A low-level drow adventure - and it's pretty good! --

It's unlikely that many people today will play Web of the Spider-Queen as it was intended. Not only was it released for 4th Edition, but it was released for the little-loved "Essentials" era of late 4E. On top of that, it's intended to push 4E's line of collectible Fortune Cards - so it's basically wanting you to use an awkward version of an already idiosyncratic ruleset, plus a line of physical accessories that are hard to get your hands on today.

Putting all that aside, if you're either willing to play Essentials, or do the work to convert the module to base 4E (very easy) or 5E (harder, but surprisingly not too hard), this is a pretty solid product.

Let's start with the bad. It's a 4E module - and an Encounters module at that - and it has a fairly tight set of design paramaters as a result. 12 episodic encounters, almost all of them centred around an unavoidable combat, with a relatively minimal amount of roleplaying around them, and zero opportunity for the party to go off-script or do anything but keep moving down the railroad. It's a problem across the entire 4E line, and if you're buying a 4E product, you probably know what you're getting. Your group had better like fights.

With that out of the way, what's good here? Actually, quite a lot. The fights themselves are interesting and relatively varied. 4E groups will have a lot of interesting ways to interact with the terrain and with the unique abilities of the monsters. If you're running a conversion to 5E, a lot of this will be lost because of the different priorities of 5E combat, but it's still good design. What you lose in tactical complexity, you'll gain in 5E's greater support for roleplaying and thinking outside the box. Besides, everyone loves fighting drow.

It's also one of the very few official Forgotten Realms adventures for 4E, and it makes good use of this setting. The story is set in Shadowdale, and it's rich with Shadowdale lore and callbacks to canon without ever making the players feel like they're missing out if they're not lore nerds. It's an accessible entry story in a classic locale.

And as for what roleplaying is there - it's good (at least by 4E standards). The game uses the "themes" idea from Essentials to offer characters direct hooks into the action, which gives lots of personal attachment to the specific encounters. (If you're not running Essentials, the adventure includes everything you need to repurpose these themes as regular-style adventure hooks, or even 5E Backgrounds.) There are named NPCs that run through the adventure, and they're reasonably well drawn (considering they only get a couple of paragraphs each). There's even a fairly clever use of Elminster. There's a puzzle challenge (ugh, I hate puzzles), and an action scene done in a cinematic style rather than by combat, and there's several combats where diplomacy, deception or roleplaying can either bypass the fight entirely or substantially alter the odds in the players' favour. It's not high drama, but it's better than official 4E products usually offer.

The actual presentation of the package is nice. As with most of these Encounters seasons, there's a full-colour wraparound cover. There's also full-colour battlemaps, but as with most similar 4E packages, they've been repurposed from other products and are fairly generic. All encounters have a clear 4E-style layout, and all relevant monster statblocks are included. There's unfortunately no unique art inside, leaving some of the more intriguing set-pieces to be described only through awkward descriptive text and the collective imaginations of the players.

Official 4E adventures are uniformly pretty terrible - but by that admittedly low standard, Web of the Spider Queen is one of the better ones.

NOTE: This release of Web of the Spider Queen does NOT contain any of the promo materials that accompanied its original release. It does NOT include the themed character sheets, fortune cards, or treasure cards released during this Encounters season.

Comments on the print-on-demand version: The POD is as good as it could be, given the general limitations of DM's Guild POD products. It's a single perfect-bound book, in the same dimensions as the original product. (Note that the original was a loose pamphlet inside a cardboard folder.) The battlemaps are printed in colour, but they're bound inside the book and at the wrong scale, so effectively useless for actual play. It replicates the original cover perfectly - but that means that there's no text on the spine, as the original didn't have a spine at all. The interior text is crisp and high resolution, in a grayscale that I assume matches the original product. With the exception of the issue with the maps, this could pass for an official first-party printing, and it will sit nicely on your shelf. After running the adventure over four sessions, the book shows no significant wear and the binding is still strong.