 So, the new adventure book just dropped and everyone is losing their minds over it because it was written and sponsored by God's Gift to Dice, and it represents some people's only chance to live out the fantasy of being on Critical Role that's been perpetuating the scene since 2015. Even I'm a fan of Critical Role. I've watched most of Campaign 2, stuck around for Xandria Unlimited, and watched C3 right up until the pussy joke and knew that it had peaked. For me, Call of the Netherdeep represents Matt Mercer's ability to write a story that's completely inflexible and doesn't revolve around the players so much as they revolve around the book. So, does it manage to capture that tabletop whimsy sponsored by D&D Beyond? Yeah, I think so. Keep in mind that this is all just my opinion and that the cruel mistress of the YouTube algorithm forced me to upload a video immediately after the book's release or else it'd be lost in the maddening sea of irrelevancy, but from what I could skim, I think that this is a refreshingly normal tale about heroes and villains set in a very cool setting where humans are considered an exotic race. For all you Grognards, Call of the Netherdeep keeps to the D&D formula of an epic scale, Call to Adventure that makes you feel like a real hero by the end of it. But modern D&D fans who want something new will distract themselves with the monstrous race setting and the new rival system, without needing to dedicate 4 hours of your life to a single podcast episode in order to know what's going on. The book actually throws a lot of pregame lore players to get them up to speed on the world, so you'll know you're marquise from your menagerie coast before you even put pencil to paper, and the locations are places that the cast either never went to at all or spent so little time in that only the most hardcore critters will pretend to remember it. Breaking the mold of typical 5e adventures, Call to the Netherdeep starts players off at level 3 instead of level 1, and it's balanced around 5 players rather meaning unless you want your DM to go through major revisions, you'll need to use an extra dose of sleepy time tea if you want to kidnap a full party. The book says that it goes up to level 13, but I hate it when books do this because you hit level 13 by completing the adventure. So really, you just go through levels 1 through 12, and level 13 is for the closing credits and players who want to homebrew further adventures in Wildemouth. The story is broken up into seven chapters, one of them being a traveling chapter that gives me caravan PTSD, but the majority are just sandboxy cities and dungeons that are really easy on the DM to run, but like all modules, don't allow players to wander off the beaten path too much, and players looking to travel the whole continent of Wildemouth just like their favorite voice actors will be very disappointed by both the linear storytelling and the few locations presented. However, if that's what you're looking for, the Explorers God to Wildemouth already has everything you want, and it's definitely not necessary for this adventure, but it helps expand on the world if you're looking for after-class activities. Also, despite not being the officially sanctioned seafaring adventure, Call of the Netherdeep has multiple water levels, and water plays a surprisingly big role in the atmosphere. So, if you've been wanting to break out that Triton or Water Genasi, or hey, even a Simic Hybrid, now would be a good chance, even more so given that Xhorhas is a hub for non-traditional monster girls. The overall story, like I said, is linear, but not anywhere near as linear as some books on the market. Obviously, the broad strokes are going to be the same because this is a book and books aren't your friend, but several sections have multiple pages of what-ifs to describe the consequences of previous actions. If the party is a dick to the rivals, the rivals will be dicks back in multitudaneous ways. If the party steals from the old lady's muffin wagon, she will hunt you in the night and strike you down with the might of Zeus. Besides that, every location is its own little sandbox where walking to a shop activates a minigame to count all the bellhop's beans before they explode and kill everyone inside, and they even throw in some fancy little factions, a la Dragon Heist, to give you more sidequests to follow, ensuring that, like Leroy said, there's always something to do. It's kinda like Order the Dragon Queen, but with actual content. So much so that they included an actual caravan chapter. Luckily, it's only a quarter of the time, and it doesn't have a self-destruct button hidden in one of the carts, so I won't have to make a 14-minute rant this time to warn people of the impending danger. You can just spend the time mingling players with their rivals as they sing campfire songs into the next city. Speaking of rivals, the rival system is what you would expect from hearing about it. You've got five NPCs that make up Rivals Incorporated LLC, who will show up to cause a big stink and give players a punchable face to look forward to. As the adventure goes on, you swap out their early game stat blocks for newer, stronger stat blocks so that they always stay a challenge for the party. In terms of story, they're fairly indispensable, constantly getting new flavor texts to describe how they respond to the player's actions, and I can see my players losing their minds over trying to one-up the rivals, which kind of makes them better antagonists than the actual villains of the book, which range from creepy cult of bad guys to the conceptual idea of evil. Despite their canonically being five rivals, they're always supposed to be as many of them as there are you, so if your game only has the classic four players, you can erase a rival as well, and if you end up with a massive six players, the game suggests that you give one of the rivals an identical twin. I guess if you have seven people, you should just make rival triplets. I do really appreciate that the book takes time to give you goals for the rivals and things for the rivals to say offhandedly during a fight, which isn't necessary for veteran DMs, but it just helps add an extra layer of personality on characters that this book is trying hard to get you to care about. No matter what, though, I am going to spend my entire life hating that this water genasi pirate girl born of orcs on the sea isn't the spawn of Ford and Jester, because of course that would be too much fan service. I'm not mad, I just want to put something in your eye. The ending of this adventure does something that I absolutely love and wish more campaigns would take to heart, which is that it provides multiple full endings for the players. No spoilers, but most 5e adventures have a few alternate endings that get like a paragraph at most, and then one canonical ending that gets art and flavor text that the writers obviously wanted you to read. Call of the Netherdeep instead goes the route of Undertale by titling its endings best, worst, and natural, based on what the party did up until this point and how the rivals reacted to the party Fortnite dancing on them. None of the options are presented as better than the others and one leaves the story open to further adventures if the party is looking for a reason to keep playing, but it makes me feel like I'm not fighting to get to the real ending, I just get what I get. Honestly, the entire story feels like it has way more to say about the nature of being a hero and having something to say is more than 5e has given in a long while. Overall, I'm excited to run Wet Boys the RPG and while I haven't even started yet, it looks like an easy adventure to run for DMs looking to rope their critter friends into and I plan on starting every session by asking who can give a recap for Call of the Netherdeep. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to click everywhere and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can afford to pay for some rivals of my own because everyone else is too scared to face me. But yeah, Davi out.