Out of the Abyss

Disaster in the Last Chapter!

Okay, to review this I'm going to need to delve into spoilers. If you don't want to know, then here's the non-spoiler summary: this adventure starts spectacularly well, goes downhill a bit later on (but is still good), and then falls to pieces at the end. As such, I recommend it but with huge reservations.

From here on out, there are spoilers.

The adventure can broadly be split into three sections. Section one starts with the PCs as prisoners of the drow, and has them escaping and making their way to the surface. Section two starts with the PCs being recruited to venture back into the Underdark to find out what's going on, and gathering materials to help them fix it. And section three is a two-chapter climax of the campaign, consisting of the Fetid Wedding and the Rage of Demons.

Part One: Escape from the Underdark

As noted above, this section begins with the PCs as prisoners of the drow. They then escape, make their way through the Underdark, visiting many of the iconic sites in FR's version of that landscape, before finally escaping to the surface. Along the way, they encounter some significant signs that something is very, very wrong, and are chased throughout by drow intent on recapturing them. It covers about half of the book.

This section is absolutely brilliant from start to finish. It contains some of the best adventure material I've ever seen from WotC, ever, and features a lot of very alien settings and very strange creatures - exactly what I would expect from the Underdark, and especially an Underdark falling under the sway of the demon lords. This section also manages to present the PCs with many meaningful choices, rather than a simply railroad of scenes, and yet also manages to foreshadow events later in the campaign.

Basically, had I been reviewing this half of the campaign alone, I'd give it five stars without hesitation. I even rate it more highly than "Lost Mine of Phandelver" - although the adventure design is probably on a par with that adventure, it also gains points for novelty, while LMoP is deliberately quite mainstream in its content.

Part Two: Back Into the Depths

Unfortunately, the second half of the campaign isn't nearly so good. This section sees the PCs recuited by Bruenor Battlehammer to go back into the Underdark, find out what is going on down there, and hopefully put a stop to it. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, this section just doesn't have anything like the same flair to it as the first half. Off the top of my head, there are several weaknesses:

• Unlike the first half, this half's choices amount to "what order shall we do things"? The PCs basically have to go to the Zhentarim outpost, and from there they have to go to the Underdark library. There, they make contact with a duplicitious drow mage, and although they don't have to ally with him, the alternative is still that they need to perform the same ritual, just without his help. Then, they have to go get a bunch of ingredients, each of which is only really available in one place, so they more or less have to go to all of the locations detailed - as I said, they do get to choose what order to handle things.
• I found the level of detail in the second half fell short of what was needed. This was especially true of the incursion into Sorcere, which by rights should have had a full 32-page adventure (at least) to itself. But several other locations were similarly lacking - locations weren't mapped, events were presented in a very abstract manner, and so forth. I didn't notice this as a problem in the first half, which made it very noticable in the second.
• Following on from the above, I felt that the designers had clearly had a lot of good ideas, but I felt they weren't fleshed out enough. Basically, it felt like they were trying to fit too much adventure into too few pages. This wouldn't have been so noticable, but for the comparison with the first half.
• I believe this part of the adventure would prove very difficult to run. The adventure assumes here that the PCs would be accompanied by a great many NPC allies, none of whom were particularly fleshed out (again, unlike the NPCs in the first part). I'm really not sure what these allies really added to things, either - except perhaps warm bodies to soak up some of the incoming attacks. But with so many characters and so many factions to juggle... it really felt like it would be a chore, rather than a pleasure to run.
• The adventure provides a new downtime activity, establishing a way-station in the Underdark. This was actually a really great addition to the game... or it would have been. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no payoff for setting up way-stations - the adventure never talks about what happens to expedition morale if the supply lines get cut, or details what reinforcements PCs might get from their way-stations, or anything like that. It's a great idea that doesn't actually go anywhere.

But all of this pales next to...

Part Three: Disaster in the Last Chapter

The adventure has a two-part climax. The first part of this sees the PCs disrupting "The Fetid Wedding", a ritual by which one of the demon lords aimed to gain control over a huge fungal growth in the Underdark. Again, this is a really great idea, very atmospheric and exactly the sort of insanity an Underdark/demons adventure should feature.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work so well, for three reasons. Firstly, the demon lord in question is too powerful for the PCs to actually deal with. Therefore, the adventure introduces a neat deus ex machina to fix this - another demon lord appears out of nowhere to distract the first, allowing the PCs to deal with another part of the problem themselves. Ick.

Secondly, this episode takes place in an alternate plane, and any PC reduced to 0 hit points is therefore not killed, but instead wakes up unharmed back in their bodies. "It was all a dream" sucks in storytelling, and sucks no less in a published adventure.

And, thirdly, there's the question of what happens if the PCs fail? What happens if they are all reduced to 0 hit points? Well, the answer to that doesn't please either: if they fail, they've nonetheless done enough for that Underdark fungus to be able to throw off the demon lord itself. So, in effect, there are no stakes - the Players might as well go out for a coffee, let their PCs just soak up the damage until they all wake from their dream, and all will be well.

Lame.

And then comes the final chapter. The PCs conduct the long-promised ritual, they summon all of the demon lords to one place for the big finale...

and they then get to watch as these ultra-powerful NPCs battle things out amongst themselves. After all, one demon lord is too much for them to handle, so all of them together?

Now, in fairness, it's not quite like that - the adventure suggests instead that the PCs should instead face four 'lesser' combats while the demon lords fight it out, before facing a weakened Demogorgon at the end. But that still sucks: they're still effectively spectators.

There's also a sidebar that suggests the players should instead be given the demon lords to run, and the battle played out that way. This is much better, and the DM absolutely should do this. But it still sucks - at the climax of the campaign, our heroes who we have followed throughout the story are reduced to watching.

(Reading this, I actually wondered: is this adventure actually intended to be run? Or is it rather a 'storyline' presented more to be read and imagined? That would explain an awful lot - in addition to this problem, there's also the plethora of NPCs in the second section.)

But, fundamentally, I think the problem simply lies with the level range of the campaign - the demon lords are suitable opponents only for highest-level PCs (if even then), but the campaign was intended to run from 1st to 15th level, putting them well out of reach. So, really, what was wanted was instead a longer book to give it room to flesh out all these ideas, a longer level range, and therefore a delayed climax until 20th level. Alas, it was not to be.

Conclusion

I found it really hard to rate this one: the first half is outstanding, the second half merely good, and the climax terrible. So, where does that leave us?

In the end, I settled on recommending it, but...

It's worth the money for a read-through, and indeed for the first half. But as a complete campaign, it's flawed, probably fatally. Still, it's a step up even from "Princes of the Apocalypse", and so another improvement on "Tyranny of Dragons", so they're heading in the right direction.