Red hands and high fives

Filed under Reviews on April 17, 2006
Tagged: Dungeons and Dragons, Eberron, modules

Accolades to Marcy Rockwell for signing her first novel contract. The book will take place in the Eberron campaign setting. Check out her blog for more details.

This is your last week to vote in the 4th Annual Pen & Paper Fan Awards. You don’t have to fill out every catergory. I didn’t, but there were a handful that applied to people who I know and certainly deserve the recognition.

I bought WotC’s latest adventure, Red Hand of Doom, this past Saturday. It’s a 126-page, softcover supplement printed in full color. The premise is nothing new, a horde of goblinkin descend upon an unsuspecting vale of humanity, and the characters are sent on several missions that will sway the outcome. What grabbed me was the execution, and the production quality.

The cover states the adventure is for characters of levels 6-12, while inside it states that the module was “designed for a party of four characters who begin the adventure at 5th level.” Based off my initial reading, I think a starting level of 6 would be more helpful. I haven’t sat down and done the calculations for XP, but I’m not sure 5th level characters would advance far enough to really be able to handle encounters in the last two parts.

Red Hand is broken down into five parts, and includes a combination of event- and location-based encounters. There is also a good mix of solutions that involve combat or roleplay. The PCs successes and failures have a direct impact on the events of the major battle between the horde and the humans. The villians are intelligent and unique enough they will make lasting impressions on the players. There was one encounter in particular that stuck with me as I read through the book, but I’m not going to give away any spoilers here.

The designers have provided a lot of details for DMs that will aid in running this adventure, including color battle mats for using miniatures. One of my favorite features is the Tactics section of each encounter, where DMs are given general ideas of how the monsters will use their abilities. In some cases, round-by-round descriptions are supplied. Several areas and encounters also included Designers’ Notes where Richard Baker and James Jacobs would give some insight on what they were thinking as they came up with these ideas. Another great feature was a section detailing suitable locations you could drop the adventure into if your campaign took place in the Forgotten Realms, Eberron or Greyhawk.

I found Red Hand of Doom to be an excellent value, and look forward to running it as a PbP campaign or with a gaming group in the future (my current gaming group is going through some of the DCC modules). And I will purchase future WotC modules if they are of the same quality.

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