I realize this module has gotten a lot of attention online as D&D 4e has been having a bit of a (much deserved) renaissance. I don't necessarily think I have anything revelatory to say about it, but I will be running my own adaptation of it at a local game store starting in about 2 weeks, and I see no reason not to put my thoughts in writing.
Adventure Summary
This is an adventure that came out in the middle-to-late days of 4e's run (which was roughly '08-'13; not as short relative to most prior editions as the haters would have you believe, despite their best efforts at the time.) It's designed for level 1 characters, although by my math a 5-player party would hit level 2 about 2/3 of the way through. The increasing levels of the last few encounters would support this.
The setup is that the PCs are hired to retrieve the eponymous MacGuffin from a fallen human city that has been overrun by goblins. The Slaying Stone is supposed to be some big-time scary magic weapon that can't be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, or whatever. I have some thoughts on this conceit and its execution that I'll get to later.
This is a faction-driven adventure. The biggest and most frequently encountered faction are the goblins. There's also a smaller group of kobolds that have beef with the goblins and an orc mercenary group that are also looking for the Stone.
I have seen this described as a sandbox, which I don't think is accurate, although I also object to false dichotomies and I don't think any two D&D players will ever agree what "sandbox" and "railroad" mean. The encounter structure is linear at the beginning and the end. You're supposed to run encounters 1-3 first, no matter what, and then wrap up with encounters 10-13. The middle chunk is flexible.
Check it out, I made a whole diagram and everything!
What I Like
Faction Play Done Right: Not that it's rocket science to pull off, in my opinion, but I think the factions are well-executed in this adventure.
The three factions are designed to be easy to play off each other. They're fairly distinct in motivation and the resources available to them, although I have ideas about how they could have gone further with this, specifically with the kobolds. Narratively, the goblins are the bread-and-butter enemies, the kobolds are underdogs who can be swayed to the PCs' side, and the orcs are the Big Bads and don't directly show up until near the end.
I anticipate this element working well with minimal changes, and it's a core part of the adventure, so I'm happy about that.
Creative Use of Skill Challenges: Skill challenges are a divisive element of 4e, even amongst its own designers. This shows through in how much the chapters on them evolve between the DMG1 and DMG2.
In my opinion, the first two skill challenges in this adventure (Encounter 2 and Encounter 3) are excellent. They showcase the strength of skill challenges as a piece of design: mechanizing non-combat parts of the game that still need to have stakes, in a way that integrates well with the combat mechanics that make up 95% of the game system.
Encounter 2 provides the players three options on how to sneak into the city. The options' pros and cons are immediately obvious and mechanized in ways that make sense with the narrative details. Straightforward, but not to its detriment!
Encounter 3 is the one that really has me itching to design weird storygame inspired skill challenges, though. It progresses between fights throughout the entire rest of the adventure. A sidebar suggests it may be better not to even announce it as a skill challenge to the players, which kind of reminds me of the whole debate in the OSR about how much of hexcrawl mechanics should be made visible to players.
I could see this encounter forcing a GM to improvise if the players fuck up a lot near the start of the adventure, but I will withhold judgment on that until I run it myself.
The one other skill challenge, Encounter 10, is kind of boring; a bog-standard negotiation with a dragon too powerful just to fight head-on. It feels likely to chafe at players if you keep it firmly within the skill challenge framework, but whatever. There's nothing stopping me from replacing it or sprucing it up so that players have more meaningful choices to make.
Narrative Flexibility: This is pretty minor, but I like that the adventure explicitly advises the GM to alter the overarching questgiver framework according to what will be fun and interesting. For example, if the players start to suspect their employer and that of the orcs are in cahoots, it says that you should feel free to make that true.
I don't think the questgivers and their motives are likely to cross the players' minds during the adventure, because it's very much a narrative bookend thing, and as written they are highly unlikely to compare notes with the orcs, rather than just fighting to the death. But I appreciate the sentiment.
What I Don't Like
Linearity: As stated above, I don't care about debating "railroads vs. sandboxes." But I do care about giving my players meaningful choices, even in games as prep-heavy as modern D&D, where respecting those choices can mean throwing out a whole session-long fight I spent time designing, bought minis for, etc etc.
There is a balance to be struck, and I realize prewritten adventures are going to skew toward forcing their setpiece encounters, but I wish some of that advice to be flexible applied here as well.
The most egregious case of this is that the final battle with the orcs is set up such that they ambush the PCs after they acquire the Slaying Stone, and there is nothing players can do to prevent this from happening.
I have a few ideas on how to fix this. One is to have two versions of the final fight: a harder one where the players fail to prevent the ambush, and an easier one where they come prepared. Or, I could have the orcs discover the stone at the same time as they do, and either have a three-way fight with the dragon as its own side, or ditch the dragon altogether. Or combine the two: maybe the default is they fight at the location of the Stone, but clever planning could mean they beat the orcs there. There's a lot of options I prefer to the prewritten version.
Not Enough Magitech!: One of the things I really fuck with in this module is the whole "lost magical weaponry" aspect... Except there's almost nothing to it. One fight with the cool-ass robot dogs from the cover, and the Slaying Stone itself, which... See the next section for why that's not enough for me.
I plan to run this in a way that really emphasizes the Roadside Picnic Zone-iness of the city. It's dangerous, it's full of hostile factions, but there's also uniquely cool magitech weirdness to harvest, even if some of it will try to kill you for your trouble. One change will be to have more construct fights.
The MagGuffin is Boring: So yeah, all the Slaying Stone does is kill one creature within the city, AFTER it gets a full turn of combat. And there's just one stone and it can only be used once. Even if, as GM, you BS some implications it could be turned into something more powerful, that's lame. And the adventure explicitly tells you to hype this thing up whenever possible.
My fix? It's basically a one-use Death Note. It can kill any one person as long as you have a decent Arcana bonus and know their true name. That's strong enough they're unlikely to waste it on this encounter. It also makes the Stone, and by extension the party, focal to future adventures rather than just getting destroyed by the questgiver upon retrieval. What will the PCs do with it? Surely they don't trust some old wizard guy who paid them 100 gold with this kind of power, right? These are more interesting questions to me. And I'm never afraid to upset the status quo of a campaign this way. Many of my favorite moments in RPGs result from giving the PCs this kind of dilemma, and power.
The Kobolds Don't Actually Use Traps: This is pretty minor, but one of the things the module says makes the kobolds distinct from other factions is that their territory is full of traps. But there are no encounters where this get used (nor any trap stats for during exploration.) They do have a secret passage in one fight, at least.
Anyway, this is dead easy to fix. I'll poach some of the low-level traps from the DMG and slot them into one or two of the kobold fights.
Racist Fantasy Game is Racist: This is by no means unique to this module, but damn, it's always jarring to see everyone that's not a "civilized" (playable) race get described as if they're barely smart enough to speak. And of course they're ontologically evil and thus OK to kill. I dunno. It's just weird and boring and gross.
One change I plan to make around this, besides roleplaying people as people with survival instinct, real motivations, not monocultures, etc. is to replace the orcs with a mercenary faction that aren't all one race, and that have more sophisticated methods than "torture goblins until we ambush the PCs as scripted." I'm thinking probably having a tiefling spellcaster in charge, since they're supposed to have been the ones to create the Slaying Stone (and presumably the Iron Defenders and other, undescribed magitech weirdness).
Some of the Fights are Kind of Boring: I do feel like I should spend more time on this, because it's really the important part, and the main reason to buy a module rather than run your own story off-the-cuff. But here's the gist of my thoughts.
Overall I think most of the fights are fine. I really like Encounter 6, which is not only the one with the iron defenders, but also a kobold that summons an ankheg halfway through the fight. The only ones that really strike me as underwhelming are Encounters 11 and 12. This is kind of a shame, since Encounter 12 is the boss fight with the leader of the goblins. His only gimmick is that he has a mount and he can deflect damage to it.
I'll probably redesign that one, and just scrap Encounter 11 altogether. That one has a lycanthropic noble NPC who gets ambushed by a bunch of goblins. I find his whole subplot half-baked and uninspiring, so I will be cutting him altogether. I'm not really big on the whole "reclaim the city for humans" thing they set up in general, between the fantasy racism as mentioned above, and the fact it detracts from the Stalker-y "overrun magitech city" vibes that I think are a lot of fun.
I also feel like there are slightly too many fights with all or mostly Skirmisher enemies. I get that they're kind of the "default" monster role, but variety is the spice of life.
Okay, that was a lot of words! I'm curious to see how many of them I take back and/or eat after actually running this. Stay tuned on that, and also maybe on some posts about the DIY mini substitute I'm thinking of trying since I gave away all my miniatures a couple years ago.
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