Go to Part 1

THIS BROKEN RAILROAD

By its nature, Call of the Netherdeep is a linear campaign: Festival of Merit → Emerald Grotto → Bazzoxan → Ank’Harel → Cael Morrow → the Netherdeep.

In theory, this should be fine.

In practice, however, the designers have decided to link these set pieces together with a railroad.

And, unfortunately, it’s a really shoddy railroad. Honestly, just sloppy, terrible, ill-conceived infrastructure. Maybe not quite, “there’s a dragon attacking a town that’s also being besieged by an army, and our expectation is that the 1^st level characters will decide to just walk into town,” bad, but close.

Let’s start with the hook for the entire campaign.

At the end of the Festival of Merit, the Elders of Jigow choose the two most successful teams to compete in the Grand Finale race through the Emerald Grotto. One team will be the PCs. The other team will be the Rivals.

This is a little weird, because literally none of the festival games up to this point have been team-based events. The only previous mentions of a “team,” in fact, were (a) an event where you are explicitly FORBIDDEN from competing as a team and (b) a different event where you competed with a partner (which is not the same thing as the five-ish person teams selected at the Grand Finale).

So, to kick things off, there this’s big, glaring continuity error squatting right on top of the event which is the lynchpin for the entire campaign.

In any case, the PCs and Rivals have to race through the Emerald Grotto and claim the Emerald Eye. Whichever team returns with the Emerald Eye wins the race.

Oddly, the adventure then acts as if the races ends as soon as someone grabs the Eye. Which, of course, it doesn’t.

But let’s move past that, too.

The real problem here is that the entire campaign hook is horribly broken.

Here’s how it works:

• The PCs get to the end of the Emerald Grotto and they spot a shark that has the Emerald Eye strapped to its side.
• They fight the shark.
• When the shark dies, it crashes into a stone pillar, causing the wall of the cavern to crack open.
• This reveals a passage “awash with golden light.”
• If the PCs go down the passage, they will discover the Jewel of Three Prayers, which — as noted above — is the essential McGuffin on which the entire plot is built.

Problem #1: It’s a race.

So, yeah, the glowy light is interesting. But the PCs are motivated by their immediate and only goal to NOT explore the light right now. Generally speaking, you want scenario-crucial actions to flow from the established goals of the PCs, not in direct contradiction to them.

The same is true of the Rivals, of course, but ultimately you, as the DM, control their actions, so you can just decree that they go and check out the glowy light even if the PCs don’t. The campaign is designed to hypothetically work if the Rivals claim the Jewel of Three Prayers (more on that in a second), so you can route around this. It’s just kind of awkward in its design.

The bigger problem is that you don’t have to fight the shark.

In fact, fighting the shark is probably the dumbest way for the PCs to get the Emerald Eye.

Even if you overrule an Animal Handling check, that still leaves alternative solutions like mage hand (to grab the amulet), an animal friendship spell, or just a Stealth check (with or without invisibility). And it should be noted that the writers know that these options exist, because animal friendship is how they get the amulet on the shark in the first place:

A druid of Jigow cast animal friendship on the shark earlier today and tied the Emerald Eye around its body, then made a speedy getaway.

So… no dead shark?

No thrashing.

No thrashing, no pillar collapse.

No pillar collapse, no glowy light.

No glowy light, the campaign doesn’t happen.

Oof.

Okay, let’s move forward to the next day. There are four scenarios:

PCs have the Jewel, the Rivals are Indifferent. The Rivals decide to just follow the PCs. (We’ll come back to this.)

PCs have the Jewel, the Rivals are Friendly. The Rivals offer to join the PCs (and, as mentioned before, the rivalry breaks and GMPC problems start).

PCs have the Jewel, the Rivals are Hostile. In this case, the Rivals try to steal the Jewel. First, as mentioned earlier, this probably means that the Rivals are now dead and the rivalry is over. More than that, the railroad is frequently driven by the Rivals showing up by surprise and forcing the plot forward: So whether they’re working with the PCs or they’re dead, the railroad breaks multiple times over.

Second, their plan for stealing the Jewel is also hilarious:

The rivals’ plan is to gather outside the inn where the characters are staying. One rival then sneaks into the characters’ room at the inn and searches for the jewel. If the thief doesn’t return after an hour, the rivals travel to the Emerald Loop Caravan Shop (described later in this chapter) and wait up to seven days for their mission companion.

Uhh…

Maggie: So the plan was for Galsariad to sneak in and grab the Jewel?

Ayo: Yup.

Maggie: And then he comes right back?

Ayo: Yup.

Maggie: And he hasn’t come back.

Ayo: Yup.

Irvan: What should we do?

Ayo: Let’s leave town and wait at a rest stop for a week. See if he shows up.

…

Anyway.

The Rivals have the Jewel. This is, as both we and Call of the Netherdeep have established, quite likely. And if it happens, the railroad junction is almost unimaginably bad:

You’re eating breakfast at the Unbroken Tusk while locals chat around you. Through the cacophony, one voice catches your attention.

“Rumor has it they’re going to Rosohna to sell it. Elder Ushru met them and everything, kept whispering while pointing at a huge, shiny amulet on the table. He was talking about ‘destiny’ and other heroic-like words. I think they were the group who won the grand finale yesterday. The amulet looked plenty magical, but even if it isn’t, it’d be worth a fortune. Yeah, they’re traveling down the Emerald Loop today.”

[…]

People are saying that the jewel would sell for over 1,000 gold pieces — maybe twice that if it’s magical, and twice that again if the sellers were to make the long, oversea journey to a trade hub like the desert metropolis of Ank’Harel.

Nothing is forcing the characters to chase down the rivals, but the thought of losing out on such a prize is enough to motivate most adventurers.

That’s it. That’s the hook: Chase the Rivals down and rob them.

“The thought of losing out on such a prize is enough to motivate most adventurers.”

That’s not adventurers. You’re thinking of criminals.

And not even very smart criminals. There’s gotta be easier marks for 1,000 gp than five well-equipped adventurers who already beat you once.

Even if the players do hear these rumors and leap straight to, “Oh, man! We definitely gotta rob those people!” Call of the Netherdeep forgets to include a mechanism for telling them that they’re supposed to go to Bazzoxan.

Sure, they might interrogate the Rivals before/after robbing them. Or maybe they follow them all the way to Bazzoxan before robbing them.

But if not, the entire adventure is literally scripted to derail.

EVERYTHING FAILS TOGETHER

Sadly, the whole campaign is like this. Every transition is a broken, ill-conceived railroad.

One I want to call particular attention to, however, is the transition from Bazzoxan to Ank’Harel, because I think it reveals the fundamental misstep of Call of the Netherdeep here.

To briefly review, the core structure here is:

• The PCs meet one or more of the three researchers in Bazzoxan.
• They go into Betrayers’ Rise.
• They follow one of the researchers back to Bazzoxan, where they join that researcher’s faction.

This seems pretty straightforward, right?

But every step of the way, Call of the Netherdeep transforms this into a tortured disaster.

First, the campaign hides the researchers so that the PCs have to jump through weird, arbitrary, unlabeled hoops to meet them.

The first option is:

• The PCs randomly wander over to the crematorium.
• They decide to stay and help dispose of corpses.
• A researcher named Prolix shows up.

If the PCs don’t go to the crematorium? The campaign breaks. If they don’t help dispose of the corpses? The campaign breaks.

The second option is:

• The PCs eventually wander into the inn.
• Among a number of other patrons, there’s a tiefling in the common room.
• If they don’t talk to the tiefling, the adventure specifically says the tiefling will ignore them.
• If they do talk to the tiefling (who is named Question), they need to mention the Jewel of the Three Prayers.
• If they mention the Jewel, then the third researcher (Aloysia), who has been eavesdropping on this conversation, will be like, “Hey! I’m the NPC who tells you what to do next!”

Don’t randomly talk to the tiefling? The campaign breaks. Don’t decide to spontaneously mention the Jewel (which you could very easily have decided is something you shouldn’t be flashing around) during this specific conversation? The campaign breaks.

This is, to put it politely, a very convoluted path. It’s really unclear to me why they’re locked the plot behind these deliberately obfuscated checkpoints.

To put it less politely, this is video game writing. And, sure, in a video game you can expect the players to keep clicking on NPCs in the tavern until they click on the right tiefling. But it doesn’t translate to the table top at all. There is no display of patrons for the players to click on.

But we’re not done yet.

Aloysia then proposes that she and the PCs should work together. Of course, as we’ve established, the campaign then just assumes the PCs will not accept her offer and pretends it never happened.

The campaign is simultaneously pretending that there’s no way the PCs are working with the Rivals, either. This is important, because, at the end of Betrayers’ Rise, the designers frame up a heavily railroaded “gotcha!” scene where Aloysia, accompanied by the Rivals, shows up and steals the Jewel.

This forced fight (which can’t happen at all if any of these convoluted preconditions is not met), ends with one of two scripted outcomes.

If Aloysia wins, she cracks a teleportation tablet, creating a teleportation circle to Ank’Harel, and announces that the Rivals should follow her. The PCs theoretically have the opportunity to follow her here, but since they’re presumably dead or unconscious, this is unlikely.

If Aloysia loses, she runs away and casts earthquake, triggering a cave-in that blocks the PCs from pursuing her. She then fumbles through her bag and — hilariously — drops two teleportation tablets on the ground while trying to activate a third.

The PCs can then spend 10-20 hours digging their way out, find the teleportation tablets, think to themselves, “This definitely isn’t a trap,” and then use them to follow her.

Now, once the PCs get to Ank’Harel, the book acts as if the PCs are equally likely to join each of the three factions. But that’s not really the case, is it? First, Aloysia has just tried to rob them (and possibly kill them). Remember the Unforgivable Sin of stealing the PCs’ shit? Yeah.

Second, the only way for the PCs to join Aloysia’s faction — the Consortium — is if they raced after her, jumped through the teleportation circle moments after she went through, immediately forgave her for everything, and then signed up on the spot.

I mean… C’mon. Even if the adventure wasn’t doing everything in its power to stop the PCs from doing that, it’s not exactly a plausible outcome, right? “Hey, person who just tried to kill us! We are interested in your ideas and would like to hear more! Do you have a pamphlet or anything we could look over?”

It seems fairly likely to me that all of this would have made a lot more sense earlier in development: You have dynamic, interesting Rivals. The researchers in Bazzoxan would have had clear, ruidium-focused agendas. This would allow the players to make meaningful choices about which faction’s agenda they agree with, and these choices could have been contrasted against the choices of the Rivals, driving the action forward through Bazzoxan and into Ank’Harel.

If the book just presented these as toys for the DM to actively play with, it’s a robust situation rich with possibility.

But then somebody decided that they needed to write a railroad that forces Aloysia to be a maniacal, monologuing villain.

And the whole thing falls apart into nonsense.

The researchers get hidden behind scripted cut scenes in Bazzoxan. The adventure wants to hide what the researchers know (so that there can be Startling Revelations™ in Ank’Harel), so the PCs aren’t given the information to make meaningful choices. Aloysia gets railroaded off the table as a viable ally.

No clear stakes? The choice of researcher becomes arbitrary.

No true choice in researchers? The faction recruitment in Ank’Harel breaks.

All of these threads — all of these broken techniques based on the fundamental flaw of believing that railroading is the only way to link an adventure together — are woven together here. The result is muddy, confusing, difficult to use, and, more often than not, completely broken in actual practice.

It’s easy to look at a moment like this and say, “Well, the writers can’t possibly account for every possibility!”

And you’d be right.

Which is why Call of the Netherdeep SHOULD be focusing on giving the DM — who CAN account for what the group has done — the tools to do so, rather than hamstringing them with unusable scripts.

FACTION MISSIONS

In addition to the shortcomings of Netherdeep’s connective tissue, we now need to talk about the faction missions in Ank’Harel.

Like the faction missions in Dragon Heist, these are very barebones in their presentation.

Unlike the faction missions in Dragon Heist, these aren’t designed to be run as contrapuntal story beats while other stuff is happening. They’re just a linear string of events. So the barebones approach here mostly just means that this phase of the campaign feels incomplete.

The other problem with the faction missions is that… well, they’re pretty bad.

For example, there’s a mission where someone is trying to frame one of the PCs’ friends for stealing a ring by planting it in his pocket. So the PCs mount an investigation to clear their friend’s name.

They find two pieces of evidence:

1. An Insight check reveals that someone has a “guarded expression.”
2. This same person, a researcher in the ruidium-infested ruins of Cael Morrow, has a ruidium infection.

The adventure then confidently announces: “The characters can present their findings to Headmaster Gryz Alakritos.”

…

WHAT findings?

Bizarrely, their NPC friend, whose name they “cleared,” then gives them the ring as a reward.

The stolen ring.

That isn’t his.

Because that was the whole premise of the entire scenario.

The next faction mission features the PCs needing to track down a double agent. This one wraps up when the PCs find two pieces of evidence:

1. An Insight check reveals the agent’s “true intentions and affiliation.”
2. This same person, a researcher in the ruidium-infested ruins of Cael Morrow, has a ruidium infection.

And if you’re thinking, “Justin, you just said that.”

Yes.

Yes, I did.

It’s the exact same setup.

And the conclusion is, once again, “Proof?! Sir, I made an INSIGHT check!”

Add to this the aforementioned problem of multiple faction missions being set in the ruins of Cael Morrow, despite Cael Morrow being too small to support multiple faction missions.

Basically, the faction missions are really bad.

Fortunately, they’re also pointless: The idea is that you have to do these faction missions in order to gain access to Cael Morrow. But it turns out that the impregnable security on the Cael Morrow site consists of… a handful of CR 1 guards who might summon five CR 3 guards if they get a chance.

CONCLUSION

I’ve spent the last couple of sections really breaking down the problems with Call of the Netherdeep, so as we wrap up, I want to mention a few more things that I really like about the book.

First, the monster design is fantastic. Look at this aboleth spawn, it oozes creepiness:

And look at this sword wraith:

Just incredible concepts wedded to fantastic art. In fact, as you’ve seen throughout this review, the art team for Call of the Netherdeep is simply superb from one end of the book to the other.

Speaking of the visual design, I also want to mention the ruidium-inspired design of the book. At the beginning of the campaign, the occasional page will have have a ruidium-veined edge treatment. Over the course of the book, however, these veins grow, until the ruidium appears to be literally taking over the tome.

I don’t know if that’s the work of Senior Graphic Designer Trish Yochum or Graphic Designer Matt Cole, or both, but bravo. Excellent work.

In closing, as I look over the totality of Call of the Netherdeep, I see some familiar themes and elements:

• Faction missions from Dragon Heist
• Corrupting crystals from Legacy of the Crystal Shard
• A three-stage god fight like the one found in Rime of the Frostmaiden
• Deep-diving memory visions to redeem a divinity from Descent Into Avernus

But the synthesis works here. In fact, in all but one case (the faction missions), I think you can safely argue that each individual element works better in Call of the Netherdeep than in its antecedents.

I think there are, as we have seen, some serious issues with structure and logic that will make this campaign much harder to run effectively than it should be. Ultimately, whether you decide to answer the Call of the Netherdeep or not is largely going to depend on whether you think it’s worth the salvage effort to rebuild the core structure of the campaign into something that makes sense.

The things to focus on, I think, are:

• Those excellent dungeons that form big, meaty pillars to build your campaign around.
• The fundamental excellence of the Rivals once your strip away the badly scripted sequences.
• The beautiful and enigmatic lore of Alyxion the Apotheon, which — if properly structured — will draw the players deep into a tragic story of epic proportions and then empower them to provide its conclusion.

Despite my reservations, I recommend Call of the Netherdeep. With a manageable amount of work, I think you’ll find something truly special for you and your players to enjoy.

Style: 5
Substance: 3

Project Leads: James J. Haeck, Matthew Mercer, Christopher Perkins
Writers: James J. Haeck, Makenzie De Armas, LaTia Jacquise, Cassandra Khaw, Sadie Lowry
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Cost: $49.95
Page Count: 224

FURTHER READING
Call of the Netherdeep: Running Betrayers’ Rise
Call of the Netherdeep: Running the Rivals
Remixing Call of the Netherdeep
How to Remix an Adventure

Go to Part 1

THE DUNGEONS

Call of the Netherdeep is studded with a sequence of really cool dungeons:

• Emerald Grotto
• Betrayers’ Rise
• Cael Morrow
• The Netherdeep

Emerald Grotto is the launch point of the campaign. It’s a pretty basic cave design, but the underwater setting gives it some nice flavor. The forked design is also used to structurally highlight the relationship between the PCs and the Rivals.

Betrayers’ Rise is you standard “cyst of evil” affair, but the devil is in the details here. (Pun intended.) The map is lightly xandered, giving the PCs some nice strategic control in their exploration, and the key is drenched in gothic atmosphere.

Cael Morrow is a sunken city. Or, more accurately, a small part of this city. This is probably the weakest of the dungeons, but is still quite good. The back half opens up, allowing for a more freeform exploration of the ruins, and the key is once again excellent in its specific detail.

The Netherdeep is the big finale of the campaign, an extrusion of the Apotheon’s subconscious mind and memory. And, not to sound like a broken record, once again the map is great and the key richly detailed.

Here’s a good example of how great these dungeon keys are:

R2. HALL OF HOLES

The walls of this hallway are covered with carvings that depict a great battle involving mortals, celestials, and fiends. A faint whistling noise emerges from the walls, sounding almost like snoring.

A character who succeeds on a DC 15 Intelligence (History) check recognizes the wall carvings depict the Battle of the Barbed Fields. This fight was a climactic battle of the Calamity, in which the devotees of the Prime Deities broke through the garrison at the Betrayers’ Rise and reached the walls of Ghor Dranas. Prominently depicted in one scene is a proud, melancholy warrior with curly hair carrying a spear and shield. By his side are two figures; a white-haired girl no more than twelve years old, and a young adult woman with hair that flows behind her, turning into a road upon which countless soldiers march. A character who makes a successful DC 10 Intelligence (Religion) check realizes that the latter two are common depictions of the gods Sehanine the Moon Weaver and Avandra the Change Bringer.

There are several things to note here.

First, the boxed text invokes multiple senses, not just sight.

Second, you see generic “there are pretty pictures on the wall” or “there are some statues here” in dungeon keys all the time, but the writer here has taken the effort to get specific with the art: The hall isn’t just covered in carvings; it’s covered in these specific carvings depicting this specific thing.

Third, this effect is enhanced with multiple skill checks allowing one or more PCs to dive even deeper into the lore. This turns the lore into a reward, giving real meaning to the PCs’ abilities and also likely investing the players more deeply in what their abilities have revealed.

In a single room, this attention to detail is nice. Over the course of the entire campaign, it elevates the entire experience. This is the practical method by which the world of Exandria is brought to vivid life in Call of the Netherdeep.

When it comes to the dungeons, however, I do have a quibble.

Taken on their own merits, Betrayers’ Rise and Cael Morrow are both really good dungeons. The problem is that the dungeons are too small for the lore surrounding them.

Betrayers’ Rise, for example, is presented as a sort of Moria or Undermountain: A vast underground complex with depths unexplored and perhaps unexplorable, out of which demons of the Abyss emerge to threaten the town above. But the actual dungeon found in Call of Netherdeep is teeny-tiny, consisting of just sixteen rooms.

To address the mismatch, the writers kind of toss out the idea that “the characters experience a particular version” of Betrayers’ Rise, and that others experience “different configurations” of the dungeon. They also provide “Betrayers’ Rise Encounters” (p. 63) that can be used as inspiration to “expand” the Rise. But ultimately you’re selling one experience and then delivering another.

Betrayers’ Rise does, ultimately, work as presented, even if it’s not ideal. More problematic is Cael Morrow: Here again, the lore treats the drowned city as a vast archaeological site… but only delivers a handful of buildings and seventeen keyed locations.

In Cael Morrow, however, this is not just an aesthetic mismatch; it’s a deeply flawed structure. The campaign is designed with the expectation that the PCs will journey down into Cael Morrow for a series of faction missions (at least three, possibly more). This makes sense if the archaeological expedition is exploring the entirety of the ruined city, but it isn’t. Cael Morrow simply isn’t large enough to support the iterative missions.

Imagine that you give the PCs a faction mission that sends them into a dungeon. And, when that mission is done, there are seven DAYS until they receive their next mission. (And then another seven days between that mission and the one after that.)

What are the PCs going to do?

Well, if they didn’t completely explore the dungeon during the first mission (and they very easily may have), they’re almost certainly going to go back and finish exploring the dungeon.

Again: It’s only seventeen rooms.

And there’s nothing else for them to do in Ank’Harel.

Because Cael Morrow’s design doesn’t match its lore, there’s just no way these faction missions can work as written.

A good chunk of Cael Morrow is also hilariously linear given the nature of these missions.

The way it works is that the Allegiance of Allsight (one of the Ank’Harel factions) has used magical keystones to create regions of the city where the water is held back, making it much easier for them to excavate these sites. In practice, what they’ve done is create a linear corridor of air about 300 feet long.

One of the Allsight faction missions involves the primary archivist, who is concerned because one of his researchers has been missing for three days and he has no idea where she might be.

Where is she?

200 feet away, straight down a linear corridor.

To be clear, the problem here is not that the excavation site is limited to only one small portion of the city. (As I mentioned before, on its own merits the design of Cael Morrow dungeon is pretty good.)

The problem is that everything in the campaign — the NPCs, the faction missions, the lore, the pacing — is pretending this isn’t the case.

Go to Part 3: This Broken Railroad

SPOILERS FOR CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP

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

I have virtually no knowledge of Critical Role.

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

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

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

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

OVERVIEW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE RIVALS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problem solved, right?

No.

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

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

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

Regardless, the result is badly broken.

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

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

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

Go to Part 2: The Dungeons

Frostbanes are skeletal figures case in ice, but with a flame burning within their chest. Through its icy sheath, this flame burns fiercely — usually in shades of blues, but often purple or green or even crimson.

The Frozen Damned. Frostbane are powerful undead created from corpses which have been frozen for at least a century (usually within icy glaciers, although there are tales of reaping fields upon the Plane of Ice which are maintained and harvested by ancient liches patient enough to mortal lifetimes for their schemes to unfold).

Ice & Fire. Their existence is born from paradox and their mockery of life sustained through an antithetical balance of elemental forces, for the necromancer kindles within their frozen breast a magical flame. This flame slowly consumes their dead flesh, but does not affect the ice which was their death and tomb. Thus heat and frost are maintained in an eternal, impossible tension.

The frostbane thus thirsts eternally for the warmth it is denied — drawing in the heat of life and flame around it, but instantly converting it into the deathly grip of ice.

FROSTBANE

Medium undead, neutral evil

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Armor Class 17

Hit Points 98 (15d8+30)

Speed 30 ft.

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STR 15 (+2), DEX 16 (+3), CON 15 (+2), INT 11 (+0), WIS 12 (+1), CHA 8 (-1)

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Saving Throw Dex +6

Skills Perception +6, Survival +4

Senses passive Perception 16

Damage Immunities fire

Condition Immunities exhaustion, poisoned

Challenge 6 (2,300 XP)

Proficiency Bonus: +3

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Aura of Ice. Anyone within 40 feet of the frostbane suffers 4d6 cold damage per round (DC 14 Constitution saving throw for half damage) Anyone touching the frostbane suffers an additional 2d6 cold damage (no save). Anyone hitting the frostbane with a melee weapon suffers 1d6 cold damage (no save). Every 3 points of cold damage heals 1 point of damage to the frostbane.

Contingent Regeneration. If the frostbane is within 40 feet of a living creature or source of heat, it regains 5 hit points at the start of its turn. If the frostbane starts its turn at 0 hit points doesn’t regenerate, it enters a dormant state and appears “dead.” If someone approaches within 40 feet of the dormant frostbane, however, they can attempt a DC 14 Wisdom (Perception) check to notice an unnatural chill in the air. If the dormant frostbane remains within 40 feet of a living creature or heat source for 5 minutes, it will rouse from its dormancy (and begin healing from itsaura of ice).

The frostbane only truly dies if it suffers cold damage while in its dormant state (snuffing out the flame at its heart).

Heart of Flame. Frostbanes are immune to fire damage and heal 1 point of damage for every 3 points of fire damage they otherwise would have suffered.

Frostspawn. Any humanoid slain by a frostbane rises as a zombie (MM, p. 315) in 1d4 rounds. There’s a 10% chance that such a zombie will transform into a frostbane 1d4 hours later. (There may be rites a necromance could use to increase these odds by helping to kindle its nascent flame.)

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ACTIONS

Claw. Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 9 (2d6+2) cold damage.

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Frostbanes appear in The Mrathrach Agenda.

These detailed notes, written in silver ink on black vellum scrolls, constitute the exploration of an alchemical process referred to as azh-thalar, a dark elven word which can be translated as “boneforging.” And, indeed, the text refers to the work as deriving from the “lore of the dark elves” and, elsewhere, “the teachings of Su-Thanaz.” Several excerpts of the original body of work are directly included, without translation, in the text itself.

Once translated in full, however, the text describes a process by which bone is taken from a dead or undead creature and then molded using alchemical processes into a new form. The items so created can be almost limitless in their variety, and part of the alchemical process specifically tempers the bone to be as hard as steel (allowing effective weapons, armor, and the like to be fashioned).

Particularly intriguing, however, are the advanced methods of undead boneforging, in which the powers of the undead creature can be infused into the bone itself after the shaping is completed.

BONEFORGING

Boneforging requires alchemist’s supplies and a successful Intelligence (alchemist’s supplies) check, the difficulty of which is dependent on the size of the item desired, as shown on the table below.

Obviously, the alchemist must also have the requisite supply of bone. Complex or artistic items may require additional crafting checks at the DM’s discretion.

Boneforging is generally only appropriate for solid, static items (e.g., a chair, knife, bowl), but boneforged components could be combined with other material. Supple material (e.g., a rope) can be forged from cartilage, but this is a more delicate process and the Intelligence (alchemist’s supplies) check to make the item is made at disadvantage.

ADVANCED BONEFORGING

An alchemist creating a boneforged magic item from an undead creature can attempt to replace one spell required by the item creation with the raw necromantic power of the undead from which the item is being crafted. (Note that these items are not made from the remains of the dead; they are forged from undead still possessed of unlife.)

This process can generally be used to replace a spell with a level equal to 1/3^rd of the undead creature’s challenge rating. (So a CR 9 undead could be used to replace a 3^rd level spell.) A skeleton or zombie, however, can only be used to replace a spell with a level equal to 1/6^th their HD. (The simplistic energy which animates such mindless undead is not particularly useful for the complex matricies of the advanced boneforging.)

Advanced boneforging requires an Intelligence (alchemist’s supplies) check (DC 15 + the spell level being replaced). If the check fails, the spell is not replaced and must be provided normally or the item creation process will fail.

Boneforging does not reduce the cost of creating the magic item. (The cost of the alchemical supplies normally required by boneforging is included in this cost, however.)

This material is covered by the Open Game License.