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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I was deeply impressed by what I found.

THE WORLD OF GRIMNIR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BACKGROUNDS

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

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

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

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

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

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

PLAYABLE RACES

Raiders of the Serpent Sea includes several new playable races.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLASS ARCHETYPES

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

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

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

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

CONCLUSION

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

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

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

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

GRADE: B+

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

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

Buy Now!

Go to Part 1

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

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

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

So let’s talk about this a little bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE INDIGO SANCTUM

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe I show you Marthungrim’s Home:

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

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

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

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

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

The designer of the adventure.

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

…

This is the bit where I drop the mic.

DUNGEON HOW-TO

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

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

I hope not.

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 1

THE CORE FAILURE

A flub that The Shattered Obelisk makes entirely within the context of itself is the campaign it promises, which is a race where the PCs need to grab as many of the Obelisk fragments as possible before the mind flayers do: The more fragments the PCs get, the weaker the mind flayers’ ritual and the greater the advantage the PCs’ will have in the final confrontation.

This is a campaign that The Shattered Obelisk just fundamentally fails to deliver.

First, the “race for the fragments” is a bad joke. There are seven fragments in total:

• Four of them are taken by the mind flayers before the PCs are even aware that they exist.
• Two of them are located at sites which have no mind flayer presence at all, and the “race” consists of mind flayer minions materializing offscreen, grabbing the fragment, and dematerializing with it if the PCs lose an unrelated combat encounter.
• The final fragment, located in Gibbet’s Crossing, actually does have a mind flayer onsite, but let’s talk about this mind flayer a little bit…

The mind flayer’s name is Qunbraxel. He’s been here for weeks or possibly months (the adventure is unclear), accompanied by his grimlock servants. Unfortunately, the only hallway to the room where the shard is located is blocked by a regenerating magic item: No matter how much his grimlock servants hit it, it just regenerates.

Qunbraxel’s only idea? Have the grimlocks hit it some more.

The activation word to bypass the magic item can be found by reading the thoughts of a creature in the next room. Or Qunbraxel could walk across the hall and find it written down.

Qunbraxel has 19 Intelligence.

Given the complete failure to execute on the fragment race, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the promised pay-off also lands with a dull, wet thud. There are three triggers:

• If the flayers got five pieces, then one of the flayers is standing 100 ft. closer to the entrance of their lair.
• If the flayers got four pieces, then a different flayer is also standing 40 ft. closer to the entrance of their lair.
• If the flayers got all seven pieces, then two additional flayers are present.

Note how incredibly pointless this is. Also, that none of it has anything to do with the obelisk or its capabilities. It’s just dissociated noise.

This is part of a finale which is, frankly, a dud. The PCs jump through a convoluted series of arbitrary and increasingly tedious hoops, only to arrive at a remarkably pedestrian fight against three (almost certainly not five) mind flayers in basically four empty rooms.

As if sensing that a satisfactory conclusion has eluded their grasp, the writers have the angry god the mind flayers worshiped send a conveniently weakened “sliver” of itself to fight the PCs in an almost equally featureless 60-foot-wide room (this one has a pool in it!) while failing to announce its identity (so the players will likely have no idea who they’re even fighting).

AMATEUR HOUR

Dumathoin, Dwarven God: Yo! Ironquill! A bunch of mind flayers are going to attack your temple in a few days and kill everybody!

Ironquill: Got it!

(several days later, Ironquill appears in the dwarven afterlife)

Dumathoin: Oh, no! What happened?

Ironquill: Well, you warned me about the mind flayer attack…

Dumathoin: Right.

Ironquill: So I did the only logical thing.

Dumathoin: You warned everybody the attack was coming.

Ironquill: I faked my own death.

Dumathoin: Uh… okay. But then you warned everybody the attack was coming, right?

Ironquill: Then I secretly snuck away to investigate the local mind flayer stronghold by myself so that I could learn their plan of attack and tell everyone about it.

Dumathoin: But you warned everybody before you left, right?

Ironquill: You won’t believe this, but I died!

Dumathoin: But you warned everybody before you left, right?

(hundreds of dead dwarves appear)

Dwarves: Yo! Dumathoin! A little warning about the mind flayers would have been nice!

I would like to find some kind of silver-lining at this point, but I’m afraid it just doesn’t exist.

Most of The Shattered Obelisk is built around dungeons. And these dungeons are filled with the most amateurish design mistakes:

• Multiple NPCs with no viable route to get where they’re located.
• A hydra in a crypt that’s been sealed for centuries. (What does it eat?)
• A barricade (Z7) that stops goblins from going to the lower level of the dungeon… but the dungeon key makes no sense if the goblins can’t/don’t go down there.
• Maps that don’t match the text, and vice versa. (For example, room keys like X8 that list doors that don’t exist.)

And then you get to the point where Wizards of the Coast forgets how to key a dungeon.

On page 98, midway through Zorzula’s Rest, the PCs enter a new level of the dungeon and… The map is no longer numbered. The description of the dungeon bizarrely shifts from keyed entries to rambling paragraphs describing various unnumbered rooms.

In Whither the Dungeon? I talked about the fact that the Dungeon Master’s Guide no longer teachers new DMs how to key or run dungeons. (It doesn’t even include an example of a keyed dungeon map.) And I talked about how this has had, for example, an impact on adventures published through the DMs Guild, with an increasing number featuring dungeons with no maps or maps with no key.

It’s a disturbing trend that bodes ill for the health of the hobby.

But seeing it in an official module published by Wizards of the Coast was truly a surreal moment.

And, unfortunately, one that is repeated later in the book.

This poor design is, of course, not limited to the dungeons. I’ve already talked about the NPCs with nigh-incoherent backstories and incomprehensible motivations. To this you can add innumerable continuity errors and timelines that contradict each other, to the point where the adventure can’t stand up to even the most casual thought without collapsing like a waterlogged house of cards.

There’s a poster map that you’re supposed to give to the players at the beginning of the campaign, but you can’t because it shows all the hidden locations they’re supposed to discover through play. Later, the players receive a handout with a different overland map showing the location of the three dungeons in which the obelisk shards are located, but the dungeons are actually in the Underdark and two of them are actually different levels of the same dungeon, despite being shown in different locations on the handout.

So none of that actually works.

Something else that doesn’t work is asking the PCs to succeed on an Intelligence (Arcana) check, and if they don’t, they’re losers and they don’t deserve to finish the adventure.

Another major problem the campaign repeatedly suffers from is including potentially cool lore, but utterly failing to give the PCs any way to learn about it. (Which is a particular pet peeve of mine.) For example, in the mind flayer citadel of Illithinoch, we read:

Illithinoch’s heavy stone doors lack handles or latches. When a creature looks directly at a door for more than a few seconds, it swings open and assails the creature opening it with a jarring mental pulse that sounds to the creature like clashing cymbals. The pulse deals no damage, but all creatures other than mind flayers find it unpleasant. No one else within Illithinoch can hear this mental pulse except for the infected elder brain… Once the characters open this door and trigger the jarring mental pulse, the infected elder brain in area X15 takes notice of their arrival.

That’s pretty cool, actually. Very creepy. So with the elder brain tracking their every move, what does it do with that knowledge?

Absolutely nothing. The players will never even know they were being tracked.

…

It just goes on and on and on.

Eventually you reach the last four pages of the book, where you’ll find a “Story Tracker.” This is a double-sided sheet, repeated twice, which is “intended to help you or your players keep track of the characters’ progress throughout this adventure’s story.”

First, it has spoilers on it, so I’m obviously not going to give this to my players.

Second, it’s designed to be photocopied, not ripped out of the book. So why do they include two identical copies?

Third, I cannot even begin to conceive how it’s supposed to be used. For example, the “Chapter 2: Trouble in Phandalin” section includes spaces for listing three “Side Quests,” with each having a single 4-inch-long line for taking “notes.” The term “side quest” was used in the original Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure, but was, as far as I can tell, removed from The Shattered Obelisk. Plus, there are more than three side quests in this chapter. And what “notes” am I supposed to take in such a ludicrously inadequate space?

It’s kind of the perfect ending to The Shattered Obelisk, though, because I’m completely baffled by why it was included, what the designer was thinking, and how it survived any kind of editorial review process.

CONCLUSION

Giving a final rating to Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk is actually a little tricky.

On the one hand, Lost Mine of Phandelver is a good adventure and although it’s been needlessly degraded here, this is nevertheless the only place where it can be found in print today.

On the other hand, literally everything original to The Shattered Obelisk is terrible. Someone asked me if it would be worth picking up as a resource for trying to make a better campaign, and my conclusion was that it would actually have negative value compared to just reading the basic pitch and designing your own campaign with the same concept.

Ultimately, I think The Shattered Obelisk is a travesty and I’m going to give it the grade that it deserves. But I will offer the caveat that if it’s the only way you can get access to Lost Mine of Phandelver, you might still want to consider it (if you can find it at a substantial discount).

Grade: F

Project Lead: Amanda Hamon
Writers: Richard Baker, Eytan Bernstein, Makenzie De Armas, Amanda Hamon, Ron Lundeen, Christopher Perkins

Publisher: Wizards of the Cost
Cost: $59.95
Page Count: 220

ADDITIONAL READING
Addendum: Unkeyed Dungeons
Remixing the Shattered Obelisk
Phandalin Region Map – Label Layers

Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk can really only be described as a book of two parts, and it’s basically impossible to review it as anything else.

The first part is more or less a reprint of Lost Mine of Phandelver, the classic adventure that went out of print in 2022 when the original 5^th Edition Starter Set was discontinued. I strongly suspect that this was the entire modus operandi for Phandelver and Below: Wizards of the Coast wanted to replace the Starter Set with Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, but they knew Lost Mine of Phandelver was a great and well-loved adventure, so they wanted to find a way to keep it in print.

Unfortunately, Lost Mine of Phandelver wasn’t large enough to be its own hardcover release, and so it was grafted to The Shattered Obelisk, a Tier 2 adventure in which mind flayers search for the seven pieces of an obelisk which they can use to power a ritual which will transform the Phandelver region into… uh… let’s say an extrusion of the nightmarish Far Realm. The book is kinda vague about this, presumably because it will go to any lengths in order to railroad the PCs to ensure the pre-scripted outcome, so the specific details of what the mind flayers are trying to do doesn’t really matter.

On that note, it feels weird that “take a decent Tier 1 sandbox and then awkwardly bolt a Tier 2 railroad onto it” should be a recognizable formula from Wizards of the Coast, but I guess somebody thinks that’s a good structure for a campaign.

(It isn’t.)

And if you think that bodes ill for The Shattered Obelisk… well, strap in. Because we’ve barely gotten started.

GRAFFITI ON A MASTERPIECE

In my original review of the 2014 Starter Set, I described the original Lost Mine of Phandelver as being “the single best introductory adventure D&D has ever had.”

The version of Lost Mine of Phandelver found in The Shattered Obelisk is largely identical to the original, and it therefore remains a good Tier 1 campaign… mostly. The problem is that the designers have, in fact, made a bunch of minor changes, and, as far as I can tell, every single one of them makes the adventure worse.

Imagine you’re looking at Michelangelo’s David, but somebody has decided it would look better if they spraypainted some random graffiti on it. Fundamentally, it’s still Michelangelo’s David. It’s a masterpiece. But the graffiti seems problematic, right?

For example, the original adventure hook is that the PCs have been hired by Gundren Rockseeker to escort a wagon of supplies to Phandalin while he rides ahead to begin making arrangements for his business affairs. This hook is specific, detailed, and directly tied into the first encounter that actually kickstarts the campaign: The PCs find Gundren’s dead horse on the road, realize he’s been kidnapped by goblins, and need to rescue him.

For The Shattered Obelisk, the designers decided that they should include alternative hooks. This isn’t a bad impulse, but the hooks they came up with were:

1. The PCs randomly decide to head to Phandalin because… uh… maybe they can do something there (what, exactly?) that will impress the Harpers so that they can join up.
2. The PCs decide to head to Phandalin to meet with a representative of the Order of the Gauntlet so that they can then… join up somewhere else?

The problem here is not just that these are just generic mush. (Although that is a problem.) They’re also not hooked into the actual structure of the adventure. In fact, they actively muck up the organic pacing of the original Lost Mine of Phandelver, in which the PCs are assessed by local faction reps and offered membership based on their actions. Reversing cause and effect here isn’t a neutral change; it makes the adventure worse.

To be fair, the original Lost Mine of Phandelver never actually pays off the PCs joining one of these factions, which is too bad, but understandable because the adventure ends before that can happen (and it’s left as a seed that the DM can use to plan out their Tier 2 campaign). The Shattered Obelisk, of course, provides the Tier 2 campaign, and so it has the opportunity to actually develop and pay off the PCs’ relationships with these factions.

… an opportunity which it does not take.

This is really indicative of how half-assed these changes are, which is also evidenced by the fact that the opening boxed text of the adventure is completely unaltered and still refers exclusively to the original Rockseer adventure hook.

The immediately ensuing opening encounter, however, has also been changed: In the original adventure, the PCs discover two dead horses lying in the road. In the revised version, the two horses are still alive and just kind of wandering around the road.

Again, this seems like a minor change, but it isn’t: Dead horses send a clear message of DANGER, which is important because there are four goblins waiting to ambush characters who approach the horses. Furthermore, the tactics section for these goblins have been changed, making it much more likely that this initial encounter will result in an immediate TPK.

As I mentioned, these changes are frequent and the problems they create are pervasive, which can perhaps be best demonstrated by looking at the “foreshadowing” for the mind flayer portion of the campaign which has been introduced into Lost Mine of Phandelver.

Again, this makes sense. Obviously you’d want to foreshadow the new adventure and link it to the existing material so that the whole campaign would feel like a cohesive whole! And there are a bunch of obvious ways you could do that:

• The titular shattered obelisk is a Netherese artifact. The original adventure includes a Netherese archaeological expedition, so you could plant links there.
• The titular lost mine of Phandelver includes the Forge of Spells, a site where dwarves once studied arcane secrets. Maybe they studied the Netherese obelisks!
• There’s a nothic in the Redbrands hideout, a type of creature with specific ties to the Far Realms, Vecna, and the mind flayers in this adventure. We could link him to the mind flayers, perhaps as an advanced scout in the region?
• The Spider, who is the main mastermind villain of Lost Mine of Phandelver, seeks the Forge of Spells. Maybe he could also be looking for pieces of the shattered obelisk, allowing us to plant lore in his lair.
• We could actually just put an obelisk fragment in the Phandelver mine itself! Finding this fragment alerts the mind flayers to the presence of a shattered obelisk in the Phandalin region, triggering the next phase of the campaign!

But the designers do none of these things. Instead, they “foreshadow” the mind flayer plot by randomly pasting psionic goblins into various encounters. These psionic goblins do things that are best described as LOL-so-random-LOL, and it’s difficult to really convey just how dumb this is. Here’s the first reference to them, which comes from questioning the Cragmaw goblins from the first encounter:

Strange Goblins. Recently, strange goblins have sometimes joined the Cragmaws in their road-ambushes, though not today. These strange goblins have elongated skulls, and glowing green energy surrounds their weapons when they attack. The Cragmaw goblins don’t know who these newcomers are; the new goblins simply cackle and leave after each attack.

None of this makes any sense. Why would you allow random people to join your ambush? More importantly, why are the psionic goblins doing this? It’s not just the Cragmaw goblins who don’t know. The designers don’t either.

Even the decision to choose psionic goblins to be the minions of the mind flayers is fraught, because — as you’ve seen — the completely unrelated bad guys in Lost Mine of Phandelver are also goblins. You could have added the word “psionic” to literally anything else in the Monster Manual and it would have been a better choice: It would have mixed things up and helped keep the campaign fresh. It also would have made things significantly less confusing for the players.

STOP HUFFING YOUR OWN HYPE

I have unfortunately learned that if Wizards’ marketing promises some big, amazing thing in their next adventure book, it’s a virtual certainty that the book itself will completely fail to deliver on that promise.

• Dragon Heist doesn’t feature a heist (and also doesn’t include the promised links to Undermountain).
• Descent Into Avernus breathlessly promised Mad Max in Hell, but then only included a couple pages about infernal war machines before immediately forgetting that they exist for the rest of the book.
• Shadows of the Dragon Queen promised full integration with Warriors of Krynn so that you could play your own PCs on the battlefields of the wargame… and then just forgot to do that.

So when the marketing for Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk promised to reveal the TRUTH ABOUT THE OBELISKS which had been seen in previous 5^th Edition adventures like Tomb of Annihilation, Storm King’s Thunder, and Rime of the Frostmaiden… well, you know what happened.

First, the “truth” about the obelisks is completely irrelevant to The Shattered Obelisk. In fact, I’m uncertain how the PCs could even learn the “truth.”

Second, literally nothing new is revealed about the obelisks. The four paragraphs tucked away into the “Netherese Obelisks” appendix at the back of the book are just a rewritten version of the “Secret of the Obelisks” sidebar that appeared in Rime of the Frostmaiden back in 2020.

And, ultimately, this is really unsurprising. Because the Cylons Wizards’ designers don’t have a plan. They never had a plan. “Weird obelisk” is a common genre trope, so they just coincidentally showed up as flavor text in a bunch of different adventures. Then fans noticed the “pattern” and created a Grand Conspiracy out of it. In the context of The Shattered Obelisk as a book, this doesn’t even count as a flub: The book doesn’t need or even seem to want a grand “truth about the Obelisks,” so it doesn’t matter that one isn’t included.

But Wizards needs to stop selling their books by lying about them.

And if you were planning to buy The Shattered Obelisk because you were looking forward to learning the truth about the Obelisks… well, you deserve to know that it was a lie and you won’t get it.

Go to Part 2: Obelisk Hunting

Alice is Missing is a stunningly beautiful storytelling game that delivers an utterly unique and unforgettable experience. I’ve played it twice, with different groups, and each game was profound. Every player was deeply affected, and several texted the group the next morning to say that they’d dreamed about the events of the game.

The premise of Alice is Missing is in the title: A high school student named Alice has gone missing, and the players will take on the roles of her friends as they try to figure out what happened while dealing with the emotional trauma of her disappearance.

The central conceit of the game is this: You don’t talk. Instead, all of your interactions — all of your roleplaying — takes place via text messaging.

HOW IT WORKS

You can play with three to five players and you’ll start by each selecting one of the five broad, archetypal characters provided. These are quickly fleshed out with Drives, which provide Motives (a key personality trait) and two Relationships, which you’ll assign to two different player characters. It’s a fairly quick process that creates a remarkably broad dynamic of play while keeping the structure of play focused.

Now the Facilitator will start a group text message with all participants by sending a text with their character name in it. All the other players reply by sending their character name, at which point everyone should create a contact for that number (if they don’t have one already) and change its name to the character’s name.

At this point play begins: The Facilitator will open an Alice is Missing video which provides both a soundtrack and a 90-minute timer. From this point forward, no one speaks: The Facilitator will send a message initiating the game, and then everyone will spend the next hour and a half texting.

The core mechanic of the game revolves around Clue cards. These are synced to the timer — so, for example, there’s an 80 minute clue card, a 70 minute clue card, and so forth. There are three different cards for each time interval, and these can be freely intermixed, resulting in thousands of potential game states.

Each Clue card contains a prompt for the player who draws it:

• Reveal a Suspect card. This person shows up at your door acting suspicious. What weird question about Alice do they keep asking you?
• Reveal a Location card. You dig up some weird or unexpected history about this location. What do you learn about this place that would make it the perfect spot to hide?

The player creates the answer to this question and introduces it into the group chat, pushing the narrative of the game forward.

As you can see from these examples, the game also includes Suspect cards and Location cards. These help shape the mystery of Alice’s disappearance, and a number of clever mechanics are used to make sure that the narrative in the back half of the game evolves logically and naturally from the foundation laid down in the first half of the game, even as it’s ultimately being guided by the player’s creativity.

Finally, the game provides a deck of Searching cards which are more flexible: Whenever a PC decides to go somewhere without being prompted by a Clue card, they should draw a card from the Searching deck to reveal what they discover there. (Examples include “a drop of blood in the fresh snow” and “a loaded firearm.”)

SOME GRIT IN THE GEARS

Overall, Alice is Missing does an excellent job of walking a new player through the rules. The rulebook is actually split into two parts: The first is an in-depth explanation of the rules, and the second is a Facilitator’s Guide which walks the Facilitator (most likely the game’s owner) through the exact steps they should take to explain the rules to the other players (including short scripts they should read at every step).

This is crucial to the game’s success, because if everyone at the table isn’t completely onboard with the rules, the central conceit of silent gameplay won’t work and the game will fall apart. Spenser Starke, the designer, deserves major kudos not just for a great game, but for making sure the presentation of the game was everything it needed to be.

With that being said, there are a few places where grit gets into the gears, and I’m going to point them out so that when you play Alice is Missing you can hopefully benefit from my experience and avoid them.

First, the game comes in a lovely box that suggests completeness. Unfortunately, the box is missing components. There are no character sheets, for example, and there’s also supposed to be a stack of missing person posters that isn’t in the box. These are all easily downloadable from the publisher’s website (at least for now), but these aren’t just optional supplements: The rulebook will tell you to, for example, select a missing person poster, and you won’t be able to. (So make sure you track these down ahead of time and print them out.)

Speaking of the character sheets, they’re too small. For example:

In the half-inch by three-inch space between “Charlie Barnes” and “Dakota Travis,”you’re supposed to write down their physical description, favorite class, home life, etc. plus the answer to their Background question plus more… You can’t do it. The character sheet should have been designed as a full-page sheet and probably also double-sided to work properly.

After everyone picks their characters, they’re encouraged to specify their character’s pronouns. This is great in principle, but Alice is Missing completely flubs the execution by constantly referring to the characters by predetermined pronouns (and even baking this into the mechanics). Points for trying, but beaucoup negative points for failing. (A close edit of the rulebook to remove predetermined pronouns and, most especially, removing gendered identities from the character roles would be the minimum required to fix this. Ideally, I’d also want all the character names to be gender neutral.)

On a similar note, every character has a Secret. These are listed on the character cards, and so when the Facilitator is instructed to lay the character cards out in front of the players and have them select which characters they want to play, all of the players are going to read every single character’s Secret. The Facilitator’s script then almost immediately says, “Do not share your Secret — it should come out in play.”

This is not actually a problem: The players are not their characters, and what the rulebook means is that the answer to your Secret prompt question should not be included in your character introduction, but instead revealed during play. But every single group I’ve played this with has immediately gone, “Wait. Did we screw up? I read the Secrets!” It’s a very minor thing, but it’s a consistent irritation and it’s probably worth thinking about how you want to tweak that particular point of presentation to sidestep it.

My final critique of Alice is Missing is more significant: The rulebook sets things up so that the Facilitator is always playing the character of Charlie Barnes.

I can understand why they’ve done this. (It allows them to script specific examples into the scripts in the Facilitator’s Guide.) But it makes for a really bad experience if you’re the one who owns the game and is, therefore, always the Facilitator introducing new players to it. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix this and let the Facilitator play any of the characters. (But it will require some edits to the guide and its procedures.)

WHAT MAKES IT BRILLIANT

I took the time to highlight all these little minor bits of grit in the gears of Alice is Missing because you’ll want to know about them when you play the game.

And you will want to play this game.

Because it’s brilliant.

The mechanics are elegant, easily grasped, and expertly tuned by Starke to effortlessly guide almost any group to a powerful story which is nevertheless unique every time. It’s a true exemplar of storytelling game design.

The novelty of the experience certainly helps to make it memorable, but the true brilliance of Alice is Missing is more than that. It’s a game that effortlessly immerses you in your character: The experience of play — focused through your text messaging app — is seamlessly identical to the character’s own experience.

You know how the world can sometimes sort of drop away when you get focused on your phone? Starke leverages that fugue state — everything else drops away, and the only thing you’re truly experiencing is the world of the text messages. A world where you’re not talking to your friends; you’re talking to Charlie and Dakota and Julia. (This is why it’s so important to change your contact names before playing.)

In addition, the text-based medium automatically leads the player to create the game world through a creative closure which is nigh-indistinguishable from the closure you perform every day in the real world. When Julia, for example, texts you to say, “There’s someone outside my window!” you immediately imagine that scene in exactly the same way you would if one of your actual friends texted that to you.

The power of that in a roleplaying experience really can’t be underestimated.

Either of these two things — the near-flawless mechanical design or the novel genius of the text-based roleplaying — would make the game worth checking out.

The two together?

Alice is Missing is one of the best storytelling games ever made.

Grade: A+

Designer: Spenser Starke

Publisher: Hunters Entertainment / Renegade Game Studios
Cost: $21.99
Page Count: 48
Card Count: 72