SPOILERS FOR CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP

Call of the Netherdeep is a campaign set in Exandria, the world of Critical Role created by Matthew Mercer.

I have virtually no knowledge of Critical Role.

I haven’t read the comic books or the tie-in novels. I haven’t watched the animated series. Of the original show itself, I’ve watched a number of clips, a couple of episodes, and Matthew Colville’s phenomenal recap of the Season 1 finale. (Which still brings tears to my eyes.)

I haven’t even had the time to dive into the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount or the Tal’dorei Campaign Setting.

Nonetheless, Call of the Netherdeep is something that I’ve wanted Wizards of the Coast to do for awhile now: Release a sourcebook for a campaign world (e.g., Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount) and then support it with a full campaign book. (Ravnica, Theros, etc. They’d all be more useful with an accompanying campaign book.)

In any case, this review tackles Call of the Netherdeep on its own terms and only its own terms.

OVERVIEW

Call of the Netherdeep starts the PCs at 3^rd level (and eventually wraps up as they hit 12^th level). Things kick off in the coastal village of Jigow, where the PCs have arrived just in time to enjoy the Festival of Merit. While enjoying the festival games, they fall into rivalry with another group of adventurers who are also competing. As the festival draws to a close, both groups race through the Emerald Grotto, an underwater obstacle course, in order to claim a magical spear that has been stuck into the side of a shark.

When the shark is killed, its death throes knock open an underwater temple that has been lost since the time of the Calamity (a semi-legendary apocalypse). Inside the temple, either the PCs or their rivals claim the Jewel of Three Prayers, an artifact which once belonged to Alyxion the Apotheon.

The PCs are then sent to Bazzoxan, a small city that was built around Betrayers’ Rise, a huge temple complex dedicated to the Betrayer Gods and squatting atop a vast dungeon. The Rise had been abandoned since the Calamity, but would-be explorers delved too deep and awoke Abyssal portals. Bazzoxan is now a military compound — the front line in a war against demons and abominations streaming up from below.

While in Bazzoxan, the PCs will run into scholars belonging to three different factions from the distant city of Ank’Harel who have come to Bazzoxan because [SPOILERS FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER, TELL THE PLAYERS NOTHING]. Heading into the depths of Betrayers’ Rise themselves, the PCs discover another temple that adds extra magical mojo to the Jewel of Three Prayers.

Following one or more of the scholars back to Ank’Harel, the PCs join their faction. After completing a series of faction missions, the PCs are eventually granted access to the ruins of Cael Morrow, a city which was destroyed during the Calamity and now lies sunken below an underground sea beneath Ank’Harel.

Within Cael Morrow, the PCs eventually discover (and enter) the transdimensional prison in which Alyxion the Apotheon has been held since his “death” during the Calamity. Within this prison, the PCs explore manifestations of Alyxion’s memories, learning the true story of what happen to him. In short:

• He was born under the red moon of Ruidus, which is considered bad luck.
• He entire life was, in fact, an endless string of bad luck.
• During the Calamity he prayed to the gods three times for assistance to save those in peril, and three times the gods answered his prayer (creating the Jewel of Three Prayers).
• When Gruumsh attempted to destroy all life on the continent of Marquet with a single blow of his spear, the Apotheon countered the blow with his semi-divine power. Cael Morrow was destroyed, but the rest of the continent was spared.
• The fury of Gruumsh’s blow, combined with Alyxion’s parry and the destruction of Cael Morrow, ripped open an interdimensional space into which the strange energies of Ruidus flowed. This was the Netherdeep, and it became Alyxion’s prison.

Recently the Netherdeep has been leaking, its strange energies escaping in the form of ruidium – a reddish crystal that is both immensely powerful and also corrupting. The PCs have been encountering ruidium since the beginning of the campaign, and it turns out the factions in Ank’Harel want access to its source so that they can either exploit it or destroy it (depending on their individual agendas).

At the campaign’s finale, the PCs confront the Alyxion in three different forms, ultimately deciding whether to kill the Apotheon, redeem him, or unleash him. A decision which will have consequences for all of Exandria.

THE RIVALS

So if we strip away the Critical Role tie-in, what’s the log line for Call of the Netherdeep? What’s the pitch? Why would you pick this campaign over any other campaign?

Well, as you can see from the summary, this is an epic adventure: From humble beginnings, the PCs journey across vast distances to save the world.

There are, of course, any number of such campaigns, but Call of the Netherdeep is a well-formed one. The transition from the gothic depths of Betrayers’ Rise directly to the sun-drenched streets of Ank’Harel, for example, is beautifully vivid, and speaks to the varied and richly realized milestones in the PCs’ journey. The underwater themes of the adventure — in the Emerald Grotto, Cael Morrow, and the Netherdeep —  also give it a distinctive flair.

But Call of the Netherdeep’s truly unique calling card is the Rivals: Five NPCs who form their own adventuring party and dog the PCs’ heels throughout the campaign.

So my elevator pitch for Call of the Netherdeep would be:

It’s an epic adventure, like the Lord of the Rings. But you have a group of rivals who are competing with you for glory.

The best thing about the Rivals are the rivals themselves: Ayo Jabe, Dermot Wurder, Galsariad Ardyth, Irvan Wastewalker, and Maggie Keeneyes. Each is given a great backstory and strong personality, which are then expertly presented in three or four paragraph briefings. Each is also given an individual goal to pursue.

The result is very easy to pick up and play, with lots of varied opportunities for cool interactions. In fact, if you paired these up with character sheets, you’d have a great party of pregenerated PCs, which speaks to just how solid these characters are.

The Rivals are then given a really great introduction, being individually introduced during the festival games in Jigow, so that the players have a chance to form one-on-one relationships with them (instead of the Rivals just becoming an undifferentiated mob).

Unfortunately, in practice, the Rivals are then marred (possibly crippled) by the adventure’s execution.

The core problem is that the campaign is railroaded. Or, more accurately, that it’s railroaded badly. We’ll discuss this in more detail momentarily, but as far as the Rivals are concerned, this railroading hamstrings their ability to actually have a rivalry. A rivalry generally requires you and your rival to be in competition to achieve a common goal and/or to demonstrate your superiority in a field of endeavor.

But like most bad railroads, Call of the Netherdeep (a) scripts predetermined outcomes and (b) struggles with presenting a clear, actionable agenda.

So the rivalry largely works at the beginning of the campaign — when the PCs and the Rivals are both clearly aimed at winning the Emerald Grotto race — but then rapidly falls apart. You can’t race to achieve a goal before your rivals do when the campaign has failed to define what your goal is. Nor can you meaningfully race someone if they’re scripted to show up in the next cutscene.

The other major problem is that the relationship between the Rivals and the PCs is defined entirely by attitude: The Rivals are Friendly, Indifferent, or Hostile.

This gauge is basically designed to produce fail-states in the rivalry.

If the Rivals are Hostile, for example, they are constantly framed up to either:

• try to steal the magical artifact from the PCs; and/or
• attack the PCs and try to kill them.

In my experience, there are two Unforgivable Sins that an NPC can commit:

1. They can kill a PC’s pet.
2. They can steal the PC’s shit.

Anything else (even assassination attempts) can probably be forgiven, but if an NPC does either of these things? The PCs will never forgive them and will almost certainly kill them on sight.

So if the Rivals go Hostile, the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that the PCs will kill them very early in the campaign. And then, obviously, no more rivalry.

On the other hand, if the Rivals go Friendly, the logical outcome is that they’ll offer to work with the PCs. As Call of the Netherdeep says:

If [Ayo Jabe] gets the sense that the characters have stumbled onto something big, her eyes grow wide. She decides that she and her group want a piece of the action and proposes that they travel with the characters, saying that there’s safety in numbers. A character makes a successful DC 13 Wisdom (Insight) check realizes that she isn’t hiding anything and wants nothing more than to be part of a grand adventure.

It seems rather likely that the PCs will agree with Ayo Jabe’s logic… and now you have five GMPCs to deal with.

This, honestly, feels like a huge headache to me. Even running one NPC companion can create issues with spotlight time and bias (perceived and actual), as I discuss in more detail here. But the really big problem is combat balance: Running 5^th Edition D&D for a group of ten PCs is infamously difficult because the action economy means results in any encounter with a small number of opponents (one or two or three) just getting absolutely curb-stomped.

Crucially, Call of the Netherdeep is not designed for this: The encounters are neither CR-balanced for ten party members, nor are they designed for large groups. Betrayers’ Rise, for example, is made up entirely of encounters with 1-3 opponents, and will be absolutely steamrolled if the PCs and Rivals have teamed up.

The campaign clearly knows it has a problem here, so — even though it explicitly mentions that Ayo Jabe will offer to work with the PCs — it just silently assumes that the PCs won’t do that.

Problem solved, right?

No.

Rather the opposite, actually, because the book, as part of its bad railroading, just blithely includes multiple pre-scripted scenes which assume that the Rivals are definitely not working with the PCs.

This is actually something that Call of the Netherdeep does quite often, and it’s honestly kind of bizarre: An NPC will approach the PCs, offer to work with them… and then the book just assumes that they don’t do that.

Maybe the authors have just literally never had players willing to work with NPCs before?

Regardless, the result is badly broken.

To sum up: The Rivals are incredibly cool. But if you run them the way the book tells you to, then somewhere around Chapter 2 they will end up either:

• dead;
• no longer rivals of the PCs; and/or
• breaking the campaign.

I think we can mark this down as “rough around the edges.”

Go to Part 2: The Dungeons

I think we need to start with a little disambiguation. This is NOT a review of Ptolus: City by the Spire, the incredible 700-page city supplement originally designed for D&D 3^rd Edition, recently adapted to both D&D 5^th Edition and the Cypher System, and the basis for my own In the Shadow of the Spire campaign.

This is a review of Ptolus: City of Adventure, an anthology of three adventures each sold separately as PDFs:

• The Doctrine of Ghul
• The Runeblood Blessing
• Return of the Ebon Hand

(Also not to be confused for Ptolus: City By the Spire, the graphic novel by Monte Cook and Caanan White. Although the odds of that error being made are probably significantly lower.)

The adventures are designed with the expectation that you’ll be using them in conjunction with the Ptolus sourcebook, but it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to adapt them to any urban D&D setting.

They are dual-statted for use with both 5^th Edition and the Cypher System. I usually find dual-statted books very awkward and frequently confusing, but Monte Cook Games cleverly uses sidebars and iconography to clearly delineate the two sets of stats. The result is easy to read and easy to use.

SPOILERS FOR THE ADVENTURES!

DOCTRINE OF GHUL

In Bruce R. Cordell’s Doctrine of Ghul, an incomplete manuscript purportedly written by Ghul the Skull-King (an evil overlord from the history of Ptolus) has surfaced and is being promulgated through the city. Those who read the manuscript, however, discover that (a) they are cursed to die unless they finish reading it and (b) it’s incomplete, so they can’t do that.

Whether it’s the PCs who get cursed by the incomplete doctrine, someone they care about, or someone who’s willing to pay them for help, they’ll have to journey into Ghul’s Labyrinth — the vast dungeons beneath Ptolus which once served as the barracks for Ghul’s legions and the laboratories for his arcanists — and visit three locations where the missing passages of the Doctrine can be found.

Truth be told, the metaphysics and background of this whole framing device is a dog’s breakfast. The “Doctrine” is actually a fake, created by a wizard named Alberek who wants to bring Ghul back from the dead. Alberek believes that each time someone finishes reading the full Doctrine there’s a chance that they’ll bring Ghul back from the dead… so, naturally, rather than just sending out full copies of the Doctrine, he’s hidden chunks of the text underground so that people have to go adventuring to read the full Doctrine. (Even though this isn’t necessary and, if you copy out the passages, you can bring them back to the surface and have people read them.) Also the Doctrine isn’t completely fake, it’s based on fragments of text which may have actually been written by Ghul. Also also, each time someone finishes reading the Doctrine and doesn’t miraculously resurrect Ghul, Alberek teleports to their location and kills them. For… reasons?

Bit of nonsense really.

But here’s the thing: This whole framing device is, ultimately, just a way to get the PCs to visit three locations within Ghul’s Labyrinth.

• The Frozen Crypt
• The Breeding Pits of Formless Hunger
• The Galchutt Cyst

Each of these locations is a completely independent mini-dungeon, and they’re all quite excellent. Incredibly creepy ambience, clever encounters, and cool lore make each one a delightful gem of dungeon design.

For example, in the Breeding Pits the PCs will encounter an airborne pathogen which subverts their immune systems and uses them to begin creating a grey goo. As they expectorate or vomit forth the strange substance, it becomes animate and begins joining together to form strange servitors seeking to continue the ancient work of the researchers who once labored here.

That’s the kind of idea which elevates a simple dungeon crawl into a truly memorable experience, and each of these locations are studded with stuff like this.

So here’s the bottom line for me: Jettison the wonky framing device and you’re left with three really great mini-dungeons that you can use to flesh out any journey into or through Ghul’s Labyrinth. That’s a fantastic tool for your toolkit! And makes it more than worthwhile to grab a copy of Doctrine of Ghul.

(Just make sure you read the whole thing.)

Grade: B-

THE RUNEBLOOD BLESSING

The Runeblood Blessing by Sean K. Reynolds is a brilliant example of how to prep and run urban adventures.

The concept is that a sorcerer named Vlenn has perfected a magical ritual that will grant people a blood-red rune that gives them a magical power (like blur or invisibility or feather fall). She offers the ritual for an extremely affordable price, and empowered runeblooders begin showing up throughout the city. It’s the democratization of magic and it upsets the existing structures of power in myriad ways.

There’s just one little problem: Some of the runeblooders are dropping dead.

So many published adventures would take this incredibly cool concept and immediately fail to realize its expansive, transformative potential by locking it into some form of linear structure. Reynolds’ skips right past this potential pitfall by instead providing an adventure toybox for the GM to actively play with.

The presentation of these toys can be a little sloppy in places, but it boils down to:

• A series of background events combined with incidental encounters that allow the runeblood blessing to become engrained into your campaign world.
• An investigation track that the PCs might choose to proactively look into the “runeblood sickness” as it begins to emerge through the background events.
• An investigation into various crimes being committed by runeblood-enabled gangs and cat burglars.
• An investigation into Vlenn’s operation, culminating in a location crawl or raid at her headquarters in the Warrens.
• An otherworldly dungeoncrawl in the Shadow of Ptolus (an evil demiplane) where the PCs explore the surreal umbral fortress from which the runeblood blessing’s power flows.
• A set of three Ptolus “side scenes” that further flesh out the life of the city.

The important thing to recognize is that these are all independent (yet overlapping) adventure elements. What makes The Runeblood Blessing so cool is that there’s not some specific moment at which The Adventure™ begins. There’s not one specific point where somebody shows up and says, “You should go on this adventure now.”

Instead, there is this vast, ongoing event that’s happening throughout the entire city. It’s not happening specifically to the PCs. It’s happening to the city. To everyone. And it’s up to the players to decide if, how, and when they’re going to choose to interact with these events: Do they buy a runeblood blessing? Blackmail Vlenn? Investigate the criminals?

The result will add a deeply rewarding layer to your Ptolus campaign, bringing the city to life and making it feel huge to your players. That scope and vibrancy, in turn, will make the PCs feel incredibly important once they get involved.

Highly recommended not only as an adventure in its own right, but also as a nearly perfect exemplar of how to create your own urban adventures.

Grade: A-

RETURN OF THE EBON HAND

The final adventure in the book — Return of the Ebon Hand by Monte Cook and Sean K. Reynolds — is another phenomenal example of how you can/should design adventures for your Ptolus campaign.

There are two things I love here.

First, Return of the Ebon Hand is a sequel. The adventure assumes that the PCs have already routed the Ebon Hand from their temple, which is presented as an adventure location in the core Ptolus sourcebook. Although it can’t be entirely sure how those events might have played out in your campaign, it offers several options and some guidance on how you can adapt the adventure to make it fit.

This is such a great example of how events in your campaign can/should spark additional adventures as events develop over time. (I might have a soft spot here because, in my own campaign, the PCs routed the Ebon Hand and then also had to deal with the legacy of their actions in a subsequent adventure.)

Note: I’ll also note that you don’t have to run this adventure as a sequel. The published adventure notes the possibility of assuming that NPC heroes or the City Watch had cleaned out the Temple of the Ebon Hand, and that perhaps those events could be used as background events in your campaign. But it would also be fairly easy to tweak things so that both the Temple of the Ebon Hand and the New Temple of the Ebon Hand are active at the same time. You could even put Fulton’s Journal, as described below, in the Temple of the Ebon Hand where the PCs can discover it.

The second thing I love about Return of the Ebon Hand is how it showcases using multiple scenario hooks that all point to the same scenario.

The background of the adventure sees the vestiges of the Ebon Hand flee from the destruction of their temple and eventually reorganize into a new temple built around a Pit of Insanity within Ghul’s Labyrinth. Harnessing this powerful artifact of chaos, the Ebon Hand once again begins experimenting with the human mutations which are the heart of their faith and through which they believe they will achieve transcendence.

Their use of the Pit kicks its chaotic power into high gear, and it begins manifesting strange effects in the city above and the dungeon nearby. This includes resurrecting various dead criminals in the crypts of the Prison.

As with The Runeblood Blessing, several background events are presented to integrate this background into your campaign. Then Cook and Reynolds present three scenario hooks:

• The PCs can investigate the chaotic manifestations, eventually tracking them back to the house that the cultists are using to access their underground temple.
• The PCs can investigate the resurrected criminals (who begin causing trouble throughout the city).
• The PCs can be come into possession of journal written by a delver named Fulton, whose adventuring party explored the area of Ghul’s Labyrinth where the Ebon Hand has now established its temple.

The cool thing is that you can deploy all three of these scenario hooks simultaneously. (The PCs might pursue one of them or they might want to pursue all three of them.) The even cooler thing is that it’s not immediately obvious that all three clues point to the same dungeon crawl!

Each hook not only points to a different problem/opportunity (chaos manifestations, resurrected criminals, an enigmatic journal), it also points to a completely different entrance to this section of Ghul’s Labyrinth. So, for example, the PCs might explore the prison crypts, follow the tunnels back to the lair of the resurrected criminals, and then realize, “Hey! I think these tunnels match those in Fulton’s journal!” And then they might explore a bit more and discover the Ebon Hand cultists that have been making headlines in the newssheets for the past several weeks!

In short, it’s a rich, multi-dimensional adventure environment that I think you’ll find really rewarding in actual play.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of flaws here that should be noted.

First, I found the cartography a little underwhelming. There’s some very nice xandering here (including, but not limited to the multiple entrances), but there’s a lot of “square rooms joined by long hallways.” I would have liked a few more geographically distinctive set pieces and perhaps a greater sense of the purpose for which these corridors were originally made. (This should not be interpreted as a knock on the key, which is studded with lots of interesting rooms.)

Second, Fulton’s journal is a really scenario hook and could be a really cool prop. But the adventure chooses to chop the journal up and print each entry directly next to the room which it’s describing. Expect to do some extra work stitching these together, and then even more work filling in the significant lacuna that you’ll immediately discover. (If you don’t do this, your players will find it virtually impossible to get any meaningful utility out of the journal.)

But these quibbles should be understood as exactly that: Quibbles.

Return of the Ebon Hand is a very, very good adventure that’s also a perfect bookend to The Doctrine of Ghul, nicely showcasing a different facet of Ghul’s Labyrinth.

Grade: B+

Style: 5
Substance: 4

Authors: Bruce R. Cordell, Sean K. Williams, Monte Cook
Publisher: Monte Cook Games
Cost: $29.95 (Physical) / $14.97 (PDF)
Page Count: 96

Buy Now!

SPOILERS FOR CANDLEKEEP MYSTERIES

Candlekeep Mysteries is an adventure anthology for 5^th Edition D&D featuring seventeen adventures — one each for every level from 1^st to 16^th (plus an extra one for 4^th). The central conceit is that the hook for each adventure is a book: You find a book at the great library of Candlekeep. That book contains a mystery. You solve the mystery.

(The hook for the book is that the hooks are books? Try saying that five times fast.)

It’s a great premise. It gives the individual authors a huge amount of latitude in creating unique and imaginative scenarios. You can easily imagine an entire campaign where the PCs are a specialized team of acolytes or specialists working for Candlekeep to investigate new books being added to the collection (or resolving “cold cases” from the forbidden shelves), but it also makes it trivial to pluck out any one scenario and use it as a one-shot with the Dungeon Master having a huge amount of freedom in how they choose to actually use the scenarios: You can, after all, put a book basically anywhere.

It’s unfortunate, therefore, that the book so consistently fails to deliver on this promised premise. The problem is that Candlekeep Mysteries doesn’t trust the players to be tantalized by the strange mysteries at their fingertips. What if they open the book and — oh, no! — aren’t interested in it? So, with a few exceptions, every scenario in the anthology starts with a book… and then almost immediately has an NPC pop in to tell the PCs exactly what they’re supposed to be doing and often offering them a cash payment to do it.

The frequent result is an unnecessary railroad that simultaneously locks the adventure tightly to Candlekeep (since it now depends not on the book, but on a specific set of Candlekeep NPCs) and greatly limits the utility of the book. It’s particularly frustrating in those scenarios where the authors were clearly writing to the premise, but the railroad was then lathered on in development. In these scenarios, you get books with weird mysteries in them… and then an NPC pops into the room and solves the mystery for you before giving you a To Do List.

Despite this systemic failure, many of the adventures in Candlekeep Mysteries nevertheless succeed. In some cases, they succeed brilliantly. And so we’re going to take a look at each of them in turn.

CANDLEKEEP GAZETTEERS

Before we dive into that, however, let’s take a quick moment to look at the brief gazetteer of Candlekeep that’s included in the book.

If you’re not familiar with Candlekeep, it’s a library-fortress built along the Sword Coast in the Forgotten Realms. It’s the Library of Alexandria on steroids. In order to access the library, you need to offer Candlekeep a book which does not already exist in its collection. (This can be a great adventure seed in its own right.) Even after you’ve gotten your foot in the door, however, there are layers of secrets to be peeled away within the strange and labyrinthine buildings and vaults.

In 2020, about a year before Candlekeep Mysteries came out, there was a DMs Guild supplement called Elminster’s Candlekeep Companion. I reviewed the book in June 2020, and I thought it very, very good. So one of my first questions as I sat down to read Candlekeep Mysteries was actually: Will this book render the Companion by Justice Arman, Anthony Joyce-Rivera, M.T. Black, and others obsolete?

The answer: Not at all. In fact, I would say that it actually super-charges it.

And this appears to be the thoughtful and intentional effort of the team at Wizards of the Coast. To take one simple, visual example of this, consider the incredible poster map created by Marco Bernardini for the Candlekeep Companion and the equally impressive poster map created by Mike Schley for Candlekeep Mysteries, as illustrated by these insets:

These maps are not just similar. It’s the same place mapped from a different perspective.

And the beautiful result is that both maps complement each other.

What’s true visually here is true in general: Candlekeep Mysteries provides a good, well-rounded briefing on Candlekeep as a setting. Elminster’s Candlekeep Companion goes deep, with a ton of play-oriented material that will add a ton of value to anyone running the scenarios from Candlekeep Mysteries.

I’m not here to regurgitate my review of the Companion, but check it out if you’re thinking about grabbing a copy of Candlekeep Mysteries. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

THE ADVENTURES

THE JOY OF EXTRADIMENSIONAL SPACES (Michael Polkinghorn) is a good scenario. The PCs come to Candlekeep to meet a researcher and find them missing. The subsequent investigation leads them to a hidden extradimensional sanctum, where they have to solve a puzzle to figure out the passphrase home.

The sanctum uses a hub-and-spoke design for exploration and is studded with flavorful environments. There’s a nice mix of roleplaying and combat encounters with the surviving experiments and constructs of the mage (although having a few of these encounters designed to go either way, instead of each being clearly designed for specifically combat or specifically roleplaying would have been appreciated).

There are a handful of continuity errors, but the one significant flaw here is that all of the PCs need to go through the portal together and get stuck. The scenario’s whole premise breaks if only one or two PCs go through first to scout things out: When the portal snaps shut, the PCs back with the book can just open the portal again.

Even if all the PCs go through the portal at the same time, all they need to do is tell someone at Candlekeep what the password for opening the portal is (or leave a note) and the scenario similarly breaks.

I’m honestly confused how this survived playtesting, and it’s not an easy problem to fix if you keep the metaphysics the way they’re set up in the adventure, but there are a few different solutions that aren’t too difficult to graft into place. So this should not, in the grand scheme of things, overly detract from the top line here: Good adventure.

Grade: B-

MAZFROTH’S MIGHTY DIGRESSIONS (Alison Huang) is a really nice, tight scenario that demonstrates Huang’s trademark style of layering complexity into her antagonists: The PCs are sent to investigate some criminals who are indirectly defrauding Candlekeep and putting people in danger. Except it turns out the criminals aren’t aware of the true dangers of their actions and their motivations are closer to desperate altruism.

… until you take a closer look and all the ethics turn murky.

The hook is that the PCs are attacked by a book that they’re reading in Candlekeep. It turns out that this is the third such incident in recent weeks, all occurring with books that have recently been donated to the library. When the PCs investigate the source of these books, the trail leads them back to a bookseller in Baldur’s Gate.

(You could experiment with this hook by having the book that comes alive and starts attacking people be the one that the PCs themselves submitted to gain entry to Candlekeep! This would sacrifice some of the intrigue, since the PCs would know where they got the book, but crank up the stakes on the hook, since the PCs would now be responsible for the situation.)

The meat of this scenario, as I say, is that there’s no simple or straightforward solution. The villains aren’t villains (except they are?), and it’s not hard to imagine the PCs getting themselves tangled in knots trying to unravel the complications here. It’s an elegant bit of adventure writing.

Grade: B

BOOK OF RAVENS (Christopher Perkins) is, to put it bluntly, bafflingly bad.

The first thing to understand is that this isn’t really an adventure. It’s more of an extended scenario hook: “Book of Ravens” leads the PCs to an isolated chateau where they can be recruited by a secret guild of wereravens who monitor the Shadowfell and fights its evils.

There’s nothing wrong with setting up an entire campaign premise.

The problem is that literally nothing in the scenario makes sense.

Let’s start with the hook: The PCs find a treasure map in a book that leads to the chateau.

Why is the map there?

Well, 150 years ago a member of the wereraven society decided that they should recruit new members by putting the map in an obscure book at Candlekeep on the off-chance that somebody reading the book would (a) follow it and (b) be the sort of person to join their secret society.

That’s not necessarily the worst marketing idea I’ve ever seen, but…

Actually, no. That’s definitely the worst marketing idea I’ve ever seen.

And I guess the proof is in the pudding here because no one HAS found the map in the past 150 years. Although maybe this wereraven society was running a huge ARG and these TR3AZURR MAPZZ were being spammed everywhere. Outhouse in Daggerdale? Treasure map in the toilet paper! The Well of Entry at the Yawning Portal was choked full of them. This map is just the forgotten detritus of a huge 14^th century fad.

Okay, regardless: Treasure map! Treasure maps are cool! Puzzling them out! Figuring out how the map relates to the territory! Following a treasure map is a cool adventure!

… one that they didn’t include in this book. “Book of Ravens” instead chooses to literally say, “Please design this adventure yourself.”

Hmm. All right. That’s fine. The real focus is on getting recruited by the wereravens, right? And the bulk of the scenario is dedicated to describing the secret sociey’s cool chateau hideout in detail. If you decided to embrace this campaign concept using, say, the Ravenloft sourcebook, having all this detail for the society’s hideout would be really useful!

… if any of it made a lick of sense.

Which it doesn’t.

First, at least 150 years ago (because that’s when they ran the ineffectual ARG) everyone in the chalet died and the wereravens moved in. But, despite living there for 150 years, they’ve done literally nothing to fix the place up: Every single room still lies in decaying ruin as a testament to the Brantifax family who built the place and then died in various gothic tragedies.

150 years! Multiple generations of wereravens!

 Second, the wereravens came to the chalet because there’s a shadow crossing into the Shadowfell here. They monitor the crossing, keeping tabs on whatever crosses over.

… except the end of the scenario reveals that the shadow crossing has literally never been used. Not once. Not ever.

The wereravens have been monitoring a closed, unused door for One. Hundred. And. Fifty. Years.

Third, the wereraven society’s modus operandi is to find evil magical items and secure them, removing their evil from the world. When the PCs arrive, in fact, the society is currently discussing what they should do with an evil statue of Orcus that they’ve just gotten their claws on.

If the PCs don’t interrupt the meeting, the ravens conclude that the statue should be hidden here in the chalet.

Three important facts:

1. They’ve been doing this for 150+ years.
2. They hide the items they find in the chalet.
3. There are no other such items at the chalet.

… is this literally the first time they’ve ever done this?

In any case, this is how the scene plays out:

Wereraven 1: We should hide it here in the chalet.

Wereraven 2: Good idea!

And then Wereraven 2 hops over to the corner of the room, drops the statue on the floor, and piles some random rubble on top of it.

Job done!

(There’s rubble lying around, of course, because, once again, they’ve done literally zero cleaning in the chalet for the past 150 years.)

This is unusable nonsense.

Grade: F

A DEEP AND CREEPING DARKNESS (Sarah Madsen) is one of the best scenarios I’ve seen in recent years. It’s actually been awhile since I read an adventure I would run without making any changes and it’s a pleasure to find one here.

In “A Deep and Creeping Darkness,” the PCs are hired by a mining consortium: A few decades back there was a small village with a platinum mine that was abandoned. The consortium has found the records detailing the mine, but they don’t know why it was abruptly abandoned. They have, however, heard that there’s a trove of documents from the survivors that was deposited at Candlekeep and they’d like the PCs to investigate and determine if it’s safe to the re-open the mine.

When the PCs go to investigate, of course, they have an opportunity to end the horror which plagued the mining village in its final days.

What makes this scenario sing are the personal stories that Madsen laces into the experience. These stories are layered, but also presented in myriad ways: A journal. Meeting with survivors. Clues in the ruins themselves.

Even better, the PCs are invited to become a part of these stories, bringing closure to the tangled emotions, painful enigmas, and unfinished business of those final, chaotic days.

Meanwhile, in a contrapuntal rhythm with these stories of loss and nostalgia, Madsen weaves a creepy horror laced with suspense: The events of the past begin to echo into the present as the same horror threatens to sweep over the PCs.

And then, of course, there is the ultimate closure, as the PCs end the horror which destroyed the town and, ultimately, help to bring the town back to life.

It’s just fabulous stuff.

The only thing I’ll flag is a small bit of undisclosed homework for the GM: A NPC named Lukas “can give them a rough map of the village.” But no such handout is included in the published adventure, so you’ll want to take a few minutes to sketch it out. (It’s probably also worth working up the titular journal that the PCs find at Candlekeep as a lore book handout.)

Grade: A

Go to Part 2

SPOILERS FOR DESCENT INTO AVERNUS

Descent Into Avernus begins by having the PCs stand around doing nothing while the GM describes an NPC doing awesome stuff.

If then proceeds to “if they don’t do what you tell them to do, the NPCs automatically find them and kill them.”

It’s not an auspicious start.

EVERYBODY INTO THE HANDBASKET!

Although titled Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus, this adventure has very little to do with Baldur’s Gate.

It does begin in the city, however, with Baldur’s Gate being overrun by refugees from Elturel, a city further up the River Chionthar which has mysteriously vanished from the face of Toril. The PCs will spend a couple of days investigating Zarielite cultists in the city, discovering that they may have something do with Elturel’s disappearance. They will then be sent to Candlekeep to research an infernal puzzlebox they’ve recovered during their investigation, and Baldur’s Gate is never seen again.

A scholar at Candlekeep opens the infernal puzzlebox for them, revealing that Elturel has been taken to Hell as the result of a pact signed between the High Observer of Elturel and Zariel, the Archduchess of Avernus. The PCs are then sent to a different wizard, further down the road from Candlekeep, who can take them to Hell.

Arriving in Hell, they discover that Elturel is floating above the hellish plains of Avernus and slowly sinking into the River Styx. Jumping through a number of hoops, with NPCs sending them hither-and-yon, they eventually encounter an NPC who tells them that he’s had a vision from the god Torm, and the PCs are supposed to go forth and find the Sword of Zariel if they want to save the city.

So where is the Sword of Zariel?

Well, back in Candlekeep they were also introduced to a small, golden, flying elephant (technically an angelic being known as a hollyphant) named Lulu. Lulu came with them to Hell and it turns out she used to be Zariel’s warmount, but she’s lost all of her memories. She does remember one thing, though: She was at a place called Fort Knucklebones, and she met a couple of kenku there.

So the PCs leave Elturel and journey across Avernus to Fort Knucklebones. It turns out the kenku don’t know anything, but by a stroke of luck the hag who runs Fort Knucklebones has a machine that can restore Lulu’s lost memories. So Lulu gets strapped into the machine, she recovers her memories, and remembers where the Sword is!

… or, at least, that’s what Descent Into Avernus claims will happen. We’ll come back to this, but the reality is that Lulu has no idea where the Sword. Fortunately the PCs can jump through some more hoops and eventually claim it.

With the Sword in hand, they can confront Zariel and either redeem her, make a deal with her, or decide to join her. The last of these is rather unlikely (although good show to the book for considering the possibility), while either of the former two result in Elturel being saved and the PCs escaping from Hell triumphant!

THE REST OF THE BOOK

While the adventure may not be overly concerned with Baldur’s Gate, however, the same is not strictly true for the book. About fifty pages are given over to the Baldur’s Gate Gazetteer, detailing the city as it exists in 1492 DR. (Oddly, the campaign itself is described as taking place two years later in 1494 DR. There have been some recent indications that the campaign is canonically being moved back to 1492 DR in order to maintain continuity with Baldur’s Gate III… so we’ll just mark this down as “thoroughly confused.”)

The Gazetteer itself is quite serviceable, although much like the gazetteer of Waterdeep found in Dragon Heist, it pales in comparison to previous sourcebooks detailing the city. It notably includes a number of player-facing options, including customized backgrounds for characters from Baldur’s Gate.

The oddity here is that the discordance between the focus of the background material and the actual content of the campaign (in which the PCs are likely to only spend 48 or maybe 72 hours in Baldur’s Gate) renders the gazetteer largely useless for anyone actually running Descent Into Avernus.

It can also actively mislead DMs and put them on a bad footing. For example, the gazetteer includes a section on Dark Secrets:

During character creation, once players have developed their characters, they should collectively choose a dark secret shared by the entire party. Every member of the party is entangled in this dark secret, regardless of how new they are to the city or how incorruptible their morals. Maybe they’re merely witnesses, maybe they’re covering for a friend’s crimes, or maybe they’re deep in denial. Regardless, in the eyes of the law, they’re guilty. Each dark secret shares a number of elements. Players should work with you, the DM, to customize these particulars to the group.

These dark secrets include Conspiracy, Murder, Theft, and a Failed Coup. Each type of secret has multiple versions, and also details the PCs’ roles in the secret, the consequences of what they did, and who in Baldur’s Gate knows their secret.

This is a really cool concept and, for any campaign set in Baldur’s Gate, it’s a fantastic way of giving the PCs deep and meaningful ties to the city (and to each other).

The problem, of course, is that Descent Into Avenus ISN’T set in Baldur’s Gate.

So you get the players invested in these connections to Baldur’s Gate and lay down the seeds of what seems like an epic campaign. (For example, you want to overthrow the patriars and lead an egalitarian revolution.) Then, after just a couple sessions, the PCs blow town and leave all that stuff just dangling in the wind.

And some Dark Secrets are completely incompatible with the campaign. For example, the primary campaign hook is the PCs getting hired by the Flaming Fist to investigate some cult-related murders. One of the Dark Secrets is, “The Flaming Fist is corrupt. You turned against your commanding officer, seeking to take the Fist in a new direction. Now you’re branded a traitor.”

AMAZING IDEAS, FAILED EXECUTION

Unfortunately, a lot of Descent Into Avernus is like this: There’ll be an amazing idea, incredibly cool concept, or breathtaking revelation, but then the execution of that idea will be broken or simply lackluster.

For example:

DIA: Do you want to play MAD MAX IN HELL with infernal muscle cars fueled by the souls of the damned?

Me: Fuck yes, I do!

DIA: Just kidding. We’re not doing that.

Me: …

These infernal war machines were actually hyped quite a bit in the pre-launch marketing for Descent Into Avernus. In the book itself, there are two and a half pages which are just straight up the introduction to a Warlords of the Avernian Wastelands campaign. It is straight up cooler than anything else in the entire book.

And then it just… vanishes.

There are a couple of scenes where an infernal motorcycle is parked nearby because that’s how an NPC showed up.

That’s it.

It’s really weird.

My best guess is that this was a really cool idea that somebody had really late in the development of the book and they just couldn’t integrate it?

But maybe not. Because, like I said, this is kind of a pervasive problem for the book.

DIA: Do you want to explore HELL ITSELF ON THE WAR-TORN PLAINS OF AVERNUS?

Me: Fuck yes, I do!

DIA: Just kidding. We’re not doing that.

Me: … stahp.

The book frequently talks about how the PCs are going to be “exploring” Avernus. But then it goes out of its way to stop them from doing that in almost every way possible.

For example, it’s impossible to make a map of Avernus. Apparently the Lawful Evil plane of Avernus is so chaotic and ever-shifting that anyone trying to map it goes insane.

(This is, it should be noted, something that was made up specifically for this adventure. It not only doesn’t make sense — read my lips: Lawful — it explicitly contradicts preexisting lore.)

The reason they don’t want you making a map is because navigation is meaningless. If you want to go somewhere, it’s completely random whether you get there or not:

Using the map to chart a course from one location to another is unreliable at best… When charting a course through Avernus, ask the player whose character is overseeing navigation to roll two dice:

• Roll 2d4 if the characters are traveling to an unvisited destination marked on their map.
• Roll 2d8 if the characters are returning to a destination they’ve visited previously.
• Roll 2d10 if a native guide is leading the characters to their destination.

If the rolls of both dice don’t match, the characters arrive at their destination as intended. If the dice match, they wind up somewhere else: pick one of the other locations.

Despite maps being both impossible and useless, the adventure nevertheless gives the players a poster map. It’s unlabeled and, again, the spatial relationships it depicts don’t actually exist, so it’s utterly useless for literally anything you might actually use a map for. But it is very pretty, so it has that going for it.

(Astonishingly, neither Elturel nor Fort Knucklebones — the two places the PCs would start navigating from — are depicted on the map. The DM is told that they can put them anywhere on the map they want, but — once again! — this is pointless and has no meaning.)

The one thing the map does do is magically talk to the PCs: Every time they go somewhere, the map tells them exactly what it is and where they are before they have a chance to explore and find out.

“Okay, we’ve made sure it’s impossible to run an exploration scenario on Avernus.”

“But what if the players nevertheless accidentally discover something for themselves and feel a momentary frisson of delight at exploring the unknown?”

“Oh shit! We gotta put a stop to that!”

Without actually seeing it in the book, I think it’s difficult to really believe the lengths Descent Into Avernus goes to in order to make sure that the players absolutely cannot explore Avernus in any possible way.

Even the smaller cool ideas in the book are often mucked up. For example, there’s a Zarielite cultist in the first part of the adventure whose dying words are, “See you in Hell!”

Which is so goddamn clever, right? Because the PCs are going to go to Hell later on and then — presto! — there she is.

… she doesn’t show up in Hell.

THE WEIRD RAILROAD

DIA: Do you want to play a nice game of CHOOSE. THAT. RAILROAD?!

Me: Fuck no!

DIA: All aboard! Let’s GO!

Me: Goddammit.

The problem with shouting, “It’s time to explore Avernus!” but then blocking any and all attempts to actually explore Avernus is that you’ll need some other mechanism to move the campaign forward. Descent Into Avernus chooses to do this by presenting the players with the choice of two different railroads they can follow.

It’s difficult to explain how poorly this is done.

We start with Lulu getting her memories back. She wakes up from the procedure and shouts, “The sword! The sword! I know where it is!”

Spoiler Alert: She doesn’t.

Instead, her “dreams lead the characters on a wild goose chase to Haruman’s Hill.”

There are a couple problems with this. First, there’s no clear reason given for why Lulu thinks Haruman’s Hill is where the Sword of Zariel is. Second, given the timeline presented in the book, it’s fairly clear that Haruman’s Hill did not and could not exist when Lulu was in Avernus.

But, OK. Fine. This thing that makes no sense happens.

So the PCs go adventuring at Haruman’s Hill for a little while, they figure out that Lulu took them to the wrong place, and then Lulu says: “I’m so sorry! My memory is a little hazier than I thought! Having pondered my dreams further, I think there are two sites in Avernus that are important to finding the sword! Choose between a place where demons manifest and one where demons are destroyed.”

But, once again, there’s no reason given for why Lulu thinks either of these locations have anything to do with the Sword of Zariel.

And that’s because they don’t.

They have nothing to do with the Sword. They have nothing to do with Lulu’s memories. There is absolutely no reason for Lulu to say that the PCs should go there. And if you do go to either location, it becomes immediately and abundantly clear that this is the case.

Despite Lulu telling the PCs to go to the wrong place and then immediately doing it again, the book assumes that the PCs will just continue blithely along the “path” they’ve “chosen,” even though there’s no discernible reason for them to do so.

This is not the only example of weird scenario structures in Descent Into Avernus. At the beginning of the campaign, for example, the PCs have followed a lead to the Dungeon of the Dead Three. In order to the adventure to continue, they have to speak with a specific NPC. But:

• The NPC is located behind a secret door. (Which the designers bizarrely go out of their way to make difficult to find, even going so far as specifying that a normal rat will absolutely NOT reveal its location if someone randomly casts speak with animals on it.)
• The NPC immediately identifies himself as the serial killer they’re here to kill.
• The NPC, having just confessed that he’s the serial killer they’re here to kill, says, “Hey, can you help me take revenge on the people who tried to kill me?”

Assuming the PCs agree to help this guy for some reason (and, remember, they have to in order for the adventure to continue), he tells them that they should kidnap his brother so that they can use him as leverage while negotiating with their mother.

But negotiating with their mother to do… what?

Descent Into Avernus doesn’t seem to know. And promptly forgets the idea except to briefly tell you it definitely won’t work (because their mother will “happily watch any of her sons die before consenting to ransom demands”).

The failure of the scheme doesn’t bother me. (“Go ahead and kill him, I don’t care,” is a perfectly legitimate moment and builds pretty consistently from her known relationship with her kids.) What bothers me is that there doesn’t seem to BE a scheme.

The PCs are, once again, told to do a thing, but given no coherent reason for doing it.

This happens again when an NPC tells them they should teleport to Hell and save Elturel. They’re 5^th level characters who have no special abilities, knowledge, or resources teleporting to a city which has been established to be filled with high level arcanists, clerics, and warriors who obviously haven’t solved the problem. What are they supposed to do, exactly? And why does that make more sense than investigating the Elturel crater or seeking a cure for Lulu’s amnesia?

Later Lulu tells them that she remembers meeting some kenku at Fort Knucklebones. Maybe they’ll know about her lost memories?

So the PCs go to Fort Knucklebones, they meet the kenku, and the adventure says, “The kenku Chukka and Clonk instantly recognize Lulu, since they’ve met her previously.”

And then… nothing. Literally nothing. The kenku remembering Lulu is never mentioned again.

What is going on here?

It’s a cargo cult.

THE CARGO CULT

Let’s take one step back: RPG adventures are built using scenario structures. A dungeoncrawl is one type of scenario structure. A mystery is another. There are many others, including things like heists, hexcrawls, raids, etc.

A significant problem in RPG design is that these scenario structures aren’t really talked about. DMs and even designers just kind of pick them up (often imperfectly) by osmosis. Most of them are limited to just dungeoncrawls, mysteries, and railroading.

What’s happened with Descent Into Avernus is that the designers have sort of flailed their way into a malformed scenario structure which consists of, “An NPC tells the PCs where to go and then the PCs go to there.”

Once you realize that, you can’t unsee it: The entire campaign is just that one structure repeated infinitely. An NPC tells you where to go, you go there, and you find another NPC who tells you where to go.

Because this malformed structure is apparently the only thing they have, it seems to have become a kind of cargo cult for them: They know that NPC A has to give some sort of “explanation” for why the PCs need to go to NPC B, but they don’t actually care what that explanation is.

And they assume the players won’t care either. The presumption is that the players are onboard and the words coming out of the NPC’s mouth are just, “Blah blah blah Vanthampur Villa blah blah blah.”

So why do they put essential encounters behind secret doors? Because if the PCs haven’t found the NPC to tell them where to go next, clearly the players will know to keep looking until they find them!

Why are the PCs told to go talk to people without being given any coherent reason for doing so? Because the reason is irrelevant. It’s just white noise around the person’s name.

Why does the adventure assume the PCs will plane shift to Hell without having any reason to do so? Because an NPC told them to!

Why doesn’t the adventure tell you what the kenku remember about Lulu? Because the writers don’t care. “The kenku might remember Lulu” was just the blah-blah-blah dropped around “Fort Knucklebones.” Once the kenku tell the PCs that they should “blah blah blah talk to Mad Maggie blah blah blah,” the writers assume that you will no longer care about the previous blah blah blah.

It’s a cargo cult because the designers have seen PCs talking to an NPC and then going where that NPC tells them to go. But this interaction has become ritualistic. The designers repeat the form, but with none of its semantic content. It’s a hollow shell lacking meaning and seemingly ludicrous to anyone seeking to rationally understand it.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

So what is Descent Into Avernus, exactly?

First, it’s a pretty good gazetteer for Baldur’s Gate.

Second, it’s a big ol’ bundle of cool concepts studded with memorable moments, evocative lore, and epic stakes.

• Mad Max in Hell
• The redemption of the Archduchess of Avernus
• The secret history of the Hellriders
• The fall of an entire city into Hell (and its possible salvation)
• Machinations among the dukes and duchesses of Hell
• Thrilling political stakes in both Baldur’s Gate and Elturel

Along with a gaggle of vivid dungeons crammed with flavor and featuring unique gimmicks (sewer temples, ghost prisons for damned souls, floating hellwasp nests, a crashed Avernian warship, etc.).

We should also not discount the huge cast of varied, larger than life characters (broken families, nefarious cultists, magical shields, maniacal scholars, proud leaders, pitiful victims).

Third, it’s a couple of pretty fantastic poster maps.

Unfortunately, all of this is wrapped up in a completely dysfunctional package. The intriguing characters and big ideas are hopelessly morassed in the broken logic of the campaign and crippled by a careless disregard for continuity. The cool set pieces are sapped of meaning, frequently broken by poor execution, and almost universally left as hollow disappointments of unrealized potential.

Would I recommend it?

Unfortunately, no. The amount work required to salvage Descent Into Avernus is, sadly, staggering in its scope. Despite its potential, there are simply so many better adventures out there that do not need to be completely revamped from the ground up to make them work that it’s impossible to say that you should spend your time grappling with this one.

(Unless, of course, some hopeless fool has already done a bunch of that work for you.)

Style: 4
Substance: 2

Story Creators: Adam Lee (lead), James Introcaso, Ari Levitch, Mike Mearls, Lysa Penrose, Christopher Perkins, Ben Petrisor, Matthew Sernett, Kate Welch, Richard Whitters, Shawn Wood
Story Consultants: Joe Manganiello, Jim Zub
Writers: Bill Benham, M.T. Black, Dan Dillon, Justin Donie, James J. Haeck, James Introcaso, Adam Lee, Chris Lindsay, Liane Mersiel, Shawn Merwin, Lysa Penrose, Christopher Perkins, F. Wesley Schneider, Amber Scott, James Sutter
Developers: Jeremy Crawford, Dan Dillon, Ben Petrisor, Kate Welch

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 256

A thousand years ago, we built twelve giant mecha to fight a cataclysmic war. We call them Thrones. Each was unique, a paragon of war…

Down the generations since the Great War, dynasties have formed, each drawing its legitimacy from the ownership of a surviving Throne. These titans are ancient weapons with grand legacies of battle and betrayal, but they are also symbols of dominance and entitlement. Possession of a Throne bestows wealth, power, authority over whole solar systems, and a seat on the Galactic Council.

That’s why you’re going to steal one.

Stealing the Throne is a storytelling game by Nick Bate. It is GM-less, and can be played by 3-5 players in 1-3 hours. (The game I played with four players lasted for one hour and fifteen minutes.)

The core concept of the game is evocatively summarized above, and your reaction to it probably makes this review superfluous: If stealing a giant mecha in a heist with galactic stakes makes you say, “Hell, yeah!” then you should buy this game, play this game, and love this game.

Taking a closer look, we’ll discover that the game is broken down into four phases:

• Building the Throne
• The Heist
• The Getaway
• The Finale

In Building the Throne, the players will follow a simple collaborative process that will establish the scene of the crime (where the heist will take place), the history of the Throne, the look of the Throne, and the major subsystems which define the Throne’s capabilities.

You will also, in a step whose importance may initially slip by you, establish at least three Reasons why you want or need to steal the Throne.

During the Heist, each round of play begins with a player volunteering to be the Throne — a GM-like figure who gets things rolling by establishing the next seeming insurmountable challenge in the Heist. Once the challenge has been established, a different player will take on the role of the Thief by saying, “This is what I’m here for. I’m ________, and I’m the master of ________.”

In creating your Thief, you can specify any area of expertise you can imagine, but examples include cracking impossible locks, precision timing, and forbidden technology. The Throne and Thief roleplay through the challenge, eventually reaching the Pivotal Moment in which you determine the outcome of the challenge.

The Pivotal Moment is fail-forward, with a very clever mechanic that results in one of four results:

• Unqualified success. (Woo-hoo!)
• A call for assistance. (In which one of the other players can offer their assistance to overcome a surprisingly difficult obstacle… but only at the cost of making it more difficult for them to accomplish their own goals and getaway later on.)
• A blaze of glory. (“The Thief throws in their hand and goes out in a suitably spectacular fashion,” describing how they overcome the current obstacle, but are captured or killed in the process.)
• (With the player revealing that their character is secretly a traitor, a truth which will become manifest in the fiction only later.)

In play, this process is tense, exciting, and has just the right amount of mechanical richness wed to narrative truth to relentlessly push your story right to the edge.

Each player gets one turn being the Thief and one turn being the Throne, at which point the Heist draws to a close and the Throne is seized!

But just because you’ve taken control of Throne, doesn’t mean you’ve managed to escape. In the Getaway, players have the opportunity to power up the Throne and then attempt their escape. (This is also when all sudden-yet-inevitable betrayals will play out with, in my experience, usually devastatingly amazing results.)

If any of the Thieves manage to survive the Getaway, then the Finale wraps things up. A secret vote is conducted as everyone indicates what Reason for stealing the throne is obviously the most important and must be pursued first. The almost unavoidable disputes which result inform a brief epilogue. (An alternative structure is given for epiloguing a scenario in which only one Thief escapes.)

The only other thing to mention here is that the rulebook includes several playsets, each describing a Throne. These playsets are optional, but provide a little extra structure and a fodder of creative ideas that can subtly shape and inform play in order to create unique experiences. I’m looking forward to experimenting with these playsets in the future.

There is only thing I would change about Stealing the Throne: As written, you only utter your introductory statement (“I’m ________, and I’m the master of ________.”) when it’s your turn as the Thief. I would tweak this to say that you should utter the introductory statement at whatever point your Thief makes themselves known in the narrative (including when they’re offering assistance during another Thief’s turn).

I mention this mostly because I think this minor (and only!) tweak is actually the strongest indication of just how great Stealing the Throne is. It’s smooth, it’s fast, and it’s satisfying.

(The speed of gameplay here should not be ignored: Being able to pick up a storytelling game and have an experience this rich in just over an hour is phenomenal. My guess is a typical session will be about 90 minutes long, which makes the game incredibly appealing as something you can pick up and play more or less on a whim. Or as a deeply rewarding filler on boardgame night.)

Stealing the Throne will be entering my gaming rotation. I think it should enter yours.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Author: Nick Bate
Publisher: ickbat.itch.io
Price: $10.00
Page Count: 40

Disclaimer: I have worked with Nick Bate previously, having hired him to work on Infinity, Over the Edge, and Feng Shui.

Thanks to Heather, Erik, and Allen for playing this one with me.