I had a great game of D&D tonight. We were playing Quelling the Horde, an adventure from the 3rd season of the Adventurers League by Ron Lundeen. The adventure has its flaws; the combats, in particular, are often far too difficult for a party of Tier 1 characters. It also has too much content, which is a problem when you’re trying to run a game in a limited amount of time. However, it allows different styles of approaching it, and that means a lot.
The adventure begins with a limited investigation; it’s an opening act where the players get used to the situation they must deal with. There’s the growing anticipation of what they’re facing: Strange goblins, who wear heavy armour with strange, demonic helmets, and a leader who can throw bolts of fire are raiding nearby farms. A horror-themed encounter with some scarecrows relates to one of the faction’s mission rather than the main plot, but the balance of this encounter seems badly off. Scarecrows are resistant to normal weapons and can paralyse the weak-willed. If you’re not careful, it can very easily be a TPK. A character with fire magic swings the battle greatly in the party’s favour. Guess what my party lacked?
From there, the action moves into the goblin caves, where the party is faced by many challenges . It was my group’s decision to use charm person on the goblin guarding the cave that caused this session to be so enjoyable. There’s enough information in the adventure to role-play the goblin, so all of a sudden he was telling the party about his status as a Knight of Graz’zt and the great powers of the goblin leader. Now we had an interesting situation to play with!
I delight in the players being inventive – and I’ve rarely seen charm person used effectively. It was this time! The players convinced the goblin “knight” to send his “squire” with them into the caves; he’d announce them to the other goblins and say they were friends.
And so, the adventurers entered the long winding tunnel that led to the main cave system. They then disguised themselves as orcs. As they met each group of new goblins, they announced themselves as the “Orcish Knights of Graz’zt!” come to pay homage to the goblin leader.
Things almost went pear-shaped when, in their first interaction, the small squire announced, “they’re not orcs! They’re humans pretending to be orcs!” Incredibly, they worked out a way to get out of it. “We’re not humans! We were orcs pretending to be humans, who are orcs again!” A good Deception roll later, and the goblins were guiding them through the cave towards their leader.
As I said, this adventure is very rich in content. A goblin training cavern contains a pen of rust monsters. The group avoided that. The elite knight encampment? That was avoided. The “dinner” of the goblins that broke free and needs to be subdued? They learnt about that, but declined to aid the goblins until they’d paid respects to the chief. Other groups I’ve run have dealt with these encounters, and missed others. Part of the skill in running this adventure is working out what to run and what to omit. If you only have a four-hour slot, which is the listed running time, then you may well struggle.
This was a role-playing focused party, however, and they role-played their way through as many encounters as they could. An incubus guarding (and draining the life-force of the prisoners?) He, they fooled – my Insight check was pitiful in that case, and the bard’s Deception check very good. The goblins who wanted the party to fight their new invention, a suit of armour that walks? Only after the group saw the chief!
The encounters are inventive, and full of details to delight players and DM. The encounter with the chief? He’s riding a carrion crawler! This “final” encounter has a good chance of the party surprising the chief, and I ran it that way, with the group choosing to attack rather than negotiate for the first time in the descent. Of course, that meant that once they’d dealt with the chief, the rest of the goblins were alerted to their less-than-peaceful intent.
As this adventure details each of the areas in the goblin settlement, deciding which areas to confront the party with was easy; it’s very easy to adapt if the party takes an unexpected route. With the death of the chief, the goblin engineers sent their “armour that walks” against the party scant moments after the chief’s death, and before the adventurers had a chance to rest and heal. I used the “strong” encounter here – a helmed horror. Those things are tough! It was very challenging for the party; the warlock was quite discomforted when he discovered both his hex and eldritch blast spells were ineffective. However, witch bolt was effective! Normally, it’s a poor spell, but against AC 20 when everyone is missing, being able to damage the helmed horror automatically is very useful. The warlock hid first, then attacked with advantage – thankfully, that was successful.
I’m not sure how the party would have gone if they’d fought their way through everything. I ruled that, after the helmed horror was defeated, the rest of the goblins fled from the Orc Knights. The advantage of D&D is that you can go past the printed page. As a DM, I was happy to enable the players’ fun – and keep within our time limit – and the players took full advantage of that. The group were able to escape successfully, having ended the threat to the area.
Quelling the Horde is an interesting Tier 1 adventure that challenges both the DM and players. It benefits from a group that wishes more than just a hack’n’slash challenge and a DM that enables that, but it works as a challenging combat mission as well – though you have to pay attention to the overall challenge of the fights. It has several evocative situations, and overall is a superior adventure. Highly recommended!