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They Should Have Put “Bored” in the Title: A Review of ‘Hoard of the Dragon Queen’ for 5th Ed Dungeons & Dragons

Jeff McAleer

Oct 6, 2014

Game Name: Horde of the Dragon Queen

Publisher: Wizards of the Coast

Authors: Wolfgang Bauer and Steve Winter

Year: 2014

Players: It’s an RPG so best with 3 or more

Ages: 12+

Playing Time: Ongoing

Pages: 96 pages

Price: Hardcover $29.99

Genre: First of a two part introductory 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign

While one would think the release of the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons would have led Wizards of the Coast to make sure the first adventure for 5^th Edition was a real barn burner, the unfortunate truth is nearly the exact opposite has taken place. Or, in other words, after releasing a pretty impressive Player’s Handbook at Gen Con and just prior to last week’s also well-presented Monster Manual WotC decided to dump a real dog on the public in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Lots of folks were eagerly anticipating this adventure and I’m afraid there are going to be a lot of disappointed buyers out there.

At first glance Hoard of the Dragon Queen looks like a high quality production with a good amount of art but not to the point where you aren’t getting enough text bang for the buck. Upon further inspection though you’ll begin to notice some problems with the book’s presentation. Maybe I got my hands on an early print run or something but I swear all the artwork and maps look sort of muddied and blurred. I was also surprised to see a different paper stock used than in the Player’s Handbook; the Handbook has a slicker paper stock whereas the adventure book uses a more matted finish. It isn’t as if you can’t make out the images but they’re certainly missing the same pop as you’ll find with the Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual.

The first clue that something is amiss as far as the adventure goes is in the forward. Normally, you’ll find the forward to rulebook or supplement is written by someone who wants to get you pumped up about the product right off the bat. Maybe you’ll get a bit of an inside look into how the book was put together or what inspired the creators of what you’re about to read. With Hoard of the Dragon Queen (HotDQ) Mike Mearls pens a couple paragraphs worth of thanks to the design team, mainly for putting up with all the changes the core rules were undergoing, and a sentence wishing the gamers happy dragon hunting. That’s it. One gets the feeling Mearls knew HotDQ wasn’t much to write home about and chose to keep the forward short.

Upon first reading the overview I had to wonder if I’d somehow gotten my hands on a Call of Cthulhu adventure by mistake. And a run of the mill, by the numbers CofC adventure at that. In HotDQ the player characters will pursue and attempt to stop various factions of a dragon cult bent on retrieving five masks with which they can release the ancient dragon mother Tiamat from her prison in the Nine Hells. Like I said, sounds like a Mythos adventure to me!

I’m going to keep spoilers to a minimum (although the adventure is pretty spoiled as is) since I’m sure there’ll be some out there who buy HotDQ just on the D&D name alone. What has me really scratching my head is wondering where did things go so wrong for this adventure. Wolfgang Baur and Steve Winter, of Kobold Press fame, have substantial adventure creating resumes so I can’t imagine one day they both decided to go off the deep end. Could it be the editing team at WotC dropped the ball? I ask because not only do we have a fairly generic adventure all in all with HotDQ but one which is overrun with errors, conflicting information, and references to things which never appear anywhere else in the book.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen is designed for adventurers level one through seven and is likely to be the first tale GMs will run if they’ve passed on the D&D Starter Set and happen to be using the trio of hardback books, which would be pretty difficult to do right now since the DM guide doesn’t hit until later this year. The adventure begins with the party traveling along and stumbling across a town being attacked by a small army of cultists, kobolds, ambush drakes and giant lizards. Oh… And the army is led by a dragon and a half dragon hero. Yep a dragon and a half dragon/half human baddie. I won’t even ask how a dragon and human procreate and, since the designers don’t seem to have an explanation how that happens, I guess it’s best we don’t ponder that great mystery either.

I understand how 5^th Edition D&D has made 1^st level characters more powerful than they have been in the past but it’s quite a stretch to effectively have to railroad the players into marching right into the thick of things. Most players I know would hide out on the edge of the town, knowing they’d get shellacked if they attempted to tackle this army, to await the outcome and see what role they may have in assisting the survivors of the raid. That’s not what’s happening in HotDQ though as the characters are expected to throw caution to the wind and plow straight ahead.

Two of my biggest complaints with HotDQ are the laziness and sloppiness of the adventure design as well as the multitude of laughable or nonsensical decisions the players are for the most part forced into making. This opening episode of the eight which make up HotDQ is a prime example of both my critiques. The DM is expected to roll every 100 feet the group travels to determine if a random encounter takes place. EVERY 100 FEET! At that rate the characters probably wouldn’t even make it to the keep the DM is supposed to push them toward to further the adventure. Once they do reach the keep they’re to take on different missions the town’s Governor (um… wouldn’t that be a Mayor) begins to dole out. These missions are lackluster to say the least and give one the impression you’re sitting in front of a computer playing a pretty crappy RPG where some nondescript NPC forces you on one boring fetch or delivery side quest after another.

One of the Governor’s missions is to rescue some residents trapped in a temple. The adventure spells out one way the players can affect a rescue while also pointing out, “That’s only one possibility; clever players can come up with different solutions.” That’s nice, only there’s so little presented about this mission a DM would be hard pressed to come up with anything which would lead the players to consider any other option other than the one presented in the book. Hoard of the Dragon Queen is rife with these sorts of encounters which are so generically presented as to make everything play out as one note.

HotDQ is just simply a disaster. The editing and layout are a mess, the NPCs are paper thin and one dimensional, the villains have no motivation or background which a DM can use to make them in the least bit memorable, and you don’t even get everything you need to run the adventure in the book; even using the Starter Set the DM still has to go online to download an appendix containing a lot of the monster and treasure information they’ll need to run the campaign. Not too big a deal with a download if you have a tablet handy although I’d guess it’d be a bit of a bother having to juggle both the tablet and adventure book at the same time.

Another problem I find with HotDQ is the number of scenes or small encounters where the actions of the characters really don’t matter. To be fair this isn’t in the great overall scheme of the adventure but more in the way the characters go about advancing along in the story. I don’t expect to have everything spelled out for me either but I find it important that interconnected pieces of the tale make some sort of sense. More times than not they don’t make much sense and HotDQ breaks down into go to this place, fight monsters, go to next place, fight monsters, and so on. There’s a whole lot of rinse and repeat as far as the players fighting these cookie cutter cultists too.

I’ll gather quite a few DMs will be concerned with the amount of “railroading” taking place in HotDQ (there’s a lot of it) but that’s one aspect of the book with which I don’t have much of a beef. I’d say this is probably due to the amount of Call of Cthulhu I’ve run over the years since a GM does need to lay some track to make sure you keep the mood and flow clipping along. So I don’t mind having to “railroad” the players a bit. If the final result is entertaining that is…

While the argument exists a good GM can fix just about any system or adventure – Hell, I’ve made that very same argument plenty of times – the fact remains Hoard of the Dragon Queen isn’t remotely worth investing that much time or energy into fixing. My biggest critique of HotDQ is the sum of the eight episodes is rather boring; there’s a real “been there, done that” feel to the proceedings. While there are a handful of interesting nuggets to mine from the adventure even those are presented in a ho-hum manner. Perhaps the worst thing to say about HotDQ is nothing is going on which truly inspires the DM or really gets the old imaginative juices flowing.

I still say I like the direction Wizards of the Coast has taken with the 5^th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. I get the impression Hoard of the Dragon Queen is a victim of the limbo brought on the changes which were being made up to the very last minute with 5^th Ed. Obviously, WotC needed to roll out an adventure alongside the Player’s Handbook and Starter Set and HotDQ was a work for hire that needed to get out there asap.

My understanding through reading the Starter Set, Players Handbook, and Monster Manual is Dungeons & Dragons looks to bring back more of the storytelling to the system as opposed to Monty Haulism where the game is simply like running down a checklist of monsters and knocking them off to snag treasure and XPs. In my opinion, Horde of the Dragon Queen feels more like a rehash of what so many disliked about the 4^th Edition of D&D and less like a product designed to excite those new to D&D or reinvigorate others WotC would like to bring back to the fold.

I’m sure plenty of people will completely disagree with my take on HotDQ and I’m completely cool with that. I’m not here to guess at the level of competence of every Dungeon Master out there who may aim to purchase HotDQ; I’ll guarantee there are tons of people already playing HotDQ and loving it! I can only draw upon my experiences in the hobby and provide an opinion of what I feel is a worthwhile purchase and one which I feel is extremely lacking.

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Jeff McAleer

Founder/Editor-in-chief of The Gaming Gang website and host of The Gaming Gang Dispatch and other TGG media, Jeff tackles any and all sorts of games but has a special fondness for strategy, conflict sims, and roleplaying games. Plus, he's certainly never at a loss for an opinion...