Hoard of the Dragon Queen

It's hard to decide what to make of the first published "storyline" (Adventure Path) from Wizards of the Coast for 5e. On the one hand, the buzz I'd heard was that it is fairly terrible, and that's just not the case. On the other hand, it's not a 'good' adventure by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, it does do a number of things that I feel should be recognised as being extremely positive steps.

The adventure is a 96-page hardcover, and is intended to take characters from 1st to 8th level (they should hit 8th level right at the end of the final part). Very surprisingly, the book does not include the stat-blocks of the creatures encountered in the text - instead, the creature names are in bold and refer the DM to either the Appendix or to the Monster Manual (or a free download of monster stats). This is an odd choice, and would have been great if they'd been hyperlinks, but as it is I'm not hugely impressed - the net effect is to turn the adventure into a "wall of text". That means it's very dense (as much adventure as three Pathfinder volumes), but it's also harder to read as a result.

The adventure is split into eight parts, with player characters having to pass through the parts in order. There is very limited support for DMs should the players leave the path. That's not unexpected, and perhaps not even a bad thing - this is an Adventure Path after all.

And, where the adventure pleasantly surprised me, within many of the parts there is significant openness as to what the PCs could attempt - in addition to the standard Fight! option, the book several times discusses the options to Deceive or Seduce (negotiate) their way through the encounter - and even in a few occasions for them to Evade the encounter totally. This is very unusual in published adventures, and is very much appreciated. Parts 2, 6, 7, and (to a lesser extent) 8 are particularly strong here.

On the other hand, the adventure has some significant story problems, especially with the first part. It opens with the PCs arriving at the town of Greenest to find it under attack by a dragon. This appears to be set up for the "cool opening scene", perhaps with one eye on the video game or the movie. Nothing wrong with that, except...

The adventure then mostly assumes that the PCs will make their way into the town to get some missions from the local governor, and proceeds from there. Now, it's worth noting that this actually isn't a railroad, as the adventure specifically addresses the likely possibility that they might instead choose to sit it out. Which is fine, but it does mean missing part one almost completely. It would probably have been better to start the campaign with the PCs in town and then have it come under attack, rather than expect them to run into the danger.

(There's also an issue with a "challenge of champions" scene in the adventure. I'm really not a fan of that one, but it is only one encounter, and it can be fixed. So that's less of a problem.)

All that said, I have one BIG problem with HotDQ: an Adventure Path, especially such a tightly-scripted one, lives or dies based on the quality of the storyline. And I found the story presented here deadly dull. There's surprisingly little tension in the dragon attack in Part One, and then most of the rest has the PCs chasing after some ill-defined cultists who have stolen some ill-defined treasure for no obvious reason. Eventually, they either figure out what's going on, or they just get told, but that's not terribly well handled.

My over-riding impression of this one, though, is that it's like "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part one" of "Hunger Games: Mockingjay, part one" - it's half of a story, with all of the "good bits" reserved for the second part. Which bodes well for "Rise of Tiamat", but leaves HotDQ underwhelming.

Ultimately, I can't recommend this adventure. I'm extremely happy to see the attention that the adventure gives to the Fight!, Evade, Deceive, Seduce options for dealing with encounters, and I like that there are often multiple factions that can be played against one another (or not). But it's not enough. So, no recommendation here... but I'd certainly be happy to look at other offerings from the same provider (Kobold Press - WotC outsourced this one).