Princes of the Apocalypse Review
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Something is amiss in the Forgotten Realms. It’s up to the players to uncover the mystery behind the disappearance of some dwarven delegates. What they uncover though could have dire consequences on the realm forever.
A History of Princes of the Apocalypse
There are aspects in this book that hail from many different editions to Dungeons & Dragons. In D&D 4th Edition, The Elder Elemental Eye makes an appearance. But this character makes appearances in books going back as far as First Edition in the module “The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun” by Gary Gygax in 1982. Many books since have mentioned Tharizdun in some way or another since.
Another interesting point tied to past books that is returning in this book is the Temple of Elemental Evil which we will get into more later in this review.
Though not everything is directly related here with this new book, the history behind some of the locations, names, and characters is really cool.
Princes of the Apocalypse is the first campaign setting book for 5th Edition that was released after all three of the 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons core books in April of 2015. (Monster Manual, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Players Handbook). After only a short time on the market, an Errata for the campaign, or a reprint of some information for this book was released and can be found here: https://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/PotA-Errata.pdf
So on the Anniversary of this campaign's release, let's finally review the book!
Structure of Princes of the Apocalypse
This campaign book is split up over 7 chapters. The first of which is a background on the world including the Temple of Elemental evil as well as some backstory on the elemental cults.
The first chapter also comes with a surprising amount of plot hooks to get the story started.
The campaign is meant to start at 3rd level party characters. There is a plot hook that specifically can be used with the Starter Set Lost Mines of Phandelver which would take players to the 5th level. Unfortunately the start of the campaign would be pretty easy if they are moving directly into this story. Regardless, this is a neat addition.
The second chapter is a detailed description of the campaign setting in the Dessarin Valley and the town of Red Larch. One thing that I like that was included in this chapter was travel time information. This is something that on my own campaigns I like to flesh out as well as it really adds a pacing and real consequence like feel to actions and travel in general.
There is a good amount of information on each of the 4 elemental cults as well, the main goal is to venture to outposts and find out more on each of them or even side with one of the cults themselves.
Chapter 4 is about the Temple of Elemental Evil, this is essentially the dungeon section of this campaign. There are 4 sections that if you have not guessed that there is 1 section for each then you haven’t been paying attention in this review. There is an order that is suggested to clear out the dungeon but any group can tackle them in any order that they wish. The more dungeons that get cleaned out the harder things are going to get.
Temple of the elemental eye. This is the climax to the story where the players will confront a prophet. The final battle will be based on the order in which the players go through and handle each elemental cult. This creates some nice replayability so this campaign could be played through more than once. The campaign will take players all the way up to level 15 which at this point is pretty high.
Chapter six is a side quest chapter, there is a mini campaign that can get the player group started similar to how Curse of Strahd had the Death House. There are other side quests as well that are smaller and can be sprinkled throughout the campaign in the middle beginning or end. This is a nice addition, but I personally wished that they used this chapter to flesh out a little more of the story or added more to the campaign in general.
The final chapter contains all the monsters and NPC’s that the players will encounter which is pretty similar to other campaign books.
Extra Elemental Evil Items
This campaign book was also released with a lot of goodies sold separately of course. If you are looking for a set that contains a lot of elemental figures, this is the one to get! There are many other miniatures in this set, many of the large figures are dragons, so this might be a good set to pick up if you are hunting for some color dragons and metallic colored dragons. The miniatures could arguably be the best thing about the Princes of the Apocalypse simply due to the elemental and dragon density in the set.
Gale Force Nine also made a dungeon master screen for this set. The back of the screen contains some useful maps, random encounter tables and other useful quick references. This was not something that I picked up for this campaign in particular, but is there for any DM to utilize nonetheless. I do like that the screens are solid and make for a good location to place player initiative tents for all to see.
The art in this book is pretty well done. It really does paint a vivid picture of what each of the elemental cults looks like as well as some of the areas in the world. This will be really useful to help describe the world better since this is faily sandbox style campaign.
Final Thoughts on Princes of the Apocalypse
I think that Wizards of the Coast was banking on the starter set and the three core books to carry a lot of missing elements to this book, but I think that any DM that has done at least 1 campaign before out of a book should have no issues picking this one up as well.
I have seen many other opinions on this campaign out there that all say that this campaign is rather complicated to run. It might be that this book is a little to open, and lacks some filler, or that the content is not the most clearly placed in this book. I can see where people are coming from though, and this does hark back to me to the Hoard of the Dragon Queen with less minotines steps.
I think when it comes down to it though, Princes of the Apocalypse, Hoard of the Dragon Queen have something in common, and it was that they were right along the release of the new edition of the game. I am sure that Wizards of the Coast did not have as many people on the teams for these particular projects because they were still rolling the game out. It shows with the much higher quality and more content dense the new books that players are getting treated with now.
This book mixes some discovery with a lot of fights and dungeon crawling, particularly toward the end, but players can pull off making this feel like more of a heist campaign if they wish, it just depends on the skill level of the dungeon master to help pull this off.
Princes of the Apocalypse is nothing spectacular when it comes to the now numerous campaign settings and books that have been released for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, but it was a really nice try and I would say a decent improvement over the Tyranny of Dragons book. I would give this a read through and find out from your players if they are interested in a campaign like this.
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