Review of Princes of the Apocalypse

Summary

Princes of the Apocalypse is the second 5e super adventure. The main adventure starts at 3rd level, but there is good side content to deal with the first two levels as well. The adventure will take characters up to 14th level. It is themed around the Princes of Elemental Evil, and is something of a spiritual successor to the Temple of Elemental Evil. The characters deal with a conspiracy in Red Larch and then start searching for a missing delegation. This leads them to four outposts built atop an ancient dwarven civilization. As the characters explore the outposts, they face reprisals from the elemental cults. Eventually they get to four elemental fanes beneath the outposts, where they must defeat the cult leaders to prevent them from summoning the four princes of elemental evil.

The Good

• The side treks towards the end of the book tend to be quite good, and would be useful to drop in many campaigns.
• The Weeping Colossus is the one dungeon that seemed like it would be very fun to run.
• The hand symbols for the different cults is a good touch.
• The adventure idea behind Red Larch (a crooked cabal of superstitious town leaders being taken advantage of by the cultists) is good and has a of potential.
• I will definitely steal the water cultists for use in a future pirate campaign.

The Bad

• Chock full of uninspiring dungeon crawls. I would only run one of the eight dungeons in this adventure. They are mostly just uninspiring and bland collections of repetitive rooms and encounters. I found myself skimming a lot of the descriptions.
• The adventure tries to be a sandbox in terms of how you tackle the dungeons, but mostly its directionless and hard to run. I didn’t have a good sense of how to connect the dungeons together, when characters should do what, or even what was required to do that.
• The final confrontations at the elemental portals seem like they would feel very repetitive to play. The key is always throwing the weapon into the portal - it would be good if that was varied more.
• The guidance on actually running the conspiracy in Red Larch is disjointed and spread out. As a DM you would need to prep a lot to run it well.

The OK

• The leaders of the respective cults are fine. None of them seem like they would stand out expect maybe the guy with the claw hand.
• Using the delegation as a hook is a fairly good idea, since it gives characters a reason to keep going back into the dungeons. As a DM you would want to find ways to tie characters to the NPCs that are deepest in the dungeon, to give the characters motivation.
• The guidance to tying the adventure to other setting was fine, but it felt like a lot of shoe horning for everywhere but Greyhawk. I’d rather that space be used on aids to help run the adventure in the Realms, where I would guess the vast majority of people actually run the adventure.
• The second chapter is basically a mini setting for the Dessarin Valley. Add setting info into the adventures is a early 5e thing. As a Realms fan I enjoy it, but it feels like one of the more generic sections of the Realms to detail. Its also not nearly as useful as the Realms information presented in Storm King’s Thunder, which is really useful for adventures that travel the North.

Final Thoughts

I would not run this adventure. Unlike Storm King’s Thunder, for example, there just isn’t enough good here to build out a full adventure without a lot of filler. However, I would happily steal several things (the Red Larch conspiracy, the water cultists, and Weeping Colossus) and stick them in another campaign. Without running it I am not sure how the elemental princes would feel in play, but those are really useful high level enemies that could be re-used as well. Overall, I’d rate this as the weakest of the 5e adventures I have read or played.