The original 5^th Edition D&D Starter Set was released in 2014, reaching shelves shortly before the core rulebooks.

In 2019, Wizards of the Coast released a new introductory boxed set: The D&D Essentials Kit.

Your first thought might be that they were replacing the Starter Set with a new and improved game box, but this wasn’t the case: The Starter Set remained in print and on shelves next to the Essentials Kit until early 2022, when it was replaced by the new D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle.

(Along the way, Wizards also published additional starter sets featuring Stranger Things and Rick & Morty.)

So why do we have so many introductory boxed sets?

I suspect it has less to do with what’s inside the box and more to do with the box existing in the first place.

In the mass market and big box stores, entertainment products have a shelf life: If you’re successful enough to crack that market in the first place, your game will be stocked, it will sell, and then at some point the big box stores will stop stocking the game and the sales will stop. If you’re lucky, this will be based on your sales (because if you can keep selling, then you can keep selling), but more often it’s just a matter of time: Automated reorder systems will play it safe by ordering fewer copies each time; which results in fewer sales; which results in a smaller reorder or, eventually, no reorder at all.

By having multiple introductory boxed sets for sale, Wizards of the Coast pays a cost in customer confusion: Someone wanting to play D&D for the first time may become uncertain which of these nigh-identical products they should buy.

But what they gain is a new SKU; a new product code. Each time they release a new SKU, it’s a fresh opportunity for their marketing team to go back to the big box stores that have dropped the previous boxed set and get D&D back on the shelf in Target or Walmart or Barnes & Noble.

If you’re reading this review, though, you’re probably not an account manager at Walmart. (If you are, there’s a book you should definitely acquire.) You’re a gamer. Or maybe a search engine brought you here because you’re interested in becoming a D&D player.

So if you’re looking for your own introduction to D&D, is the Essentials Kit what you should pick up? Is it worth grabbing a copy if you already own the D&D Starter Set? What if you already own the core rulebooks?

This review will probably make more sense if you’re familiar with my review of the D&D Starter Set, so you might want to read that if you haven’t already. But here’s a quick overview of what I’m looking for in an introductory boxed set like the Essentials Kit:

• A meaty, full-featured version of D&D.
• An introduction for complete neophytes to roleplaying games that would not only teach them how to play, but how to be a Dungeon Master.
• A complete gaming experience, even if you never picked up the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide.

OPENING THE BOX

So let’s take a peek inside the D&D Essentials Kit.

Where the D&D Starter Set was fairly barebones, the Essentials Kit packs in a bunch of gimmicks and gewgaws to fill the box:

• The 64-page Essentials Kit Rulebook, doubling the size of the 32-page rulebook from the D&D Starter Set. (Notably absent, however, is the index that the D&D Starter Set included.)
• The 64-page Dragon of Icespire Peak, which serves as an adventure book and monster manual.
• Six blank character sheets.
• A full set of dice.
• A two-sided poster map of Phandlin and a hexmap of the surrounding area.
• A mini-DM screen.
• 108 cards on perforated sheets, including initiative cards, quest cards, an oddly arbitrary selection of NPCs, magic items, and conditions.
• A cardboard tuck box for your cards.

Notably, both the rulebook and the adventure book have been given cardstock covers, replacing the flimsy pamphlets from the D&D Starter Set with books that can actually endure some meaningful use at the table. This was a shortcoming I called out in my review of the Starter Set, and it’s great to see it improved here. Along similar lines, the dice set in the Essentials Kit is larger, including the second d20 (for advantage/disadvantage rolls) and 4d6 whose absence I’d noted.

I’d also mentioned that a poster map of the region around Phandalin would have been a great addition to the D&D Starter Set… and here it is! Including a mini-DM screen is also an inspired choice, not only giving the game a little more “table presence” when you get set up for play, but also giving the new DM a valuable cheat sheet that will help them master the game.

I’m a little more agnostic leaning towards pessimistic when it comes to the cards. There’s a mishmash of stuff here:

• Condition cards.
• Initiative count cards.
• Sidekick cards.
• Quest cards.
• Magic items.

I find the basic utility for quite a few of these cards fairly suspect, and while I respect the quixotic quest to include “value-add” components to introductory boxed sets down through the ages, I think it mostly sets up a false expectation of what you “need” to run a D&D adventure.

(You do not, in fact, need to prep quest cards or NPC cards.)

Your mileage may vary.

RULEBOOK v. RULEBOOK

Before opening the Essentials Kit box, I was actually expecting to find the exact same rulebook that Wizards of the Coast had used in the D&D Starter Set. The rules of the game, after all, hadn’t changed.

Instead, the Essentials Kit Rulebook has doubled in size, from 32 pages to 64 pages!

There are several reasons for this, but the biggest one is that the Essentials Kit Rulebook includes character creation! Which was another thing I thought was missing from the D&D Starter Kit! This is fabulous!

But there are a couple things that could have made it even better. First, the ideal introductory boxed set would include both character creation rules and pregen characters. Character creation gives you a fully functional game, while pregens let new players leap directly into the action.

Second, if you’re going to have a bunch of these introductory boxed sets in print at the same time, I’d love to see them go a little wild with the class/race selections. If the D&D Starter Set features human/dwarf/elf and fighter/cleric/rogue/wizard, I’d have loved to see the Essentials Kit feature something like dragonborn/gnome/half-orc/tiefling and druid/monk/ranger/warlock. Mix it up! Instead, the selection here is pretty tame (although they do toss bards into the mix).

Another major addition here are rules for Sidekicks. This is a very smart addition, because it lets a DM easily run the game for a single player (playing a PC plus sidekick). That’s huge for an introductory boxed set, because it makes it a lot easier for a new player looking to play D&D for the first time to start playing.

It’s interesting looking through the two rulebooks side by side and seeing how the sequencing of information shifts subtly from one to the other, but for the most part everything seems to be pretty equivalent. (With the exception of experience points, which have been removed from the Essentials Kit.)

There are a couple other bits of rules-type content that don’t technically appear in the Essentials Kit Rulebook, but which I want to comment on here: Monsters appear as an appendix in the adventure book and magic items have been moved onto the item cards.

The monsters are given better descriptions in the Essentials Kit than in the Starter Set, but I found the selection of both monsters and magic items disappointing. There’s not really a way for me to objectively demonstrate this, but looking at the Starter Set I felt like I could take the included magic items and monsters and remix them to create a bunch of different adventures. But with the Essentials Kit, I just… don’t. It feels like there’s a lack of variety, or that key niches have been left unaddressed.

So the inclusion of character creation is a major upgrade for me, but overall I think, from a mechanics standpoint, that the Essentials Kit is something of a mixed bag for me. But I think it has a slight edge over the Starter Set here.

DRAGON OF ICESPIRE PEAK

The Essentials Kit includes an all-new adventure book: Dragon of Icespire Peak.

Like the Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D Starter Set, however, Dragon of Icespire Peak is set in the village of Phandalin.

In fact, at first glance, Dragons of Icespire Peak is structurally very similar to Lost Mine of Phandelver: You’ve got a bunch of individual adventures, forming a complete Tier 1 campaign. You don’t need to complete these adventures in any particular order, with the PCs being able to gather adventure hooks in the hub of Phandalin and then choose which ones they want to pursue. The whole thing ultimately culminates in a cap adventure where the PCs hunt down the titular dragon that’s plaguing the region.

So this should be just as good as Lost Mine of Phandelver, right?

… right?

I’m not going to beat around the bush here: It’s not.

Dragon of Icespire Speak gets off on the wrong foot, in my opinion, from the very beginning by giving some absolutely terrible advice to the first-time DM: Instead of reading the adventure book ahead of time, the DM is instructed to wait until the players are creating their characters and then “read ahead” to figure out how the adventure works.

(This is despite the fact that, on the same page, the DM is told that part of their role is to help the players create their characters. So… yeah. Do that and also read the adventure for the first time. At the same time.)

I think what they’re trying to do is support people who want to open the box and immediately play the game: They’d obviously have to claw out some time during the session to read the adventure, right? Realistically speaking, however, this is never going to happen: There’s a 64-page rulebook that needs to be digested before play can begin. So all you’re left with is some terrible guidance that will lead new DMs straight into an almost certainly horrific first-time experience at the gaming table.

This is particularly true because Dragon of Icespire Peak isn’t designed with a single initial scenario. Instead, the campaign begins with the PCs standing in front of a jobs board posted outside the townmaster’s hall, where they’ll immediately be able to choose between three different adventures. (Read fast, Dungeon Master!)

This jobs board is, in fact, the primary structural problem I have with Dragon of Icespire Peak. Unlike Lost Mine of Phandelver, in which the adventures were all connected to each other and emerged organically from interactions with the game world, Dragon of Icespire Peak primarily delivers Quests by having the DM hand the players a Quest Card when they read the Quest on Harbin Wester’s job board.

The result is an experience which has been video-gamified.

To be clear here, I don’t have an inherent problem with using a jobs board in D&D. The problem here is the implementation.

To start with, for many of the Quests there’s no clear mechanism by which Harbin Wester could have become aware of them. In other cases, the continuity doesn’t make sense. For example, there’s one quest where the PCs are sent to check on a ranch that was attacked by orcs:

• Orcs attacked the ranch. Almost everyone there was killed.
• “Big Al” Kalazorn, the ranch owner, was captured.
• A ranch hand escaped and rode to Phandalin.
• Harbin Wester then waited ten days before sending the PCs to see if Kalazorn is still alive.

In addition to frequently not making any sense, these quests are all disconnected from the world around them. In fact, the adventure frequently seems to go out of its way to eschew these connections!

For example, there’s a wilderness encounter in which the PCs stumble across an unattended riding horse branded with BAK (for “Big Al” Kalazorn). That’s good! That’s a clue that something is wrong at Big Al’s ranch and the PCs could follow that lead and discover the adventure in a way that makes the world feel like a real place!

… except that encounter is hardcoded so that it ONLY occurs if the PCs are already on their way to the Big Al’s ranch.

This lack of continuity, context, and connection, combined with the fact they’re delivered in the most impersonal manner possible (Harbin literally hides inside his house and won’t let them in), makes all of the Quests feel like meaningless errands, something which I feel is only further emphasized by the adventure using quest-based leveling. These are not things that the players will actually care about; they are rote obligations.

A subtler difference is that Dragon of Icespire Peak’s Quests are filled with a lot of Thou Must imprecations as opposed to Lost Mine of Phandelver’s presentation of options and tacit support for open-ended play driven by the players.

On a similar note, a lot of the goals in Dragon of Icespire Peak default back to “clear the dungeon.” This, too, greatly reduces the players’ ability to creatively engage the campaign and forge their own destiny… which once again gives the sensation of trudging through obligations.

I also have a much longer list of specific concerns when it comes to the individual adventures in Dragon of Icespire Peak. Stuff like:

• There’s a 60-foot-long tunnel. If the PCs don’t declare that they’re searching for traps, the tunnel collapses when they reach the half-way point and everyone in the tunnel (which, given the length of the tunnel, is likely to be all of the PCs) is automatically buried. If you’re buried, you cannot take any actions and the only way to escape is if someone who isn’t buried helps you get out. So… yeah. That’s just an instant death trap. (And there are a bunch of other death-trap issues in this vein, like the adventure that dumps 1^st-level PCs run by neophyte players into multiple fights with ochre jellies.)
• There’s an adventure where a gnomish king has been driven insane by the knowledge that a mimic is eating his subjects. Okay… sure. But as soon as the PCs kill the mimic, the king’s insanity is instantly cured! … that is not how madness works. (Fundamental breakdowns in worldbuilding, character, and basic logic are far too frequent here.)
• That same adventure, however, has a lot of really neat ideas and interesting roleplaying opportunities. It’s fairly complicated and relatively difficult for a DM to run. Which would be okay… unless you position it so that it can be the very first adventure a brand new DM using the Essentials Kit would need to run. Which is, of course, exactly what the adventure book does. Why not scale this adventure up a couple levels so that it can come in the middle of the campaign after the DM has a bit more experience under their belt? (There’s a number of strange sequencing decisions like this.)

Dragon of Icespire Peak is, ultimately, a mediocre but passable campaign. In comparison to many other introductory adventures, it’s actually quite good. But when directly compared to Lost Mine of Phandelver — and, of course, one is more or less compelled to make that comparison — it does not fare well.

THE VERDICT

In the showdown between the D&D Starter Set and the D&D Essentials Kit, which one comes out on top?

With the D&D Starter Set out of print, of course, this is something of a moot point. The Essentials Kit wins more or less by default.

Even when both were available, however, it’s hard to pick a clear winner. I’d probably give the edge to the D&D Starter Set strictly on the strength of Lost Mine of Phandelver: In large part, an RPG lives or dies by its adventures, and Lost Mine of Phandelver is just a fundamentally better campaign.

The truth, though, is that if you were to merge these two sets together, you’d likely end up with a near-perfect starter set in the fusion: Give me the rulebook from the Essentials Kit. Give me the campaign from the Starter Set.

More than that, though, when we start talking about combining the Essentials Kit with the Starter Set, we suddenly discover that Dragon of Icespire Peak suddenly becomes vastly better simply by running it at the same time you’re running Lost Mine of Phandelver. (Which is, of course, quite trivial to do.)

Having the impersonal, decontextualized jobs board as the central pillar of your campaign is alienating and results in a shallow, forgettable, and even frustrating experience for the players. But if you take that same structure and add it as a spice to a larger campaign, suddenly it comes to life! The roots of Lost Mine of Phandelver will dig in, twining themselves around the adventures of Dragon of Icespire Peak, lending them the context and depth that they natively lack.

(I suspect this also means that the D&D Essentials Kit is a perfect companion to the Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk campaign, which remixes the material from Lost Mine of Phandelver, although I haven’t read that book yet.)

Of course, in actual practice, I’d still recommend that you’d be best served by make a number of small tweaks and modifications to contextualize, connect, and make relevant these adventures. (You could use Lost Mine of Phandelver as a model of how to do that, or check out articles like Using Revelation Lists.)

In the final analysis, the D&D Essentials Kit is a pretty solid introductory boxed set. I wish it was a little better, but I wouldn’t really hesitate giving it as a gift to someone discovering D&D for the first time. And at just $25, it’s not hard to justify grabbing a copy to supplement your Lost Mine of Phandelver, Phandelver and Below, or almost any Tier 1 campaign based out of a typical fantasy village.

Grade: B-

Rulebook Designer: Jeremy Crawford
Adventure Designer: Christopher Perkins
Additional Adventure Design: Richard Baker
Adventure Development: Ben Petrisor

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $24.95
Page Count: 128

FURTHER READING
Review: D&D Starter Set (2014)
Review: Dragons of Storm Wreck Isle (2022 Starter Set)

Buy Now!

With Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk arriving on bookshelves as we enter the twilight months of 5^th Edition in anticipation of the release of D&D 2024 / OneD&D / whatever we end up calling it, I thought it would be interesting to go all the way back to the beginning and take a peek at the D&D Starter Set first published in 2014.

But let’s start by going even further back and discussing the history of D&D introductory sets. (This is something I discuss in even more detail in Every Edition of D&D if you want to go on a real deep dive.)

D&D was originally published as a boxed set in 1974. In 1977, however, the product line bifurcated: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would be published as a set of three hardcover books, while Dungeons & Dragons would be published in the boxed Basic Set. (This is why that version of the game is often called Basic D&D.)

In 1981, the Basic Set was revamped and an Expert Set was added as a supplement. In 1983, the Basic and Expert sets were revamped again, and the Companion, Master, and Immortals boxed sets were also added.

Now, here’s the key thing: Dungeons & Dragons was NOT the same game as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The Basic Set (and its supplements) were a complete, stand-alone game that even had its own campaign worlds and adventures.

Starting in 1991, this changed. The Basic D&D game remained distinct from AD&D for a while longer, but its rules were compiled into the Rules Cyclopedia. Later, after Wizards of the Coast bought D&D, they would end Basic D&D and drop the “Advanced” moniker from the 3^rd Edition of AD&D (now referred to simply as D&D). A multitude of Basic Sets, Introductions, First Quests, Starter Sets, Adventure Games, and Basic Games would continue to be published as boxed sets, but there was an important difference:

They weren’t complete games.

They were pay-to-preview ads for the Player’s Handbook, and they were usually designed accordingly: You bought them. You played them once. Then you threw them in the trash, bought the core rulebooks, and never touched them again.

I’ve talked in the past about the fact that I think this killed D&D’s gateway product and did an incredible amount of harm to the entire RPG industry. Personally, in my ideal world, D&D would be a game sold in a box, and when new players asked, “What do I need to play D&D?” you’d say, “You need the big box with DUNGEONS & DRAGONS on the cover.” Simple.

Obviously, we don’t live in that world. But this should give you a barometer for what my ideal Starter Set would look like: It would be a meaty, full-featured version of D&D. It would introduce complete neophytes to roleplaying games and teach them not only how to play, but also how to be a Dungeon Master. It would give a complete gaming experience, even if you never picked up the Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide.

And if you bought it, you would absolutely not feel like you paid money to have someone tell you that you should buy something else.

OPENING THE BOX

So let’s crack this thing open.

What’s actually in the D&D Starter Set box is pretty barebones:

• The 32-page Starter Set Rulebook, which gives you all the rules for the game.
• The 64-page Lost Mine of Phandelver, which serves as an adventure book, monster manual, magic item vault, and index.
• Five pregen characters sheets.
• A set of dice.

Honestly, I think this barebones approach is okay. You don’t need a fancy gizmos and gadgets to play a roleplaying game. Would a poster map of the Phandalin region (where Lost Mines of Phandelver is set) have been a nice bit of highly practical bling that might have been wonderfully intriguing to a new player? Almost certainly.

But barebones here gives you an MSRP of $20, which is an absolutely fabulous price point. That puts the Starter Set in the territory of an impulse buy, and that was often even more true in actual practice. (I got my copy for $10.)

Nevertheless, there are a couple of things I will ding here: First, the included dice set only includes one d20 and one d6, which I think is inadequate for a game that includes advantage/disadvantage and the fireball spell.

Second, the two booklets would really benefit from cardstock covers. Instead, they’re just stapled paper and very flimsy.

THE RULEBOOK

The Starter Set Rulebook is very good.

The introduction it provides to RPGs — what they are, how they’re played, etc. — is workmanlike, but solid in its execution. More importantly this is a complete and fully functional rulebook. It’s not painfully incomplete. It doesn’t constantly tease with how the real rules are in another book. It’s a rock solid volume, and you could run a complete Tier 1 campaign with this rulebook with zero difficulty.

In fact, except for one thing that we’ll get to in just a moment, you could run multiple Tier 1 campaigns.

Combined with the magic items and monsters found in the companion volume, a DM has enough material that they could comfortably create their own campaign. I could even imagine someone skipping the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, grabbing a Monster Manual to give them more options for foes, and continuing to game happily for months or years or forever.

This is, in case I’m not being clear, a really fantastic achievement.

Unfortunately, as I hinted above, there are a couple gaping holes here that, in my opinion, stop this from being a total triumph.

First, there are no rules for character creation. Instead, players will need to pick one of the five pregen characters included in the boxed set. This is the truly crippling blow, and the only thing that truly limits the Starter Set.

Second, the books do a pretty good job of orienting first-time Dungeon Masters. There’s a lot of practical advice for how they can referee the session, make rulings, set up adventure hooks, narrate the action, play the monsters, and so forth. But the major oversight is that they never actually tell the DM how to run the dungeons included in the adventure book.

D&D actually has a long history of failing to do this (the 5^th Edition core rulebooks are actually worse!), but it’s ultimately kind of amusing when you realize that the Starter Set includes multiple, detailed explanations of exactly how boxed text is supposed to be used, but nothing on how dungeons are supposed to be used.

For example, at the beginning of the adventure they tell you:

• This is boxed text. You should read it.
• Here is a list of specific things you should do; including getting a marching order so that you know where the PCs are positioned when the goblins ambush them.
• When the goblins ambush them, this is the step-by-step guide for how combat should start and what you should be doing while running the combat.
• Here are several specific ways that the PCs can track the goblins back to their lair, and here’s a walk-thru of how you can resolve each one.

This is all great. Concrete, specific advice presented in a clear and highly usable format.

But then the PCs get to the goblins’ lair and… nothing.

To be clear, they do a fantastic job of presenting the dungeon:

• General Features
• What the Goblins Know (always love this)
• Keyed map
• And, of course, the keyed entries describing each room.

Again, these are all great.

But the step-by-step instructions for how you’re actually supposed to use this material? It just… stops. The designers obviously just assume that reading text out loud requires a detailed explanation, but how you run a dungeon is just a skill that everyone is born with.

Which is, of course, really silly.

But I digress. As I mentioned, this problem is a much larger and more systemic than the D&D Starter Set. It’s just particularly sad to see the ball getting dropped in an introductory product.

QUIBBLES & NITPICKS

Two more quick nitpicks before we do a proper dive into the adventure book.

First, Wizards of the Coast is allergic to referencing page numbers and I don’t get it. The “logic,” which they’ve explained from time to time, is that they don’t want to include, for example, a specific page number in the Monster Manual because it’s possible that they’ll revise the Monster Manual and the page numbers will change.

But in the 20+ years they’ve been eschewing page numbers, and I cannot emphasize this enough, they have never done this. The first time it might happen is next year.

It’s, frankly, dumb in general because it makes their books much, much harder to use than they need to be. And in the specific case of the D&D Starter Set it’s even dumber because this is a self-contained product. If you were to some day revise the Starter Set, you could just update the page references.

But because Wizards of the Coast is allergic to page numbers, brand new DMs will be cursed with needlessly flipping back and forth through the books, trying to figure out where specific sections are after the authors wave vaguely in their direction.

(I will give them partial credit for an Index that isn’t complete garbage.)

Second, the random encounter procedures for dungeons given in the Starter Set are kinda garbage. They give random encounter tables, but then instruct brand new DMs, “Make an encounter check whenever you feel like it. Or don’t. But you definitely should. But don’t make too many of them, because you’ll ruin your game. How many is too many? Eh. I dunno. You’ll figure it out. Maybe.”

I suspect this text may have originally been more closely tied to detailed dungeon procedures which were present in pre-5^th Edition D&D Next playtest material but removed from the game entirely at the eleventh hour. But this is, nonetheless, bad praxis, and even moreso in material you’re presenting to first-time DMs.

LOST MINE OF PHANDELVER

Which finally brings us to Lost Mine of Phandelver, the adventure book.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here: This is good.

It’s really, really good.

I’m pretty comfortable describing Lost Mine as the single best introductory adventure D&D has ever had, and I don’t think the competition is even close.

First, it’s not just an adventure. It’s an entire campaign. In just 50 pages, Lost Mine of Phandelver presents seven — seven! — different scenarios plus the lushly detailed village of Phandalin. (The other 14 pages in the booklet are devoted to the monster manual, magic item vault, and rules index.) I am completely blown away by this.

And it’s not just the amount of material presented here. This is a really good campaign, and it’s particularly excellent as an exemplar for new DMs figuring out how to make their own campaigns.

We can start by looking at the structure of the campaign:

• Lost Mine of Phandelver starts with the PCs on their way to the village of Phandalin.
• A simple ambush-based scenario hook pulls the PCs into a goblin lair called the Cragmaw Hideout. The initial encounter is a perfect kickoff for first-time players and DMs, starting with an intriguing enigma (dead horses lying in the road) before smoothly transitioning to a combat encounter featuring a simple, but meaningful tactical dilemma for the players.
• The Cragmaw dungeon itself is absolutely fantastic: It’s non-linear. It takes advantage of the third-dimension. The key is clear, clever, and features several really cool ideas (like the dams that the goblins can use to create a defensive flood). It repeatedly emphasizes the opportunity not only for combat, but also roleplaying and clever problem-solving. Everything here implicitly tells the players that their choices matter and teaches the DM how to actively respond to what the PCs are doing.
• The Cragmaw hideout also features multiple scenario hooks, giving the players several options to pursue.
• Whenever the PCs arrive in Phandalin (whether they head there immediately or after pursuing the scenario hooks from the Cragmaw hideout), the entire village is set up to deliver another half dozen or more scenario hooks to them. The result is that the players end up with an entire menu of scenario hooks to choose between, once against emphasizing that their choices matter.
• The individual scenarios are also interconnected, in a really beautiful node-based design that ultimately funnels the PCs into the campaign finale at Wave Echo Cave, which (a) has been foreshadowed since the very beginning of the campaign and (b) is another fantastic dungeon scenario with excellent non-linear design and multiple factions.

I really can’t emphasize just how great this is.

On top of this rock solid campaign frame, the individual adventures are, as I’ve already suggested, equally excellent. I’ve mentioned the strategically interesting non-linear design of the dungeons and the Three Clue Rule, but they also feature retreating foes, personalized magic items redolent with history and flavor, and a wonderfully varied cast of characters.

On top of all that, although I quibbled about the presentation of the random dungeon encounters, the random wilderness encounters are given a very effective procedure AND they’re linked to the scenarios, providing another level of interconnectivity in the campaign.

THE VERDICT

The Starter Set Rulebook is very good, but unfortunately flawed in a couple key ways.

That almost doesn’t matter, though, because I’d pay $20 for just Lost Mine of Phandelver in a heartbeat. And I’d do it even faster than that if I could.

Best introductory adventure for D&D ever published? Definitely.

Best adventure book of any kind published by Wizards of the Coast? Quite possibly.

Overall, the 1983 Basic Set probably remains the best introduction to D&D ever published. But if I’d been given Lost Mine of Phandelver when I was a first-time DM, it would have made me a much better DM than I was, and that’s something special. Even if you’re an experienced DM with years of play under your belt, it’s still a really enjoyable campaign that’s immaculate in its construction.

I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Grade: A

• Lost Mine of Phandelver: A+

Lead Designers: Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford
Design Team: Christopher Perkins, James Wyatt, Rodney Thompson, Robert J. Schwalb, Peter Lee, Steve Townshend, Bruce R. Cordell
Adventure Designers: Richard Baker, Christopher Perkins

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $19.95
Page Count: 96

D&D Beyond: Lost Mine of Phandelver (Free!)

FURTHER READING
Review: D&D Essentials Kit
Review: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle (D&D Starter Set 2022)

Buy Now!

On April 3^rd, 1998, a new column appeared in Pyramid Magazine for the first time: “Suppressed Transmission” by Kenneth Hite.

Let’s unpack this.

Pyramid, which premiered in 1993, was a gaming magazine published by Steve Jackson Games. It had been preceded by the legendary Space Gamer (1980-85) and Roleplayer (1986-93). The original Pyramid ended its run in March 1998, but only because SJG was taking the unprecedented step of offering Pyramid as a subscription website.

Today, this is likely to elicit little more than a shrug. At the time, though, it was a hugely controversial decision. Pay money?! For a website?!

But Pyramid was the last of the generalist RPG magazines. (Dragon had finished its transformation into a complete house organ. White Wolf and Challenge were already gone. Shadis would be out of print by the end of the year.) Going to an online subscription model would allow it to survive. And survive it did, each week delivering a half dozen or so articles and reviews.

Note: Some of my earliest professional sales were made to Pyramid Magazine during this time period. Check the Bibliography for more information.

And right from the beginning, Hite’s “Suppressed Transmission” was there.

To describe Hite’s column as a “hit” honestly feels inadequate. A common “joke” at the time was that the majority of Pyramid’s subscribers were only subscribing so that they could have access to “Suppressed Transmission,” but I’m not really sure it was a joke. No matter where you were hanging out in the online RPG community, each new column would immediately spark furious discussion. It sometimes felt like we were all just waiting for the next column to drop. It rapidly established itself as something between a tentpole and a shibboleth.

Sheer popularity alone, however, doesn’t fully describe the impact of “Suppressed Transmission.” It was a huge influence for an entire generation of game designers and game masters, mainstreaming — at least in the RPG field — a slew of ideas and influences which had previously existed out on the fringe.

“You know about the suppressed transmission, of course?”
– Slacker

Okay, enough beating around the bush. What is the Suppressed Transmission?

There is, in truth, an ineffable quality to the column that can make it difficult to capture exactly what makes the column so special. But the short version is that Kenneth Hite has a voracious appetite for:

• Conspiracy
• Secret History
• Horror
• Alternate History

He takes these four elements and, like a master alchemist, mixes them into potent elixirs — “suppressed transmissions” ready for broadcasting into your campaign.

So that’s part one: Hite has collected a treasure trove of the most amazing and crazed material, and he shares it freely with the reader while inventing even more besides. For example, when the world went mad for the “truths” revealed by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, I was underwhelmed largely because Kenneth Hite had already revealed those “truths” to me… and a dozen other Grail conspiracies besides, all trussed, roasted, carved, and served up for the game table.

The second thing — and this can be quite hard to communicate to anyone who hasn’t actually read one of the Suppressed Transmissions — is the sheer density Hite achieves. Reading these columns is like having a firehose aimed at your brain. In a four-page essay, Hite can deliver mind-blowingly brilliant concepts for a dozen — or more! — full-fledged campaigns. A Suppressed Transmission collection is like a neutron star, and every paragraph neutronium.

For example, in “Six Flags Over Roswell,” Hite takes the Roswell alien crash in 1947 (conspiracy) and looks at what might have happened if the crash had really taken place at six different points in time (alternate history). Not only is every one of these variations pure gold, but for most you can just as easily frame a campaign around the event itself (PCs are Union spies racing their Confederate counterparts to investigate the crash), the immediate aftermath (psychic alien body-jumpers are infiltrating the Mexican government), or the strange other-world that results (the covert war of the Wizards of Menlo Park or the steampunk Republic of Texas).

Or all three.

In “Justinian and Arthur,” Hite introduces the concept of “high historical fantasy.” From Procopius’ Anekdota he takes the claim that Justinian and Theodora, Emperor and Empress of the Byzantine Empire, were secretly possessed by demons. Then he observes that King Arthur was essentially Justinian’s contemporary, and from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur he takes the Roman War in which Arthur fought an emperor who “had gotten with him fifty giants which had been engendered of fiends.” Sure, the emperor in Malory is Lucius, but that’s easily swapped out, and then:

Set [the PCs] out on the wild frontier between Arthur’s Britain and the Byzantine Empire. (No, there wasn’t any such border in Real History. I’ve got news for you; there weren’t any demons in Real History and there probably wasn’t any King Arthur, either.)

As the PCs find out more and more about Justinian’s demonic plans, they can work with Arthur’s spies, be harassed by the Unseelie Court of Morgan le Fay, and generally skulk around dodging fiend-engendered ogres Nazgul enforcer types. […] Finally, they uncover Jusinian’s plan — to find the Holy Grail and pervert it for his diabolical ends! Warning Arthur just in time, the PCs must keep the Grail safe from Justinian’s demon-giants and distract Belisarius (or convince him that Justinian is a demon; no small task given that his wife is in the same coven as Empress Theodora) so that Arthur can defeat the evil Romans and save the day. This is the sort of thing you can call “historical high fantasy;” it has the advantages of historical games (evocatively familiar and wonderful names and places, conveniently assembled background materials for research at your whim) without the disadvantages (having to do research to get things perfect, having to stay true to history, having to risk a player who knows more about the period than you do). When you add the cool fantasy trappings like giants, monsters, demons, magic swords, sorcery, and poison, you got game.

Oh, and do take the time to read Procopius. The bit with the demon-Emperor’s disappearing head is a hoot.

This is the sort of thing that Hite does all the time, taking 2 + 2 + 2 and somehow making it equal 187 (which means “the beginning of great enlightenment” in New Age kabbalism).

But it’s more than that.

As Hite takes you on wild romps like:

• Who Killed Kit Marlowe?
• A Night To Embroider: Who Sank the Titanic?
• A Dish Best Served Cold: The Antarctic Space Nazis
• Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
• Patterns in Amber
• Things To Do In Gaming When You’re Dead

The real suppressed transmission — the transmission hiding within the transmission — is that Hite is showing how he creates campaigns and adventures. Every column is an exemplar of how he sources material and then combines it, twists its, inverts, bissociates it, and builds upon it to create pure gaming gold.

As you work your way through a Suppressed Transmissions collection — and I do recommend taking it slowly; this is material best savored rather than binged (no matter how tempting the binge might be) — you can feel Hite reprogramming your brain.

And we haven’t even gotten into his alphabets (here’s 26 bite-sized, themed bits of awesome to inspire your adventures) or his how-to essays that peel back the curtain to look at each of the four pillars of Suppressed Transmissions (conspiracy, alternate history, secret history, and horror) in detail.

It will probably come as no surprise at this point to learn that I consider “Suppressed Transmission” to be a major influence on me as a creator and as a GM. Despite this, until recently, I haven’t talked about the column very much. The primary reason for this is that it simply wasn’t available: When the online version of Pyramid was shut down in 2008, the archives became unavailable and the published collections went out of print.

Sadly, for the most part, this remains true. Hite wrote over three hundred “Suppressed Transmission” columns, and the vast majority of these remain available only to those of us who were subscribed to Pyramid in its final days and downloaded the archives before they were taken offline.

But at some point in the not-too-distant past, Steve Jackson Games has brought Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast and Suppressed Transmission 2: The Second Broadcast back into print. These two collections include several dozen of the original columns, each of which has been festooned with detailed footnotes and extensive commentaries that somehow manage to make them even more awesome.

In conclusion…

… what the heck are you waiting for?

Grade: A+

Author: Kenneth Hite

Publisher: Steve Jackson Games
Price: $29.99 (each)
Page Count: 128 (each)

At the moment, there are three major published campaigns for Night’s Black Agents. I’ve previously reviewed The Zalozhniy Quartet, and The Dracula Dossier is a beast still awaiting its time in the sun for me. (If you’ll forgive either the least or the most appropriate metaphor of all time). So today let’s take a peek at The Persephone Extraction.

At first glance, this looks like an adventure anthology: Five adventures. Five authors (each presumably writing one of the scenarios). And, in its first paragraph, the book does kind of limply wave its hand in the direction of “they can be played individually.”

In reality, however, this is definitely a mini-campaign. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to imagine running this in any other way: The continuity between the scenarios is tightly woven and all of them are pretty immutably bound to the specific vampiric mythology of the campaign.

STRUCTURAL ISSUES

The Persephone Extraction is also pretty wedded to the idea that you can play most of its scenarios, after the introductory scenario, in any order.  Which is good in theory, but in practice you can’t have a big finale adventure with a bunch of continuity dependent on the PCs’ having played the other scenarios in a wide-open node structure where the PCs could head to the finale at literally any time.

Well… you can. It just won’t end well.

(Pun intended.)

With that being said, The Persephone Extraction repeats the gimmick from The Zalozhniy Quartet where the clues pointing to other scenarios are listed in the “Aftermath” section at the end of the scenario, instead of being mentioned in the locations where the clues would actually be discovered. So the idea may be less that the players are free to pursue the scenarios in any order, and more that the GM is free to choose the order in which they will be played and can choose which clues to seed into each scenario to force that to happen. (Which is such an anathema to me, that it’s difficult to understand why anyone would want such a functionality, but maybe they exist.)

Either way, I’m fairly certain the number of GMs who will get to the end of one of these scenarios and go, “Crap. I forgot to include the clues they need for the next scenario,” will be non-zero. It’s just such an unfriendly way of organizing material for actual play.

On a similar “unfriendly for actual play” note, some of the authors also have a deep desire to title every scene as if it were a short story:

• When the Wind Blows
• The Thin Red Line
• Guerilla Gardening
• Going Viral
• City on the Edge of Nowhere

I get the impulse, because they sound cool and feel evocative. In practice, sadly, it just makes it incredibly tough to simply flip through the book and find what you’re looking for.

CONSPYRAMID & VAMPYRAMID

The fact that the book is titling individual scenes has probably also made you suspicious that they’re once again prepping plot instead of Conspyramid nodes. This is, unfortunately, true. Unlike The Zalozhniy Quartet, however, The Persephone Extraction does include a Conspyramid.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, Night’s Black Agents features a campaign structure called the Conspyramid. It consists of various nodes — the cults, front companies, sources of blood, and other infrastructure of the vampire conspiracy — arranged into a pyramid diagram and connected to each other.  The result is a model of the conspiracy that the PCs can navigate through using both clues from their investigations and the games’ proactive investigation mechanics.

The Conspyramid in your Night’s Black Agents campaign, therefore, is also the structure of play.

The Conspyramid in The Persephone Extraction, on the other hand, is largely incoherent because it’s so utterly divorced from the tightly-plotted, linear scenarios that fill the rest of the book and are the actual structure of play. This actual structure of play is perhaps better represented by the “scene flow diagrams” that are jammed in at the back of the book, although only somewhat.

Of far more use, however, is The Persephone Extraction’s custom Vampyramid.

The Vampyramid in Night’s Black Agents is a parallel structure to the Conspyramids and is basically a system for managing the conspiracy’s reactions to the PCs’ actions. Unlike the Conspyramid, which is unique for each campaign, the core rulebook includes a standard Vampyramid that can be used in every campaign. The Persephone Extraction, however, eschews the standard Vampyramid, and instead offers a heavily customized version for use with the adventures in the book.

This is really cool tech: It’s a cool enhancement for this campaign specifically, and it’s a great model for doing the same thing in your other Night’s Black Agents campaigns.

(The only quibble being that the Vampyramid is designed to be used in conjunction with a fully functional Conspyramid, and since The Persephone Extraction isn’t actually structured around the Conspyramid, you can’t actually use the Vampyramid procedures. Whoopsie. But the material is nonetheless useful, even if you’re going to have to improvise a bit to make it work.)

SPOILER WARNING

Let’s lay all these structural problems aside and assume that you’re just going to run The Persephone Extraction as the lightly branch-plotted experience it’s primarily designed to be.

What is this campaign, exactly?

We’ll be revealing some spoilers here. Proceed at your own risk, wanderer!

THE SPIRITS OF HADES

The vampires of The Persephone Extraction are Orphic in nature: The Greek legends of Hades reflect a dark truth and the tale of Orpheus, in particular, is the refracted memory of a vampire origin story. A mortal descends into a strange realm filled with the souls of the dead, and as they return one of those souls follows them out. One might even say that the dead was shadowing them… literally, because that dead spirit was hidden within their shadow.

Destroyed by the sun, just like any vampire of the non-glittery variety, these undead spirits can become bound to the shadows of their hosts as companion spirits and thus escape their purgatory. Nonetheless, they remain terribly diminished, little more than a memory of their mortal selves; reduced physically to a vaporous spirit and even mentally to an often confused and dazed state.

… until blood is spilt near them.

From the lifeblood of mortals, the vampiric spirit can draw strength. The more blood spilt, the more powerful it becomes. Powerful enough to escape its host shadow. Powerful enough to taste life again. Powerful enough to forge a global conspiracy to ensure that the blood will always flow.

The classical, Greco-Roman mythological inspiration for these vampires is basically straight up my alley. I love everything about them: I love how you can pull source material from mythologies across the globe, give it a twist, and end up with a new scenario. I love that they feel utterly alien to what we think of when somebody says “vampire,” but are nonetheless so firmly rooted in vampiric traditions as to leave no doubt to their right to bear the name. I love how the mythology provides an easy mechanism for ramping up threat and difficulty (increase the available blood = increase the difficulty of the vampire). I love that it takes what we know about history and mythology and warps it through a lens of “truth” that leaves your faith in reality deeply shaken.

These vampires are so cool, they almost sell The Persephone Extraction all by themselves.

I do, unfortunately, have to ruin things with a few more quibbles.

First, the mechanical implication of the concept – which features a triptych of bulky stat blocks – feels pretty clunky and very finicky. But, to be fair, I have not actually run a game with these stat blocks, so perhaps they work better in actual practice than it would seem.

More problematic, in my opinion, is that the handling of the vampiric metaphysics in The Persephone Extraction is pretty sloppy. For example: What can a vampire do while it’s hiding in its host’s shadow? Depending on the adventure, the answer seems to vary from complete impotence to a poorly defined grab bag of supernatural chicanery.

I suspect the problem here boils down to the multiple writers working on the book. I’m only assuming that each of them worked on a separate scenario, but it would neatly explain these inconsistencies. (Of course, that doesn’t mean you won’t have to figure out how to fix things up at your own table.)

THE PALE AGENDA

The vampires atop the conspiracy move at a different pace from the modern world: They sleep long and awaken rarely, leaving their day-to-day affairs in the hands of their philomeli; their hosts. As technology and communication have sped up, the ancient spirits become more disoriented and confused. Some have withdrawn into permanent torpor.

Others, however, have concluded that the herd is out of control and it’s time for a culling.

To this end the conspiracy has spent several years experimenting with the Marsburg virus, creating the experimental MAR-VX variant. This is the apocalypse in a bottle, capable of wiping out 99% of the human race and returning the population base to a level that the vampires feel they will be able to control.

This is known as the Pale Agenda. Originally initiated as a safety contingency, part of the conspiracy has decided it’s time to put the plan into motion. This has created a schism, however, between the Loyalists (“we do whatever our lords and ladies tell us to do”) and the Dissidents (“we like being rich and powerful, and our money and our power depends on modern civilization existing”). This division within the conspiracy creates a lovely dynamic, which is reflected in both the scenario design as well as the variant Vampyramid.

The Pale Agenda is, obviously, horrific almost beyond the scope of imagination. It’s a great way of cranking up the campaign stakes: It’s not just a vampiric conspiracy you’re struggling against; it’s the literal end of the world.

The only drawback, unfortunately, is that the continuity is, once again, a little sloppy.

For example, in the opening scenario the Loyalists frame the PCs for destroying the MAR-VX virus and all the research that would allow the conspiracy to recreate it. Which kinda undermines the campaign stakes I was just lauding, but then there’s a scenario where the PCs have to stop the vampires from getting their hands on a sample of the MAR-V virus that the MAR-VX virus was based on. (But I thought all the research showing how to turn MAR-V into MAR-VX was destroyed?) And then later none of that actually matters, because in the final scenario “the last surviving canister of augmented MAR-VX” just shows up no matter what the PCs have done.

THE SLOW DECAY

I read The Zalozhniy Quartet and The Persephone Extraction back-to-back to see which campaign I would be running this summer.

For the first half of the book, I was terribly excited about The Persephone Extraction and it was easily outpacing the Quartet: The overall design was far stronger and more coherent. The concept for its vampires electrifyingly original. The scenarios interesting and varied.

In the back half of The Persephone Extraction, unfortunately, the promise of the pomegranate blossom wilted pretty fast. As the campaign moves forward, both the mythology and the logistics of the conspiracy seem to melt down into an inchoate mess.

Some of this is the result of the myriad continuity errors we’ve already discussed, but another factor seems to be the designers’ desire to prep heaping mounds of contingencies on top of a vaguely defined mythology.

The failure to achieve a coherent metaphysic for the mythology is perhaps best exemplified in the second-to-last scenario, which is designed to allow the PCs to pass through a gate and into the Underworld from which the vampiric spirits come. This Orphic journey is insanely ambitious and the excitement I experienced in reading the initial pitch for this scenario was immense. Unfortunately, the book just can’t nail down what’s actually happening to the PCs and, like the dog who’s just caught a car and has just realized that they don’t know what happens next, the designer seems to have no idea how to actually realize the epic scope of what they’re grasping for, and so we end up with a weird railroad built on top of amorphous geography.

Contingency-based-prep, on the other hand, is when you “try to second-guess your players and develop mutually contradictory material for every possible choice they might make.” The Persephone Extraction’s plot-based prep combined with the directive that the scenarios should be playable “in any order” (or skipped entirely) unfortunately takes the perfectly legitimate desire to have the PCs’ actions in the previous scenarios impact the final scenario and makes it cancerous.

They still might have pulled off this nigh-impossible juggling act if they weren’t balancing on the house of cards formed from their ill-defined mythology. The result is a final scenario that just doesn’t really make much sense: Baffling stuff just sort of arbitrarily happens while the GM is awkwardly shoving the PCs around. This becomes a feedback loop, because the less stuff makes sense, the more confused the players will become, and the more the GM will need to shove them into situations they don’t (and can’t) understand.

Sadly, despite so much of this confusion being in service of “making the PCs’ actions matter,” the designers — trapped in their plot-based prep — ultimately can’t even deliver on that promise (as evidenced by the aforementioned canister of MAR-VX that materializes out of thin air because the plot requires it).

So, ultimately, we are left with the incredible concepts at the heart of the campaign and the very strong opening giving way to a disappointing finale, with my own opinion slipping from “must run ASAP” to “maybe I’ll fix this some day.”

Hopefully this review has captured this dichotomy — not only reflecting my ultimate disappointment, but also my excitement at The Persephone Extraction’s very real strengths.

In the end, I give The Persephone Extraction a cautious recommendation. But my own decision, ultimately, was to run The Zalozhniy Quartet, and that’s also what I’d recommend to anyone else trying to figure out which Night’s Black Agents mini-campaign they should check out first.

Grade: C+

Story Design: Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
Designers: Heather Albano, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Emma Marlow, Will Plant, Bill White

Publisher: Pelgrane Press
Cost: $29.99
Page Count: 160

The Zalozhniy Quartet is a mini-campaign for Night’s Black Agents, the thriller RPG where retired special ops agents discover that vampires are real and then vow to destroy the undead conspiracy once and for all.

Or, at least, that’s what I’m choosing to call it.

The Quartet bills itself as a “thriller story arc of four missions,” in which “each of the missions can be played individually, or linked into a campaign in any order.” But this doesn’t seem to hold up to close inspection.

We’ll come back to that.

SPOILER WARNING!

This review is absolutely going to ruin the twists and surprises of The Zalozhniy Quartet for you. So if you have any intention of playing in this mini-campaign at some point in the future, you should leap through the nearest window and make a daring escape. (Figuratively speaking.)

The major opposition of the Quartet is the Lisky Bratva, a Russian mafia that has figured out how to create the zalozhniy: Vampiric entities whose moment of death has been undone, transforming them into killing machines that can only be stopped if you recreate the lethal wound which has been “edited” out of their personal timeline. For an extra creep factor, this temporal meddling causes all kinds of weird, non-linear events whenever a zalozhniy is near.

In addition to the criminal machinations of the Lisky Bratva, the Quartet also features the Philby Plot, in which the historical figures of Henry St. John Philby and his son Kim Philby, both spies whom infamously betrayed the British government during the 20^th century, are revealed to have been part of an alchemical plot in which the entire Saudi royal bloodline was given a vampiric contamination. Anyone who can track down the tri-partite alchemical reagents known as the Albedo, Nigredo, and Rubedo will be able to complete St. John’s final ritual, transform the entire Saudi royal family into their vampiric thralls, and take de facto control of one of the richest nations on the planet.

… guess what the Lisky Bratva want?

Together, the zalozhniy and the Philby Plot form two fantastic pillars for The Zalozhniy Quartet to build around. The myriad individual ops are also great – varied, dynamic, and well-tuned to show off the strengths of the Night’s Black Agents system.

The basic bottom line here is that the core of the Quartet is very good. Personally, I find the concepts compelling and the raw material useful. It’s the type of adventure that you read and think, “I can’t wait to see what my players do with this!” And, as a testament to that, I’m currently halfway through running a Zalozhniy Quartet campaign.

So, obviously, I’m going to recommend The Zalozhniy Quartet. If you have any interest in Night’s Black Agents, this gives you a lot of awesome stuff to play with and great bang-for-your-buck.

But I do have some reservations.

THE FLY IN RENFIELD’S OINTMENT

Robin D. Laws often says that published adventures are valuable because they teach you what and how to prep for the game.

And that’s the problem with The Zalozhniy Quartet: This is not how you’re supposed to prep a Night’s Black Agents campaign.

A Night’s Black Agents campaign is organized around the Conspyramid, a selection of nodes — sources of blood, funding, and protection; cults, institutions, infrastructure, front companies, etc. — arranged into a pyramidal form and connected to each other, creating a model of the vampiric conspiracy which the agents will navigate.

This is not, however, what The Zalozhniy Quartet does.

Now, to be fair, the intention of the Quartet is that it can be plugged into your existing Conspyramid. For example, if you have a Russian mafia node on your Conspyramid, you can just use the Lisky Bratva! This is why the book says the adventures can be played in any order, because the idea seems to be that each adventure can be plugged in as a separate node on your Conspyramid (and the agents should be free to navigate the Conspyramid without being locked into a sequence).

This is good in theory, but the actual execution is flawed.

For example, the adventures can’t actually be played in any order. At least, not as written. There are too many continuity errors, including one instance where, if the PCs aren’t playing them in the right sequence, there’s supposed to be a phone call that basically says, “The stuff that happens in the other adventure is already over-and-done. You missed it.” Another of the missions — “The Zalozhniy Sanction” — is clearly designed to be played first.

I suspect this is because the series was originally designed to be played in sequence, and then at some point in development it was decided that they should become modular. The retrofit, however, was slapdash, and it wreaked havoc on the book.

For example, if the adventures can be played in any sequence, then logically each adventure should include clues pointing to all the other adventures. And this is true. Except the clues aren’t integrated into the adventures. Instead, they’re listed as separate Exit Vectors and Entry Vectors for each scenario, which also don’t match each other. (So, for example, the entry vectors for “Out of the Ashes” say that PCs in “The Boxmen” will be able to trace the owner of a safe deposit box or some business correspondence to get to “Out of the Ashes.” But if you check the Exit Vectors for “The Boxmen” these clues do not appear!)

It’s difficult to really express how intensely unfriendly this presentation is to the GM.

Similarly, the book also provides an adversary roster for the Lisky Bratva:

At first glance, this seems useful. Except:

1. There are significant continuity errors between the structure shown on the map and the structure described in the text of the book; and
2. The structure shown in the diagram doesn’t match the structure of play.

See, the function of an adversary roster in Night’s Black Agents is to guide the players’ investigation: They follow the connections from one adventure to the next.

But there’s no way to do that in The Zalozhniy Quartet as written, because, in addition to the damage wrought by the retrofit, the original structure of the scenario was clearly a linear railroad and that structure hasn’t actually been removed!

You can see this very clearly, for example, in the first adventure in the book, “The Zalozhniy Sanction.” The PCs are hired to investigate a Lisky Bratva smuggling operation, but the job is scripted to fail and the GM needs to force them to go on the run. (Oof.)

And not just on the run in general (despite the extended chase rules in Night’s Black Agents being specifically designed to empower the players to choose how and where they run to). The GM needs to force the PCs to specifically make a run to their handler’s safe house in Vienna. (Oof again.)

With the PCs forced onto this path, an effort is then made to actually invoke the extended chase rules… except that just won’t do, because on their way to Vienna, the PCs need to be dragged through a whole sequence of ops:

• Sabotaging a football team
• Infiltrating a vampire monastery
• Rescuing an investigative reporter
• Breaking up a human trafficking ring
• Disrupting a mafia meeting

So the extended chase rules are invoked in name-only, but don’t actually do anything. (Oof a third time.)

(This “just ignore the chase rules” thing happens quite a bit in the adventure. For example, there’s a thriller chase elsewhere in the adventure where if the PCs lose the chase, the target they’re chasing goes boom; but if they win the chase, then the target goes boom and so does a PC. Which is backassed adventure design.)

Plus, this whole thing doesn’t really make any sense because the Lisky Bratva’s reaction to the PCs is insanely out of proportion. For example, they stage a major terrorist incident killing hundreds of people in an effort to silence some people who… tried but failed to steal some intel?

Then, on top of all this, the Quartet’s best intentions end up biting it in the ass: It wants to be something that any Night’s Black Agents GM can plug into their campaign, which is admirable. But Night’s Black Agents notably includes a system for creating custom vampires, which means in any given campaign they could be anything from Nosferatu to psychic statues to alien space vapor.

So as you draw towards the finale of The Zalozhniy Quartet and, in particular, the Philby Plot comes into focus, the writers have a problem:

• What, exactly, did Philby do?
• What, exactly, are the albedo, rubedo, and nigredo?
• What, exactly, does the final ritual entail?

And so forth.

In a quest for genericness, the writers literally can’t answer these questions. They do, to their credit, offer you a bunch of options, but they are, perforce, vague options. They can’t actually nail anything down, which means they also can’t design concrete, playable scenarios. The inevitable result is that, as the campaign reaches its grand conclusion, it just kind of dissolves into a mushy non-entity.

CONCLUSION

That seems like a lot of problems. And it is.

But I also said that The Zalozhniy Quartet is very good and that I heartily recommend it.

So… what gives?

Well, remember those ops I mentioned above? They’re all pretty great. So are the other ops in the book:

• Extracting an enemy intelligence agent
• Performing a heist on a private Swiss bank
• Raiding a museum in Baghdad
• Tracking down the Thing Which Was Once St. John

So, yes. There are some large scale structural problems. But the actual adventure content ranges from pretty good to really good, and the core pillars of the campaign — the zalozhniy and the Philby Plot — are conceptually fantastic (even if you need to fill in a few holes).

Plus, here’s the great thing: Night’s Black Agents already has an incredibly flexible and robust campaign structure. Remember the Conspyramid? All you need to do is pull the ops out of the book, plug them into a fully functional Conspyramid, and you’re good to go. As remixes go, Night’s Black Agents makes this one really simple.

Don’t get me wrong. If The Zalozhniy Quartet wasn’t so messy, it would receive a significantly higher grade from me. It doesn’t take much imagination, in fact, to see that it might have been one of the best RPG campaigns ever written. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and what we’re left with is a flawed masterpiece.

But even a flawed masterpiece is going to create some pretty cool experiences at your table.

Good hunting!

Grade: B-

Author: Gareth Hanrahan
Story Design: Kenneth Hite

Publisher: Pelgrane Press
Cost: $26.95
Page Count: 148

FURTHER READING
Review: Night’s Black Agents