Enjoyable module, only held back by the Season 8 lack of impetus and plot reason to be moving forward.

Very good module. The group basically fought most of the enemies the first time I ran, but did intimidate some spawn to take them to the boss so I had some extra guys in that fight which was fun. Druids have ways to wreck the adventure with things like gaseous form and pass without trace which I have seen. All in all worth it for sure.

So my players had some fun with this and I added some aspects to it that I felt add to the tension that the players really enjoyed.

The party decided to stealth into the area where they needed the charges. You had stated that the charges had a 3 minute delay... so without them knowing the strength of the charges, once the first one was hidden and pressed, I started initiative. Every minute mattered and the charges were going down as they headed down to fight the final boss.

It made them handle the encounter more tactically and I think they got more into it. Overall... my players had a great time and for me, that is considered a win.

I played this mod as a player and ran it as a DM. When I played it as a player the entire thing took 2 hours with both bonus objectives. At the time I thought the DM must have ran it incorrectly, but unfortunately he was right. I managed to stretch it out to 3 hours when I ran it, but the party had accomplished all the objectives within 2 hours. Part of the problem is that there is a mechanic at the beginning that allows the players to essentially bypass all encounters until the final objective. Even if the players do have to fight through the encounters, the enemies are way underpowered.

Continuity is an issue with many of this season's adventure series and this series is particularly bad. The adventure begins in the prisoner cell. I assume this is meant to be the same prisoner cell from Escape from Vanrakdoom. There is a window that looks on the Forge in this adventure, but it looks on Shar's perpetual Darkness in the Vanrakdoom adventure. In any case Stone Shape would bypass the entire trek.

In the final battle, how many vampire guardians are present? The adventure doesn't say. It says to add one for a strong party, but the text does not specify how many for an average party.

I ran this adventure and my players enjoyed it. The players did take advantage of the some of the venting terrain features, and saw that furtility in trying to take on the masses of creatures that they encounter. The players were challenged by Biscuits and also the HH's, but Seabordt and his guardian truly made things dangerously challenging and pushed them. I liked that the planar environmental effect, although my party wizard sent a sunbeam (brust) to deal with most threats! They were still challenged though. My rating is based on the fun factor of the module for players. As a DM, I had to open DotMM in order to read up a little more on the area the adventure takes place in, as well as review the DMG for other excacerbating elements. All-in-All, and ample finish to a good run.. .now I will keep my players down here and have them continue through Vanrakdoom! Run it as part of the series for a complete adventure arc...

Very fun module! Unfortunately we left the sanbox of the rest of season 8 and had a very linear path throughout this adventure. The story was great. The RP opportunties were awesome. And the Nitrogen puzzle was fan-freaking-tastic. I would have liked to have given the characters more agency but they seemed to have enjoyed themselves. I will say this. Sunblade ruins all of these adventures. I don't know whose idea it was to allow that weapon in a season chock full of vampires and other undead, but holy crap, the characters are killing the big bads in a single round. I don't want to punish the players by nerfing their toys but the theme wasn't very well thought out with replacing all of those problematic weapons with the Sunblade.

DDAL 08-15 Forge of Fangs

3/5 Stars

The final part of the Season 8 Tier 3 trilogy. As a DM I prefer dungeon crawl style adventures. It is easier to keep the party on track, as well as avoid unpleasant surprises (insert Leeroy Jenkins moments). This adventure was almost too much of a railroad for my taste though, as well as an editing issue (ergo the 3 star rating).

My party was used to vampires by this point (almost every Tier 3 I have run in the past 6 months either had vampires or mind flayers present). So they planned ahead, and through judicious use of Heroes Feast and Aid spell, kept me from dropping any characters throughout the 4 hour session. And with the easy combats (I even ran the final fight with an extra baddie) they even accomplished the 2 bonus objectives in the 4 hours.

Pro: I found the balance nice, as well as the challenges presented by an undead cast of villians. Con: Some items, such as bonus objective A, could be structured differently to add to the challenge. One successful skill check and an extra ACP and 2 extra TP. One of the encounters is not clear as to what you are facing (specifically pg. 10). The creatures to fight are buried in the text, instead of broken out into a separate section. Easy to miss if you are in a hurry.

For completionists, this is a must play. Especially as the story leads into the Tier 4 content. As a DM, you may want to plan on adding difficulty if the adventure goes too easily. And read it through very carefully.

The story is familiar, but one villain stands out...and no it is not the terribly named Seabordt. It's Biscuits, the undead (depending on level) critter with a dead heart and wicked smile.

I highly recomend that you have Biscuits consume Seabordt, gain all of his hit points, powers and legendary actions, and become the villain this story calls for.

The magic item is once again suboptimal to a point of irrelevance. It's something you would not usually waste an attunement slot on, as it gives DC 15 powers at tier 3, and it's main use would be to perhaps get a lucky Fairie Fire off. It's got cool flavor, and it would be a great item for a tier 1 party.

This module is for competionists only.

Just like the last 2 modules in this series, the monsters are being used out of tier. This makes the threat level of the combats continue to be entirely dependent on party composition.

The module also depends entirely on the party using stealth. Clearly it is intended that the party sneak past several of the possible combats in the module, but it also says that any light sources will give the party away. This means a party without darkvision or etc. that are using lanterns or the Light cantrip will be automatically detected and trigger extra combats.

The solution this module uses to try and make the vampire boss fight threatening is to give ALL the enemies in the last combat Legendary Actions. This can really slow combat since it effectively means the DM is running an enemy Legendary Action after every PC combat turn. It also doesn't fix the problem: the final boss only does +9 attacks with 4d6+4 damage in Tier 3. Even with Legendary Actions to give more attacks, a max of 28 damage per attack is not particularly dangerous for Tier 3 adventurers. Seabordt's average damage of 18 requires at least 3 or 4 hits to drop most Tier 3 Wizards and Sorcerers, so he poses little to no threat to most parties unless they are incredibly poorly prepared.

This adventure had some promise but the maps, lack of numbers, and assumption the pcs are undercover hurt the module. Again the first set of monsters are easy bluffed or destroyed due to the CR level. The poison trap is second most dangerous encounter but that is pass or fail. Scene D map is too small for the monsters and magic trap will not really delay a group pass the first time some one fails. The map for Scene E is missing the cauldron. And does not give how many spawn are in the room. I suggest 2 per pc. The boss fight is most difficult encounter but the spell Dawn will put a hurt on the vamps.

Annd wrapping up this trilogy, which started out so well, we have the forge of Fangs.

All content was completed in 1.75 hours, a lot shorter than the listed run time of 6 hours. Admittedly the characters had access to wall of force and dawn, completely trivialising the forge encounter.

The final encounter has some potential, but the players had access to a sunsword which again trivialised the encounter. The Cleric spell list is a bit short and contians spells inappropriate to vampires (Revivify?), it could do with some tweaking, I would advise people who run in the future to change up the spells to make it more competitive. To the author I suggest having some method of reducing sunlight's effectiveness against vampires that the players had to circumvent in some way.

This module again suffers from the lack of varied vampire mobs athat can challenge a tier 3 party. had the encounters leading up to the final encounter been more challenging I suspect that my group wouldn't have had it so easy.

Compared to 8-14, this module has potential to be fixed, make the encounters prior to the finale tax the player's resources, and fix the spell lists and this might manage to make it to the 6 hour run time.

I love the idea behind the Forge of Fangs triology, if they were listed as Tier 2 modules. At tier 3, players have way to many resources available to them to make this module. I have played and DM'ed this module, and it really feels like its just half-hearted for tier 3.

The theme, the plot of uncovering these vampires plots is amazing. A++ for that. Please just list them for tier 2 or give us a realistic way of making it challenging for the level it is supposedly designed for.