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jjvaldezbooks's review
2.0
repetitive and hard to follow. no index??? bummer because the concepts are cool
ruthelibrarian's review
4.0
I've finally reread this cover to cover instead of the piece by piece way I was going about it. I have a few negatives for this campaign book first, followed by many positive feelings.
1. Organization is poor in this work. This stems from the fact it is a sandbox, and I think it is definitely hard to organize a sandbox game. In any case, they did not organize this adventure as well as I would have liked.
2. The poor organization makes this a hard read, and thus a bit hard to prepare. Since my groups were starting at level 1 (many newbies, so I wanted to start with the basics), I didn't realize how important certain NPCs were, how important it was to leave certain hooks, and how important it was to talk about the messed up weather in the local area. I've had to retcon things due to not knowing certain things would be a bigger deal. I would advise DMs wanting to run this book to read THE ENTIRE THING, and make notes on big events that are upcoming. I am a bit of a pantser, so this was kind of on me too, but flipping through several chapters to see the full story was still not that helpful or welcome.
3. Despite how awesome the art is, I wanted MORE art of the cultists in this book. This is just a minor complaint.
Now the positives:
1. Once you figure out how the sandbox works, the individual pieces run well! My groups are all having a blast with the challenges in this book. The story is bare bones, which for me is a positive. I am creating a story around the adventure laid out in this book. I'm also incorporating PC back stories to make this more interesting to the players.
2. The art is AMAZING. You will get a strong feel for the aesthetics of each cult, how the members operate, and what they look like. They didn't include art for everyone (as far as I can tell), so that is kind of a downer, but only because I enjoyed the artwork so much.
3. The adventure can be fit into ANY setting that allows for magic to exist. I am running mine in Eberron, and so far, it is amazing. I am doing the cultists a little differently, and will be introducing the cult leaders to the party early on so they can seem like a bigger threat. I am able to do this because of the bare bones plot.
Huge tips:
1. Learn about the missing delegation (this is the main hook), make certain members of them prominent and important, and give your PCs a reason to care about finding them.
2. Consider chopping the dungeons up into pieces and placing them around the world or at least a bit further away than they are. It is possible for lv 3 PCs to walk into lv 6+ temples filled with things that may instagib them. Each cultist main location has a door that leads to their underground temple... and this is bad. The PCs can definitely wander into them. Avoid at all costs if you want your PCs to stand a chance.
1. Organization is poor in this work. This stems from the fact it is a sandbox, and I think it is definitely hard to organize a sandbox game. In any case, they did not organize this adventure as well as I would have liked.
2. The poor organization makes this a hard read, and thus a bit hard to prepare. Since my groups were starting at level 1 (many newbies, so I wanted to start with the basics), I didn't realize how important certain NPCs were, how important it was to leave certain hooks, and how important it was to talk about the messed up weather in the local area. I've had to retcon things due to not knowing certain things would be a bigger deal. I would advise DMs wanting to run this book to read THE ENTIRE THING, and make notes on big events that are upcoming. I am a bit of a pantser, so this was kind of on me too, but flipping through several chapters to see the full story was still not that helpful or welcome.
3. Despite how awesome the art is, I wanted MORE art of the cultists in this book. This is just a minor complaint.
Now the positives:
1. Once you figure out how the sandbox works, the individual pieces run well! My groups are all having a blast with the challenges in this book. The story is bare bones, which for me is a positive. I am creating a story around the adventure laid out in this book. I'm also incorporating PC back stories to make this more interesting to the players.
2. The art is AMAZING. You will get a strong feel for the aesthetics of each cult, how the members operate, and what they look like. They didn't include art for everyone (as far as I can tell), so that is kind of a downer, but only because I enjoyed the artwork so much.
3. The adventure can be fit into ANY setting that allows for magic to exist. I am running mine in Eberron, and so far, it is amazing. I am doing the cultists a little differently, and will be introducing the cult leaders to the party early on so they can seem like a bigger threat. I am able to do this because of the bare bones plot.
Huge tips:
1. Learn about the missing delegation (this is the main hook), make certain members of them prominent and important, and give your PCs a reason to care about finding them.
2. Consider chopping the dungeons up into pieces and placing them around the world or at least a bit further away than they are. It is possible for lv 3 PCs to walk into lv 6+ temples filled with things that may instagib them. Each cultist main location has a door that leads to their underground temple... and this is bad. The PCs can definitely wander into them. Avoid at all costs if you want your PCs to stand a chance.
sallie82's review
4.0
Started playing D&D in 2018. Went to my local game store, sat down at a table, and started playing. A year later, I’m no longer playing at the store (to big, way to noisy, and unfortunately we aren’t able to role play much. Way to busy with new players each week). I got a group of friends together and we started playing at home. Then another group got together so we started playing. Then a combo of those two groups and I started DMing. Now I’m in 5 games and I DM 2 of them.
Princes of the Apocalypse is the first campaign I’ve started after the starter set game. It is easily understandable. It has all the information I need there. And it is so much fun.
Princes of the Apocalypse is the first campaign I’ve started after the starter set game. It is easily understandable. It has all the information I need there. And it is so much fun.
talasterism's review against another edition
adventurous
inspiring
slow-paced
3.5
i liked the process of capy pasting and heavy editing for my campaing. very good very good
dylansmphillips's review
2.0
Princes of the Apocalypse by John-Paul Balmet is a dense, but open-ended official adventure module that presents a primordial problem for a D&D 5e world. The module, which acts as a sandbox style adventure, is poorly organized and at times a slog to get through. It expects characters to follow a very formulaic trajectory, even with the sandbox elements, and expects DMs to rely heavily on their own worldbuilding or improv to fill in the gaps. However, as a plug and play module to place into a preexisting world, this is a fantastic narrative to add to anyone's homebrew world. And while the book lacks more art and maps to help to give visual representation of what the cultists and locations look like, what the book does have gives feeling and personality to the cults and their culture.
TL;DR: While not built as a great out of the box module, it has the necessary parts for a great plug and play mini-campaign set in a homebrew world that helps to fill in the missing sandbox elements.
TL;DR: While not built as a great out of the box module, it has the necessary parts for a great plug and play mini-campaign set in a homebrew world that helps to fill in the missing sandbox elements.
sassybookreader's review
4.0
Started playing D&D in 2018. Went to my local game store, sat down at a table, and started playing. A year later, I’m no longer playing at the store (to big, way to noisy, and unfortunately we aren’t able to role play much. Way to busy with new players each week). I got a group of friends together and we started playing at home. Then another group got together so we started playing. Then a combo of those two groups and I started DMing. Now I’m in 5 games and I DM 2 of them.
Princes of the Apocalypse is the first campaign I’ve started after the starter set game. It is easily understandable. It has all the information I need there. And it is so much fun.
Princes of the Apocalypse is the first campaign I’ve started after the starter set game. It is easily understandable. It has all the information I need there. And it is so much fun.
dbrousseau's review
4.0
We had fun with this. Took us about two months to get through it. The princes of elemental evil. A bit repetitive but easy to DM and hubby loved it.
awestgard's review against another edition
2.0
This book suffers from a severe lack of organization. The adventure is actually quite good, if you can piece it all together.
charliemudd's review against another edition
3.0
A decent D&D module that purports to be able to take characters from level 1 all the way up to level 15. (After the first few weeks of playing this, my group's characters are level 5 and about 1/3 of the way done with the adventure, so achieving level 15 seems about right.) In other words, this adventure may span the entire careers of the adventurers -- they will be created for PotA and be retired after they finish. As such, this book needs to cover an entire world, with lore, history, maps, politics, and natural resources -- and it accomplish this fairly well. The depth of the backstories and countryside is enough without being overwhelming, and there are plenty of adventures to fill up the characters' lives and careers. The main story line centers around a small town that is trying to deal with four elemental cults that have grown to prominence in the nearby hill country, and is willing to entrust any band of able adventurers to help figure out how to handle the threat. One complaint is that the book could be better organized with easier access to maps and a better index to get to NPCs and new monsters. Make sure you have a lot of sticky notes handy to mark critical pages. My biggest complaint though is that the module is way too open ended and definitely requires heavy DM mods to make it work. It assumes the characters will do things in a certain order, but has no plot points or mechanics to accomplish this. As a DM, you will be responsible for pushing the characters in the right direction or adding doors, keys, gates, etc. to force fit a level of serialization.
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