Go to Part 1

At this point in Call of the Netherdeep, the PCs are supposed to (a) be aware of the Jewel of Three Prayers and (b) have received a vision of an unidentified prisoner who begs them for help (either directly or as a kind of psychic static if the Rivals were the ones who touched the Jewel first). Structurally, the PCs are now supposed to leave Jigow and head to Bazzoxan.

If the PCs have the Jewel, the transition works like this:

• Elder Ushru tells them he also had a vision of the same mysterious figure.
• He identifies the Jewel of Three Prayers as a Vestige of Divergence, i.e. “an enchanted relic from the time of the Calamity.”
• He tells them that they should go to Bazzoxan because “there is no place in Xhorhas where the memory of the Calamity lingers more strongly than in Bazzoxan.”

If the Rivals have the Jewel, the transition works like this:

• The PCs overhear someone saying that (a) the Jewel is worth at least 1,000 gp and (b) the Rivals have left town and are heading to Rosohna.
• ???

The idea seems to be that this will prompt the PCs to hunt down the Rivals and rob them. Although even if they do that, the campaign doesn’t really include any mechanism to then point the PCs towards Bazzoxan. So the connection here is either broken outright or outrageously fragile.

But even the first version of this hook is pretty problematic. The core problem is that the PCs are not actually given a reason to go to Bazzoxan. Yes, the “memory of the Calamity” lingers there, but that’s not actually a reason. To understand the distinction, consider the immediate follow-up question from the PCs: “And what do we do when we get there?”

If you can’t answer that question, then you don’t actually have a reason to go. This is why, when the PCs get to Bazzoxan, the book assumes they’ll just kind of wander around until they bump into the plot.

(There is, of course, a metagame reason for the players to have their characters go to Bazzoxan — the DM has mentioned a place name and is waggling their eyebrows suggestively. But (a) that’s a bad table experience and (b) doesn’t solve the underlying structural issue here.)

The other thing to ask yourself here is, “Why are the PCs even talking to Elder Ushru?” Well, because he had the vision, right?

But why did HE have the vision?

Because, in the absence of a reason to go to Bazzoxan, the adventure needs an NPC mouthpiece through which the DM can say, “You’re supposed to go to Bazzoxan.”

My rule of thumb, though, is that if I have an NPC doing something really cool (and I count receiving enigmatic visions from proto-gods on the list of really cool things), I should double-check and make sure I couldn’t design things so that the PCs get to do the really cool thing.

So let’s clean all of this up.

UNIVERSAL VISION

When anyone touches the Jewel of Three Prayers (whether it’s the PCs or the Rivals), everyone in the Emerald Grotto receives the vision of Alyxian the Apotheon.

This means that PCs and Rivals alike have a unique connection to the Apotheon and they have ALL received the campaign’s call to adventure, regardless of who actually ends up in possession of the Jewel of Three Prayers. This connection to the Apotheon, of course, can (and will!) persist through the entire campaign, drawing both PCs and Rivals inexorably towards the Netherdeep.

It also means that the vision can be used to clearly establish the bridge from Jigow to Bazzoxan. There are a couple of ways that we can do this.

EXPLICIT VISION

In the vision as written, Alyxian says:

“I am imprisoned, please help me.” […] “My name is Alyxian. I am lost in darkness. Long ago, I prayed to the Change Bringer in the heart of a temple of evil. I beg you, take my jewel and…”

The easiest fix here is to just change the vague reference to a “temple of evil” and make the call explicit:

“You must find me! You must bring the Jewel to the Cyst of Avandra within Betrayer’s Rise beneath Bazzoxan!”

This is every bit as direct as the DM waggling their eyebrows while pointing at the flashing neon sign saying, “The book says you need to go to Bazzoxan, dummies!” But, of course, it has the advantage of being diegetic: It’s the PCs, not the players, who are being given a clear instruction.

ENIGMATIC VISION

There are, however, a number of reasons why you might want the players to work for this a bit:

• I’ve previously mentioned Getting the Players to Care. One of the techniques described there is making something a mystery: the process of unraveling a secret will invest the players in the lore, and also give them a sense of accomplishment and reward when they figure it out.
• If they need to figure out what the vision meant, it will probably also focus their attention on the Jewel. (Whereas if they’re just explicitly told where to go next, they may not spend much time thinking about the Jewel at all.)
• While the PCs are taking action to figure out the Jewel and/or vision, you can use the actions they take as a vector for feeding in other Lore of Alyxian.

You can accomplish this by basically just stripping information out of the vision to dial in the desired level of enigma. For example:

“You must find me! You must bring the Jewel to the Cyst of Avandra within Betrayer’s Rise!”

… okay, but where’s Betrayer’s Rise? This is fairly easy to figure out (ask almost anybody or just look at a map of Xhorhas).

Or you can strip out even more information:

“You must find me! You must bring the Jewel to the Cyst of Avandra!”

Well, Avandra the Change Bringer is obviously well-known. But what and where is her “cyst”? The PCs now have two vectors they could pursue: The Cyst or the Jewel.

Note: I’m enigmatically referring to the Prayer Site of Avandra within Betrayer’s Rise (CotN, p. 72) as a “cyst” of good within the evil of that place.

And, of course, you can go one step further:

“You must find me! Bring my Jewel to me!”

Which would obviously leave the PCs with the Jewel as their only vector.

Regardless, your structural goal is to point the PCs in the direction of Bazzoxan. So, depending on the vectors you’ve provided, this ultimately boils down to:

• Identifying that the Cyst of Avandra lies within Betrayer’s Rise (e.g., it is said that during the time of the Calamity, Avandra blessed a site within Bazzoxan; it is described in some demonic texts as a “cyst” which blighted that temple of the Betrayers Gods).
• Discovering that the Jewel of Three Prayers is depicted on the walls of Betrayer’s Rise. (We previously looked at how this research might work when we were discussing campaign agendas; e.g., Elder Ushru tells them he saw a drawing of “this very Jewel” there when he was younger.)

Once the PCs start digging into this enigma, you may find them pursuing other lines of inquiry unrelated to the Apotheon’s vision. If so, remember once again that your goal is to point them to Bazzoxan.

For example, they might become curious about the ruidium outcroppings in the Emerald Grotto. (Identifying and researching the red crystals reveals that there are similar outcroppings in Bazzoxan.) Or they might try to do historical research into the history of the Emerald Grotto/Jigow to figure out where the hidden temple came from. (This would be an opportunity to drop some Lore of Alyxian, including perhaps a reference suggesting a connection with the “Cyst of Avandra,” which would lead them back into the research trail for the cyst.)

As you begin pointing your final vectors into Bazzoxan, it’s worth noting that the ideal hook — for reasons described in the next section — should also imply an action of “talk to the local scholars” when they get there. If the PCs had to do research themselves to get there (while still having lingering questions they want answers to), this probably follows quite naturally. But, of course, you can also make it more explicit.

WHAT ABOUT THE RIVALS?

As noted, the Rivals received the same vision the PCs did and will likely have a lot of the same questions.

If they’re working together, this might be a good opportunity to “split the party” by having the Rivals pursue one set of leads while the PCs pursue another. (This might eventually include the PCs heading to Bazzoxan while the Rivals pursue “other leads” and only join them later.) If the PCs fail to identify Bazzoxan as their goal (for whatever reason), then you can use allied Rivals to deliver the lead. Alternatively, maybe it’s the Rivals who fail to identify Bazzoxan, but still uncover some ancillary information of interest.

If they’re not, then think about how the Rivals might pursue their own research: Perhaps they journey to Rosohna to peruse the libraries of the dark elves or seek out a major temple of Avandra in Asarius in order to identify the Cyst. (If you’ve followed the Three Clue Rule and prepped multiple vectors that the PCs might follow to Bazzoxan, then you can just choose a research path they didn’t pursue and give it to the Rivals.) You might consider giving one of the Rivals a research journal summarizing their conclusions that the PCs might discover later.

In either case, it’s probably most interesting — even if the PCs and Rivals both successfully identify Bazzoxan as their next goal — for each team to collect related, non-overlapping lore in their investigations.

Go to Part 5: The Scholars of Ank’Harel

Go to Part 1

The Emerald Grotto is a great dungeon:

• The underwater setting is both refreshing and establishes an aquatic theme that will persist throughout the campaign.
• The bifurcated route does a great job of structurally reinforcing rivalry.
• The key itself is filled with a lot of delightful details and clever ideas.

But there are two problems bracketing the Emerald Grotto that I would want to address: the broken premise at the beginning and the fragile conclusion at the end.

ESSENTIAL HOOK: THE RACE

At the end of the festival, 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 will be the Rivals.

An elderly orc, dressed in deep blue robes, stands atop a platform of crates. He smiles at the crowd… “The main event, as you know, is yet to come. Only two teams will be chosen to compete in the final challenge—a race through the Emerald Grotto, in the depths of which the greatest prize awaits!”

And this is a little weird, because literally none of the contests up to this point have been team-based events. In fact, “teams” have only been mentioned in order to explicitly prohibit competitors from participating as a team (in J3).

This is a very awkward continuity glitch to have squatting right on top of the event which is the lynchpin for the entire campaign. But I don’t actually have a great solution for it.

HAVE TEAM EVENTS: One option would be to revamp the Festival of Merit so that it would feature team events. Unfortunately, revamping the existing events to be team-based instead of individual-based isn’t very practical. So you’d basically be creating a whole new slate of team-based events.

THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF YOUR STORY: Alternatively, maybe the PCs aren’t actually a group when the campaign begins. They become a group because they are the individual athletes chosen by the Elders to form one of the Grand Finale race teams, and then their fate is inexorably bound together by the vision of the Apotheon.

Unfortunately, there are a couple problem with this.

First, what if one or more of the PCs don’t actually do very well in the contests? How would you justify the Elders picking them as the cream of the crop? (This problem also afflicts the team-based approach.) You might address this by running the Festival of Merit as a Dungeon Crawl Classics-style funnel, where the players are all running a bunch of introductory characters and only those who score highest in the competitions become the PCs. (Although since Call of the Netherdeep starts at 3^rd level, it would be a very unusual funnel.)

Perhaps just a straight up lottery would work? It doesn’t matter how well you actually did in the various competitions at the festival, because the participants of the Grand Finale are selected by lot.

Second, you’d want the same logic to apply to the Rivals. But their backgrounds are all built around them being an existing group of aspiring adventurers. So you’d basically have to scrap them as characters and rebuild them from the ground up. (Which isn’t very appealing, since the Rivals are one of the strengths of the campaign.)

Like I said, I don’t really have a completely satisfying solution here.

Here are some possibilities though:

• Lottery. Participation in the Grand Finale is determined by lottery. Festival members get a number of entries in the lottery equal to the number of medals they win. (Using the lottery system bypasses the, “What if the PCs have rotten luck during the festival?” as long as the PCs win at least one medal.)
• Individual Competition. If the PCs are competing individually (and being drawn together by fate during the Grand Finale), then you can frame the Rivals as being last year’s champions. (They won, have been hanging out since then, and have decided to try their hand at adventuring. This requires some minor revision to their back story, but not so much as to require a complete rewrite.)
• Group Competition. Alternatively, people sign up for the Festival as a team. The team gets a number of entries in the Grand Finale lottery equal to the number of medals they win.

Obviously the fix is in and the PCs and Rivals will be selected no matter what. This is, after all, the instigating event of the entire campaign. The goal here is not really to take your thumb off the scale; it’s to make your thumb invisible enough that the game world still logically makes sense.

ESSENTIAL HOOK: TRIGGERING THE EARTHQUAKE

When the PCs get to the end of the Emerald Grotto they see a shark with the Emerald Eye strapped to its side. They then fight the shark and, when they defeat the shark:

The dying shark slams into the stone pillar in the south end of the cavern. The pillar cracks under the force, teeters, then crashes down against the south wall. The wall fractures and collapses, revealing a passage awash with golden light.

If the PCs follow the golden light, of course, they discover the Jewel of Three Prayers, the essential McGuffin on which the entire plot of the campaign is based.

There are a couple of minor quibbles here:

• The PCs are in the middle of a race. So, yeah, the glowy light is interesting, but they’re heavily motivated by their immediate goal to NOT check it out 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 for the Rivals, of course, but since you control their actions, it’s easy enough to route around this problem.)
• The players might have some questions about how the shark got into this cave, since it’s too large to fit through any of the passages. (This might particularly be true if they decide to lure the shark away from the grotto for some reason.)

But the far bigger problem is that the PCs 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 (although there’s no reason that you should), that still leaves alternative solutions like mage hand (to grab the amulet), animal friendship, or even just making a Stealth check (perhaps assisted by invisibility).

(It should be noted that the writers KNOW these options exist, because animal friendship is how a druid of Jigow got the amulet on the shark in the first place.)

The short version is that if the shark doesn’t get killed, then it has no death throes. No death throes? No pillar collapsing. No pillar collapsing? No glowy light. No glowy light?

The campaign doesn’t happen.

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: My recommendation is that grabbing the Emerald Eye triggers a thunderous voice which declares that SO-AND-SO HAS WON THE RACE. This booming announcement pulses through the water, echoes across the shore… and also triggers an underwater cave-in that reveals the glowy light.

(This also, you’ll note, ends the race immediately, so that the PCs no longer have a competing motivation driving them to ignore the glowy light.)

Go to Part 4: Road to Bazzoxan

Go to Part 1

The community of Jigow is really cool. A literal jumble of villages which have smashed together as they’ve grown around giant mangrove trees. It’s the chaos of urban growth in real-time as large chunks of the town are literally mobile:

The villages and townships that make up Jigow are loosely divided into three major areas: the Meatwaters, the main dock area on the shores of the Ifoon River; the Wetwalks, a collection of houses on stilts closest to the wetlands and marshes; and the Jumble, the most densely populated region of the city, where houses are built among giant mangrove trees or on the backs of horizonback tortoises and used as traveling homes.

As written, Jigow is a unique and very flavorful community.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the cartographer:

To be clear, this map is a beautiful piece of artwork. But instead of presenting the unique city of the text, it presents a very generic community with the same kind of urban planning that we’ve seen in lots of other fantasy city maps.

Only three tortoises? Why is the thick mangrove forest depicted as scattered trees? This is not many communities that have collided, but a single community built around a central common area.

Aesthetics aside, the key is confusing at best. You’ve got the Meatwaters district on the shore, the Wetwalk stilt-houses near the wetlands, and the Jumble between them. But:

• J2 is in the Jumbles and J6 is the Wetwalks. So where is Meatwaters, exactly?
• J5 are the rice paddies on the edge of the wetlands, but J1 is also in the Jumbles… so where are the stilt-houses of the Wetwalks supposed to be?

Jigow, as described, would be a real challenge for a cartographer. (If nothing else, large chunks of the town are mobile.) On top of that, based on the keyed locations, I would assume they were given bad notes to work from. (The turtle tracks are a lovely touch, though.)

I am a huge, huge fan of using city maps to draw players into an immersive urban environment. In the case of Jigow, unfortunately, I would strongly recommend not using the map.

The other option would be to heavily modify the text to accurately reflect the map’s depiction of the city, but given how much more interesting the text’s version of the city is, I think that would be a mistake.

MOTILE LIFE: I want to take a moment to reflect on what I see as the motile life of Jigow. There are clustered “villages” of static structures, but lots of people and even more businesses live and work on the tortoises.

You “commute” to work by having your tortoise head up to the paddy fields. The bakeries follow you, arriving at the Wetwalks midday to sell lunch to laborers taking a break from the high noon heat. When lunch is done, though, the bakeries will head down to the Meatwaters for the mid-afternoon dock breaks.

Having a soiree? It’s likely that you and some or all of your guests will bring your tortoises together in a clutch and drop gangways that will temporarily link your residences into a single big party locale.

At night, you’ll see the bars moving to drop off their drunken patrons (or at least the ones who tip well) so that they don’t have to walk home.

THE FESTIVAL OF MERIT

The campaign starts with the PCs standing in the middle of the Festival of Merit. Locations J1 through J7 are different festival games or challenges, and the festival is introduced like this:

All around you, colorful signs and banners point toward festival booths surrounded by cheering people. On this street alone, you can see a meat-pie eating contest near a shop mounted on the back of a massive tortoise [J1], and on the other side of the road, a banner emblazoned with the words “Riddles and Rhymes: Unbeatable Riddles!” That banner points toward a three-story temple in the center of the Jumble. [J7] The town is yours to explore—where do you want to go?

So the PCs are standing in the street between J1 and J7 and they’re told, “Where do you want to go?”

Obviously they’ll hit J1 and J7, but then the expected experience here is unclear to me. Are they just going to randomly walk around town and hope they run into keyed content? Or is the DM supposed to show them the keyed map and have them just point to which keyed location they want to go to? (That’s not exactly “the town is yours to explore.”)

To put this another way, you want the scale of the PCs’ decision to match the density of the keyed material. You can do street-by-street navigation in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord because there’s content keyed to every street. But that doesn’t work in Jigow because there’s not enough material keyed to make those decisions meaningful.

OPTION 1: FESTIVAL GREEN

One option is to latch onto “all around you, colorful signs and banners point toward festival booths surrounded by cheering people” and collapse the festival down into a single location. (This would probably be J6 on the map if you’re using it.)

Some of the competitions — the harvest race (J5), the Ifolon river plunge (J3) — are specific to other areas of town. For those competitions, create horizonback hawkers in the festival green who ferry people to the other festival centers: You load up onto a horizonback tortoise and the hawkers sell you their wares (drinks, baked goods, trinkets, etc.) while the tortoise walks you through town.

(These hawkers will also be a good exemplar of the motile life of Jigow.)

OPTION 2: FULL FESTIVAL

A more complicated option is to use the Festival game structure described here on the Alexandrian.

The key thing here is to communicate to your players that there’s stuff happening in all three of Jigow’s districts. The meaningful choice for the PCs is now, “What district do you want to go to?”

And you can still present that choice as, “The town is yours to explore—where do you want to go?” Because whatever answer the PCs give, you can parse it through the lens of, “What district are they in?” and pull up the material you’ve keyed to that district.

This means splitting up the festival games described in Call of the Netherdeep, and I would do that by following the natural divisions of Jigow and divvying the games between the three districts:

• Meatwaters: J2, J3
• Jumble: J1, J4, J7
• Wetwalk: J5, J6

You’ll probably also want to add topics of conversation. I’d look to seed these with stuff establishing the festivals’ big finale at the Emerald Grotto; rumors from afar to bring players up to speed on Xhorlas; local color; etc.

Tip: No matter what structure you use to prep the Festival of Merit, you’ll probably want to treat the Emerald Grotto finale as a revelation. Seed three clues throughout the festival so that the players can become aware of it, anticipate it, and get excited about it.

ADDING MORE FESTIVAL EVENTS

Adding more festival games, events, and activities for the players to experience can be a great value add here.

If you’re looking for some fantastical ideas in this vein, you might check out the Numenera Tavern for inspiration. (You’ll likely want to change some science fantasy explanations for straight-up fantasy ones. Although even that may not be necessary if you have an artificer or two tending the games.)

As you’re adding more events, there are a couple things to keep in mind.

First, Call of the Netherdeep does a great job seeding the Rivals into the keyed contests. You’ll want to continue doing that with your new events, while also being cautious not to water the interactions down to the point where they become empty of meaning.

Second, this is a great opportunity to look back at your campaign revelation lists and start seeding in clues. Obviously you still want to keep your campaign pacing in mind (don’t overdo it!), but a little imagination can easily suggest opportunities like:

• A play depicting events from the Calamity.
• A hawker is selling mysterious red gemstones (ruidium) that have been washing up on shore.
• A fortune-teller who “reads the red rays of Ruidus” to tell your future. (It’s a scam.)

And so forth.

MAZE & RIDDLE

The maze and riddle contests in the Festival of Merit are, in my opinion, somewhat flawed in their execution. Two of the riddles, for example, are resolved with an Intelligence and/or Wisdom check. One of them can ONLY be resolved with a skill check (because the player doesn’t have access to the visual images required to solve the riddle.)

Basically, any place in the game where the DM is saying, “Here’s a situation, give me a check” — without the player making any meaningful choice — and the entirely reactive check completely resolves the situation is not a great experience at the table. (The game is playing itself.)

I much prefer the approach taken in the third riddle, for example, in which successful Intelligence checks provide the player with clues, but ultimately the player still needs to find the answer.

I discuss how to handle stuff like this in more detail in Random GM Tip: Rolling for Riddles.

Go to Part 3: Emerald Grotto

If you’re familiar with the Alexandrian Remixes – e.g., of Eternal Lies, Dragon Heist, Descent Into Avernus, etc. – that’s not what we’re doing here. For better or worse, I’m not currently planning to do a full remix of Call of the Netherdeep.

This article is more of a How To guide: If I were to do a remix of Call of the Netherdeep, this is how I would do it, with tips and tricks for your own campaign along the way.

You may want to check out How to Remix an Adventure. I’ll also be largely assuming that you’re familiar with Call of the Netherdeep, so if that’s not the case you may want to start by checking out my review of Call of the Netherdeep, which includes a summary. I’ve also written a few other articles about Call of the Netherdeep and will be referencing those where appropriate.

In terms of a broad overview, we’re going to start by looking at campaign-wide elements:

• Running the Rivals
• Revelation List: Campaign Agendas
• Revelation List: Lore of Alyxian
• Ruidium

Call of the Netherdeep is a linear campaign (Jigow → Emerald Grotto → Bazzoxan → Ank’Harel → Cael Morrow → Netherdeep), so once we’ve looked at the campaign-wide structures, we’ll largely just be walking through the campaign from beginning to end.

Of course, no battleplan survives contact with reality. So if you start digging in here and discover cool tips, tricks, and/or alternatives, make sure to come back and let the rest of us know!

RUNNING THE RIVALS

A primary feature of Call of the Netherdeep is the rival adventuring group: Ayo Jabe, Dermot Wulder, Galsariad Ardyth, Irvan Wastewalker, and Maggie Keeneyes.

I’ve previously written Running the Rivals, which provides a detailed breakdown and analysis of how the Rivals can be tweaked and used to best effect in Call of the Netherdeep. I’m not going to repeat all of that material here, but the core concept is that the Rivals should be debating the agenda with the PCs:

• Where should we be going?
• What should we be doing?
• Why are we doing it?
• How should we do it?
• Who is Alyxian and what should be his fate?

And the key to running them effectively is the Principle of Opposition: Whatever the PCs think the right course of action is, the Rivals take the opposite opinion.

The Rivals thus help to define the shape of the campaign, and push the players to (a) think deeply about what they’re doing and (b) make meaningful choices that reflect the values and experience of the PCs.

But in order to make meaningful choices — and certainly if you’re going to actively debate those choices! — you first have to understand those choices. Which brings us to…

REVELATION LIST: CAMPAIGN AGENDAS

Because Call of the Netherdeep is a linear campaign, its structure can be understood as a series of agendas — i.e., the sequence of goals that move the PCs through the campaign.

In the campaign as written, unfortunately, these goals are generally underdeveloped, vague, and merely procedural. For example, when the PCs are sent to Bazzoxan they aren’t given a true, actionable reason for going; instead an NPC just tells them to go.

This is a missed opportunity. We’ll be looking at some of the specific agendas in more detail below, but in order to build any of them you need to start with the foundation. In order for the players to understand the agendas and make meaningful choices, they’ll need the context provided by answering three campaign-wide questions:

What is the Jewel of Three Prayers? Specifically, the PCs should be able to figure out that it was empowered by the gods to aid Alyxian three times; that shrines were erected in those places; and that they need to find the shrines in order to fully reactivate the Jewel.

What is ruidium and what should be done with it? This obviously includes the properties of ruidium itself, but it should also become clear that ruidium is appearing at sites associated with the Apotheon.

Who is Alyxian the Apotheon? Answering this means piecing together the details of his story and framing the ultimate question of the campaign, which is whether he should be helped, freed, or destroyed. (You may also discover that understanding what’s at stake if the Apotheon is freed is an important and distinct revelation.)

In practice you can break the answers to these questions down into a revelation list:

• Properties of the Jewel of Three Prayers.
• The Jewel of Three Prayers was empowered by the gods three times.
• Shrines were erected near each location where the Jewel was empowered.
• The Jewel can be fully reactivated by visiting the shrines.
• Properties of ruidium.
• Ruidium is appearing in sites associated with the Apotheon.
• The Lore of the Alyxian (which we’ll look at in more detail below.)

Each revelation should, of course, be supported by the Three Clue Rule — e.g., for each conclusion you need the PCs to make, you should include three clues pointing at it. Here’s some general advice you might find useful as you place these clues throughout the campaign:

First, the PCs should ideally have been able to piece together at least a general understanding of what’s happening before they get to Bazzoxan. If not, you’ll likely get stuck in a situation where the scholars from Ank’Harel are just dumping tons of exposition on the players.

On the other hand, you don’t want to dump so many clues into Jigow that the players have everything figured out before they hit the road. Call of the Netherdeep should be driven, in part, by the desire to unravel these enigmas. If the PCs get all the answers right up front, it will have a negative effect on the campaign.

You may, therefore, want to carefully consider further splitting and layering the revelations. For example, maybe the PCs can figure out very early on that the shrines are associated with the Jewel of Three Prayers, but they won’t be able to find any clues revealing that it’s because the gods empowered the Jewel at these locations until later.

As you’re thinking about sequencing the revelations, it may be useful to think of it in overlapping phases. You don’t need to, for example, put all the clues regarding the three shrines in Jigow and then all the clues revealing that the gods empowered the Jewel in Bazzoxan. Instead you might put a couple of shrine-clues in Jigow and another in Bazzoxan; then put a couple of gods-empowered-clues in Bazzoxan and another in Betrayers’ Rise. The sequencing remains likely, but isn’t rigidly locked in. More importantly, this gives you a lot more flexibility in designing and incorporating clues in a way that feels natural and organic.

Finally, if the players are engaged with the campaign, it’s quite likely they might try to figure out how to do some direct research to answer these questions. You may have an impulse to stymy them. Don’t.

But, by the same token, you also don’t want to just dump all the answers on them. (Because (a) you are still trying to pace the campaign appropriately and (b) the whole point is that the answers here are obscure and difficult to obtain.)

A good technique for this is to have their research reveal where they can go to get more information, rather than just dumping the information. In other words, the research provides an action instead of an answer.

For example, consider the transition from the Emerald Grotto to Bazzoxan. If the PCs choose to research the strange Jewel they’ve obtained — no matter how they might go about doing that — you just need to explain why the answer they’re looking for is in Bazzoxan:

• You discover that there’s a painting on the wall of Betrayers’ Rise which depicts the Jewel.
• Here’s a journal of one of the explorers who delved too deep and awakened the abyssal gate in Bazzoxan. The end of the journal trails off into mad gibberings, but it includes a vivid description of a figure that resembles the one you saw in your vision.
• It seems that the leading expert on this is [insert one of the three scholars]. Ank’harel would be a very long journey, but you’re in luck: Recent reports suggest that they’re on a field assignment in Bazzoxan.

You can repeat this same logic at any other point — and for any other structural link — in the campaign. (You learn that the answers you seek are in Betrayer’s Rise / in Ank’harel / in Cael Morrow, etc.)

LORE OF THE ALYXIAN

In talking about campaign-wide revelations, I want to take a closer look at the lore surrounding Alyxian the Apotheon, in large part because it’s absolutely vital for the campaign’s conclusion.

When the PCs reach the Netherdeep, they are confronted by an extraplanar extrusion of a demigod’s traumatized mind. As they explore the physical space of the Netherdeep, they are simultaneously delving into the mystery of Alyxian’s past (and the trauma he has suffered).

This is a really cool dungeon, but in its current form the Netherdeep is doing most of the heavy lifting for both establishing a mystery (What is Alyxian’s story?) and then also solving that mystery. If you want to elevate this material, then you need to pull some of this amassed lore backwards so that it appears meaningfully earlier in the campaign. (All the way back, in fact. From the Emerald Grotto if not earlier.) What you want is for this enigma (Who is the Apotheon?) to be much more front-and-center throughout the campaign, so that by the time the PCs get to Netherdeep the players are fully engaged with the mystery and trying to figure it out. The Netherdeep should just be the focused resolution, as they fill in the gaps and realize some deep and terrible emotional truths.

The result will be much more satisfying, and feel more like the culmination of an entire campaign, instead of just another procedural step.

To understand what I mean here, let’s consider one small, concrete example: In Area 24 of the Netherdeep, the PCs encounter Perigee the Deva. This celestial actually fought with Alyxian during the Calamity centuries ago and remains, ruidium-corrupted, by his side even now.

This could be a really incredible moment: The PCs get to meet this legendary figure out of myth!

… but it really only works if you know who Perigee is before you walk into that room. And in Call of the Netherdeep, you don’t.

Imagine that you went on an adventure in the dungeon beneath the hill where King Arthur is buried, fated to rise in Britain’s hour of greatest need. As you journey through the dungeon you encounter some of his knights: Galahad, perhaps. Percival. Guinevere.

Those are cool moments because you recognize those names: “Holy crap! It’s Guinevere!”

But you don’t get that moment with Perigee because… well, who the heck is Perigee? No one at the table cares.

But if you establish Perigee earlier in the campaign — she appears in a mural in Betrayers’ Rise; she’s mentioned in a scrap of poetry; she has a statue in Cael Morrow or the Emerald Grotto — then you CAN have the moment of, “Holy crap! It’s Perigee!”

You just have to put the work in.

Check out Getting the Players to Care for various techniques you can use for doing this. There are already numerous opportunities throughout the campaign for including this lore, you just have to take advantage of them:

• Establishing the Calamity during the Festival of Merit.
• Murals in the Emerald Grotto prayer site.
• The first vision.
• What the Elders of Jigow know.
• What basic research in Jigow can uncover.
• Lore in Betrayers’ Rise.
• Lore held by the Bazzoxan researchers.
• What advanced research in the libraries and lore-stocks of Ank’Harel can uncover.
• More material seeded in Cael Morrow.

What you want to do is flip to Chapter 6 in Call of the Netherdeep and make a list of Apotheon-related lore that should get pre-established for maximum effect. That’s your revelation list. Now you can just apply the Three Clue Rule by seeding lore into the opportunities listed above (plus any other clever ideas you come up with).

In doing this, remember that your goal is to maximize the payoff in the Netherdeep. Don’t reveal enough? The players won’t be engaged in trying to figure it out. Reveal too much? You’ll undermine the revelations of the final act.

You’ll know you have the balance right if:

• The players already have strong opinions about Alyxian before ever reaching Ank’Harel (and, ideally, those opinions are varied and shifting); and
• The players have big questions about the Apotheon that they talk about and clearly want answers to.

This will allow the Rivals to challenge those opinions and to join in the discussion hypothesizing what the answers might be. But, even more importantly, the desire to answer those questions will motivate the agenda of the campaign.

RUIDIUM

RUIDIUM METAMAGIC: Ruidium — the crystalline residue of an ancient power that corrupts its users — is a really cool riff on a primal fantasy trope.

The mechanics for ruidium corruption (CotN, p. 10) seem really cool. There’s a nice pacing to them and a very flavorful progression of symptoms erupting across the victim’s body.

Because it’s so cool, I’d really like to see a greater temptation for the PCs to meddle with it. The existing mechanic is:

RUIDIUM SPELL COMPONENTS

One ounce of ruidium can be substituted for 500 gp worth of any material component needed to cast a spell. A creature that casts a spell using ruidium as a replacement component must succeed on a DC 20 Charisma saving throw or gain 1 level of exhaustion after the spell is cast. If the creature isn’t already suffering from ruidium corruption, it becomes corrupted if it fails the saving throw.

To this, I recommend adding:

RUIDIUM METAMAGIC

Ruidium can also be used to increase the effectiveness of a spell. Any spellcaster can use ruidium while casting a spell to duplicate the effects of a metamagic option (as per the sorcerer’s class ability), expending a number of ounces of ruidium equal to the number of sorcery points that would normally be required to use the metamagic option.

When using ruidium metamagic, the caster must make a DC 20 Charisma saving throw for each ounce of ruidium used, or suffer the consequences listed above.

Ruidium can only be used to add one metamagic option to a spell, although a sorcerer can still apply one of their metamagic options to the spell normally (as long as it is a different metamagic option).

RUIDIUM LORE: A fairly large logic hole in Call of the Netherdeep is the motivation for the Ank’harel scholars to come to Bazzoxan. According to the book, they’ve come to study a site associated with an “unknown hero who wore the Jewel of Three Prayers.”

But… why?

They’re all interested in ruidium and its sources, but there’s nothing in Cael Morrow to point the researchers at either the Jewel or the Betrayer’s Rise as being related to ruidium.

You could solve this by adding Jewel-lore to Cael Morrow. That way, the researchers could connect the Jewel-references to Bazzoxan (just like the PCs do coming from a different direction). But given the importance of ruidium in the campaign, I think it’s actually more effective to introduce it earlier. So what I suggest is adding ruidium to the Emerald Grotto and Betrayer’s Rise. In other words, ruidium is manifesting at all of the sites associated with the Apotheon.

The scholars can now follow leads to this other source of ruidium, and will have come to Bazzoxan in an effort to figure out the connection. This also means that the PCs have potentially valuable information to trade with the scholars if they’ve previously identified ruidium in the Emerald Grotto.

This fixes both the logic of the campaign and foreshadows the importance of ruidium.

If you want to go even further with this, I recommend extending the history of ruidium: Trace amounts of it have been found in the area around Ank’harel for generations, requiring painstaking efforts to gather enough of it serve as a reagent. Alchemical studies have revealed a connection to the light of Ruidus, with various theories postulating that some specific condition results in the moon’s red light “precipitating” the substance. When recent explorations of Cael Morrow revealed huge outcroppings of the stuff, it precipitated the current arms race.

This background provides a context in which the PCs can research the strange red crystals and learn more about them.

It also means that you can use an interest in ruidium to motivate the PCs’ trip to Bazzoxan, Ank’harel, or both as the opportunity presents itself.

REMIXING CALL OF THE NETHERDEEP
Part 2: Jigow
Part 3: Emerald Grotto
Part 4: Road to Bazzoxan
Part 5: Scholars of Ank’Harel
Part 6: Betrayers’ Rise
Part 7: Cael Morrow
Part 8: Faction Missions in Ank’Harel
Part 9: Netherdeep Wrap

COMPLETE PDF COLLECTION

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