This piece of D&D history is a great addition to my collection. I got the POD, and the physical quality of the book is high, the construction feels solid and the pages look great. This tome presents a snapshot in time - when 5E was D&D Next, and the rules hadn't quite been ironed out yet, and the starting area was going to be Daggerford instead of Phandalin. The adventure campaign in the book is a lot of fun, with a ton of great lore about Daggerford and the surrounding area including the eponymous Dragonspear Castle. This information integrates well with the fifth edition Realms. The rules section is a fascinating look into what directions were considered for 5E and then discarded. Weapons and Spells are particularly interesting. An enterprising DM who likes some of these ideas could re-integrate them into their campaign with little effort, since they're still built on the 5E framework. All in all, I'm very pleased to have this in my collection!

I got the book today. I bought the printed version and I must say, it is very satisfying to finally hold it. I know the material presented in the adventure was part of the play testing before 5e was officially released; but the story, and the way it is presented, is engaging and I do not mind working on the conversion for 5e players. It would be great for others if they ever update the adventure to fit 5e, but it is not necessary.

One of the things I like the most apart from the adventure, is the section on the town of Daggerford. It could have been a little bigger, but it is good as a starter just as it is.

An instant classic of the Forgotten Realms, easily converted to 5E.

Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle is a complete campaign for the DnD Next Playtest rules (the precursor playtest of 5E). In addition to a sprawling campaign made up of four mini-adventures, you also get a complete copy of the DnD Next rules as they existed at the time of this adventure's release. This makes it a must-have for DnD historians or collectors.

The campaign is great on its own merits, especially as an "intro" campaign for new players. It provides a well fleshed-out home base (Daggerford) and a variety of quite different dungeons around it that make good use of NPCs, wilderness travel, varied combats, and traps and environmental puzzles. Your adventures variously take you to a classic "lair" style dungeon themed around lizardfolk; a "crazy wizard crypt" full of magical puzzles; a mutli-level "living dungeon" that can be solved in any order, using either combat or diplomacy; and finally a set-piece staged boss battle. It's got more variety than many official hardbacks, and is a great sampler of what DnD has to offer.

In addition, it's filled with unique, attractive art, including portraits for NPC characters, full-colour maps, and incidental images.

For DnD grognards, you'll love that the campaign is an explicit homage to the classic adventures "Under Illefarn" and "Hordes of Dragonspear Castle", and contains fun references to both - through the lens of a Forgotten Realms that's marched on 100 years. For those who care more about the 5E era, it's worth noting that this adventure introduces multiple plot threads that are continued and paid off in the Tyranny of Dragons hardbacks, including Sir Isteval, Alagarthas, the green dragon Chuuth, the Red Wizards, and the town of Daggerford itself. It also has themes that are echoed later in Princes of the Apocalypse.

Converting the adventure to 5E is a breeze. All monsters in the module appear in the eventual 5E Monster Manual, and in almost all instances you can just use the Monster Manual stats. A few monsters got a power boost in the final rules - notably the vampires and behir that appear in the final part of the adventure - and a good DM should probably swap these out for replacements to avoid unfairly wiping the party. (The vampires are easily changeable to "vampire spawn". The behir needs a substantial edit of its stats, or to be replaced with another monster entirely.)

You may also need to pay attention to skill checks, as not all of those listed line up with the final 5E skill list and recommended difficulties, but this should be trivial for an experienced GM.

Print on Demand edition: The POD version of Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle is as good as you could hope for from a DM's Guild softcover hardcopy. It's largely in line with the best of DM's Guild's POD products. The interior is clear and high res, while still a little less crisp than a professional publication. The paper is quite high-gauge, making the book itself fairly thick. The cover is a full-wrap, with authentic colour and titling on the spine. It's perfect-bound, and the binding appears strong. The cover is made of relatively thin card stock - more than adequate as a cover, but not tough enough to take much of a beating. The layout is appropriate to the book dimensions, and there are none of the awkward gutter-loss or orientation issues that appear in some other DM's Guild PODs.

For collectors, I should say that no one is going to mistake this product for the original Wizards release. The content is identical but the final product looks quite different. This is a product for someone who wants to use it, or have it on their shelf for reference, not for someone who wants to own the original book as published by Wizards.

After running the entire campaign over some months, my copy of the book is still in good condition and looks fine on a shelf, so I certify it as 100% suitable for actual use.

Note: For the sake of clarity, this product does NOT include Scourge of the Sword Coast (available separately from DM's Guild) or Dead In Thay (at this stage not available for sale anywhere, although the second half of it was reprinted in Tales from the Yawning Portal).

Discovered this adventure recently. It's excellent - well written, with a balanced combination of role-playing opportunities, dungeon-delving combat, and overland travel. It has the 'feel' of one of the early AD&D 1st edition modules - and I mean that in a good way. There's a coherent plot that spans four mini-adventures, which provides lots of opportunity for 'sandboxing' in the region and character growth, without those adventures feeling random. Highly recommended.

I came to this adventure after already DM'ing a small amount of 5e, and plenty of 4e. I think that the comedic style of the writing and the multiple concurrent story arcs make the adventure fun to play, fun to DM and fun to read. I always gauge both my ability to DM and the adventure I'm playing by my wife's ability to read between the lines and guess what's going on after she's done playing for the night. This adventure passed that test from the get-go. We chatted after the first session, and she was able to follow the breadcrumbs set out in the first chapter without guessing the whole story. Success! Also, having played some other Next titles prior to this one I can see how playing this first in an excellent way to introduce your players to the more free-flow adventure style that Next is obviously working very hard to promote. Players treat with evil NPCs, make moral decisions on the fly, make tactical decisions to avoid conflict or face it. All those things happened in the first chapter and really got my players into character and in the zone for good role play.

Only downside I see now is that since this is a 'beta' game version of Next they are using pre-official rules, monsters etc. There's a little bit of leg-work for the DM to keep things balanced and working if you want to use up to date classes/races/etc. Certainly not a deal breaker, as most DMs will modify adventures anyway as they get to know their players play-styles.

It is ok. Gives you a chance to have a digital adventure that lets you playtest our nice shiny 5e players handbook and dm's guide without paying the pretty big bucks that are being charged for d and d books nowadays.

I am verry pleased with this download and it works very well on my wife's tablet so makes it easy to dm away from the computer ty for providing it at such a low cost

My group has gotten through the first Chapter just last night. The story is excellent and the diversity and variations I (DM) can come up with is expansive. This is an easy merge for use with 5th edition rules and gets your party rolling easy like.

Really tried to like this adventure path but just couldnt get into it. Read through the first 25 pages half a dozen times desperately trying to find an angle that I could spruce up the story for my players and just couldnt find one. Uninspired and extremely generic theres just not much to work with here. Tons of non-interactive encoumters and an over emphasis on detail and world building doesnt give the DM much to work with out of the box. The characters are bland and the storyline is boring. Sorry. Tried to like it, really did.

SPOILER ALERT...Excellent story. Not a fan of dwarf-orc half orcs however. yuck. However, the rakasha as the main villain is great. Also it is a great one-stop shop for the new D&D next rules. I consider it a must have!

(This is where I should have posted my review. To TPTB, please feel free to delete my review in the Discussion thread. Yes, Grandpa is an idiot.)

One of the things which bugged me when Advanced D&D took over from Original D&D, is that suddenly there was this concern about "balance." None of the new players wanted to play in a game where they didn't have advantages over the NPCs (or as the new guys called all NPCs, "monsters"). This alone made the game less of role-playing and living a character IN the story as well as CREATING the story with the GM and other players.

Conan stories were much more thrilling when he was hopelessly outclassed and/or outnumbered, and fought (or cheated or lucked) his way through anyway. Those were the types of characters our groups played - and you could almost see the wood chips from all the pulp.

So the concerns that this adventure was not "balanced" and that the odds were stacked against the PCs? That made me buy it.

And it is deliciously, horribly, unbalanced. We used to call this "danger" and our PCs lived for danger.

....except for that one cowardly human/deep one hybrid in my wife's campaign....

This series plays and reads like an old-fashioned serial, complete with impossible situations that would make my parents HAVE to pay another dime to see the next chapter "Next week, in this theater!"

Me? I got to watch those serials (one chapter a day) on television. From 1976 onward, I got to roleplay them.

Kudos, Mr &/or Ms "et al" -- this is a thinking man's adventure!

*jeep! & God Bless! ---Grandpa Tzhett

Originally posted at: http://diehardgamefan.com/2013/09/04/tabletop-review-ghosts-of-dragonspear-castle-dungons-dragons-next/

Note: The review was originally written when this was a convention exclusive and a physical release only. I'm EXTREMELY happy to see a digital release made available to everyone as this was one of my sticking points back in September when I reviewed this. CONVENTION EXCLUSIVES BAD!

I’m not a fan of Convention Exclusives. In fact, I outright hate the very concept of them. Why have an item that could easily make a company a lot of money and make a lot of fan happy by giving it a general release, but then limited production for a few thousand people that feel like going to a convention. No, whether it’s a Heroclix miniature, a core rulebook variant, a Botcon Transformer exclusive or something else, there is something logically and ethically shady about convention exclusives to me. At least some companies like Catalyst Game Labs make their convention “exclusives” available digitally layer on (like the award-winning Elven Blood, so the exclusivity is only on format rather than the number of people who can get their hands on it. This thing is already going for $75-130 on the secondary market and that just makes me sick.

Here I am though reviewing Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle. Why? Because it’s the first physical release for Dungeons & Dragons Next aka Fifth Edition for the world’s oldest tabletop roleplaying game. I felt it was very important, both as a journalist for the tabletop industry and someone who has been on the ground floor of D&D Next since before it was announced to the general public to see how the first purchasable version of the game holds up. One of our staffers, Matt Faul, attended GenCon 2013 and grabbed me a copy (which I paid for in advance – this is not a review copy unlike 99.99% of what we do here) and I’ve spent the past few weeks reading, playing and most of all comparing this version of D&D Next to the many versions I have saved to my hard drive after a year and a half of helping with the rules revisions. I wanted to see some sort of end result, even it is actually a midway result.

I’m happy to say that while D&D Next still does need a lot of work (especially regarding class balance and design), Ghost of Dragonspear Castle is a worthwhile purchase as it contains everything you need to play a long running D&D Next campaign. It contains four adventures that will bring your PCs from Level 1 through Level 10. Best of all, these four adventures only make up half the book. The other half includes things like a quickstart set of rules so that even if you’ve never played ANY form of D&D before, you can still play Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle without any trouble. The quickstart rules are roughly twenty-two pages long and cover combat, initiative, stats, progression through the game and are simply wonderfully done. Sure any fan of the previous four editions of Dungeons & Dragons will find things to pick apart or outright dislike, but they will also find things that remind them of “their” version of the game. I was really happy with the QSR in Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle as they show that even with a long way to go before D&D Next in truly ready for a wide scale release, what’s here is useable, playable and fun.

The four adventures in the book are interconnected, with the first three having players trying to keep three elemental keys out of the hands of the Red Wizards of Thay. These adventures lead into the 2014 D&D Encounters season, so they do kind of end on cliffhangers in regards to why the Thayans want the keys and the eventual ultimate goal for them are. The fourth adventure is a final encounter between the players and a running antagonists that ISN’T a Red Wizard who has annoyed them through the previous adventures. Of course you just may get a climactic battle with the Red Wizard’s big gun (No, not Szass Tam. That’s too big). I really liked the first and third adventures (especially since the third has a very large Twin Peaks homage that the adventure revolves around), but the second and fourth just seemed a little underwhelming to me. The adventure balance seemed way off as well, as often, the enemies seemed far too powerful for the character level. A lich with multiple mummy bodyguards is not an appropriate encounter for characters between levels four and five, for example. The lack of a Challenge Rating seems to have stymied the writers of the adventures and the end result is that combat and the challenge of the encounters seems to be a bit too off, meaning the DM will have to scale things back with alarming frequency. Still, I liked the way all four adventures interconnected and the story they told when all was said and done. Again, Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle is meant to be an example of a work in progress and so noticing things like class and encounter imbalance is bound to happen.

Another twenty-four pages are devoted just to a magic spell compendium for wizards and clerics. Every spell locked in for the game so far are provided here, which is nice. It’s a short list, but the book contains every spell a NPC, PC or monster would want to cast in your playthrough of this campaign. It’s interesting to see some of the spelling changes like Burning Hands and Chill touch are now considered cantrips (One of many reasons I consider the new Wizard to be the most powerful and unbalanced the class has ever been)or how much damage Fireball now does. Again, everything you need to run the campaign is here, although once your characters get past Level 10, you’ll be stuck.

The next chapter in the book is Equipment and it’s another dozen pages. Here you’ll find all the armor, weapons and equipment a PC will need to go dungeon crawling. It’s short and sweet but all the basics are here and a DM will only be lacking a list of magic items, weapons and the like. Unfortunately the book is missing a section for those, but you do find a dozen magic items in the next section, the DM Guide. This chapter is done akin to quick start rules, but for the DM instead of the PC. Here is where you will find a host of ability checks, information on traps, advice on doling out experience points and/or treasure. As mentioned earlier there ARE a dozen magic items listed, but there are only two weapons (a flame tongue sword and a javelin of lighting) followed by four potions, a wand, a staff, a bag of holding, gauntlets of ogre power, dust of dryness and a horn of blasting.

My favorite chapter is the sixth which is the Bestiary. Think of it as a mini Monster Manual/Monstrous Compendium. It’s crazy how many monsters they fit into this thing, and the layout is similar to the old 2nd Edition AD&D style, which made me happy. There are close to 100 different monsters for your PCs to face down here, ranging from the cannon fodder goblins, zombies and gnolls to powerful creatures like liches and death knights. This section really runs the gambit and with roughly fifty pages devoted to all these antagonists, the Bestiary is well worth the sticker price on the book alone.

Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle ends things with the six pregenerated characters to use. While the Bestiary was the high point of the book or me, these characters are easily the low point. I’m find with pregens, except that the pregeneration goes from Level 1 through Level 10 with everything laid out for your characters path. Even this wouldn’t be so bad if the character classes weren’t exactly the same in terms of growth and distribution. The Dwarf Warrior and Human Warrior get the same exact changes at each level, meaning the only thing separating the two from being carbon copies of each other are the racial bonuses and the character background options (think Secondary Skill from 2e AD&D). This is also true for the Human Wizard and Elf Wizard, although at least each one gets different spells in their spellbook to make the two slightly different from the other. I’d have liked to have seen something else differentiate the characters that have the same class. Perhaps The Elf Mage could have had something different than Brew Potions at Level 6 or Overchannel at Level 9. They’re just too wooden for my liking and character customization is one of the most important things about a game system for me, so anyone like me who hasn’t been taking part in D&D Next playtest and rules-writing will be instantly turned off by the character class system presented here thinking you have no real path or control over what your character gets at certain levels. That thankfully isn’t the case, but this is one area where the team behind Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle fell way short and could have done so much better. I also really don’t like the layout of the two page character sheet that comes with the book. It’s far too busy, with things jumbled up and the lines for writing/typing things out being far too much for 99.99% of people. Supposedly this thing won a contest for best designed character sheet but holy hell – if that’s true, I’d hate to see the losers. Seriously, it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen, especially for D&D. Here’s one thing I really hope gets retooled before the official edition launch.

Finally, a word on the art. I liked that much of the art used in Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle was taken from previous editions of D&D and AD&D. There is some really good (and bad) classic artwork proliferating this book and it was fun to see what I recognized and what was new to me. The book also includes faux post-it-notes with sarcastic or comedic commentary about the book, which is a nice touch as much of the WotC versions of D&D have been lacking a sense of humour and/or took itself FAR too seriously.

So as you can see, Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle is pretty well done. It’s not great, and as the first physical beta test of D&D Next I’m pretty happy with it and would happily recommend it to everyone at the MSRP on the cover. Unfortunately, Wizards made this a GenCon only and it’s already going for more than double the cover price, which disgusts me. Wizards could have made so much more money by making this publicly available while also making D&D fans everywhere happy by letting them have unfettered access to this release and keeping the secondary market gougers from making a mint off the people who really love and care about the game but couldn’t go to a four day convention for whatever reason. At least the contents of Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle will keep you and your gaming troupe busy for months as you play through the adventures, read through the weighty tome and get a real sense of where Wizards of the Coast is heading with D&D Next. What’s here is far from perfect with a terrible character sheet, cookie cutter pregens and some horribly unbalanced encounters for PCs in the adventures, but for the most part, what’s here should satisfy the curious and D&D faithful alike. I’m pretty excited for the end result myself, and my thought is that between this and Murder in Baldur’s Gate, you will be too.