Rage Of Demons Out Of The Abyss

[Lara Preece]

Theseminis are a solid purchase for most gamers, providing you with reasonably sculpted and painted plastic miniatures at an average list price of $4. The minis are useful in home campaigns, previous 5E adventures, and especially with the Out of the Abyss adventure. Just opening a few booster boxes can provide fun and useful prepainted miniatures. The quality is similar to that of previous sets.

On the other hand, if you are a collector, this is the worst set in years! For the first time, and completely unannounced by WizKids, your case will not provide a full set and you will spend hundreds more to complete the set. This was a dirty move by WizKids and they should communicate such changes more clearly in the future! Many collectors and I were outraged and felt cheated by these changes.

This set has a wide variety of monsters, favoring those found in the underdark, demons, and elementals. We will review most of the set later, and you can find the entire list on the excellent Minis Gallery web site. If you want a way to track your collection, check out my D&D Miniature Collection Tracker.

The set is most useful for DMs, with PC minis confined to half-orc paladin, wood elf archer, shield dwarf wizard, human wizard, and 3 drow (scout, captain, archmage). This is fairly typical of recent sets. The PC minis are of sound quality, though the faces continue to be low on detail, with the paint blobbing over features rather than enhancing them.

Ultra-Rares make this even worse. The previous sets used invisible PC minis as brick incentives, which are nice to have but are not critical. They had one in every brick, meaning you needed to hunt down 1 or 2 others. This set provides one in every other case, meaning you have to hunt down 3 more!

A good set of minis provides useful miniatures with a look that inspires play. The best monster minis evoke a reaction from players when they are placed on the table and the best PC minis make their owner feel cool. In reviewing minis I look for that. I also compare the quality of the sculpt (3D details, great poses, etc.) and the paint (number and quality of colors, highlighting and shading). Comparing this set to previous sets gives us a feel for whether this set adds great value. I also want to see whether a new set adds to previous collections, making it easier to create diverse and exciting encounters.

There have been many quo-toa over the years. This set adds a purplish duo, contrasting with the green of previous sets. You can compare the two Kuo-Toa Archpriest from this set with the Whip from Night Below. Really cool, though the older one has more interesting and finer details, such as on the headdress and clothing. The regular Kuo-Toa (far left in bottom picture) is also sound, and is better to some but inferior to other older minis. The armor from the Kuo-Toa Hunter (second from left) in Night Below is really nicely detailed.

The rare Nalfeshnee, on the other hand, has inferior color and is far smaller (even an actual size category smaller, beyond the usual lower plastic quantity). The Lords of Madness version has these nice deep grooves and superior sculpting of the tusks, maw, and wings.

Another example is the rare Helmed Horror. This should be a great miniature, with translucent red below and golden armor painted over, but there is no shading or highlighting and the translucent red is barely visible in normal light.

The new Grimlock (far left) is the best of the grimlocks so far, and the shading is fairly strong. The Troll is solid, capturing the basics, which is good given that many trolls have so far tried to be different. It compares favorably to the War Troll (middle) and Troll Slasher (right), though that last one may be my favorite. It also avoids the insane size and fantastic almost comical appearance of the most recent two (see below).

The Tyranny of Dragons set blew us away with amazing dragons. This set is far tamer. We get an okay Copper Dragon and Gold Dragon, plus the Red Dracolich (sure would be great if I had one in my case!). All of those are rares, plus there is an ultra-rare Shadow Gold Dragon which is just the same mini out of a smoke material and unpainted.

D&D has had many iterations of metal minis, going back to 1977. Prepainted plastic minis began in 2003, with a whopping 17 sets of DDM miniatures. The economy changed drastically, with the raw materials escalating in costs. The line was changed in various ways for four more sets as WotC tried (and failed) to find a profitable model. Lords of Madness was the last DDM set in 2010.

In 2014, Wizards launched the Icons of the Realms series, this time as a license to WizKids. WizKids also has the license for Pathfinder miniatures, and both miniatures share the same benefits and problems when it comes to quality, sculpting, and paints.

Thanks for this! I read through the book once, and it is a doozy in terms of it's scope, so your guide will certainly be handy if I get to running it. I'm not a WotC disciple by any means, but this adventure is really well done and has some unique ways to conceptualize and adventure in the underdark. Thanks for your efforts!

Jason Raabis: Seriously, this book is so dense. It's full of good ideas, but there's wayyyyy too many moving parts. It really does seem like it would be a lot of fun to run, though. I really like the kuo toa thing and the Pudding King. Thanks!

Thanks for this collection. I plan to run the adventure soon and your post saved me doing the usual search for helpful materials myself.

Although you see AotA as a "railroad in serious denial", I find this characterization a little bit harsh. It has a core story which guides a lot of the things in the adventure, yet there are a lot of different ways for the adventurers to reach their goals. This "goal" is indeed a given - drive the demons back to the abyss - and in so far your railroad comment is correct, but a published adventure wouldn't make much sense without one in my opinion. But I may be predisposed because my players like to decide their own course of action, but don't actually like pure sandboxes. They want an overarching theme and goal during their adventures and are not really happy with making it up all on their own. Some may frown upon this, but after some decades of playing they know what they want from an adventure.

I wrote way more than I intended. Actually I just wanted to thank you for your helpful post :)

Anonymous: I think the thing that really bugged me about this "sandbox" is the fact that in the very beginning, the adventure gives the heroes the option of going to menzoberranzan. But if the heroes take that tunnel, the adventure advises you to cave in the tunnel and basically force them to go to darklake. Or, they get near menzoberranzan and Khalessa Draga begs them not to go there, and warns them drow are coming after them and etc. So to me, I think to myself "Why are you putting a tunnel to Menzoberranzan there when you clearly don't want the group going there until they're around 10th level at least?" I understand that the heroes are meant to be shipped off to menzo as slaves so there should be a tunnel from velkenvelve to menzo, but I think the adventure should have had that tunnel caved in from the start of the adventure. Maybe the heroes' job as slaves is to clear the cave-in, and it's a long term project that never gets close to being finished. That way you have a tunnel to menzo but there's a legit reason why the group can't go through it.

Anonymous: Thanks! I'll add the link, I really appreciate it.

Zingbob: I think that players aren't going to hit every location in the book, so they will miss out on some of those items. Also I am still in the mindset that every character should end up with a magic weapon, magic armor (or a ring of protection) and one other cool item, in addition to consumables. I realize it's not really like that anymore, but all of these adventures just feel so stingy to me.

What a useful article!

The Droki as white rabbit connection is easy to see, but I wonder if he was also influenced by Gygax's NPC dwarf Obmi. Psycho dwarf, boots of speed, big sack of stuff...

Great work - thank you! I have just started this with my group (one session in), and these notes will be a great help. An idea: I think I will let one or two demon lords actually reach the surface during the middle section. Let them break out into a city somewhere in some suitably epic fashion. Maybe draw inspiration from the Pathfinder adventure path Wrath of the Righteous. Put additional pressure on the PCs. The summoning ritual at the end will draw them back into the Underdark.

Re: The Obelisk in the Whorlstone Tunnels.

From what I understand, this obelisk was broken at some time in the distant past. The true magical purpose of it is unknown and not revealed (at least not in Chapter 4 which I am on). However, faerzress has infected it and caused it to gain this teleportation ability. If a character casts any level spell while touching it, they are transported to just outside Gracklstugh's gates (they can learn this if they are proficient in Arcana and make the appropriate check. The derro Pliinki, who is at the obelisk, has a notebook with notes in it with various surface world items listed on it (especially coins and jewelry). The gold coin she has on her is an anicent elvish coin from the surface world. Pliinki indicates if interrogated that the Tunnels are very far from the surface. The implication is that the faerzress is causing the obelisk to transport items from the surface to itself, and this is the reason that the coins Ylsa knows about have appeared in Gracklstugh. If you bring the notebook to Ylsa, the party is rewarded with XP.

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