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Zeiss
2008-01-15, 12:10 PM
I'm thinking about buying this adventure and running it for some friends of mine, but I cant seem to get time to read through it yet, and I was wondering if anyone had experience with it.

RTGoodman
2008-01-15, 12:54 PM
I've started the campaign about 3 or 4 times, only to have it fall apart by the end of Chapter 1 (mostly because I can't get a group to stay together that long, especially living three hours from my normal group).

The adventure itself is probably one of my favorite that I've read through or started playing. The design is good, the layout is good (as long as you print out the NPC appendix from the Web Enhancement, so you don't have to constantly flip back and forth), the art is good (love the picture of the Horde coming across the river towards Drellin's Ferry), and it includes material from all sorts of sources (MMIV, Complete Divine, maybe Heroes of Battle for the points system thingy, etc.) that all lend themselves to making a fun, cohesive campaign.

The Red Hand is full of well-designed and fun to run creatures (who doesn't want to make their party fight an Aspect of Tiamat? :smallcool: ), and provides a difficult but not TPK-laden adventure. However, I will caution you - because of the nature of some points in the adventure, your party will have a really tough time if they don't have an arcane caster to take down the mooks while the main melee character worry about the big bads.

Also, you should know before you get into it that it's a military-style campaign - there's some room for roleplaying, certainly, but a lot of it is spying on enemies or just fighting enemies in waves as they attack various cities.

As I said, this is probably my favorite pre-made adventure, and I think many people agree with that. If you go on the Wizard's forums, there are several people posting recaps of the epic adventure. My favorite is by the poster Caligula - his party has been playing for a year and a half or more, and they're finally at the final encounter. You can read it here - Red Hand of Doom - TOTAL RECAP! (http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=642066) And by the way, Caligula's recap is so popular that the whole thread is 1380 posts on 46 pages, with nearly 62,000 views.

Hope you get a chance to play through and fight the Red Hand, because it's definitely fun if you're into the style of game that it falls under.

Shishnarfne
2008-01-15, 02:48 PM
Seconded! I greatly enjoyed playing through this campaign! How much? I signed up to play the campaign again via message board! Seriously, this is a great epic-adventure campaign, and I'll agree with the suggestions made by rtg... just try to make sure that your group has enough dedicated players to stick with it, and your players will enjoy saving the world, or at least trying.

Azaul
2008-01-15, 03:00 PM
My friend DMed. I was playing a character I wasn't fond of with a few options I regret taking and still thought it was a wonderful adventure. Right now we're running Expedition to Castle Ravenloft with the same group. The more we play Ravenloft, the more I appreciate how well assembled Red Hand of Doom was.

Teeka
2008-01-15, 05:39 PM
It's the best adventure ever, that's what my friends and I think of it at least. In fact we're getting ready to go through it again with new characters because some new people joined our group and we want them to experience it as well. The only problem it has, and it's not really a problem, is that the next adventure you play though when it's all over will seem pathetic in comparison.

KillianHawkeye
2008-01-15, 08:16 PM
I'm running the adventure right now for my group. We've been playing for about a month and a half and they are nearing the end of Chapter 1.

The book is extremely well written. As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to use it. The adventure is combat heavy, but there is a great variety of creatures, encounters, and locations. You'll want to run some random encounters between each of the main battles so that your players aren't always facing tough opponents. (The book has random encounter tables for each area. You can roll, but I like to just choose something from the list.)

All the NPCs are really well made, too. Especially the villains, who are really unique and interersting. Plus, there's dragons! :smallwink: