The Lost Sanctum is a four-hour adventure for level 5-10 characters by Paige Leitman and Ben Heisler set in Elmwood, a small town on the edge of the Moonsea, which is recovering after the detonation of a devastation orb. It is part two of a trilogy; I haven’t run part one, but part two stands very well on its own.
It’s also an excellent adventure that includes a strong storyline and fascinating and challenging encounters.
The main encounter of the adventure, a fight against many cold-based creatures emerging through portals into a room lined with brown mould (which grows in the presence of flame) is brilliant. If the players aren’t smart, there’s a strong possibility of a Total Party Kill. My group had three members unconscious just after a white dragon entered the fray and were only saved by the quick-thinking wizard who used a banishment spell to allow the group time to recover. If you’re running this for a tactically weaker group, you may need to tone down some of the situations.
The townsfolk recruit the heroes to find the sanctum of the Saurial Mage Grypht, which contains information about the threat to the town. The heroes must overcome the challenges of the Cormanthor Forest to reach the sanctum and then defeat its defences. This adventure uses a lot of boxed text to help convey information and set the mood. The plot is relatively linear, but as you spent most of the adventure proceeding to your destination, this doesn’t feel forced.
Although I think most of the adventure is excellent, I had a few issues with the presentation of some encounters. It wasn’t always clear exactly how many monsters were present. I had to go to the battle maps and count the starting places of monsters to determine how many there were, as it wasn’t obvious from the text. There’s also a very long section about avoiding the hazards of the Cormanthor Forest – taking up most of two pages – which implies that each character must make either a Wisdom (Survival) or Intelligence (Nature) check, but the description of the results reads as if only one character makes the check for the entire party. Roll well, and you avoid most of the text on these pages. Roll poorly, and the group needs to worry about going mad from the whispers in the wood! It’s flavourful, but a bit problematic in play.
Unusually, the final encounter is not a combat, but rather an extremely clever puzzle which requires a little set-up. (You need to cut out part of the handout to use as an overlay). I hadn’t seen a solution like this before, and it played exceptionally well, with the characters moving a toy boat around a grid of letters to discover the solution. The players were able to solve it without needing my help beyond a few encouraging words.
The adventure makes excellent use of Forgotten Realms lore, harking back to the Finder’s Stone trilogy by Jeff Grubb and Kate Novak. The callbacks delighted me, as that’s one of my favourite series set in the Realms. My players were unaware of the books. With the use of that material and that relating to Elmwood, this felt like a proper Forgotten Realms adventure; it didn’t feel like a generic adventure just set in the Realms.
Overall, this is a fantastic adventure that provides engaging situations for the players, while using lore to set it in the world and aid the DM. Highly recommended!