 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and I've been running at least six games a week for a good long while now, and the reason why I've been able to facilitate such an impressive workload is because I rely heavily on the power of PRE-MADE ADVENTURES! You know, those books that Wizards releases every half a year that you try to avoid eye contact with because it isn't a new source book? Well, in my adventures throughout the pages of these modules, I've seen the good, the bad, the ugly, and the other stuff of quite a few of these campaigns, and I think that it's high time that I put all this spelunking to good use and impart my knowledge onto any players that are looking to run the Horde of the Dragon Queen. Keep in mind, as always, that a lot of this is just my opinion, and that I'm going to try to keep this adventure spoiler-free and with a larger focus on the player's perspective towards the adventure. And if you enjoyed this video, then share it like it's a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and you are the number one peanut butter slut. And I'll make another video breaking down how to properly run it as a DM so that your games can be as chunky thick as possible. But with that out of the way, let's begin. THE GOOD! Horde of the Dragon Queen is very simple to understand. Within the first session, you discover that there is a cult that worships dragons, and you, as the adventurer, need to stop them. And the process of doing this is simple enough. As for better or worse, the campaign is way linear. So as long as you keep walking in a forward line, you'll never go off track or get lost in the sound. So keeping the game focused as a group of heroes trying to go out and stop an enigmatic bad guy is pretty easy. You travel along the Sword Coast, and there's definitely the Lord of the Rings-style feeling of traveling for long periods of time as you venture across the countryside. In addition to that, the book gives the DM a lot of options to tie players into the story of the game, which is easily my favorite thing about this whole book because it gives you a real reason to care and helps you put a lot of emotional investment into the world with little to no effort. Things like a specific enemy having killed your father, or an NPC that's involved in the story happens to be your friend from the past, or even multiple options for giving your character previous history with the cult as a whole organization. The module gives you optional background features to make you either a scholar that specializes in dragon knowledge, or to make you an ex-cultist member who knows enough about the group to understand how it works and how to pass off as a member. And yeah, most 5e campaign books give you something to tie into the campaign, but it's still a nice thing that I always enjoy seeing. Finally, while it takes a while to get there, the later chapters are pretty engaging in an episode of the week type of way, where it's structured in the way that you go to a new place, you approach the problems that are there in a clever and different way each time, and then you move on to the next place. It's not the most emotionally fulfilling way of running things, but it feels nice to complete them anyway. Also, one of the NPCs is big bass boy Farbleck Spatterge, the dad bod bullywug of Ultimate Destiny, and he is best frog. The bad! Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of good to talk about, and one of the only real good things also has a bad side to it. Firstly, the campaign is super linear, so while you won't have to worry about getting lost, if you do ever want to go off the beaten path, then you can go flumpy yourself, because there are absolutely no options to do anything other than what the book wants. Like a controlling spouse, the book expects you to do what it says, when it says, and you get no say in the matter. You are going to this place, you have no choice, you can't go anywhere else, get used to it. Other than that, the NPCs are bland. Out of all of the big bad evil guys of evil, only two of them even get a conceivable personality, with the rest of them being generic mustache twirling villains that are evil because they like the health plan, and literally all of them exist to die. You theoretically learn about all four of the quote-unquote main villains within the first few sessions of the story, but then the game just sort of has them all disappear completely until the time comes to face them in what are honestly super-forgetful fights that don't amount to much, and just sort of feel like cliff-note fights because this chapter needs a boss at the end. Other than that, all the other NPCs are either the two good guys that send you on the quest, and then are never seen again, or a bunch of characters with shades of grey that have zero consequence to the story at all, and may as well not even be there. Hell, off of memory, the book gives one specific NPC a crazy cool introduction, halfway through the story as the group is about to enter a town, and then they enter the town and said NPC is never mentioned again in the book ever again ever, and it's set up like there's supposed to be some big important character where the book specifically states that it is something that is required to take place, but the character doesn't do anything, they just show up and then say niner niner. Now, given that this campaign is only the first part of a two-part story, that should be forgivable as a couple of these NPCs do make a return in the rise of Tiamat, storyline, but the majority of them don't ever come back, nor are they mentioned again ever, despite the game treating them like a big deal, including the NPC I just mentioned, and if you've ran the module, you know who I'm talking about. The majority of these characters are just filler that the book doesn't give a lot of guidance for, that'll either die within the first minute of meeting you, or they'll be picked up by the giant flying purple baby and will never be seen again. The story as a whole makes enough sense, but what's annoying is that the majority of the story is set as a sort of mystery espionage type thing, where you have to follow this cult and figure out what it is that they're all about, but come on, let's be honest, it isn't a spoiler to make the logical conclusion that the horde of the dragon queen is about taking a horde of something to a place involving a dragon queen who may or may not be Tiamat, who may or may not rise in the near future. The idea that there is any wonder at all to what the cult of the dragon is trying to do is one that just isn't going to work out for anyone that has any understanding of the premise, and so the main hook is boring because the players already understand everything through context clues. And then there's just weird things that are brought up and then go missing soon after, like you find some important things in a cave that you're supposed to destroy, but nothing is really stopping you from just taking them, besides the book literally giving you no real information outside of like just one line, or later you find a machine at the top of a ruined castle that gives insight into something that is literally never brought up again and is apparently just a weird easter egg for the forgotten realms grognards of additions past. It's just bizarre that the writers seem to hyper focus on a choice that they think the players will make while excluding all other possible avenues that the players could possibly go down, which brings us to the ugly. Okay, so believe it or not, I was trying to be nice for most of this review, but honestly fuck this campaign. It is awful for three big reasons. Firstly, the first chapter set in the town of Green Nest where you very first start is the most unbalanced bullshit in the history of bulls defecating on things. Because this book was written before they properly figured out the power level of first level characters in fifth edition, the very first encounter is a possible TPK and you're meant to just keep going and dealing with all of the problems in town, when literally every encounter that you meet up with is an unbalanced match in the bad guy's favor, culminating in the absolute BM play that is having one of the overpowered bad guys knock out one of the players and deal a single death blow before just leaving saying ha ha, you guys suck. It's like, are you serious? I understand that they wrote it before they understood the power level of the players, but they didn't change it when they scaled the power level down? They didn't think maybe they should do that or maybe Adeline saying hey, maybe if these guys are having a really hard time you should bump the characters up to at least level three so that they stand a goddamn chance. And I get that the first encounter is meant to make the cult look big and bad like they're on an unstoppable force that you're gonna have a really hard time dealing with and it's meant to prop that bad guy that's doing the pub stomp as being a really tough threat, but the problem is that every encounter after this the cult is chumps and the bad guy suffers from the same problem that all the other bad guy NPCs have in that you meet him once and then you don't see him again until the fateful final fight of finality, robbing the players of all that agency that having a recurring enemy could bring. Secondly, the game demands the world of you in terms of where you are allowed to go, but it doesn't even bother to flesh out the places you do go to. Seriously, you go to some of the most famous places in all of D&D lore and yet all you get is half a page of flavor text and a half off coupon to the next place where you can go fuck yourself. If you were planning on enjoying a sightseeing tour throughout the Sword Coast like the game presented it as, I really hope you like not doing that or I hope you like having your DM lift the goddamn Sisyphus Stone in order to flesh out the world by themselves only to have to do it again in the next town four sessions later. Lastly, and this one is a little bit of a spoiler so you might want to skip ahead it's not really that much of a spoiler but fair warning anyway. But this game for all its focus on traveling takes a really long time to get absolutely nowhere. What I mean by that is that chapter four is literally just traveling in a straight line for a stupid period of time during which the second point comes into play because the chapter literally starts you out in a town then makes you travel six days to a town semi-important to the DND lore then travel three days by boat to arguably the biggest most important city that people who have an inkling of an understanding about DND would love to be but you only get to be there for five seconds because then you have to travel another 15 days to a famous haunted castle that gets zero screen time whatsoever not even a single line of information as to what it is then you get to travel another 15 days to another semi-important town more people would care about it than the first semi-important town but it's eh but then you travel another fucking 10 days to get to the other arguably biggest most popular city in DND lore and none of them I mean none of them get any description as to what you are supposed to do there besides the very limited and specific things that progress the story in a janky and unfulfilling way and it's insane that the writers didn't even give out a single thing to do given that the plot crashes them into every goddamn town they possibly can get to and yet doesn't expect DND players to explore an area and I nearly choked on my own uvula when I flipped to the next page to chapter five and found out that after spending 50 days trying to finally arrive to the plot you were expected to catch a trip to nowhere and travel for another 10 days just to finally arrive at a place where things actually happen and if anything and I mean anything happens to make the players stop following this 60 day linear trail then the entire story falls completely apart which is really difficult to deal with when you realize that the players have to spend most of this time in close vicinity to the cult that they're investigating and players love investigating things they love messing with the bad guys and they will inevitably attempt to do this because players are like that and although the NPCs will tell them hey maintain secrecy they're players they have no reason to assume that the reality of the situation is that touching anything will just break the game like who even read this and thought yeah a big empty middle section of absolutely nothing is a perfect addition to dnd's first official module but i digress fuck chapter four the verdict god i hate horde of the dragon queen it's stupid it's ridiculous it's obnoxious and it's unbelievable that the book was either not play tested at all or just ignored because it's dnd it'll sell and it's massively disappointing that this was the first introduction to the world of dnd that the players got to what is arguably the best edition of dnd that has existed in years because it means that they'll have a skewed opinion on all of the other honestly pretty great modules that fifth edition has to offer but even then don't let that distract you from the fact that a good dm can spin absolutely anything into gold as long as they follow the one basic rule of dnd make sure the players are having fun i've ran this module i've completed this module four separate times and each time the players told me that they had a blast they told me that while they recognized all the pitfalls that the adventure had made that made the whole experience a chore to sift through they also acknowledged that it's not the dm's fault that a premade book is poorly written and they applauded that with a lot of heavy lifting i was able to spin each session individually into a great time to be held by all which honestly is the most that we can possibly hope for in a game you can enjoy this module your dm just has to work harder that being said a good module is weighed by how fun of a campaign it's able to be without all the various edits and adjustments from the side of the dm because what's the point in buying a $50 book if i'm gonna have to work to fix it all the way through anyway and unfortunately i had to sweat to carry the burden that was giving the story a satisfying thread to follow that made sense and allowed the players at least a little freedom to move around and sure after the fourth time running through it i had things pretty down pat but the first time it was a nightmare so i'm giving horde of the dragon queen two chapis out of a possible 10 chapis the game is very look but don't touch and if you do touch something then i hope you like homebrew but yeah that'll about do it i hope you enjoyed this video i apologize on how ranty it turned out i didn't mean for it to turn that way when i was writing the script but as soon as i sat down and started recording all of the pent up anger just came out of me but yeah if you enjoyed this video leave a like comment subscribe ring my bells to make me swell and maybe support me on patreon so that i can afford a module that doesn't suck also if you want me to make a video talking about this game from a dm's point of view where i can actually go over a lot of the ways to fix the game have it be a much more enjoyable experience for all the players then share this around to your group friends if this video does well enough then the power of voting with your views will tell me to milk this potential cash cow for all its worth may your lips be always chapped but yeah davi out