Princes of the Apocalypse

Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition

by John-Paul Balmet, Sean MacDonald, Mike Schley

Abolish an Ancient Evil Threatening Devastation in this Adventure for the World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game

Called by the Elder Elemental Eye to serve, four corrupt prophets have risen from the depths of anonymity to claim mighty weapons with direct links to the power of the elemental princes. Each of these prophets has assembled a cadre of cultists and creatures to serve them in the construction of four elemental temples of lethal design. It is up to adventurers from heroic factions such as the Emerald Enclave and the Order of the Gauntlet to discover where the true power of each prophet lay, and dismantle it before it comes boiling up to obliterate the Realms.



• An epic adventure for characters levels 1 – 15, the Elemental Evil™ story arc, Princes of the Apocalypse provides everything a Dungeon Master needs to create an exciting and memorable play experience.
• Includes new elemental spells and the element-touched genasi as a new playable race.
• Fans of the Dungeons & Dragons® Roleplaying Game can get a sample of what this product has in store for them through the D&D Encounters™ in-store play program.
• Adventure design and development by Sasquatch Game Studio LLC.

Genres: Dungeons and Dragons, Role Playing Games, Fantasy, Gaming, Games, Fiction, Forgotten Realms

Hardcover

First published April 7, 2015

Reviews

[Douglas Cosby · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars -- A decent D&D module that purports to be able to take characters from level 1 all the way up to level 15. (After the first few weeks of playing this, my group's characters are level 5 and about 1/3 of the way done with the adventure, so achieving level 15 seems about right.) In other words, this adventure may span the entire careers of the adventurers -- they will be created for PotA and be retired after they finish. As such, this book needs to cover an entire world, with lore, history, maps, politics, and natural resources -- and it accomplish this fairly well. The depth of the backstories and countryside is enough without being overwhelming, and there are plenty of adventures to fill up the characters' lives and careers. The main story line centers around a small town that is trying to deal with four elemental cults that have grown to prominence in the nearby hill country, and is willing to entrust any band of able adventurers to help figure out how to handle the threat. One complaint is that the book could be better organized with easier access to maps and a better index to get to NPCs and new monsters. Make sure you have a lot of sticky notes handy to mark critical pages. My biggest complaint though is that the module is way too open-ended and definitely requires heavy DM mods to make it work. It assumes the characters will do things in a certain order, but has no plot points or mechanics to accomplish this. As a DM, you will be responsible for pushing the characters in the right direction or adding doors, keys, gates, etc. to force fit a level of serialization.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've finally reread this cover to cover instead of the piece by piece way I was going about it. I have a few negatives for this campaign book first, followed by many positive feelings.

1. Organization is poor in this work. This stems from the fact it is a sandbox, and I think it is definitely hard to organize a sandbox game. In any case, they did not organize this adventure as well as I would have liked.
2. The poor organization makes this a hard read, and thus a bit hard to prepare. Since my groups were starting at level 1 (many newbies, so I wanted to start with the basics), I didn't realize how important certain NPCs were, how important it was to leave certain hooks, and how important it was to talk about the messed up weather in the local area. I've had to retcon things due to not knowing certain things would be a bigger deal. I would advise DMs wanting to run this book to read THE ENTIRE THING, and make notes on big events that are upcoming. I am a bit of a pantser, so this was kind of on me too, but flipping through several chapters to see the full story was still not that helpful or welcome.
3. Despite how awesome the art is, I wanted MORE art of the cultists in this book. This is just a minor complaint.

Now the positives:
1. Once you figure out how the sandbox works, the individual pieces run well! My groups are all having a blast with the challenges in this book. The story is bare bones, which for me is a positive. I am creating a story around the adventure laid out in this book. I'm also incorporating PC back stories to make this more interesting to the players.
2. The art is AMAZING. You will get a strong feel for the aesthetics of each cult, how the members operate, and what they look like. They didn't include art for everyone (as far as I can tell), so that is kind of a downer, but only because I enjoyed the artwork so much.
3. The adventure can be fit into ANY setting that allows for magic to exist. I am running mine in Eberron, and so far, it is amazing. I am doing the cultists a little differently, and will be introducing the cult leaders to the party early on so they can seem like a bigger threat. I am able to do this because of the bare bones plot.

Huge tips:
1. Learn about the missing delegation (this is the main hook), make certain members of them prominent and important, and give your PCs a reason to care about finding them.
2. Consider chopping the dungeons up into pieces and placing them around the world or at least a bit further away than they are. It is possible for lv 3 PCs to walk into lv 6+ temples filled with things that may instagib them. Each cultist main location has a door that leads to their underground temple... and this is bad. The PCs can definitely wander into them. Avoid at all costs if you want your PCs to stand a chance.

[Taddow · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never played or read the original Temple of Elemental Evil adventure but I have always heard good things about it. This book, which is a 5th Edition remake of that adventure, did not disappoint and I look forward to running this in my current D&D 5th Ed. group (which just arrived in Red Larch as 3rd level characters). I like the sandbox feel of the adventure and thought that the elemental cult themes and unique monsters and leaders was a great touch. There are some minor challenges with getting suitable plot hooks (that I don't think the adventure as is addresses), but this should only involve a little extra work from the DM. Overall, a great addition to the D&D 5th Ed. books.

Update (March 24, 2018): My group is still trekking through the Dessarin Valley. More players have joined the adventure and I now have a 6-player party (a Wood Elf Paladin of Titania, a Dwarven fighter, a Halfling Rogue, a High Elf Mage, a Half-orc Bard and a Cynidicean human Cleric if Gorm) who are still piecing together what’s going on in the Valley, and have just finished defeating the forces at Scarlet Moon Hall. You can check out the group’s progress on Obsidian Portal (https://talesofelrond.obsidianportal.com).

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ring Side Report- RPG Review of Princes of the Apocalypse

Originally posted at Throat Punch Games, a new idea everyday!

Product- Princes of the Apocalypse
System- DnD 5th Edition
Producer- Wizards of the Coast
Price- $50 Here
TL; DR- Good, but I left feeling hungry! 85%

Basics- The elements are back! Around the town of Red Larch, monsters and evil are stirring. Horrible elemental forces are advancing on civilization, and the heroes are the only ones who stand in their way. Can you stop the elemental cults before they summon the elemental evil?

Mechanics or Crunch-This book adds a fair bit to the DnD 5e setting, but what's here is less than I expected. Overall it's all well done, but I just want more. The player's companion online add-on was well done, but that had more options than this book. The monsters and the story all have well done mechanics, but again, I wanted more. I wanted new third level paths for a few classes. I felt at least the cleric should have gotten four new domains and given the GM new tools to add evil elemental mad priests to the world, but that wasn't added. Clerics don't even get new spells in this book! What is here is great, but the book feels a bit like leaving hungry after a meal. 4/5

Theme or Fluff- I love the Forgotten Realms, so it's good to see any more information about that world! The story itself is well done, and provides the players with some great side trips for different adventures across the valley where the story takes place. Even more interesting, some of the previous settings like Dark Sun get some support by providing the GM with Dark Sun information if you wanted to run this adventure there. As a story, this adventure really hits its stride. 5/5

Execution- I don't really like how WotC is setting up their adventures lately. I feel the descriptions of the rooms bury the lead when it comes to monsters and other descriptions of locations. Also, this book has a lot of information, but it's somewhat arranged in a difficult to follow layout. The campaign starts at 1st level, but that section before the real adventure is after the start of the campaign, so as a GM of a low level party, I have to flip all over the book. It's annoying. Also, some of the maps are in different orientations, so unless you notice the compass rose, you're going to spend a few minutes confused to why things to the north suddenly moved to the south! It's nothing game shattering, but some of the layout and arrangement choices for the book make this not as enjoyable as it could have been. 3.75/5

Summary- Let me start by saying, I'm just happy to see more D&D products out there! This book is a great continuation of the Forgotten Realms story calling back to some of the most iconic D&D adventures ever written. I also enjoy that other settings are supported by this book, as some of those settings haven't gotten as much love lately as I'd like. However, this book didn't deliver as much I hoped. The play section contents less information than the free online player PDF. Also, I would have really liked a few new class additions to really drive home the elemental nature of this story. Furthermore, the execution of this book, while not bad, makes this adventure somewhat hard to read and run. This isn't a horrible book by any means, but this isn't as great as the core three books. If you want a great adventure, this is worth it. But if you want some good additions to DnD 5e as a whole, you will be somewhat disappointed. 85%

[ik.ben.henri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unorganised and messy book

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have had to change and add to so much of this campaign in order for it to make sense and be compelling. Would have almost been easier to use if they had just provided the monsters and dungeons and told DMs to make up the plot themselves.

[Scott wachter · Rating 2 out of 5]

search for traps, kick in the door, kill the guys, loot the room, rinse, repeat. for one hundred pages.

[Alix · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book suffers from a severe lack of organization. The adventure is actually quite good, if you can piece it all together.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit that this particular scenario seemed to me to be a bit overpowering for its target gaming party.  This particular scenario involves serious threats to a region that involve the elemental planes, and yet the parties that are supposed to be dealing with this are beginning parties around or less than level 5.  Admittedly, I have played in some overpowered groups around this level that could take on this sort of challenge, but I don't know if everyone would be up to such a thing, not least because this is a very lengthy and complicated campaign that manages to try to shorten up its description in order to keep the page level manageable given all of the different areas that the players would have to clear out of their elemental evil and all of the NPCs that must be either killed or driven off or allied with over the course of this lengthy mission.  While this is certainly a mission I would have no problem playing if I had a group that wanted to take their gameplay in that direction and deal with planes and the evils to be found there, I don't know how many people would quickly realize just how massive and complex this particular campaign is.

This particular book is about 250 pages long and is divided into seven chapters.  The book begins with a discussion of how to use this book as well as an adventure and synopsis that discuss the rise of elemental evil in four elemental cults (1).  After that the authors provide a discussion of the history and current events of the Dessarin Valley, including the Red Larch and locations and rumors of evil involving it (2).  After that there is a discussion of the Slumber Hills, including some missing people and cult reprisals for the party's earlier actions as well as various quests and important locations to investigate (3).  This leads to a discussion of how the party can root out of evil in one or all of the four elemental temples that will lead to further retaliation by cult members (4).  After this there is a lengthy step of attacking the evils at the Temple of the Elder Elemental Eye, which rules over the various elements and has a larger plan in mind (5) that needs to be stopped in the campaign.  After that there are various alarums and excursions that provide side quests and other locations to investigate (6), before the book closes with a chapter on monsters and magic items (7) as well as three appendices that include information on the Genasi as well as spells and the adaptation of this campaign to other worlds, and then an afterword.

In reading this book I wondered, looking at the sort of enemies that were being dealt with, how it was that an ordinary level 5 party of some four characters would be expected to successfully take on any of the elemental threats that this book has.  To be sure, there would be ways where it could be done, but it would require some preparation, including having magical weapons and some serious range attacks and defensive buffs.  Admittedly, the successful completion of the campaign only requires one of the elemental fiends to be defeated, which makes the challenge a bit easier as the party can figure out which of them they are best equipped to take on, but those looking for completion in eliminating them all with find it to be a difficult task that will end up providing plenty of experience and also the making of new enemies on the elemental plane, for what it's worth, as well as new friends in those areas who one has protected as a result of one's efforts.  If this sort of campaign will take many hours to get through, it will at least be interesting time, that's for sure.

[Arcuro Shelton · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this addition to the Dungeons & Dragons series, Wizards of the Coast takes players through an adventure of defeating Elemental Evil. As a DM, the person who'll be "telling the story", I found this campaign interesting and entertaining to read in preparation for running the campaign for family and friends. The adventure permits a number of characters, designed by the players, to experience the world of Faerûn in a new and exciting way.

Tasked with preventing the complete invasion of Elemental Evil, the characters must work together as they gather information and pursue it to various locales throughout the Dessarin Valley. Suitable for levels 3 through 15, with an opening sample of adventures for levels 1 through 3 loosely tied to the main plot, the adventure unfolds as Elemental Evil makes its presence known to the players through different adventures their characters have in and around the valley. The campaign is full of colorful characters who may help or hinder—or prove ultimately indifferent—to the characters' chance of success, and the world is rich and detailed with locations both above and below ground.

I've tried to run this campaign once but had to abandon it due to getting a temporary vocational rehab job early in 2020, and I've wanted to restart this campaign ever since. Princes of the Apocalypse provides plenty of options for engaging the players in the adventures to be had, from offering secret organizations who send them on the adventure to providing adventure hooks that give the characters plenty of reason to go investigating things in the Dessarin Valley. I'm looking forward to the challenge of guiding a group of players through this campaign.

The primary adventure involves traveling about the valley in pursuit of leads about the true source of the difficulties Red Larch, and the rest of the valley, are suffering. Opportunities abound for success, failure, and a whole lot of trouble for the players' characters to endure. Eventually, the clues will lead the characters to a subterranean city abandoned by its Dwarven crafters centuries ago and now reclaimed as the temples for the four Elemental Evil Prophets and the Princes of Evil they serve.

[Francisco · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons version of the 1980s Temple of Elemental Evil, Princes of the Apocalypse brings the action to the Forgotten Realms rather than the original Greyhawk and creates a kind of loose sandbox-like adventure which is pretty fun if you are into fighting elemental boss after elemental boss.

In terms of plot there is something here, of course, with these elemental god-like beings trying to move into the world of Toril and take over it, with these four priests of Elemental Evil which have somewhat compelling individual stories, but the majority of the adventure is really all about hacking and slashing cultists and elemental beings going down and down into the dungeons until you get a big boss. What's fun about it, and gives the module quite a bit of replayability value, is the fact that the order in which you tackle these cults will lead to very different progressions in the story. While you are dealing with the Fire cult, for example, you aren't dealing with the Water cult, which means the Water guys get more time to develop their rituals and get closer to their ultimate goals.

This makes each cult you fight harder than the next one and more developed and spread. If you tackle them in a different order you would get a very different story and big bad. So, that's fun, particularly if you are a DM that runs this for different groups, you'll always get a different experience. With some cool illustrations and loads of fun dungeons, some extremely big, this is definitely something that will keep you busy for months or years of your life. Not exactly my style of adventure as it is pretty light on plot, but definitely a good one.

[Dylan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Princes of the Apocalypse by John-Paul Balmet is a dense, but open-ended official adventure module that presents a primordial problem for a D&D 5e world. The module, which acts as a sandbox style adventure, is poorly organized and at times a slog to get through. It expects characters to follow a very formulaic trajectory, even with the sandbox elements, and expects DMs to rely heavily on their own worldbuilding or improv to fill in the gaps. However, as a plug and play module to place into a preexisting world, this is a fantastic narrative to add to anyone's homebrew world. And while the book lacks more art and maps to help to give visual representation of what the cultists and locations look like, what the book does have gives feeling and personality to the cults and their culture.

TL;DR: While not built as a great out of the box module, it has the necessary parts for a great plug and play mini-campaign set in a homebrew world that helps to fill in the missing sandbox elements.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is awesome. The story is cool, and I was just able to start a DnD group into the process. This thing helps me every step of the way. I've never GM-ed before, but I feel comfortable and confident because it is all here. The story is easy to follow, the chapters are broken down nicely, and everything I need is at my fingertips.

I'm a little concerned the campaign might be a little dungeon heavy, but I'm not too worried about it, there seems like enough other stuff to break up the main story enough to keep it fresh.

Even if I wasn't playing the game and using the book, the artwork is gorgeous, the story is fun to read, the background is amazing. Everything about the book just comes together nicely. I'm glad I have it and hope my group enjoys playing it as much as I enjoy reading it.

[Ay Oh Be · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read the campaign books I try to avoid the story beats because I do plan to play them someday. So when I crack open these books I focus on the lore pieces and the new rules, races, spells, classes etc that are introduced.

Princes of the Apocalypse suffered from the fact that I have read most of the lore books and rule supplement books before this one so a lot of its information like the genasi race and the spells have been reprinted in other texts.

I really like that everything for this campaign was well flavoured. The items, the spells, the new races all came together for this campaign in a well thought out way. It adds depth to the theme of the campaign and really blends it all together very well.

[Sallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started playing D&D in 2018. Went to my local game store, sat down at a table, and started playing. A year later, I’m no longer playing at the store (to big, way to noisy, and unfortunately we aren’t able to role play much. Way to busy with new players each week). I got a group of friends together and we started playing at home. Then another group got together so we started playing. Then a combo of those two groups and I started DMing. Now I’m in 5 games and I DM 2 of them.

Princes of the Apocalypse is the first campaign I’ve started after the starter set game. It is easily understandable. It has all the information I need there. And it is so much fun.

[Louis Norton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think the authors made the right choice by not simply "remaking" another Temple of Elemental Evil. The storyline is relatively original and makes good use of the Princes of Elemental Evil in a campaign. I liked a lot of the setting points, however I am sure a fair amount of preparation would be required to actually use this in a campaign as it is unlikely players will stick to the script. Some of the side quests are very interesting, others less so. Overall a very good quality supplement, interesting to read, might be fun to try in actual play.

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very poorly organized, poorly plotted sandbox with some really cool environments and lore. Could definitely use a comprehensive rewrite, there's no easy way to project future sessions if you prefer more DM guided rather than player-driven sandbox. At the very least, the dungeons could provide better clues as to possible future locations. It's not that the DM can't fill in the details, he can, but I would have preferred the authors at least give some suggestions or options.

Also the original story hook kind of goes nowhere. Again, I can fill this in, but I shouldn't have to.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great adventure with a very nice sandboxy feel to it. I ran a Dark Sun campaign based on this. It contains many great locations and encounters, and I especially liked the staged reactions of the temples once they discover the party is messing with them. The one thing I was missing was more info on a path with evil parties - seems reasonable that some parties might want to ally with/take over one of the elemental factions...

[Pádraic]

Pretty tedious. An open-ended opening section in a bland area of the Forgotten Realms, where the players can run around chasing various rumours and leads, none of them particularly interesting. After a certain point it's basically a dozen dungeons in a row. As much as I like the idea of a bunch of elemental cultists roaming around, clashing with each other and causing environmental devastation, this book, with its focus on endless reams of plotless combat, is definitely not for me.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This adventure is well-presented and sets up some fun scenarios, but the plot is just very... meh. It's solid in theory, but falls flat and doesn't feel as epic as it should in practise. In my opinion, the best bit of this book comes at the end - the Alarums and Excursions chapter is great and can slot into lots of campaigns, the statblocks and items are pretty good, and I love Genasi. Ironically, the adventure itself is probably the weakest part of this adventure book.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great starter open world story with the ability for the DM to make it more linear and direct the characters through exposing certain clues. Really this module puts the power into the DMs hands. The monsters and story line was believable, interesting, and scaleable. All in all, it was a decent module to run.

[Toevolution · Rating 5 out of 5]

Princes of the Apocalypse is an adventure module for the fifth edition of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

Princes of the Apocalypse (PDF-Online Reading-Download-Summary-Review): https://www.toevolution.com/blog/view...

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't like the set up of the campaign books for 5th edition that much. The stat blocks just aren't detailed enough and the adventure doesn't read like a story. The magic items are also very under-powered even for epic levels.

[Walter Schutjens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great adventure, a bit too many dungeons for my liking

[Eric Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent 5e campaign I foolishly didn’t pay nearly enough attention to when it first came out. I can say with confidence now that I would love to run this campaign for my players.

[Raiko · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent D&D 5e adventure. Needs extra work to connect some dots.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

We had fun with this. Took us about two months to get through it. The princes of elemental evil. A bit repetitive but easy to DM and hubby loved it.

[J.J. Valdez · Rating 2 out of 5]

repetitive and hard to follow. no index??? bummer because the concepts are cool

[Nicole]

No one is ever really finished with this book until the campaign ends. I keep reading it over and over trying to make sure I remember everything or think of new things for my players.

[James Bowman · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid enough adventure path, although it basically turns into a series of dungeon crawls towards the end. The four elemental cults make good enemies, well-constructed with interesting minions, and I liked seeing the Elemental Princes of Evil back in action. But overall, I feel like it's missing something, which I can't quite put my finger on... maybe it was too game-y, and didn't have enough of a sense of storytelling? Maybe the stakes didn't feel high enough, despite the premise and the title? I'm not sure, but I definitely felt a little disappointed.

In any case, the supplemental material is good. The chapter of side missions is useful for campaigns generally, with "Curse of the Fire Witch" and "Halls of the Hunting Axe" being my favorites. There are some neat new magic items. And the material on Genasi and elemental spells is fun, if a repeat of the free Elemental Evil Player's Companion. The guidelines on adapting the adventure to other worlds are a nice touch, certainly something they didn't have to do (though I wish they'd been gone into the worlds a little more for new readers).

Was this better than the Tyranny of Dragons? I think so, but not as much better as I'd been led to expect. It's definitely good, but I feel like it could have been better. (B+)