Rise of Tiamat

Like "Hoard of the Dragon Queen", this adventure surprised me. Unlike HotDQ, this was not a pleasant surprise. I had heard good things about this adventure, and in particular opinion was near-unanimous that this was better than it's predecessor.

It isn't.

Reading through the introduction, I had high hopes to see them present lots of factions and lots of "moving parts" in the adventure. That boded very well, I thought - this would be a very open adventure with lots of opportunity for scheming, role-play, and various shenanigans. My one concern was that surely there must be better ways to present this data - some sort of org chart for the evil cult, really. But never mind, maybe it was omitted due to reasons of space.

But then I read through the nine episodes of the adventure... and it became apparent that this actually was quite tightly scripted. Yes, after each of the four departmental meetings that anchored the adventure (no, really) there was a choice of what the PCs did next... sort of. The caveat to that was that at each point they had two choices, and the choice was which of the two to do first (and, consequently, which to do second).

Worse, where "Hoard of the Dragon Queen" offered the PCs plenty of scope to choose their approach within most of the individual episodes, here the PCs have a clear objective and a clear 'best' way to complete the challenge. It's not the same solution in every case, but the scope for PC action is actually more constrained here than in the previous adventure.

And the adventure did have the Cult of the Dragon react to PC actions... again, sort of. Three times, the cult sends assassins against the PCs, but there are two issues there. Firstly, the first set of assassins is deliberately pitched to not really have a chance against the PCs. I guess that's okay, but it's frankly an annoying cliche at this point. But the second was that even a TPK was stated as not being the end of the campaign - the PCs would just be resurrected and carry on. Death, where is your sting?

Worst of all, the climax of the adventure features the PCs desperately struggling to prevent the Cult of the Dragon from bringing Tiamat back into the world. If the Cult succeeds, that's pretty much guaranteed to be a TPK... and that would be the end of the campaign. Which means that at the climax of the campaign, the PCs are desperately struggling to bring about an anti-climax. Not ideal.

Finally, I was struck by something. This campaign features a flying castle. It features an effort by extensive dragon-themed armies to bring the Queen of Dragons back into the world. It features an undead warrior who is allied with that dragon-themed army, but not absolute in his alliance. It features red robed wizards whose betrayal at a key time can weaken the Cult. It features a crown that is absolutely key in the ritual to free that Dragon Queen. It even features a secret council with the metallic dragons to bring them on-side in the final struggle, plus a venture into an artic citadel.

All of which were very reminiscent of something else. I vastly preferred this campaign when I read it twenty-five years ago and it was called Dragonlance.

Ultimately, I'm really disappointed in this adventure, and by consequence am very disappointed in the "Tyranny of Dragons" storyline. Such a shame.