D&D‘s most ephemeral official releases have always been the ones made for organized play. It’s what made old Gencon modules priceless collector’s items, and the many RPGA releases from the 90s legendary and apocryphal. Whenever these have been relevant and available I’ve tried to cover them, but the fact of the matter is that they’re curious objects that largely exist outside the game’s canon despite their original publisher—in most cases, even the best organized play releases have never seen widespread publication. But by the time Fourth Edition was released, it wasn’t so hard for people to make copies of these works and spread them online, such that when it came to the Encounters series for Fourth Edition (and bleeding over into Fifth), these works were for the first time ever no longer so apocryphal. It’s pretty damn easy to find a PDF of any of the 19 Encounters Series modules, and it’s more a question of why exactly anyone would want to bother. 

I’ve covered the RPGA previously, but it had largely lost relevance during Third Edition D&D. You can find it mentioned occasionally in old issues of Dragon, but it really petered off by the end, and with it organized play seemed to pretty much die away with it, especially when Living Greyhawk was killed off in 2008. Oh sure, there was a Living Forgotten Realms successor program, but it never seemed to have much impact, as Paizo took the people who’d been managing Living Greyhawk with them, plus the 100 year time jump Fourth Edition gave to the Realms (which was universally derided as a bad decision) meant limited interest even from longtime fans. But just when it seemed like official organized play for D&D was well and truly dead, in 2010 Wizards of the Coast introduced the Encounters program as a sort of roleplaying take on the popular Friday Night Magic series. And perhaps due to the amount of support it was given, which as of when I’m writing this in 2024 seems absolutely unfathomable given the almost complete lack of support given to any ancillary organized play today, the Encounters series actually caught on.

Let’s quote a bit from our favorite game historian, Shannon Appelcline, for some context:

Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition released in 2008, but by early 2010 it was obvious that the game needed a little something extra to get it to the level of success that Wizards required. This would result in two major expansions in 2010 that were each intended to help the game appeal to a more casual demographic that wasn’t currently playing it: Essentials and Encounters.

Encounters was an organized play initiative. Wizards of the Coast supplied GMs across the nation with adventures to run on Wednesday nights. Players could either use pre-generated characters or provide their own 1st-level characters. Each night’s adventuring contained just a single encounter. These sessions were billed as running 60-90 minutes in length, but a few of the climatic encounters in Season 1 ran 2.5-3.5 hours for some groups.

By running Encounters simultaneously across the nation, Wizards hoped to take advantage of social media; they envisioned people talking about the games on Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, comparing their experiences with those of other players across the nation.

…

Overall, the Encounters program would prove extremely successful. Though neither it nor Essentials made D&D Fourth Edition into an unprecedented success story, the Encounters program was well-loved; it got attention on CNN and elsewhere and was successful at drawing players into game stores to play. Eleven Encounters seasons ran through late 2012, before the program took a short break and shifted over to a mixed 4e and D&D Next format in 2013.

Dark Legacy of Evard was the fifth of these Encounters series, first released in late Spring of 2011 (May-August) and meant to tie-in with the Heroes of Shadow supplement we skipped past without covering because it’s largely just mechanics (theoretically this would mean that the series also links a bit with The Shadowfell – Gloomwrought and Beyond, but in reality this isn’t the case). It consists of 13 total sessions divided into three chapters, each of which takes place in roughly a day of in-game time and covers one level of experience. If, like me, you find going up an entire level in a single day pretty ridiculous, well then just wait until Fifth Edition comes your way, in which players can casually gain 10 in published modules while barely trying. Anyhow, one other nice thing about these really recent releases is that there’s a great deal of information known about their development. I’m not going to quote an entire article at length, but suffice to say that Appelcline’s product description has some wonderful material about its background.

All of that context is interesting enough for people who care about the history of the game, but as far as the actual adventure goes… ugh, what utter crap. I don’t feel that this is the fault of the module’s designer, Richard Baker, it’s simply that the Encounters format is miserable for what I like about roleplaying games. Each session is given anywhere from two to five pages of detail, largely a small bit of linear prelude and then a battle. Sometimes there is a skill challenge before the battle, which will affect things, barely. But there is always a battle, and while this particular module makes tiny attempts at allowing character choice, there are a grand total of two (2) branching paths, neither of which actually matters as they rejoin a session or two later. It’s as linear as things can be, which seems necessitated by the format. Many people have fond memories of the Encounters program, but it’s easy for me to tell that this type of gaming simply isn’t my thing. 

As for the planar material, it’s hardly more interesting. Within the Points of Light “world,” Evard is the originator of shadow magic, which apparently only became a thing very recently. He had a fight with another wizard and faked his own death to get people to stop bothering him. When a person goes to his supposed tomb, they’re possessed by the soul of this other shadow wizard, who is doing evil things causing the nearby city to travel into the Shadowfell every night. This isn’t a bad overall plot by any means, but the Shadowfell material is paltry. Essentially, once there, the town is attacked by a bunch of low-level undead and shadow creatures. And that’s it. Cue 13 fights in a row. There’s no nuance, nothing really exciting or worth exploring happening in the Shadowfell here, which is by design, since if there was then the module would have to consider the possibility of people investigating. Instead, the Shadowfell is a world of nothing but dread and hazard. Conceptually speaking, this town might as well have gone to hell, because the effects are the same—endless and purposeless waves of attacks. 

As a result, there’s nothing to recommend this module, and while I can see how it works as a decent introduction to Fourth Edition D&D, at the same time it seems like a rather terrible introduction to roleplaying games. The world is boring, the NPCs are boring, and the story’s implementation in this scenario is barely existent. At least at this early stage of the series, the Encounters series modules are all essentially D&D versions of Final Fantasy XIII, attempting to give an impression of decision-making but essentially sticking players into a linear tube filled with monsters and hoping that’s all anyone wanted from the game. All I can say for now is that I hope they improve quickly, or that I don’t need to read many of them for this series.