In Night’s Black Agents, the PCs are retired intelligence agents. Maybe they left willingly; maybe they’re ex-pats on the run from their own governments. Regardless, they’ve been putting their skills to use as mercenaries, doing whatever jobs their consciences can live with in the gray and black markets of the world.

And then they discover that vampires are real.

In fact, there’s a vast vampire conspiracy. It’s infiltrated (or has begun infiltrating) every corner of the modern world, feeding the murderous hunger of the undead.

Which, of course, means that — even as their minds reel from the sanity-shattering immensity of this revelation — the agents must dust off their skills one last time and save the world.

It’s not like anyone is going to believe them, after all.

In large part, Night’s Black Agents is driven simply and entirely by the immense erudition of Kenneth Hite, whose mastery and appreciation of both the espionage and vampires genres is vast. Even more impressive is Hite’s success in boiling his knowledge down onto the page and making it effortlessly accessible to you.

Sure, you’ll benefit mightily from flipping to “Sources” on page 207 and at least sampling the array of vampire and spy fiction that Hite recommends. But the point is that you don’t need to, because Hite has packed all that lore into this remarkably thin rulebook in the most practical and useful ways possible. With nothing but Night’s Black Agents in hand, you will be able to dial in everything from James Bond to John Le Carre; from Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

THE GUMSHOE SYSTEM

The GUMSHOE system was originally designed by Robin D. Laws explicitly for designing and running mystery scenarios. It’s been adapted into a dozen different games over the years, and Night’s Black Agents isn’t even Hite’s first rodeo. (He previously designed Trail of Cthulhu.)

The central conceit of the GUMSHOE system is that it divides all of the PCs’ skills into Investigative Abilities (e.g., Cryptography, Electronic Surveillance, Accounting) and General Abilities (e.g. Athletics, Gambling, Shooting), both of which have pools of points which can be spent by the players.

While General Ability tests are resolved by rolling 1d6 + the number of points spent vs. a difficulty (which generally defaults to 4), the GUMSHOE gimmick is that you never need to test Investigative Abilities: If you are in a scene where a clue can be found using a relevant Investigative Ability and you use that ability, then you gain the clue. (The points for Investigative Abilities can be spent, but only for various enhancements to the action. You never need to spend or roll for a core clue required to solve the scenario.)

I have some quibbles with this gimmick: First, the claim is that it eliminates the risk of the players failing to find and follow a clue! But that’s not actually true. They can still fail to look for the clue and, if they find the clue, they may still misinterpret it. You can mitigate these problems somewhat with point spends, but the solution ultimately ends up being the Three Clue Rule. And if you’re using the Three Clue Rule, then you don’t actually need the “you never roll!” gimmick to begin with.) Ironically, the claim that it’s magically solved the problem can actually exacerbate the problem at some tables.

Second, this system can create some very nasty hard limits in play: The plethora of pools creates a multitude of limited resources, any one of which the PCs can unexpectedly and catastrophically run out of in ways that can completely derail scenarios or result in horrific TPKs.

A sufficiently savvy table, however, will be able to get a general feel for how scenarios need to be paced in order to work, and later GUMSHOE games have found ways to soften the hard limits. Night’s Black Agents, in particular, is festooned with a cornucopia of systems designed to flexibly replenish pools and route around the hard limits.

And despite my reservations, I’ve consistently found the various GUMSHOE games I’ve played and run deeply satisfying. A large part of this seems to be the skill lists, which are all built on the same chassis while varying somewhat game to game, and are universally excellent for investigation scenarios. This is paired to a character creation procedure which systemically divides these skills evenly among the PCs, neatly setting things up so that spreading the spotlight around during investigation scenes is a seamless and virtually automatic process.

Character creation also features a handful of other features that efficiently flesh out characters and motivate them for investigation. In Night’s Black Agents, this includes backgrounds (quickly orienting players into the milieu of the game), drives (directly motivating the characters), and sources of stability (which define people, places, and ideologies that are significant to the character and then ties those things to the dehumanizing themes of the spy genre).

The result is a system that’s not only good at the table, but also fabulous during prep.

CONSPYRAMID & VAMPYRAMID

The heart of Night’s Black Agents is the Conspyramid, a campaign structure/recipe that the GM can use to reliably create an effective conspiracy for their campaign.

The core concept is that the conspiracy is broken down into nodes — sources of blood, funding, and protection; cults, institutions, infrastructure, front companies, and so forth — and these are arranged into a pyramidal structure and then connected to each other:

For example, in this sample Conspyramid, agents investigating the Ganymede nightclub might find leads pointing them towards the Abkhaz gangs or the renfield H. Volov. Similarly, those investigating Volov would find connections to Istanbul Customs and the S.S. Paradine. The idea, of course, is that the players will work their way up the Conspyramid to the core leadership at its pinnacle and then burn it all down.

What makes the Conspyramid sing in actual play, though, is how Hite has broadly integrated it into the other mechanics and structures of play.

The simplest example of this is that the default difficulty of relevant tests is equal to 3 + the row of the Conspyramid. So, for example, Infiltration tests to break into the Ganymede will default to difficulty 4, but if you’re trying to break into the Hungarian Interior Ministry (up in row 3), the tests would generally default to difficulty 6. A key word here, of course, is “default,” but the overall effect is that the stakes of the campaign will naturally escalate as the campaign continues — the players will feel the pressure and the difficulty as they climb the conspiracy’s ladder.

A more complicated example are the adversary mapping mechanics. Here the basic concept is that the PCs will use Human Terrain, Traffic Analysis, Surveillance, asset interviews, ops, and other relevant abilities and actions to discover how the conspiracy is organized (i.e., the links between nodes). What’s really cool is that Night’s Black Agents is designed to empower the PCs to create their own ops: Once you’ve identified the Ganymede on your adversary map, do you place it under surveillance, interrogate the owner, put a tap on the computer servers in the basement, or just burn it to the ground and see who collects the insurance money?

The agents’ adversary map will not always precisely match the GM’s Conspyramid, but the Conspyramid gives the GM everything they need to respond flexibly and confidently to the agents’ investigation no matter what form or direction it takes.

The players are also mechanically incentivized to build out their adversary map because the more links an op has, the more bonuses they’ll receive when staging an op with that node as their target, thus encouraging a slightly more contemplative style of play in which the PCs figure out how stuff is connected before choosing how and where they want to strike.

Perhaps the most significant integration with the Conspyramid, however, is the Vampyramid, which I consider the other pillar of a Night’s Black Agents campaign:

Although superficially similar to the Conspyramid, the Vampyramid, based on the Push Pyramid from Elizabeth Sampat’s Blowback, is a structure for running the active vampiric response to the agents’ actions. Each tier of the Vampyramid is “unlocked” as a result of the PCs targeting one of the nodes on the corresponding tier of the Conspyramid. The GM then selects an appropriate response, following a “path” up the Vampyramid.

For example, let’s say that the PCs hit the Ganymede nightclub, make a copy of the server hard drives, and then destroy the data center. This unlocks Tier 1: Reflex on the Vampyramid, so the GM scans through their options and decides Offer Payoff is the best fit:

OFFER PAYOFF: Some seemingly unconnected node of the conspiracy offers the agent a handsome payoff to walk away… This also offers the players a clue to another node of the conspiracy.

So we need to grab another node from our Conspyramid: We could go up the Conspyramid, perhaps having someone from Lisbon Import-Export, LLC approach the PCs. But at this early stage of the campaign, it might make more sense to stay lateral, so maybe we grab a rep from the Szegeli Clan to make the approach.

Since the PCs grabbed the data and slagged the servers, it probably makes sense if the conspiracy wants that data back. In fact, they might even assume that the PCs are just blackmailers. “We know you made a copy of our data. So how much do you want?”

However the PCs turn that approach to their advantage, we can assume they continue mucking about in their investigation and maybe they eventually track things back to the Dagestan Militia. That node is on the second tier of the Conspyramid and it unlocks the corresponding tier of the Vampyramid. Looking at the pyramid, the GM can just follow the arrows to find “the most natural escalations.” The idea is that, depending on which initial node you select, you can chart a course up through the Vampyramid in a process that creates great complexity and variety from a surprisingly simple structure.

Our chosen example, however, does reveal one structural drawback of the Vampyramid: Once you hit one edge of the Vampyramid, you end up “locked” into a single chain of response actions. (Offer Payoff, for example, connects only to Kill Enemy.) In practice, this is ameliorated because the Vampyramid is designed as a tool, not a straitjacket: You can always skip to a completely different node or improvise a custom response if it’s more appropriate for your campaign. You can also always return to the bottom tier and initiate a new response path.

Regardless, the Vampyramid provides a simple, default scaffolding that makes the Conspiracy a living, breathing entity that’s actively opposed to the PCs and reacting to their operations. It’s also, as we can see in the Offer Payoff example, yet another mechanism Night’s Black Agents uses to dynamically introduce clues into the PCs’ investigation. (The game is simply excellent at making it virtually impossible for the PCs to ever dead-end.)

The tight integration of the Conspyramid with the rest of the game can also be seen in the system for Heat.

The Heat mechanics provide a model for how much pressure the PCs are under from the authorities as a result of their actions: Did they kill someone? Did they blow up a building? Did they kidnap the daughter of a vampire scion? Did they get involved in a massive car chase through downtown Lisbon? All of these actions will generate Heat, and once per operation the GM can call for the players to roll against their current Heat level.

If the roll fails, some sort of official interference will crop up during the op. That might be the CIA agent who’s been tracking them catching up and ruining their cover stories. Or a SWAT team raiding their safe house. Or “a whole fleet of cop cars joining the chase.”

Notably, getting rid of Heat generally requires the PCs to either skip town (pushing their activities into the international scope of cinematic espionage films), make a deal with someone in power (further entangling them), and/or staging some kind of op (creating exciting game play). So this is yet another example of Night’s Black Agents using simple systems to dynamically generate complex and rewarding play.

But the other thing to really take note of here is how all of these different elements are put into motion and swirl around each other: The PCs are actively investigating the conspiracy’s infrastructure (Conspyramid), the vampires are actively trying to shut them down (Vampyramid), and the cops and other official agencies are getting drawn into the vortex (Heat). The ops generate Heat and unlock new tiers of the Vampyramid; the Vampyramid creates situations which draw Heat and introduce clues for tracing the Conspyramid; and Heat can either trigger responses from the Vampyramid or force the PCs to diversify their investigation into the Conspyramid.

This isn’t just a random assortment of resolution mechanics. It’s an engine that generates espionage and drives the campaign forward.

THRILLER RULES

With Heat and the two Pyramids driving the action, Night’s Black Agents packs even more action into GUMSHOE with the Thriller Rules, a selection of optional mechanics that are designed to evoke the espionage genre. These include:

• Thriller Chases
• Extended Chases
• Thriller Combat
• Special Tactics

The rules for Thriller Chases provide a robust, but not overly complicated system for resolving either foot or vehicle chases. The Extended Chase system sounds like it would be an add-on for Thriller Chases, but it’s actually a completely separate system for handling scenarios where the PCs are fleeing from trouble across multiple countries and is tied into the Heat system.

The Thriller Combat rules are designed to patch up the major problem with using GUMSHOE as the engine for an espionage action game: Combat in GUMSHOE kinda sucks.

The problem ultimately boils down to the core math of the combat system: You roll 1d6, add the points spent from the General Ability you’re using to attack (Hand-to-Hand, Shooting, or Weapons in Night’s Black Agents), and compare it to the target’s Hit Threshold. Hit Thresholds are almost universally between 3 and 5 (although some supernatural creatures will exceed those limits), so you can hit your target even if you don’t spend any points, but obviously you can improve your odds (or even hit automatically) if you do spend points.

From the player’s side this is very simplistic, but mostly works. They have a limited pool of points that likely needs to be stretched across multiple combat encounters in a scenario, and so they need to strategically decide when and where to spend their points. (This is largely a binary choice, though: If you’re going to spend points, you’re almost always going to want to spend enough for an auto-hit.)

The big problem is on the GM’s side of the screen. NPCs are built to have roughly the same range of ability ratings that PCs do, which means they also have a similar number of Hand-to-Hand, Shooting, and Weapons points to spend. But the NPCs don’t need to stretch their points across multiple encounters and usually don’t have a variety of targets to prioritize: They can spend two or three points on every single attack, automatically hit the PCs every single time, and almost certainly never run out of points before the encounter is finished.

In practice, this means that the GM can make one of three choices:

1. Automatically hit the PCs every time. (Providing a flat and ultra-lethal combat experience. In fact, you’ll almost certainly TPK the group in any fight where the PCs don’t dramatically outnumber the opposition.)
2. Never spend ability points for NPC attacks. (Another flat experience, and one in which there’s no difference between tussling with a random street thug and the ultimate battle with Dracula.)
3. Just arbitrarily decide when the NPCs will hit the PCs. (Which kinda negates the entire purpose of having a combat system, and still doesn’t mechanically reflect NPC skill, but is probably fine if you’re the sort of GM who likes stuff like railroading and fudging.)

I’ve run a lot of GUMSHOE and, frankly, the combat system is fundamentally broken. Its only saving grace is that it’s just barely functional enough that you can sorta just coast through the occasional combat encounter. It’ll be vaguely bad and unsatisfying, but not game breaking.

Okay, but the Thriller Combat Rules are ostensibly designed to fix this, right? So do they pull it off?

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but… No.

They do their best, but ultimately can’t route around the fundamental mechanical flaw. What they can do, however, is add a lot of fun options to the fight that can distract the players from the unsatisfying core mechanics and keep them entertained.

All this flash and bling, however, does highlight another slight tarnish in the system, which is that there seems to be a handful of minor mechanics scattered throughout Night’s Black Agents where the math just seems wonky to me.

Take called shots, for example. Useful mechanic to have for a vampire game (where you may need to stake them in the heart), but one of the generic effects is a damage boost. Check this out, though: Aiming at either the Heart or the Throat is +3 Hit Threshold, but hitting the Heart does +3 damage while hitting the Throat only does +2 damage, so you’re obviously always going to pick the mathematically superior option every time.

(It should be noted that these wonky bits are so minor in nature that, in practice, it’s quite difficult to spot them. But if you’re the sort of person who would put together a comprehensive cheat sheet for the game, they will pop out at you.)

What does make a big difference in Night’s Black Agents combat, though, are the Special Tactics. Tactical Fact-Finding Benefits (TFFBs) and Tag-Team Tactical Benefits (TTTB) both give the players (a) a channel for using their Investigative Abilities to gain tactical advantage in combat and (b) methods for the PCs to collaborate with each other and form mechanically impactful tactical plans on the battlefield. They’re flexible, powerful, and very satisfying to use.

VAMPIRES!

The final trick Night’s Black Agents has up its sleeves is an incredibly robust system for creating custom vampires.

These aren’t just palette swaps. Hite provides an almost overwhelming variety of options drawn from across world mythology and vampire fiction, strapping them into a modular system that can combine them fruitfully into an almost infinite variety of forms. This system is, in fact, so robust that it can be trivially adapted to creating supernatural foes of any type.

More importantly, this means that every time you start a new Night’s Black Agents campaign, the players will be legitimately in the dark about exactly what form the dark, vampiric threat will take. Every campaign is an exciting journey of discovery and revelation.

CONCLUSION

Night’s Black Agents takes the rock solid investigation mechanics of the GUMSHOE system and enhances them with Thriller Rules and Special Tactics that can flip the reactive investigations of Christie (“let’s look for the clues they left behind!”) into the explosive investigations of Fleming (“let’s blow stuff up and make some clues”). It then marries those mechanics to the tripartite espionage engine of Heat, Conspyramid, and Vampyramid.

The result is an RPG that’s not only delightful to bring to the table, but also a truly unique experience.

The core concept of “secret agents hunting vampires” is also surprisingly perfect in its conception and execution. When first pitched, it can seem almost random, but the more you think about it (and play with it), the more it seems not only utterly natural, but also inherently awesome.

It’s worth noting, though, that Night’s Black Agents is a fantastic RPG for even a mundane espionage campaign without a trace of vampiric action or supernatural conundrum: Drop the Vampirology ability and, on the player side, you’re just left with secret agents. On the GM’s side, the only potentially thorny issue is the Vampyramid, but that’s mostly just the name. (In a pinch, you could even grab the Push Pyramid from Sampat’s Blowback and plug it in.)

This is largely because, as I mentioned before, Hite is so effective at boiling down the huge breadth of not only the vampire genre but also the espionage genre into the game in a shockingly practical fashion. Truthfully speaking, either genre would be capable of supporting an entire game in its own right, and to have both so perfectly blended together in Night’s Black Agents is the gaming equivalent of possessing the riches of Croesus.

(Who, infamously, has no reliably recorded death, and is, therefore, almost certainly a vampire. Feel free to use the Lydian conspiracy for your first campaign.)

But I digress. The point is that removing the vampires from Night’s Black Agents nevertheless leaves you with a comprehensive and fully realized espionage game capable of handling everything from James Bond to Jason Bourne to George Smiley. In fact, Hite will help you dial in the subgenre of espionage you want with different modes of play:

• Burn games will focus on the psychological damage and personal cost of the spy game.
• Dust games eschew cinematic excess and instead dial in the gritty realism of The Sandbaggers or Three Days of the Condor.
• Mirror games feature the deception and betrayal of the spy game, where corrupt agents and agencies pursue ends that justify the means until, finally, they forget what the ends were supposed to be.
• Stakes games, by contrast, will shine the spotlight on the high ideals of espionage, where the fight really is about protecting the ideals, nations, and people that you believe in.

Through the Night’s Black Agents rulebook, symbols associated with each of these modes clearly mark various options and advice that you can use to dial in exactly the style of espionage campaign you want.

I offer this as the conclusion of this review because I think it speaks deeply to Kenneth Hite’s philosophy as a designer and to what Night’s Black Agents offers you as a game: Hite wants to give not only the GM but also the players everything they need to make the game that they want, and he achieves that by loading you up with a truly astonishing array of tools, options, and information. He doesn’t just dump this material on you, though. Instead, it is meticulously organized, designed, and implemented to make it as easy as possible for you to use it. Everything is designed to effortlessly empower you.

Night’s Black Agents comes bearing gifts.

And you should invite it in.

GRADE: A+

Designer: Kenneth Hite

Publisher: Pelgrane Press
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 232

FURTHER READING
Review: The Zalozhniy Quartet
Review: The Persephone Extraction
System Cheat Sheet: Night’s Black Agents
Untested NBA: Funding

Rescuing Lulu From Elturel is the second part of the Descent From Waterdeep series, which is designed to reshape Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus into a cohesive campaign.

Don’t bother looking for the other three parts, though, because they haven’t been released yet. And that’s okay, because Rescuing Lulu is quite capable of not only standing on its own, but demanding your attention.

If idea of weaving Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus into a single campaign doesn’t sound appealing, you can ignore that bit, too, because Rescuing Lulu can also be used:

• To weave Elturel into a Tyranny of Dragons
• As a pointcrawl supplement detailing Elturel before its Fall.
• As a supplement to the Alexandrian Remix of Descent Into Avernus.

And more!

If anything, I think the default frame of Rescuing Lulu — in which the PCs meet Lulu during the events of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Lulu is kidnapped by Zarielite cultists and taken to Elturel, and the PCs follow — is more a hindrance to this book than anything else. (But more on that later.)

THE WEAVE

The first thing I love about Rescuing Lulu is how Hunter Stardust weaves together material from a multitude of sources, particularly other DM’s Guild books. This is something I’ve seen a few other DM’s Guild authors attempt, but it’s often awkward. Stardust, on the other hand, pulls it off smoothly and effortlessly, and Rescuing Lulu could be an exemplar for others interested in doing the same.

The reason I love this is that, when done well, it can very easily elevate the value of all the integrated works into something greater than the sum of its parts. If you’re familiar with how my Avernus Remix approached the Avernian Hexcrawl, then you’ve seen similar praxis.

On that note, one of the sources Stardust uses is, in fact, the Alexandrian remixes of both Dragon Heist and Descent Into Avernus. Rescuing Lulu is specifically designed to be integrated with the remixes, although options are given for those using strictly the published versions of the campaigns.

Other sources include:

• Blue Alley
• Hellturel
• The Hellriders Keep
• Baldur’s Gate: Fall of Elturel
• Encounters in Avernus

(If you’re unfamiliar with these supplements, I’ve previously done reviews of most of them, which you can check out here.)

While juggling and integrating all of this material, Stardust is also constantly offering options: Using Blue Alley in Chapter 2 of Dragon Heist? Here’s how you can use it to introduce Lulu. Not doing that? Here are three other options.

Stardust is meticulous with his cross-referencing and his notes are smart, thoughtful, and flexible. The only possible improvement here would be hyperlinks.

THE MAP

The second thing I love about Rescuing Lulu is the map of pre-Fall Elturel. Created by Meshon Cantrill, this map is absolutely stunning:

It is an absolutely perfect companion piece to Jared Blando’s post-Fall map of the city in Descent Into Avernus, which is no mean feat.

Frankly, even if you used absolutely nothing else from Rescuing Lulu, the book would be worth buying just for the multiple, high-resolution versions of the city map.

THE POINTCRAWL

Within its many variations, Rescuing Lulu is built around an investigation spine:

• The PCs meet Lulu.
• Lulu is kidnapped by Zarielite cultists, who take her to Elturel to be sacrificed as part of a ritual.
• The PCs track Lulu to Elturel.
• The PCs explore Elturel, which is described using a pointcrawl.
• While exploring the city, they discover clues indicating that Lulu can be found at a ritual masquerading as a wedding ceremony.
• The PCs perform a heist at the wedding ceremony, rescuing Lulu and hopefully disrupting the ritual.
• The cultists all shrug and invite the PCs to have some cake. (Hmm… We’ll come back to that.)

The real heart of Rescuing Lulu, therefore, is the Elturian pointcrawl. (This also takes up roughly half of the book’s 65 pages, with another ten pages being given over to the final heist scenario and the rest mostly fleshing out the preliminary investigation and epilogue.)

This pre-Fall ‘crawl of the city is a nice companion piece to the post-Fall ‘crawl of Hellturel found in the Avernus Remix. Every location is richly detailed and ready-for-play, being sourced and adapted from a variety of sources including Volo’s Guide to the Sword Coast, Forgotten Realm Adventures, and the Alexandrian Remix itself. It sets up the structure of urban pointcrawling for groups unfamiliar with it, and also gives the players an intimate familiarity with the city which will makes its post-apocalyptic incarnation in Descent Into Avernus all the more shocking.

RESERVATIONS

So there’s clearly a lot of like about Rescuing Lulu From Elturel, and I’ve already told you that I think you should buy the book if you’re planning to do anything with pre-Fall Elturel in your campaign. But I do have some reservations that you should be aware of before snagging your copy.

First, the book could really benefit from some rigorous proofreading. There are a lot of typos strewn across the text, most of them of minor significance but a few which seem to create significant errors.

Second, there’s some material that I find to be quite awkward in its execution. For example, there are several instances where encounter checks are made by having the DM roll a die and then having the players guess a number: if the number matches, the encounter happens. It’s difficult for me to imagine doing that at the actual gaming table. Perhaps the intention is to engage the players in some way? For me, it doesn’t work.

Third, if you are planning to use Rescuing Lulu in conjunction with the Alexandrian Remix of Descent Into Avernus, you should be aware that there are some significant changes to continuity, most of which are not clearly indicated. You’ll need to keep on your toes to make sure everything lines up.

Fourth, Rescuing Lulu is whimsical and kinda wacky. For example, there’s Morrale the Beerholder — an alcoholic beholder who serves drinks at a tavern and uses random eyebeam attacks to assault PCs who don’t tip him. This tone is not really my jam, particularly for a Descent Into Avernus campaign. It’s significant enough that I, personally, wouldn’t use this book as written. But I know that for many people this is exactly the tone they’re looking for, and if that’s the case for you, then you’ll love this!

The biggest reservation I have when it comes to Rescuing Lulu, unfortunately, is the adventure itself. There’s so much cool material and so many varied tools packed into its pages that could be useful in so many ways… but which is instead made subservient to a specific conceit.

For example, it feels like there’s an alternate version of this book which is just called ELTUREL and features a pointcrawl sourcebook for the city along with additional material (like a Rescuing Lulu adventure) that can be used in conjunction with the pointcrawl sourcebook. And that version of the book is a lot more useful to a lot more people.

As written, however, the pointcrawl becomes subservient to the adventure, which greatly limits its potential utility. It also becomes quite heavy-handed in its foreshadowing of the Fall, which ties into some of the continuity issues I mentioned before. As depicted here, everyone in the city seems ready for the Fall to happen, and are often giving the PCs a nudge-and-a-wink about it, and there are so many Zarielite cultists cavorting in the street that everyone who isn’t a cultist is like, “Man, have you seen all the cultists around town?”

So as you’re considering whether to add Rescuing Lulu From Elturel to your own library, you should keep these reservations in mind. But, as I’ve already said, this is a supplement which, despite my reservations, I recommend.

GRADE: B-

Buy now!

This review was requested and sponsored by a patron of the Alexandrian.

Has the Candela Obscura Quickstart convinced me to run the game? And will it convince you? Should you take the time to check out this new roleplaying game from Critical Role and Darrington Press? Why is Candela Obscura a game afraid of its own shadow? ENnie Award-winning designer Justin Alexander dives into the controversy.

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TO WAR!

Shadow of the Dragon Queen takes place during the Siege of Kalaman.

No, not the Siege of Kalaman in 352 AC where Laurana is the general and the Dragon Armies deployed their flying citadels for the first time. This is an earlier Siege of Kalaman that takes place in 3-mumble-mumble AC, when a completely different flying citadel showed up for the first time, shredding absolutely everything we know about this continuity.

Ironically, I think Kalaman was chosen for this campaign because so little was established in the Dragonlance Saga about what happened there during the War of the Lance. Across all fourteen of the original modules, there’s only like a dozen paragraphs you would have to keep track of to keep things consistent, so it’s almost impressive in a way that they nevertheless managed to screw it up.

(I’ll stop calling out rotten continuity at this point, for that way lies madness.)

The other reason to set a campaign here is that Kalaman is basically the point closest to the Dragon Armies at the beginning of the War of the Lance which is NOT conquered by them. Go any closer to the draconian homelands and the PCs can’t save the day. Go any farther away and you can’t get away with telling a story of the early days of the war where people are still coming to grips with the true nature of the Dragon Queen’s threat.

The point is that Shadow of the Dragon Queen is set in the heart of a war, and the PCs will be no strangers to the battlefield. Over the course of the campaign, there will be twelve major battles that the PCs will be part of, and you’ll have two options for handling them.

First, as I mentioned, there’s the Warriors of Krynn boardgame, which contains each of those battles as individual scenarios. I’m likely going to do a separate review of the board game and will take a closer look at how it integrates with Shadow of the Dragon Queen there.

But you don’t need to buy Warriors of Krynn to run Shadow of the Dragon Queen. The book includes a system of battlefield encounters which can be run as standard D&D combats. These consist of four parts:

The battlemap. These are gorgeously rendered and are roughly the dimensions you’d expect in any other D&D battlemap.

Notably, however, the battlemaps have a 15-foot rim on all sides referred to as the fray. This is the first way in which these battlefield encounters represent the chaotic melee swirling around the PCs: Each fray has unique properties, generally being difficult terrain and requiring a saving throw to avoid damage if a character enters the area.

There are also the battlefield events, which occur randomly whenever a character enters the fray or at initiative count 0 on each round. These include things like:

• A volley of arrows falls on a random character’s position.
• Low-flying dragonnels flee across the battlefield.
• A draconian dragon rider falls from their mount, plummeting out of the sky and landing on the battlefield.
• An injured member of the PCs’ army crawls onto the battlefield, begging for aid.

Finally, of course, there’s the encounter itself. Sometimes this is a single group of bad guys; in other cases there’ll be a scripted sequence with additional bad guys showing up over time. Either way, when the bad guys are all defeated, the encounter (and the wider battle) come to an end.

This seems like a really simple structure, but conceptually it packs a big punch. There’s a lot you can do with just these few simple tools to bring radically different battlefields to vivid life in your campaign.

The one thing I would like to be able to say is that the outcome of these battlefield encounters have an effect on the outcome of the wider battle. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Which is perhaps unsurprising, because…

ALL ABOARD, FOLKS!

… the campaign is horrendously railroaded.

By which I mean both that the railroading is relentless and all-encompassing, but also that the methods they use to force the railroad down your throat are just hopelessly awful.

Phrases such as “encourage the characters to” and “it’s up to the characters to…” and the like seem to be the book’s favorite ways to signal the DM that the time has come to take the character sheets away from the irresponsible players.

Different people will have different reactions to this kind of stuff, but for me the absolute worst type of railroading is when the DM takes control (directly or indirectly) of what your character says. (Because, honestly, what’s left at that point? We’re literally just sitting at the table watching someone awkwardly talk to themselves.) And Shadow of the Dragon Queen absolutely loves this.

For example, the PCs have been railroaded into a debate with NPC military commanders about what the next logical course of action should be. The NPCs make their arguments, and then the DM is instructed to:

…encourage the characters to make the case that Lord Soth is a threat and the Dragon Army’s plans to the north shouldn’t be taken lightly.

But then the writers think to themselves, “Maybe the players won’t take the hint from the clue-by-four we’ve smashed into their faces. Or maybe the Dungeon Master won’t have the guts to put the gun to their heads and keep them in line.”

The answer, of course, is to cue up a GMPC. So, for example, even after you’ve “encouraged” the players to say their scripted lines, it’s an NPC who swoops in and gets to be the hero of the scene:

Darrett then asks Vendri to let him take the characters and a contingent of troops into the Northern Wastes to investigate whatever the Dragon Army wants there. [Vendri] asks the PCs to leave while she and Darrett discuss details…

I cannot emphasize enough that this is not one or two isolated incidents: It is the entire campaign. Just an endless, mind-numbing litany of blow-by-blow descriptions of how the authors anticipate/demand each scene be played out.

“The NPCs will say. Then the PCs will say. Then the NPC will say. Then the PCs will say.”

This is interspersed liberally with “the PCs can roleplay or they can make a Persuasion/Intimidation/whatever check,” which (a) is just bad praxis (rolls and roleplaying work together; it’s not either-or) and (b) is completely pointless anyway, because the check result never seems to vary how the conversation plays out!

And I just want to take a moment to say something truly from the bottom of my heart:

Fuck Darrett.

This prick gets attached to the PCs like a cancerous mole early in the campaign. He tags along as a sidekick squire, but then, suddenly, he’s the main character: It’s him, not the PCs, who gets promoted based on their adventures together. It’s him, not the PCs, who’s scripted to save Lord Bakaris’ life. Before you know it, he’s the PCs’ boss, ordering them around, making all the important decisions, and continuing to scoop up all the accolades.

So, again: Fuck Darrett.

And there’s basically an endless parade of these jackasses through the entire campaign.

About midway through the book, for example, Darrett says, “See that huge hexmap over there? I’m going to stay here on the boat. Y’all go and explore for a while!” For one glorious moment, the players will rejoice! The fetters have come off! Not only do the PCs finally get to ditch Darrett, they’ll be in control of their own destiny! They’ll get to make their own choices!

Except no. Because the authors are so terrified of the players having the slightest bit of agency that literally eight paragraphs later a brand new GMPC pops up with detailed instructions on EXACTLY THE ORDER IN WHICH YOU WILL CONDUCT YOUR “EXPLORATION!”

There’s even a little scene so that, if the PCs are confused about who their new master is, Darrett will helpfully explain it to them.

The whole thing is so grotesquely pointless that it almost feels as if the authors are being deliberately petty. As if they have some personal grudge against the players.

THE BORING BITS

As I look over my notes for Shadow of the Dragon Queen and flip through the book to refresh my memory, I can see that it’s studded with big, impressive set pieces:

• huge battles,
• dragonriding duels,
• flying cities,
• gnomish siege weapons,
• ruined cities,

and more!

Just looking through this list, it seems as if this campaign should be a thrill-fest from one end to the other.

So why did I find the book so utterly stultifying to read?

Largely because the medium is the message. When I read an adventure book like this, what I’m thinking about is the experience of running it at the table. And the picture Shadow of the Dragon Queen paints of the actual play experience isn’t a pretty one.

Yeah, the set pieces are shiny and cool in an abstract sense. But when I’m reduced to a mute audience either watching somebody else do all the cool stuff or stuck as a helpless puppet unable to have any effect on what’s happening, they lose their luster.

For example, consider the big finale of the campaign:

First, the PCs fight and fight and fight and fight to prevent the bad guys from taking control of the flying citadel!

And it doesn’t matter, because an unskippable cutscene is triggered and they’re forced to just watch while the bad guy activates the flying citadel helm.

But that doesn’t matter, either, because it doesn’t work and the citadel is falling apart all around them!

But that ALSO doesn’t matter, because after the PCs escape from the collapsing citadel, they turn around and see a different bad guy flying off in a completely different citadel!

Whoopsie-doopsie!

You can almost be impressed by the skill it takes to build up so many levels of irrelevancy. (Almost.) But they aren’t even done!

See, the PCs might think to themselves, “We’ve gotta stop the other citadel!” and rush to do that. That’s not the plot, though, so the DM is instructed to use endlessly respawning death dragons “that attack until the characters retreat.” The defenses are too strong! All you can do is watch helplessly while dragonnels ferry troops from the ground into the citadel!

Three pages later, though, after the entire dragon army has transferred itself into the flying citadel and its defenses are even more impregnable? Now it’s time to attack, and so a gaggle of GMPCs show up and give the PCs their marching orders.

Sure, after all that, the dragon-riding duel with Dragon Highmaster Kansaldi Fire-Eyes (complete with pre-scripted conclusion) has a cool illustration, but I honestly find it impossible to get legitimately enthused about it.

When the book goes to such elaborate lengths to scream, “THIS IS ALL POINTLESS AND NOTHING YOU DO MATTERS!” eventually you believe it, no matter how pretty the two-dimensional set painting is.

Grade: D-

Project Lead: F. Wesley Schneider
Writers: Justice Arman, Brian Cortijo, Kelly Digges, Dan Dillon, Ari Levitch, Renee Knipe, Ben Petrisor, Mario Ortegon, Erin Roberts, James L. Sutter

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

Meh.

When Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen was announced, I was really excited about it. So excited, in fact, that I ended up spending most of the summer and beyond doing a deep dive into the Dragonlance Saga. I was excited about the campaign returning to the War of the Lance, the time period of the original Saga (and accompanying Chronicles trilogy). I was excited about Stephen Baker (designer of great mainstream wargames) and Rob Daviau (father of the legacy board game genre) joining forces to design Warriors of Krynn, a companion wargame that was designed to be played in conjunction with the campaign.

What an amazing opportunity to reinvent the bond between wargaming and roleplaying that has been part of D&D’s legacy from the very beginning! And, more than that, an opportunity to triumphantly realize the unfulfilled promises of the original Saga!

Plus it was coming out within mere days of my birthday! What a fun little birthday treat! I didn’t hesitate at all in preordering the Deluxe Edition that bundled the D&D campaign and board game together into one package.

So when the book showed up at the beginning of December I didn’t hesitate for a moment in ripping open the box— (Literally. The Deluxe Edition box is incredibly fragile and basically impossible to open without destroying it. Bizarrely, it’s apparently deliberately designed to be disposable.) —and flipping open the book.

Of course, I was still excited! Just completely engaged with the book. There’s some nifty little player handouts in the first chapter that are designed as missives from various NPCs to the PCs as an introduction to the setting, and I recorded some dramatic readings of those, thinking they’d be cool to send to my players as little teasers.

But then I found myself reading the book less and less. At first I thought it was just the holidays keeping me distracted, but by the end of the month it was clear that Shadow of the Dragon Queen had become a slog for me. It was frustrating and, even worse, it was boring.

And then the OGL crisis hit, with Wizards of the Coast flipping off the entire hobby and promising to detonate a devastating nuclear bomb in the middle of the industry. As I dealt with the professional and personal fallout from that, I wasn’t really in the mood to read any D&D books (and it wouldn’t really have been fair to the book), so I laid it aside. Fortunately, the OGL crisis eventually resolved itself in perhaps the best way anyone could have reasonable hoped for, and so, in February, I eventually picked up Shadow of the Dragon Queen again.

… and it was a still a miserable slog.

To a large extent, the simple fact that I have only just now, at the end of April, managed to drag my carcass to the final page of the book, is a pretty accurate summary of my entire review.

IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?

The original Dragonlance adventures, published in the 1980’s, sought to bring the power of a true fantasy epic to Dungeons & Dragons. It plunged the players into the world-spanning epic of the War of the Lance, in which the evil draconians of Takhisis, the Dragon Queen, formed the Dragon Armies and invaded the realms of Ansalon, positioning the PCs to change the course of history.

Shadow of the Dragon Queen is set during the earliest days of the war, ostensibly serving as a prequel or sidequel of sorts to the Dragonlance Saga. Part of the appeal of a ‘quel narrative like this, of course, is seeing how the continuity meshes with the existing work. When done well, as in the early issues of Kurt Busiek’s Untold Tales of Spider-Man or Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, you get an exciting bit of frisson whenever you see a character walk off stage left, knowing that they are simultaneously walking on stage right in a different story. Like a great heist movie, there is a kind of puzzle-solving delight in seeing the pieces come together, plus a real opportunity for depth and meaning that resonates beyond the immediate boundaries of what you’re creating.

The problem, though, is that Shadow of the Dragon Queen cares so little for the established continuity of Dragonlance or the War of the Lance that it’s a complete turn-off for any Dragonlance fans who would be interested in that sort of thing.

For example, the fact that several hundred years ago the True Gods abandoned the world of Ansalon during the Cataclysm and have not been heard from since is a really big deal. It’s a central tenet of the Dragonlance setting, a crucial element of the War of the Lance, and something which, in my opinion, is part of what makes the original Dragonlance Saga something special and unique in the annals of D&D. The quest to find the True Gods and restore the divine magic of clerics is, in fact, a really big part of the Saga.

So when it became clear to me that Shadow of the Dragon Queen was set in a time period before the True Gods returned to Ansalon, I was really curious: How were the designers going to deal with the fact that clerics canonically (pun intended) don’t have their spells?

And the designers’ provided a truly epic answer:

“Eh… fuck it.”

The book provides a short dream sequence. If a player creates a cleric, the DM basically says, “A god appears to you in your sleep! So I guess all that stuff that happens over in the Saga was completely pointless! Woo-hoo!”

The fact that the designers really couldn’t give a fig about this is really underlined by the fact that the FIRST TRUE CLERIC TO BE SEEN IN CENTURIES is just… kind of irrelevant? There’s one oblique reference to an NPC being impressed if the PCs have healing magic and that’s it.

Okay, so existing Dragonlance fans aren’t the target audience here. None of that continuity crap matters because this campaign is being written for new fans! Shadow of the Dragon Queen is their introduction to the wonderful world of Dragonlance, and it’s fine if stuff doesn’t match up perfectly up with the old stuff.

… except Shadow of the Dragon Queen kinda sucks as an introduction to Dragonlance.

The setting “gazetteer” (if you’re willing to call it that) is just fifteen pages long, and six of those are dedicated to short descriptions of every god. There’s an absolutely stunning poster map of Ansalon by Francesca Baerald, but most of the locations listed on it are not given even the briefest of descriptions.

From a player’s perspective it’s probably a slightly better experience, but I honestly don’t know how any DM would be expected to run the setting with confidence based on the information (or, more accurately, the lack of information) given here.

So if the book shows a careless disregard for the old fans and is completely inadequate for the new fans… who is it for, exactly?

Go to Part 2: All Aboard