly enjoyed it as such.

The biggest question I have about the game is why, if it’s called Bedlam in Neverwinter, is the entire story set in Icewind Dale? It’s quite baffling, honestly. My best guess — and it’s just a wild guess — is that somebody said, “Don’t we have a movie coming out in 2023 that’s set in Neverwinter?” and a few references to Neverwinter were shoved in and a new title pasted on the cover.

(I’m not going to get more specific than this because, again, I’m trying to avoid spoilers. But it’s very baffling.)

Bedlam in Neverwinter’s biggest flaw, however, is the map boards. As I mentioned before, the idea is that you put a map board on the table and then each player chooses where they want to explore, places their miniature there, and reads the associated card describing what they find. Unfortunately, the illustrations on the map boards don’t match the card descriptions. The first sentence on a card will be something like, “This body appears to have been…” and you’ll look back to the map board in confusion because there’s nobody there.

The first few times this happens, you may think you’ve made a mistake, but you haven’t. The bigger problem, however, is that this failure is so pervasive that selecting map board locations is basically just random noise. Other decisions make this even worse. For example, there’s one map where a clearly Dexterity-based activity is depicted. So you send the Dexterity-proficient character and… ha! ha! Nope! The skill check here is a Charisma-based check where you encourage the most dexterous character in your group to do the activity. (The most dexterous character does not actually contribute to the check in any way.)

I’m not certain if this sort of thing was a deliberate bait-and-switch or just more bad design, but either way what could have been — and arguably should have been — the most significant interactive element in the game is needlessly rendered meaningless.

Like the rest of the escape room genre, once you’ve played through the content once, you’ll be done with the game forever.

Which, ultimately, brings us back to what I said before: The game basically plays itself, but the activities along the way are a pleasant way of passing the time.

You’ll want to keep in mind, though, that like other escape room board games, Bedlam in Neverwinter is not designed to be replayed: You’ll play this once and then never again. (Unlike some games of its type, however, Bedlam in Neverwinter is not destructive, so you could reseal the envelopes and pass it along to someone else easily enough.) You’ll want to keep that in mind when deciding whether or not to grab a copy.

BUY NOW

Raiders of the Serpent Sea is a third-party campaign for D&D 5^th Edition created by Brent Knowles, the lead designer of Dragon Age Origins, and released by Arcanum Worlds, who are also the publishers of Odyssey of the Dragonlords, Heroes of Baldur’s Gate, Minsc & Boo’s Journal of Villainy, and Chains of Asmodeus.

The campaign is set in a world inspired by Norse mythology, with the PCs as reavers seeking the immortality of glory in the shadow of a Ragnorak-esque apocalypse. When it hit Kickstarter I’d already been scoping out sea-based campaigns, and I’m always a sucker for Norse mythology, so it was nearly a no-brainer for me to back the five-hundred page mega-tome.

This, however, is not a review of the campaign book. It is, instead a review of the Player’s Guide that accompanies the campaign.

Personally, I’ve grown quite skeptical of player’s guides. In theory, the idea of a slim, slickly produced book that I could give to my players to get them amped up for an impending campaign sounds like a great idea. In practice, however, I’m almost always underwhelmed. The biggest problem tends to be that they’re cheaply produced by mostly copy-pasting text from the main book, which would be okay if it was properly rewritten for the players. But it frequently isn’t, resulting in a book that I can’t give to players without inundating them with spoilers that are better delivered during actual play. The result is a book with no utility at all.

It’s probably not surprising, therefore, that I skipped right past the Raiders of the Serpent Sea player’s guide and went directly to the main campaign book.

I quickly realized, however, that this was a mistake. The main campaign book kept referring to material from the Player’s Guide, and it quickly became apparent that this guide was, in fact, essential. Far from an afterthought, it had been designed as an integral part of the campaign.

So I set the campaign book aside and pulled out the Player’s Guide.

And I was deeply impressed by what I found.

THE WORLD OF GRIMNIR

The world of Grimnir was born from apocalypse: The Yoten had invaded the lands of the Vanir and, thanks to the betrayal of the mage-turned-god named Mirgal, had driven them to the verge of destruction. In the final battle, Aldyhn, the leader of the Vanir, slew Mirgal and performed a powerful rite which turned his blood and flesh and bone into the seeds of a new world. The Vanir fled into this new world, leaving the Yoten trapped behind.

The legacy of apocalypse, however, lies deep within the rock and waves of Grimnir, and now this world, too, is threatened with destruction.

As presented in this primer, I really like the world of Grimnir. It’s not just history with the numbers scratched off. Knowles has been legitimately inspired by myth and legend, and then built creatively from that inspiration to create something unique and fascinating.

For example, not all of the inhabitants of Grimnir crossed over from the old world. There are native peoples who were born with the world. Which raises a fascinating and fantastic dilemma: To whom does the world belong? Those who created it or those born to it? Both? Neither?

The gods, it should be noted, are not the Norse gods. Again, Knowles has taken inspiration, but created a legacy of fresh myth, redolent of Norse themes — of divine betrayals in a world born of betrayal; of a struggle against inevitable nihilism; of a warrior’s glory and doom — in new-minted wonder.

The major factions of Grimnir are the Raiders (i.e., your Viking heroes), the Baendur Kingdoms (young kingdoms ripe for raiding), and the Witches of the Ironwood (servants of a dark lord).

My only gripe with the presentation of Grimnir in the Player’s Guide is that the two-page map world map was printed with nearly all of the label layers turned off. I’m fairly certain this was a production error, but it makes the gazetteer and description of the world almost incoherent. If you’re giving the Player’s Guide to your players, I recommend also giving them a copy of the properly labeled world map from the full campaign book.

(To be honest, even with the labels turned on, there seem to be some inconsistencies between the map’s depiction of the world and the text. But it definitely helps.)

BACKGROUNDS

Raiders of the Serpent Sea includes several “epic backgrounds.” These backgrounds — the Bonded, the Cursed Raider, the Fallen, the Royal Heir, and the Vigilant One — are designed to be taken instead of the normal backgrounds from the Player’s Handbook.

What makes these epic backgrounds particularly notable is that they’ve been integrated into the campaign. While still giving the player a ton of freedom for customizing the details of their character, they provide a starting story connection, along with heroic tasks and epic goals seem to be designed so that they can potentially be achieved in several different ways during the campaign.

Now, I haven’t seen how the campaign actually executes on this concept from the other side, so I don’t know how well it actually pulls this off. But I like this A LOT.

I’ve talked before about how you should create characters who are integrated into the campaign, and also how published adventures are forced to feature generic hooks (since they don’t know your campaign or who your PCs are), but that you can super-charge your campaign by making the hooks specific to your group.

When you start talking about published campaigns, on the other hand — instead of modular scenarios — it seems odd that so many of them are still designed around the bland, generic hooks. The players will be creating characters for this specific campaign, right? So, unlike a modular adventure, a campaign book can absolutely give you and your players guidance on creating characters who will be deeply tied to the campaign.

So it’s very exciting to see Raiders of the Serpent Sea do this in a robust and interactive way.

PLAYABLE RACES

Raiders of the Serpent Sea includes several new playable races.

Beastborn are literally animals who see a humanoid community, become enamored of their lives, and  become human themselves in order to experience the lives they see. The book includes guidelines for customizing your own beastborn based on any animal, along with prebuilt options for hunter-gatherers, fish, and fowl.

Grims can sort of be thought of as merpeople, but with a distinctly Norse flavor to them. Importantly, they are the native children of Grimnir, their souls touched by the dead demigod who gave their world existence.

Tallfolk are small giants, their origins shrouded in mystery. They are always found as babes on the edges of the forests near Turnfjall, but none are certain who their parents are or why they are abandoned to become foundlings.

Tuss have the blood of the hated Yoten flowing through their veins. They can live their lives as humans — many are not even aware of their secret birthright — but in times of great stress or need, their Yoten blood may reveal itself.

Wicker are tree-golems, created to serve some ancient purpose which has been long-forgotten, even by themselves.

I really like all of these options. I’m probably not doing a great job of capturing the flavor, history, and unique identity that drips off the page here.

In fact, although the book assumes that you’ll be including the standard array of D&D races, I would be strongly tempted to ditch all of that while running Raiders of the Serpent Sea and use only humans and the original races presented here.

CLASS ARCHETYPES

The last big chunk of the Player’s Guide are twelve class archetypes, one for each of the core classes in the Player’s Handbook.

I haven’t personally playtested any of these archetypes, so I can’t be entirely certain how they work in actual play. But, reading through them, I really like that the design seems to be willing to take some BIG swings, which particularly manifests in a willingness to embrace bold, exciting flavor even if it can’t necessarily be nailed down to a convenient, combat-optimized mechanical package.

So you end up with a monk who is the chosen Wanderer, positioned by Fate at the fulcrum of reality. A wolf-riding ranger. Rogues who choose worship the dead god from whose bones the world was forged. Sorcerers who become disconnected from reality, believing that either they or the entire world is an illusion.

And so forth. Just grand, daring concepts that capture the imagination and are backed up with clever unique class abilities.

CONCLUSION

The rest of the Player’s Guide is fleshed out with a medley of interesting stuff:

• New spells;
• Ships for the PCs to own (although the actual ship rules appear to be in the campaign book);
• A one-page primer of the world for quickly introducing players who don’t want to read the full guide;
• Equipment;
• Mechanics for oaths, curses, and glory.

A surprisingly rich treasure trove for a slim, 80-page volume.

Ultimately, the Raiders of the Serpent Sea Player’s Guide turned me from a skeptic into a believer. It got me excited to read the full campaign, I’m certain it will get players amped up to actually play in the campaign, and it’s easy to imagine it being an erstwhile companion at the table for the duration of the campaign.

GRADE: B+

Designer: Brent Knowles
Additional Writing: Gage Ford, Atlantis Fraess, Carter Knowles, Linden Knowles, Brandon Korolik, Zack Webb

Publisher: Arcanum Worlds
Cost: $8.00 (PDF)
Page Count: 80

Buy Now!

In my review of The Shattered Obelisk, I said that buying the book in the hopes that you could remix it would be a bad idea: The book would actually have a negative value compared to just reading the basic pitch and designing your own campaign with the same concept.

Nevertheless, the first thing several people asked me was: Will you be remixing The Shattered Obelisk?

Obviously, no.

So what are we doing here?

In addition to my remixes of adventures like Dragon Heist and Keep on the Shadowfell, I’ve also done a couple of Remixing essays, one for Hoard of the Dragon Queen and another for Call of the Netherdeep. These are basically How I Would Remix It, If I Were Going to Remix It. You still have to do all the heavy lifting, but insofar as you find my advice useful, this is my advice.

But I said you shouldn’t buy the book and it would have a negative value if you did!

So, again, what are we doing here?

Well… I did say you would be better off just reading the basic pitch and designing your own campaign with the same concept.

So let’s talk a little bit about what that might look like.

SALVAGING THE LOST MINE OF PHANDELVER

Before we dive into the concept of the The Shattered Obelisk, though, let’s briefly touch on the first half of the book, which is a badly marred reprinting/remastering of Lost Mine of Phandelver. If we wanted to salvage this part of the book, how would we do it?

Fortunately, this is pretty straightforward:

1. Find a used copy of Lost Mine of Phandelver (from the 2014 Starter Set).
2. Buy it.
3. Run it.

That’s it.

Reclaiming Lost Mine of Phandelver from The Shattered Obelisk is literally just laboriously scraping the graffiti off. If we, sadly, get to the point where the only viable means of getting Lost Mine of Phandelver is in the altered form it takes in The Shattered Obelisk, hopefully there’ll be a wiki out there somewhere that will do the work of listing all the changes so that you can reverse them.

THE CONCEPT

Let’s start with the core concept we’re working with:

1. A powerful obelisk was shattered and the pieces are scattered in the region around Phandalin.
2. A group of mind flayers want to re-assemble this obelisk (or as much of it as possible) so that they can use it in a powerful ritual.
3. The PCs need to race the mind flayers to obtain the various pieces of the obelisk. The more pieces the PCs stop the mind flayers from getting, the less powerful (or more difficult?) the mind flayer’s ritual will be.

What does the ritual do?

Whatever you want it to do. Here’s some quick brainstorming:

• Rewrite reality so that the mind flayers never lost control of Gauntlgrym.
• Forge a spelljammer that will allow them to travel through time.
• Create the powerful illithid tadpoles required to ceremorphosis dragons.

Something to keep in mind is that, unless your campaign structure makes it plausible that the mind flayers could actually win, their objective is only really significant for (a) setting stakes and (b) the cool lore you can pull into the campaign. So you’ll want to be make sure to build revelation lists to pull that lore in. It’ll be even better if you can make it actionable in some way: For example, the illithids are also collecting spelljammer components (and that gives a new vector for the PCs to track their activities). Or they’re collecting the various dragons scattered around the Phandalin region so that they can transform them once the ritual is complete. (The PCs might find a mind flayer team engaged with one of the dragons from Lost Mine of Phandelver or Dragon of Icespire Peak; or they might even be able to forge a draconic alliance in response to the mind flayers targeting them. This activity could also bring in the Cult of the Dragon as an additional faction.)

THE RACE FOR THE SHARDS

The core structure of the campaign is the race to claim the obelisk shards.

As written, The Shattered Obelisk has the mind flayers automatically grab four of the seven shards before the PCs can even get involved in the race; two more shards are claimed through a completely dissociated trigger; and the third is pursued by a mind flayer who is inexplicably stuck waiting for the PCs.

It’s underwhelming. But the problem probably largely boils down to the fact that the designers simply don’t have a good scenario structure for handling this. They can’t present the mind flayers as a truly active, responsive challenge to the PCs because they apparently don’t have the tools to do that.

Fortunately, we do have those tools.

Start by having a single fragment in the Phandalin region, the stealing of which is structured in a way that clearly reveals what’s going on. My suggestion would be to frame this after the conclusion of Lost Mine of Phandelver: The PCs have helped reclaim the Wave Echo mines. A little while later, the dwarves at Wave Echo find an obelisk shard and they bring it to Phandalin so that the PCs can help them figure out what it is.

Design Note: This hook directly protagonizes the PCs. It’s also a great way of signaling the transition from Tier 1 to Tier 2. The PCs aren’t just anonymous wanderers anymore. They’re local heroes who have built a rep for themselves and are now leaders and experts who are sought out by the community.

The dwarves disturbing the obelisk somehow brings it to the attention of the mind flayers, who dispatch their minions to steal it.

At the end of this sequence, there should still be a lot of unanswered questions about what exactly is going on — what the obelisk is, where it came from, who the mind flayers are, what they want, etc. Resolving this enigma will help drive the campaign forwards and get the players invested in solving these mysteries.

Structurally speaking, however, the key thing is that some combination of investigating the shard itself, the attempted/successful theft of the shard, and/or backtracking to Wave Echo and seeing the site where the dwarves pulled the shard from (which may have also been targeted by mind flayer operatives) points the PCs (and the mind flayer agents) in the direction of a second obelisk shard.

This triggers a Race for the Prize, which is a scenario structure where two or more groups are all pursuing the same McGuffin.

Design Note: We’re structuring the campaign this way — an initial shard that points to a single additional shard — to kind of “prime the pump,” because things are about to get really crazy. This initial phase will help prep the players for race-based activities, so that when we step things up in the next phase, they’ll have had time to grok the basics.

One key thing you’ll need to prep for this scenario structure is the team that’s competing with the PCs to grab the shard. The mind flayers probably aren’t doing this themselves, so you’ll want to figure out who their agents are.

In the original module, they use psionic goblins. I would recommend not doing that, unless you take the extra effort to connect them to the goblins in Lost Mine of Phandelver, because otherwise the players will probably assume there is a connection and create unnecessary confusion. Finding some other option — even if that’s just adding the word “psionic” to literally any other creature in the Monster Manual — will eliminate that confusion, and also offer a valuable change of pace. (We’ve already been fighting goblins for a bunch of sessions now; let’s fight something else for a while.)

The other thing is that these McGuffin-based scenarios tend to become more fun if there’s more than two factions involved. So you might want to think about who else might be interested in the Obelisk and toss them into the mix. (Zhentarim? Cult of the Dragon? Zariel cultists? Thayans?) Alternatively, maybe the mind flayers — while all being loosely aligned — are each competing to see which one can claim the most shards.

At the site of the second shard, you’re going to plant all the clues pointing to the remaining fragments. This will include a method to find the shards, because in addition to launching multiple Races to the Prize, this phase of the campaign will also kick off a McGuffin Keep-Away, as the factions (including the PCs) not only seek to claim new shards, but also steal shards that have already been recovered.

(How many additional shards should there be? That’s entirely up to you. I’m guessing the sweet spot is probably four to six.)

At some point you need to trigger your endgame. I see a couple of options here:

• Throughout the shard race, the PCs can start collecting clues revealing (a) the mind flayers’ intentions for the obelisk and (b) the location of their final ritual, giving the PCs a chance to take the fight to them.
• The PCs figure out how the obelisk ritual is supposed to work, and they’re able to stage their own ritual. Depending on what the mind flayer ritual is actually doing, this might put them directly in conflict with the flayers (their version of reality vs. the flayer reality); or they might actually be doing a counter-ritual. If this ritual doesn’t need to take place at the same location as the flayer ritual (the site where the obelisk was broken perhaps? or Netherese site of power? or the Phandelver spell forge?), I recommend some kind of schism in reality that can connect the PCs’ ritual to the flayer ritual and allow for a final confrontation.

And, of course, both of these might be true with the PCs being able to figure out their own strategy for bringing things to a conclusion.

LINKING PHANDELVER

Most of what we’ve discussed for our version of The Shattered Obelisk doesn’t require the adventure to be run as a sequel to Lost Mine of Phandelver. But if you are running it as a direct sequel, you’ll want to make the effort to add foreshadowing to Lost Mine that will help set the stage for The Shattered Obelisk.

I listed several possible options for this in my original review of The Shattered Obelisk, and I’ll repeat them here for convenience:

• The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant lore about the obelisks there.
• The titular lost mine of Phandelver includes the Forge of Spells, a site where dwarves once studied arcane secrets. Maybe they studied the Netherese obelisks!
• There’s a nothic in the Redbrands hideout, a type of creature with specific ties to the Far Realms, Vecna, and the mind flayers in this adventure. We could link him to the mind flayers, perhaps as an advanced scout in the region?
• The Spider, who is the main mastermind villain of Lost Mine of Phandelver, seeks the Forge of Spells. Maybe he could also be looking for pieces of the shattered obelisk, allowing us to plant lore in his lair. (This could also set up the Spider — or the organization they work for — as an additional faction during during the obelisk chase.)

I discuss other techniques for this sort of thing in The Campaign Stitch.

As an additional note, the published module also features a plot thread where the mind flayers kidnap a bunch of people from Phandalin. If you decide to do something similar, do yourself a favor and create a cast list for Phandalin, establish the characters on this cast list during Lost Mine of Phandelver, and then kidnap NPCs the PCs have established relationships with.

For a completely different alternative, you could spread the obelisk fragments throughout the existing locations of Lost Mines of Phandelver (and/or Dragon of Icespire Peak): Whichever piece the PCs happen to discover first becomes the instigator of the obelisk chase, and the two adventures will become much more tightly interwoven as a Tier 1 epic.

As an alternative to this alternative, you might have three or four of the shards scattered around existing locations in the Phandalin region:

• The first is a curiosity.
• The second forms a pattern.
• At the third, there’s a mind flayer scouting team present.
• Then a mind flayer team tries to steal a shard.

This lets you spread out the initial lore dump a little more, hints at the machinations of the mind flayers, and sets the stage for when things explode with the discovery of additional shard locations.

MAXIMUM SALVAGE EFFORT

“But I already bought The Shattered Obelisk! And I want to get some use out of it!”

That’s fair.

Here’s my recommendation: Don’t try to salvage everything.

Instead, identify the stuff that you personally find fantastic and nick it. Maybe that’s an encounter. Maybe it’s a map. Maybe it’s a whole dungeon.

I’m not going to try to guess what that stuff is for you. I know what the one or two gems in the dung heap were for me, personally, but that may or may not match your list.

The other thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need to do a full rebuild of The Shattered Obelisk to do this. You could grab your favorite stuff and build a completely new campaign. Or you could likely just add it to a Storm King’s Thunder or Spelljammer campaign.

Which is ultimately my point here: There’s so much amazing D&D content out there — and even more lurking in your imagination and just waiting to be released — that there’s just no reason to think that you need to save the soul of every $60 hardcover from Wizards of the Coast.

ADDITIONAL READING
Review of The Shattered Obelisk
Phandalin Region Map – Label Layers

Go to Part 1

In my review of The Shattered Obelisk, I mentioned — among a plethora of other problems — that the book was notable because some of the dungeons and dungeon levels it features aren’t actually keyed. Instead, unnumbered maps of the dungeons are presented, accompanied by a text that describes the various rooms of the dungeon in rambling paragraphs instead of well-organized room keys.

In particular, I pointed out an example from the end of Zorzula’s Rest, where the PCs enter a new level or section of the dungeon called the Indigo Sanctum.

Several people have contacted me to say that I was mistaken. Others have publicly accused me of being a lying liar who lies.

So let’s talk about this a little bit.

People who are wrong on the internet, of course, are a dime a dozen. I don’t have time to respond to everyone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. But I think this is actually a really important issue — for both adventure designers and Dungeon Masters — and I’d hate to see anyone dismissing it due to a misunderstanding: The fact that D&D no longer teaches DMs how to create and run location-crawls has resulted in a lot of DMs struggling to create and run adventures that should actually be really easy for them. That really sucks for those DMs.

Seeing this atrophying of basic adventure design skills crop up in third-party adventures is also bad. And the fact that we’re now seeing the same failures from Wizards of the Coast’s own designers is really worrisome: If the publishers of D&D lose the institutional knowledge for how to design the most basic adventures, this trend will accelerate and be even more difficult to course correct.

Some people tell me this isn’t a big deal because D&D still makes money. Which… yeah, I can’t even really fathom the logic there.

Some people tell me that this isn’t a big deal because D&D isn’t about dungeons any more. And if that was true, sure. I don’t expect Technoir to teach me how to make dungeons, because that’s not what the game is about. If dungeons aren’t relevant to you, go find the scenario structures that are! But you know who does think D&D is still about dungeons? Wizards of the Coast. The Shattered Obelisk features 25+ dungeons.

Some people tell me that I’m just angry that D&D doesn’t feature “old school dungeons” any more. There’s a lot of false assumptions to unpack there, but I think we can boil it down to a simple reality: If you think “put numbers on a map and write a competent room key” is what defines an “old school dungeon,” then you’re really just proving my point that basic adventure design skills are missing in action.

So if we can all accept that “dungeons don’t exist any more, so it’s okay that this dungeon is bad” is both a paradox and a fallacy, maybe we can take a look at what’s actually going on in The Shattered Obelisk.

THE INDIGO SANCTUM

The Indigo Sanctum, as I mentioned is one of three levels in Zorzula’s Rest. You can see the map of the Indigo Sanctum, as it appears on p. 98 of The Shattered Obelisk, above.

And if we were to properly key this map, it would look like this:

Now, the reason I’m supposedly a lying liar who lies is because this isn’t fair: Those aren’t three separate rooms! The Indigo Sanctum is just one big room!

This, however, is exactly why I chose the Indigo Sanctum as my example from the book. It’s not the only dungeon like this in The Shattered Obelisk, but if I showed you the Hardyhammer Mine:

You might say to me, “Well… c’mon, Justin. That’s only two rooms. Do you really need to key them properly?”

Or maybe I show you Marthungrim’s Home:

Sure, now there are four rooms. “But,” you protest, “only two of them are actually described in the text. So are they even really separate rooms?”

And then maybe we’d argue about what actually counts as a “room.” Or maybe you’d want to debate how large a location needs to be before it counts as a “dungeon.” Just all kinds of delightfully irrelevant semantics.

The thing about Zorzula’s Rest, though, is that none of that matters. You can’t tell me it’s a dungeon that shouldn’t be keyed for some reason, because the rest of the dungeon is keyed.

“Ah, ha!” you say. “But we can still argue about whether those are separate rooms!”

Well, if you want. But it’s not an argument you’ll be having with me. It’s an argument you’ll be having with the book. Because you know who else thinks those are separate rooms?

The designer of the adventure.

The Shattered Obelisk explicitly describes Area 2 and Area 3 on my map above as the “Hostage Room” and the “War Room,” respectively. They’re even given inline headings laden with a bunch of relevant details, meaning that it would have take only the slightest amount of effort to excise them from the middle of the big, rambling description of the dungeon level and properly key them instead.

…

This is the bit where I drop the mic.

DUNGEON HOW-TO

The failure to properly execute the dungeons in The Shattered Obelisk, as I said in the original review and as we’ve seen here, is not just some weird confusion over the final level of Zorzula’s Rest. It is a pervasive problem that occurs multiple times throughout the campaign.

Is it a problem that’s going to persist at Wizards of the Coast? Will this become a trend in future adventures, until perhaps we see official products in which no dungeons are properly keyed?

I hope not.

But it’s possible. We’ve already seen this happen in third-party supplements. It seems impossible; but to a gamer in the mid-‘80s it would have seemed equally unbelievable that hex maps would vanish for a generation… and then they did.

What I actually hope is that the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide will be a massive course correction, and we’ll see a full chapter dedicated to teaching new Dungeon Masters how to create and run dungeons. (At this point, I’d even settle for a minor course correction so that the book at least contains an example of a keyed dungeon map.)

Properly keying and running a dungeon is very easy, and that makes it really tempting to dismiss the idea that they’re skills that need to be taught. But the reality is that those are often the most important skills you can teach, because they end up being the foundation on which all the other skills are built.

So let’s keep our fingers crossed that the new Dungeon Master’s Guide is better than the old one; that The Shattered Obelisk is the last time we see Wizards’ designers fail to key their dungeon maps; and that we all get a better foundation on which to build our adventures in the future.

But if not, there’s always So You Want To Be a Game Master.