Hoard Of The Dragon Queen Pdf
Pamala
This is where Hoard of the Dragon Queen really shines. Nearly every chapter offers a magnificent set piece with multiple opportunities for interaction, plus meaningful choices, setbacks, and comeback stories. Combat is far from the only tool that players have for solving problems, pushing them to rely on roleplay, skill checks, and lateral thinking wherever feasible.
In contrast to Depth of Play, Narrative Adaptability is where Hoard of the Dragon Queen tends to fall apart. In addition to its second-half slog, Hoard often relies on very weak or very vague dramatic questions, and therefore relies heavily on specific player choices or personalities.
I came into Hoard of the Dragon Queen expecting it to be a poorly made rush job of a campaign. Instead, I found some of the best adventure design this side of 5th Edition, plus some very real diamonds shining through some (also very real) muck.
1. The players start at the Greenest inn, not outside. This removes the metagamy aspect of "the DM wants us to get in although no sensible 1st level adventurer would" and instead "holy cow, how can we survive this?" and "damn, we are heroes". When played smartly by DM and players, this is the most memorable act in the entire module.
2. Careful secrets reveal: This is a mystery story, and should be treated as such. Through investigation and chase, the heroes reveal more and more of the horrific plot, with major rewarding "Aha" moments as the story unfolds.
4. Pacing: After the excellent 3 chapters, the pacing, action and drama of the module falls flat, before reaching the excellent end chapters. This must be fixed, sadly by introducing your own content. First some tension - The heroes are chased by the cult, then they are chased by Undead and saved at Elturel; Switching to roleplay by adding a festival in Elturel; Then high action with a river rapids challenge - followed by a brutal combat with an Ogre on the river bridge. In Baldur's gate I also gave a sneak peak of the Curse of Strahd by sending the heroes to a haunted house to reveal a critical lore piece (The Death House) - a sorely needed dungeon crawl after many sessions of chase.
5. Cut irrelevant items: Remove the Hunting Lodge, the irrelevant 20 NPCs in the caravan trip and its meaningless encounters, remove the one-time NPCs like Jemma, the vampire (WTF) and the second red wizard. Focus on the core, main, important NPCs, their motivations and story.
I recently agreed to write a \u201CTop 10 5th Edition Modules\u201D article for FlutesLoot, but abruptly realized that I hadn\u2019t actually read every 5th Edition module. Obviously, this meant I had to go out and read every single one that I\u2019d missed so far\u2014starting with Hoard of the Dragon Queen.
Hoard is infamous among the 5th Edition community for being 5e\u2019s first adventure module and (as common knowledge dictates) its worst. But as I began to read more deeply into it, I found a lot of my preconceptions being challenged\u2014and often for the better.
By \u201Cold-school D&D player,\u201D I mean the kind of player who enjoys optimization and system mastery, but who doesn\u2019t really mind death or defeat. This is the kind of player that I would call a \u201CChallenger\u201D on this chart:
Hoard of the Dragon Queen is not a campaign for the faint of heart. If you\u2019re the kind of player or DM who prefers any semblance of \u201Cbalance\u201D in your combat encounters, Seek Ye Elsewhere. Over half of the combats in the first three chapters alone are either highly competitive, unfair, or downright impossible\u2014and that\u2019s before factoring in how many resources the PCs will spend over the adventuring day!
This campaign also generally assumes that its players have \u201Cread the manual\u201D\u2014that is, that they\u2019re familiar with classic fantasy tropes, especially those found in pulp novels and old-school epic fantasy. On top of that, its reliance on medieval logistics\u2014from supply caravans to road reconstruction, sally ports, and grain stores\u2014might bore modern players, but are sure to immerse classic fantasy fanatics.
With that said, Hoard ultimately can\u2019t be evaluated in a vacuum. Due to the slow slog of its later chapters (which we\u2019ll get to in a bit!), Hoard of the Dragon Queen ultimately serves as little more than a seven-level prologue to Rise of Tiamat, its sequel, which might frustrate players who\u2019d like to get to the action a little more quickly.
With that said, what Hoard does present is a fascinating, slow-burning travel/conspiracy story that\u2019s stuffed to the gills with factional politics. Mystery-minded and intrigue-loving players are sure to have a good time.
Surprisingly for a 5th Edition module, Hoard is actually fairly well written! The introduction does a perfectly cromulent job of laying out the adventure\u2019s background and stakes. Information on factions and NPCs is presented to the DM upfront, with little held back. Unlike later 5th Edition campaigns, Hoard of the Dragon Queen is a technical document, not a storybook, and its readers will thank it for that.
Its dungeons and chapters are similarly well-written\u2014but do face one fundamental flaw: Hoard is a stunningly ambitious module, raising multiple long-term plot threads that involve factions from all across the Sword Coast and beyond. We\u2019ve got cultists, rebellious cultists, evil wizards, exiled evil wizards, friendly paladins, friendly bards, friendly druids, devils, giants, dragons, and\u2014for some reason\u2014a vampire. This isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing, but much of this lore is presented as an overwhelming infodump, which makes it somewhat hard to digest. A few charts or other visual aids would go a long way in making this epic-sized adventure manageable.
With that said, the writing itself is accessible, thorough, and insightful. From time to time, it even slips into casual terminology or outright breaks the fourth wall in order to deliver a few words of wisdom to its reader. From a technical standpoint, Hoard is easily one of the cleanest official modules I\u2019ve had the opportunity to read thus far.
Let\u2019s start with the good bits. The first three chapters are energetic, action-packed scenarios that give players a real opportunity to jump into action and start building their own legend. The fourth chapter is a slower, transitory travel stage that really gives the narrative a chance to breathe. Scattered throughout is a bundle of random encounters and side-quests that give the DM a lot of flexibility to build each adventuring day and really make the world come alive.
From there, though, everything drops off a cliff\u2014once Chapter Five starts, the pacing crawls to a halt and never picks up again. At no point after Chapter Three are the players put on a meaningful timer, or really given a clear objective. While the locations, factions, characters, and lore are fascinating, and while the players are given exceptional freedom to set their own standards for success, the story itself slogs badly as a result. DMs are left with a point-to-point crawl with some wonderfully fascinating dungeons, a lot to do in them, and no particular reason to do much of anything.
Hoard of the Dragon Queen is, if anything, even more dedicated to playability than the novice DM\u2019s Lost Mine of Phandelver. It does an excellent job of teaching small DMing skills, whether it\u2019s whether and when to provide advantage or disadvantage, staying flexible when assigning story roles to generic NPCs, or the different kinds of bonuses that might apply to different kinds of skill checks.
It also provides helpful tactical advice from time to time, including a line that should have been in the Monster Manual: \u201CA dragon never fights on foot where enemies might hack at it when it can soar majestically out of reach and slaughter foes with its breath weapon. Only in its lair will a dragon typically engage in melee and then only if its hoard is threatened.\u201D
Above all else, though, this adventure is remarkably well self-contained. The DM won\u2019t need to do major improvisation or independent creation, but there\u2019s room in Hoard for modding if you\u2019d like to take a crack at it. It\u2019s got a broad scope, but a remarkably manageable scale, and I think that speaks highly of it.
The players are frequently empowered to decide not only how they\u2019re going to approach a certain area, but what degree of danger they\u2019re willing to take and what route they\u2019d prefer to take. On top of that, these dangers are often high-risk, high-reward\u2014players can frequently win great rewards, both financial and strategic, by being observant, recognizing opportunities, and ameliorating risk.
The entirety of Chapter One\u2014and everything that follows\u2014assumes that a group of first-level PCs will willingly leap to save a burning town from an adult blue dragon\u2014a monster with challenge rating sixteen\u2014plus its literal army of raiders. Later on, the transition into the second half of the adventure assumes that the PCs will act in a very specific way around a very specific NPC\u2014and if they fail to impress him, the entire adventure comes dangerously close to derailing.
Now, Hoard does deserve some credit: Its optional campaign bonds and background features, found in Appendix B, go a long way toward resolving these problems. It\u2019s a lot easier to see why a PC might jump into a dragon-terrorized village, chum around with a drunken paladin, or accept a mission to defeat an evil dragon cult if they\u2019ve literally dedicated their lives to fighting the Cult of the Dragon.
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