Review: “Treasure of Talon Pass”

Synopsis: “Treasure of Talon Pass” is a an adventure for 4e D&D designed to take 2nd level characters to 3rd level. It is a fairly typical dungeon crawl that works well enough but also does not take advantage of environments and non-combat elements enough to make it more interesting than a string of combats.

Production: The print product was only available during Free RPG Day, but can be downloaded from WotC’s site in PDF for free. The product is 32 pages, of which the adventure is the first 20 (including one new magic item.) The remaining pages include 5 2nd level pregenerated characters and ads.

Notes: There are some spoilers for the adventure in the following review. If you are planning on playing in this adventure, ask your DM before proceeding.

Setup: The setup for the adventure is a relatively simple hook: a noble is looking for a rare piece of jewelry known as the “Jade Chalice” and has information on where it is, and needs the PCs to retrieve it. Complicating the fact is that a band of mercenaries from the “Nightfist” organization are after it too. There are plenty of opportunities there to drop the adventure into campaigns, from the treasure itself becoming more important, to the party becoming involved with a noble, and even the mercenary organization full of orcs is ripe to be dropped into games.

Adventure: The dungeon itself is relatively straightforward. There isn’t much branching, so your party is likely to follow the dungeon in a linear path from beginning to end. There are some secret doors, but they tend to lead to the same places as you’d get to anyway, or are somewhat irrelevant. My party ended up missing the perception checks for every important secret door, so they followed it in the most straightforward way possible. While this is less frustrating than getting stuck, it made it feel more obvious.

The combats have some interesting match-ups, and seem well paced. The party extended rested right in the middle, and both then and by the end there was at least one character out of healing surges. There’s some undead (the Tower’s former inhabitants), the orcish mercenaries, kobolds aplenty, and a solo dragon fight. If you’ve gone through Keep on the Shadowfell and/or Kobold Hall (in the DMG) you’ll probably be sick of kobolds by now, though they’re only present in two rooms in the middle. There’s a fight with two ambushing ghouls and a wraith that ended up being a lot more fun then I thought, with a big bottleneck in the middle and the wraith able to harry the party by passing through walls. The final encounter is a strange mix of skeletons, drakes, and a mage, all on different levels, and the adventure suggests random effects that happen throughout the combat, (though I didn’t end up using them.) And of course there’s the fight in a cave against a black dragon, which can be fun for your party if it’s the first time they’ve fought a dragon (or any solo) in 4e, but might seem tedious if there’s been some dragon fights already.

However, I was disappointed by a few of the fights. The two encounters right next to the entrance feature a large number of minions (zombies on one side, orcs on the other) and they both start clumped up next to each other. This goes against the advice I’ve heard on minions, and also makes it a fairly trivial challenge if your wizard gets the drop on them (and the wizard in my party has improved initiative, making that happen often.) The zombies in particular say that unless the party does something very stupid they won’t alert the monsters.

Additionally, the fight against the orcs that are also looking for the treasure happens very early no matter what. Not only is it not all that interesting a fight (you can easily ambush their outlying wolves, then the orcs have to come all the way across the room to fight), but it removes potentially the most interesting part of the adventure: the time pressure and having to deal with another group who is looking for the same thing you are. What could have provided some interesting hooks is instead yet another combat, and the main hook of the adventure is dealt with right away. In fact, the presence of the orcs is the only information that the party has going in- there’s nothing to indicate they’ll be fighting kobolds and a dragon.

Even getting past the combat itself, there’s no roleplaying whatsoever: you can’t even deal with the orcs, except for one lone orc in another room who just wants to run away, and my party sniped him (which specifically is worth no XP.) There’s only one trap, which is in a side room accessible through a secret door only. The same room contains the only thing that could be considered a puzzle, involving freeing spirits from a casket, then not attacking them. Anyone attacking them receives a penalty to defenses, and if you let them free, they fly down a well and harass the dragon. There’s no indication why you should free them, and what should be done with them, nor what the consequences will be either way.

Dungeon: I used Dungeon Tiles and placed them as the party went from room to room, as I usually do in my adventures. The rooms were pretty easy to put together, since most of them used 8×8 tiles put together, with some embellishing tiles. The only places where it proved difficult were the statue room which features a large stage, and the final room which features a multi-leveled chamber (a room I also had difficulty describing to players.) Then there’s the dragon’s cave, which was impossible to construct with tiles- that one was drawn on a blank battlemap.

The rooms do not feature much in the way of interesting terrain, and thus the combat environments are less interesting than they should be for a 4e game. (Kobold Hall in the DMG remains my top pick for cool combat zones.) Aside from the final room which has multi-levels and spiked walls, there’s also a room where kobold slingers fire from a ledge, and pillars in the room provide cover. Other than that, it’s pretty straightforward “run up and fight.”

Conclusion: If you’re looking for a straightforward dungeon crawl for your 2nd level 4e characters, then Treasure of Talon Pass could be for you. The price is certainly right. However, it had a lot of promise that it wasn’t able to live up to: the intriguing setup is quickly wasted, the combat zones aren’t interesting, and the other parts of classic dungeon crawls are absent. I found that in my campaign, I’ve gotten more mileage out of the trappings of the adventure than the dungeon crawl itself.

If you’re interested in running this with dungeon tiles, you can take a look at the pictures I took as we went along the adventure.