Dungeons & Dragons Princes of The Apocalypse

Excited to play this campaign and then DM it. Going through it, it has tons of encounters, a lot of locations and Npc's and a great storyline. Should provide a few months of play according to the Forward written at the beginning of the book. The art is beautiful and the book came in perfect condition. Happy with my purchase.

Very well written adventure with plenty of room for personal adjustment for the DM. The adventure is for players 3-15, and it has some side quests to get players from 1-3 if you want to start from 1. These adventure paths are great for DMs that just don't have the time to create an entire narrative or are burnt out creatively. The adventure is very flexible, and you can play it as railroady as you like. Having an overall story to follow, but filling in with your own inventions and side stories works just as well as following the story more like a video game from point a to b to c etc. The adventure could be done over the course of a few months, or stretched to last much longer and still serve the DM and players just as well.The addition of the playable races and spells is also very nice, although that is available from the D&D website for free in a player's companion.One warning for newer groups or players: many of the encounters are built with the very real possibility of killing off the players. If this is not something you want in your campaign, make sure to adjust them to the difficulty you want.

What a great story line. I have played a lot of Pathfinder with our friends but have not ventured into D&D yet. I really wanted to try 5e and this story sounded like a lot of fun. I GM one of my pathfinder sessions and play regularly on another. I asked if my pathfinder session that I GM would like to switch to 5e and give it a go. Everyone agreed because we wanted something more into roleplay and not so much number crunching.The switch so far has been awesome! I honestly prefer 5e so much more than pathfinder. The battles flow much nicer and there is less time per player turn. Instead of adding "well I'm flanking so thats +2, then the bard has inspiration so another +2, then first attack is BAB of 11 while second is 3 and on an on and on" you just simply have your modifier to attack and disadvantage or advantage. So much easier.Now for the campaign, princes of the Apocalypse. We are about half way done so I will update once we finish but so far it has been amazing. I love the openness to this campaign. There are so many different paths the adventures can take that you can actually run the campaign with different people and have totally different experiences. That to me makes it so fun to DM because the group gets to decide how the story plays out, I am just here to facilitate. My favorite experience thus far, spoiler free, was the group commandeered a boat at a keep, saved the civilians by hiding in the druids spell, and bolted with some stolen books. It was really fun and all played out by them.The story is not quite all laid out I found, and I have to embellish a little bit to give it a little more flavor, but the bones are all there. The dungeons are well laid out, the new classes and spells are fun, the enemies from each group feel different in play styles and RP wise. I'm very excited to see this play out.

Fair warning: this campaign is definitely not made to run linearly or directly out of the box. You're going to need to do quite a bit of note-taking, tweaking and customization, and I strongly recommend at least skimming the whole book before you get started. Bookmarks or stick-on tabs are also a necessity as there's no index, and related persons, locations and story threads are scattered throughout the book. You'll be spending a lot of time flipping through pages trying to find the name, profession and relationships of such-and-such if you don't plan ahead and mark out relevant information prior to each session. In a lot of ways it's more like a "Guide to the Dessarin Valley and the unusual people, places, and events therein" than it is a canned adventure.It's definitely not a good choice for a novice or first-time DM, but in experienced hands there's a lot to work with in here and tons of opportunity to make it your own. It lends itself well to non-linear play, so if your players are fond of chasing rabbit trails or coming up with novel solutions to problems they'll have a ton of fun. At least until you get into the central conflict in the valley, at which point you'll be doing a bunch of straightforward dungeon crawls with elemental themes (as advertised). There are a wealth of optional side-treks if you need a breather from the dungeons, and enough space to bring in your own original work or one-off adventures available from other supplements, though you'll have to be careful about pacing and keeping the pressure on in order to remind players that the cults of Elemental Evil aren't idly awaiting their demise in their lairs.If you want to get straight to the meat of the thing I'd recommend skipping all the optional content and giving a 3rd-4th level party a strong reason to head straight for the Haunted Keeps, but you'll miss out on some foreshadowing and local flavor.