I’m sure it’s become far too obvious that I’m exhausted by Fourth Edition and so, so ready to read some Fifth Edition D&D material. I’ve got a shelf of it just waiting, and while writing this article I find myself fantasizing about entire books of material that never mention the Dawn War or primordials once. Will all of the Fifth Edition be good? Dear god, no. But at least it won’t continue referring to one particular campaign setting as “the world,” and at this point even this small change would be enough. First, though, we have an absolute ton of planar adventures in Dungeon magazine to get through, as during the twilight of Fourth Edition Wizards packed them into nearly every issue of the magazine. Rather than give each of them their own space, I decided to rush through the whole pack of them for the sake of my sanity, but some of these are actually pretty worthwhile, even if none of them had much of an effect on the game’s long term lore given their context. 

First off was “The Devil’s Due” by John Rossomangno for issue #188 (March 2011). This one’s a bit of an oddity in that it’s more than just a sidequest, but at the same time it’s certainly less than a full adventure. You could think of it as an extended adventure prompt, though it takes up a solid 11 pages of the magazine and is more fleshed out than you might expect. This particular length of module was a rarity, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, and in fact there’s a solid idea at the heart of “The Devil’s Due,” regardless of its more… questionable execution. 

An Astral Sea ship captain made an agreement with a devil to transport fragile (though ill-defined…) goods while using his soul as collateral. The players get involved for one of many reasons given by the article, and soon find themselves in a pickle when the goods get damaged and the devil appears and shortly demands the captain’s soul. Of course, the devil never cared about the goods in the first place, it was always about getting his grubby hands on that fresh mortal soul, it’s just that the captain was too dumb to realize this and made a crazy-stupid deal. 

What I like about this scenario is that it uses a deal with a devil in a way that still manages to involve PC’s, which can be difficult to pull off because at least in my experience that’s not something they usually want to touch. It’s a major part of devillish identity, but in practice is rarely part of campaigns, and this adventure gets around that difficulty by largely forcing it upon players. That being said, what they decide to do once this all happens is left open-ended… kind of. The module says that it’s possible to roleplay this scenario, or perhaps fight it out, or figure out other solutions. However, roleplaying this is difficult because it’s going to involve something like finding loopholes, which would mean the DM needs to make a concrete agreement (and as written there really aren’t any loopholes to be found). 

If players don’t want to roleplay, there’s also the possibility for an utterly insane and obnoxious skill test. I’ve mentioned before that the way Fourth Edition tends toward skill tests as a replacement for roleplaying is a development I hate, but rarely are things as annoying and labyrinthine as this particular test. Essentially, in order to defeat this devil in a battle of wits, players need to win at three skill rolls. That’s very simple, as it should be, but somehow a full page is devoted to making this work. It’s all messy enough that a suggestion to use a set of tokens is given in case no one is able to count up to three on their own. 

And, well, that’s it. There’s one real fight, and then the skill test, and then…? I actually like how open this scenario is, but it’s also a lot of pages for what is going to take up maybe half a session at best. 

Only slightly more substantial is “Killing Ground” by D. Jason Wofford for the next issue of Dungeon (#189, April 2011). It’s 18 pages long and includes three full encounters, but it’s also set in the Feywild, which means it includes sentences like this: “As the wicked beast’s victorious roar erupted through the trees, beautiful fey maidens appeared in a swell of haunting song, manifesting the demesne’s newly born hunger.” This is the type of thing that keeps me from reading D&D tie-in fiction, bleh. 

For most likely no particular reason, PCs are sucked into an interplanar maze that’s sometimes in the Feywild and sometimes in “the world.” It really doesn’t matter where the place is located because there’s no appreciable difference between these two planes (such that a sidebar is included to make sure DMs remember to at least try something, anything to make this change more interesting). Sirens call to the players, and they wander the maze until the DM says they’re done, essentially. There are rules regarding how the DM should mess with time and space, but this essentially boils down to “keep the players stuck until it’s no longer fun.” And you know what, fair enough. 

But this is still ultimately a maze without a map—or rather, a maze where the rather lovely map is written so as to be completely disregarded—and as such there’s no puzzle solving or logic involved with escape. Players will wander until the DM says there’s an enemy, then repeat this until done. Eventually they find the center of the maze, fight a boss, and call it a day. There’s a lot of backstory regarding minotaurs and firbolgs and why there are fey sirens luring people to their deaths, but it’s all so basic that I just couldn’t force myself to care. I refuse to explain what the “Animus Spire” at the center of the maze is or what it does, suffice to say, “The treant lurks near the murky water of the pond. Two bough dryads flank the Animus Spire. They have all been driven mad by the Blood League’s influence over the demesne and are eager to enter the fray.” I’m going to lie down now and try to exorcize bad fantasy tropes from my brain before starting the next write-up. 

Also from this same issue is “The Pavilion of Wonders: Mihajla’s Tent” by Cameron Burry. This article consists of five pages devoted to the den of a djinn in Elemental Chaos. The setting is, for once, not devoted to combat. Whoa, is that even allowed in Fourth Edition? Anyhow, Mihajla owns an “extradimensional” (does this mean it links with a demiplane, or is something else going on here?) tent that “can appear in any locale, from a large city to a remote wilderness to a distant plane.” Mihajla is addicted to gambling, and isn’t picky about what form so this is left to the DM to decide. There’s a lot of explanation as to the tent’s layout, but of course there’s no map of it (as those are almost always reserved for combat). And while Mihajla himself may have no alignment, he sure has a creepy level of his tent in which players might find “child captives of the djinn.” Umm… what the fuck?

The children were lost by parents who gambled them and are being trained as servants. All the captives seem healthy, say they are well cared for, and have no particular complaints against Mihajla. Even so, some of them would like to see the outside world and their families again, especially the children. Like everything else, Mihajla will use them as stakes in a game but won’t relinquish them for any other reason.

Fourth Edition D&D just loves its slavery and can’t resist unnecessarily adding it to every situation that might remotely support it. The edition also really loves to say that people aren’t evil when they’re doing things like slave-trading, which is pretty goddamn disgusting. I feel like the whole tent and everything about it are meant to be whimsical, but a slave trading djinn and his child-trafficking tent of wonder are, umm, not particularly to my liking. 

I know that I’ve been incredibly negative so far, so let’s change it up with the shockingly good adventure “Reign of Despair” by Andrew G. Schneider. Published in issue #191 of Dungeon (June 2011), and so released at roughly the same time as the boxed set The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond (which I will regretfully be covering in the near future), it’s a tie-in release through and through. Set in Gloomwrought and centered around the city’s inane politics, the main storyline concerns a cadre of gargoyles murdering shadar-kai, and only the PC’s can figure out why, let alone why anyone really cares. Players get involved through the Romeo and Juliet-esque romance between two shadar-kai from conflicting houses and the rest pretty much writes itself.

Ok, I’m being overly dismissive of this adventure so far, and it’s time for a drastic course correction because it’s not just fine, it might be the strongest adventure I’ve come across in this entire edition. There are multiple NPCs to talk to, and while their personalities are sometimes a bit rote, they have motivations of their own that frequently conflict with each other. That’s the good shit that adventures—and all stories—are made from. There’s a timeline of events, and consideration given for what to do in the instance that players are successful early, or they miss clues while investigating what happened, or just leave the cityentirely  through a hilarious portal to the Feywild. I’ve never cared for Gloomwrought, but not much included here feels like it needs to be set there (just change the shadar-kai to humans and you’re mostly done with the conversion), and it would actually be easy and enjoyable to convert to another setting even now. The perennially racistly-depicted Vistani people unfortunately make an appearance late in the adventure, but that’s my only demerit for what is a wonderfully well-developed scenario full of complicated plotting and investigation. Plus, as with the city, it wouldn’t actually be that hard to transform the Vistani into someone else or remove this adventure from the Shadowfell entirely. You can hear the gears in my head turning as I consider how I might use this myself, as the adventure is good enough that it seems worth taking the effort to extricate it from Fourth Edition. 

By issue #192 (July 2011) of Dungeon the pretense of it even being a magazine was largely gone, but the content kept chugging along, even if the editorial side of things felt a bit rudderless. This issue published an article about abyssal plague demons by Michael E. Shea, which is somewhat planar in nature though it also involves a lot of Tharizdun lore nonsense. More important is another adventure set in the Shadowfell, “Evard’s Shadow” by Daniel Marthalar. It’s centered around a mansion that exists “both in the world and in the Shadowfell.” Weirdly, though, players are going to need to travel between these two planes and fight against the mansion’s dark reflection… meaning they’re not planarly coterminous after all, right? Ultimately, it’s just a dungeon crawl, or perhaps a pair of conjoined dungeon crawls, with increasingly shadowy theming as PCs get further into the adventure. Players will fight against Evard’s shadow, who is weirdly weak, and with this stop him from infecting “the world” with more Shadowfell goodness. We also get the words “nethermancy” and “nethermancer” coined in this article, which is, uhh, certainly something. 

Because I’m a masochist I’m going to keep going until the end of the year. Next up is “Temple of the Weeping Goddess” by Phillippe-Antoine Menard for issue #194 (September 2011). This adventure is that true rarity of the game, a scenario for 0-level characters. PC’s play as teenage orphans asked to “undertake a strange and dangerous mission into the Elemental Chaos: reason with and recover an aspect of Avandra, trapped there by her own dark emotions.” So typical orphan stuff. And yes, I had to be reminded who the hell Avandra was for this adventure, as she’s one of the Fourth Edition deities and this pantheon just will not stick in my head. She’s also one of only four good-aligned gods, which makes the adventure’s plot surrounding her destroying an entire island out of wrath more than a little bit off. Essentially, the goal is to convince an aspect of Avandra to “return to the natural world,” though why her location matters is never actually made clear. 

While I have a predilection for low-level planar adventures,  this particular one feels contrived and uninspired. I don’t like the aspect or understand why she’s having a weird sulk, let alone why she’s so stupid about it all. There’s no real roleplaying here, just a skill check to “encourage the aspect to break her out of her emotional prison.” The aspect is reminded that what she’s up to makes no sense and quits it, though they’re still going to have to kill a boss goblin named the Storm Prince because this is Fourth Edition and so why come all of this way to another plane of existence if you’re not going to punch someone to death? Really, the best thing about this adventure are the set of maps by Mike Schley and a cat named Zelda who distracts the Storm Prince because he doesn’t want to hurt the kitty. She even has a little collar and everything. Zelda is the real hero of this adventure. Why is there no artwork of her, Wizards?

And with that, I’m pretty sure we’re done with the planar Dungeon material through the end of 2011. I say pretty sure because by this point in time the magazine no longer had anything resembling a table of contents, and while I’ve skimmed through every issue in the year, I’m not going to claim I did with the utmost care…. 

Ok fine, there’s one more planar article, but I’m only covering it here under protest. “Baba Yaga’s Dancing Hut” by Craig Campbell in issue #196 (November 2011) ties in with a Court of Stars article on the titular witch published the same month, and in some sense the hut has long been planar. In its most iconic depiction, Roger E. Moore’s adventure “The Dancing Hut” published in Dragon #83 (March 1984), it’s a particularly weird location, and perhaps I should’ve covered it in this column ages ago, but its extradimensional properties never quite fit in with the normal cosmology as I understood it: “Baba Yaga constructed the Hut around a tesseract, a four-dimensional figure composed of eight normal cubes joined together along their faces.” Even rereading this adventure, the explanation seems like nonsense, but aside from this the Hut traveled wherever asked, planar boundaries be damned. “The Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga” by Lisa Smedman, a Second Edition AD&D module published in 1995, makes the Hut’s interplanar location more explicit and logical, saying, “the hut of Baba Yaga travels from one world to the next, ‘dancing’ (plane shifting) its way through the planes.” Not only that, Smedman removed the tesseract nonsense and says outright that the hut is “an artifact whose interior comprises a discrete demiplane.” 

Both of these adventures are classics and the Fourth Edition adventure bearing this same title is essentially a remake of Moore’s Dragon adventure. Which means it’s pretty damn good, but also hardly something to seek out unless you’re running a high level Fourth Edition adventure yourself, as you might as well convert the original as well—the end of Fourth Edition/testing period of Fifth Edition had an absolute ton of these remade adventures, for reasons pretty easy to guess at. In addition to the new statblocks, though, Baba Yaga is changed to Fey, and other bits of the game’s least compatible cosmology creep in throughout (e.g. the Hades guestroom now has visiting fey, the Hall of Gateways is weird and can take PC’s to “Earth,” etc.). On the plus side, the familiar in room eight is now given a name, and we learn that this is Shelsa the cat. Anyone who hurts her will of course receive godbolts until death and be ineligible for resurrection. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.