Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) 5th Edition hit a big milestone last year, as it was the game’s fifth anniversary. Which means for us players, we should probably expect to hear rumors of the next edition coming along shortly. However, for Wizards of the Coast, they took the opportunity to celebrate the big milestone with some hefty gifts...if you were willing to spend the money. The most elegant of these was the Sapphire anniversary dice set, which was a magnificent set of dice for the low price of just $299.99…Wow.

Equally as elegant, but not as back breaking, was the Special Edition reprint of “Tyranny of Dragons”, the adventure series that launched with D&D 5th Edition with the books “Hoard of the Dragon Queen” and “Rise of Tiamat”. It’s a great idea: celebrate all the good years that D&D has had by going back to where 5th edition started. Plus, it took these two adventure books and combined them into a single looking hardcover with a new beautiful cover.

Except….

Tyranny of Dragons was a terrible adventure.

Well, let me take that back. Hoard of the Dragon Queen was a terrible adventure. Rise of Tiamat did a good enough job course correcting the story back into “bearable” territory. Why? One moment, we first have to step out of the way of the giant railroad tracks that the adventure lays down. Meaning, the adventure grabs your hand and forces you down a specific pathway, and refuses to let you deviate from that plan. Also, there’s a good chunk of the plot line that boils down to just “follow those cultists!”

Seriously. You follow them from Greenest, where the story begins, to Baldur’s Gate. Then, you follow along with them in a caravan that is heading to Waterdeep. Guess what happens next? Oh yeah, you follow them as they head North to Neverwinter. Now, here is where the cultists make a turn and head in a different direction, but you still end up following them for awhile. My heart goes out to any new Dungeon Masters who had to learn to play D&D5e by running people through this disaster.

How Did This Happen?

The rumors that I heard were that Hoard of the Dragon Queen wasn’t actually written by the D&D development team. The story claims that the team was busy finalizing the 5th edition rules so the adventure was sourced out to another company. However, this company wasn’t given the complete 5th edition ruleset, because there was no complete ruleset to give out at this point. By the time that Rise of Tiamat was written, the rules had been locked down so this explains why that book was so much better than the first one.

It’s five years later though! Clearly, if Wizards thought it was important enough to reprint these books into a nice new collection, they might have gone back in and tweaked the adventure to make it more worthwhile? Well, according to the announcement, there was going to be some reworking of the first half of the adventure. This interested me enough that I asked to get a copy of the new book so I could see if they fixed this disaster.

Narrator: They Didn’t.

That’s not entirely true. They did fix something, in the entire premise of the adventure. Originally, this whole adventure was based on the idea that a group of adventurers would travel into a town, see A GIANT F*#$KING DRAGON, and not go running for the hills like any normal person would. Now, they modified the adventure to have you already in the town and interacting with the townsfolk when the dragon attacks. This way, you have some connection to the people getting slaughtered by cultists. Isn’t that so much better?

That’s it. That’s the main change that the Special Edition added to the story. All the other complaints about how the story progresses were largely ignored, probably because it would have needed a rewrite from the word go. In fact, one thing that I noticed as I read through the Special Edition is that Wizards goes out of its way to downplay Hoard of the Dragon Queen and hype up Rise of Tiamat. For instance:

In this photo, you see the summary that is presented for the first half of the adventure. The entire book is summarized in a column and a half of text. Meanwhile, if you look on the other page, you can already see the same amount of text about the Rise of Tiamat. But the summary CONTINUES onto other pages, where we even get an outline of events that happen in that half:

Where was this outline for Hoard of the Dragon Queen? Oh yeah, that’s right, it would have been just one sentence, *maybe* a paragraph at most. Also, remember how I talked about Hoard of the Dragon Queen being such a railroaded adventure? Well, Wizards decided to double down on the Rise of Tiamat love by pointing out that part of the adventure isn’t like that at all! You can add in things, and deviate from the storyline to follow the whims of the party. See below for proof (Additional Encounters block). How hard would it have been to include this for the first half?

In Conclusion

Is this worth your money? Not really, especially if you already have the first printing of the books. Even if you don’t own them, there are countless other adventures that are worth playing instead. In fact, the very next adventure, Princes of the Apocalypse, does a *much* better job of having an open ended framework for DM’s to bounce around and vary up their adventures. The only people that will enjoy this book are A) D&D completionists that need to own every book ever printed and B) game designers that want the challenge of taking this adventure and actually making it good. Although, I’m sure if you did a good google search, someone has already tackled this challenge for you. 

Thanks for reading this post - am I wrong in my hatred of this adventure? Let me know in the comments below, or on Twitter (twitter.com/ChrisTheProf) or Facebook (facebook.com/boardsandswordspod). If you still aren’t convinced and want a copy of this book, then subscribe to those platforms as I will probably give away this copy in a contest, once I figure out what type of contest to run!