Book Review: Princes of the Apocalypse

I'll be getting to Red Larch and its place in my Sword Coast Sandbox in the next post. However, I Princes of the Apocalypse. And I specifically want to review it from the perspective of a DM who's up to the same tricks as me -- running a campaign organized around site-based adventures rather than plots and storylines.
wanted to start with a brief review of

From this perspective, the campaign is a bit of a puzzle. On the one hand, the book is filled with site-based adventure content, so that's certainly a big positive. Red Larch itself is a village with some very interesting things going on; the level 1 and 2 adventure hooks are extremely easy to use, as are the side treks for higher levels; the Dessarin Valley is a mini campaign setting, complete with day/night random encounter tables; and, of course, the Elemental Temples, the Fane, and the Elemental Nodes represent a good-size megadungeon that can occupy our heroes for most of the second and third tiers of play.

On the other hand, there's this story. And while everyone who plays this campaign is almost certain to know what it's about, it's presented as a mystery. See, some VIPs are missing, the PCs investigate, and it turns out...gasp!...that Cults of Elemental Evil are responsible. So our heroes do their investigation, they follow the bread crumbs to one or more of the "Haunted Keeps" that the players all know are controlled by the Cults, and I suppose the heroes need to search these keeps to find any missing VIPs that may be held there. In the course of their explorations/investigations/infiltrations/assaults, they may also discover one or more entrances to a corresponding Temple beneath the earth.

Okay, I don't want to tell a story, I really don't want to tell a mystery story, and I especially don't want to tell a story that is a mystery to the characters but not to their players. As stories go, it feels like the crappy prologue at the beginning of a fantasy epic that didn't need to be there in the first place. It's like one of those old-school adventure games where you know exactly what you need to do, but you first need to discover the right combination of mouse clicks so your avatar in the game can also get a clue. "Okay, what hoops do we need to jump through before we can get to the
Temple of Elemental Evil?"

So what, you say, you don't want to use any of this "story" stuff anyway. Just skip it. I can do that -- now what do you want me to do with the Haunted Keeps? As adventure locations, their only point is to guard the entrances to the Temples. However, they aren't really set up as dungeon crawls. The expectation seems to be that the PCs will infiltrate one or more of the keeps and then search for members of delegations once they're inside. They could do a frontal assault or recon in force instead, but...why? Well, because they learn of the ancient dwarven city of Tyar-Besil, and they discover that the keeps guard the entrances, right?

Well, then they might decide to go through one of the keeps. There's no reason for them to go poking around the other three (unless you happen to be looking for members of a missing delegation, or something). I could contrive some other reason they need to explore each keep (they need the four elemental keys, see...), but that would make my implementation of the material less sandboxy and more computer gamey. Not good. Even worse, a sandbox campaign means the campaign can never become "about" stopping the Cults of Elemental Evil, unless the players choose to make it about that. But these keeps filled with Cultists of Elemental Evil kind of stick out as problems to be solved. They're going to cause trouble, especially if/when the PCs launch an expedition into the Temples.

So it really seems as though, if the keeps exist at all, they can't just be ignored. It will appear to most players as though the cultists must be eradicated if the PCs are going to explore Tyar-Besil. And that starts to look like a railroad. If the PCs need to go after the surface cults in order to explore the dwarven city, the campaign has become about stopping the cults...and then why aren't we just playing Princes of the Apocalypse as written?

I'm sorely tempted to keep the keeps (heh) as the entrances to the Temples, but repopulate them with unrelated adversaries. Maybe the PCs' own research and lore reveals that there were once entrances to Tyar-Besil from each of the keeps, but now many centuries later only one is believed to be open. I'll roll randomly to determine which one and sprinkle some clues around so it's not just blind luck for the players to find it. But then I have to completely refluff and restock up to four adventure locations, and that's not really what the Sword Coast Sandbox is about.

I'm going to have to work on it. But that's really my only substantive complaint about Princes of the Apocalypse. The mystery story that isn't really a mystery is an annoying contrivance, but one that is mercifully brief and can be ignored. However, the Haunted Keeps filled with cultists are elephants in the room, where the room is our sandbox, and this makes them very difficult to implement as take-it-or-leave-it adventure locations.

So I give the campaign 4/5 stars for my sandbox project (still a ton of content!), but I reckon I'd join the bandwagon and give it 5/5 stars for DMs looking to play it straight.