The Queen of Spades is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure for level 7 characters that should last from eight to sixteen hours. At its heart, it is an investigative adventure set in the Forgotten Realms, where the heroes must face a force of chaos and – especially – bad luck.

The adventure does a lot of things very right. I am particularly impressed by how it handles the initial investigations. After the characters are alerted to strange things happening in their city – it’s not set in any particular named city – they get to investigate five mysterious deaths. Describing them as “murders” would be wrong because there’s not always a culprit. Sometimes there is, and sometimes there isn’t. What is in common between each of them is bad luck, and that’s what the players get to discover as they investigate.

The adventure presents a lot of material to aid the DM while running the investigation. Each of the five locations is described in detail, with secrets to uncover and optional threats to engage party members who are getting sick of just investigating. Allowing the DM to adjust the pacing and throw in a combat encounter when needed is well-judged, and it helps that the combats help cement the themes of the story.

One of the crucial things the adventure gets right is to let the DM know what happened. It is too easy to write as if you’re writing a story and hide things from the reader because that’s how stories do it. However, the DM needs to present this story to the players. Hiding details from the DM won’t go well when the players ask questions or do things that need answers! And this adventure avoids that.

After the initial investigations, the players can use the clues they’ve discovered to start piecing together what truly occurred and track down what’s behind the deaths. This section is, I believe, the weakest part of the adventure. Some links go from these sites to the conclusion, but I’m not convinced that players will always spot them. Some DM intervention may be needed to progress the adventure.

However, the richness of the background material and the compelling nature of the foes makes this a lot easier. You know what’s going on and the themes you’re working with, so you have the tools to bring things together and get the adventure back on track.

The adventure concludes with a dungeon crawl. It’s not the largest of dungeons – only ten areas – but even so, it might be just a little long, considering the story’s pacing. The final encounter is stunning, however. It’s not that often that the heroes stand face-to-face with an avatar of misfortune, but that’s what they get to do. Yes, it can end in combat – and possibly should – but they can also end the adventure wagering their souls and trying to win a gambling game.

In our playthrough of the adventure, we had the latter, providing what proved to be an unforgettable end to the story. While it had a lot of rough spots I needed to smooth over, the underlying structure was fantastic.

Unfortunately, one of those rough spots proved to be the rules for the gambling games. The adventure has rules for three games – a card game and two dice games – but they don’t work well at the role-playing table. This problem is especially true of the dice games, which are pure luck and don’t allow players to affect the results with their characters’ skills.

There is the opportunity for the players to get familiar with the games earlier in the adventure and then bring that knowledge to the final confrontation. That would be brilliant, but the mechanics let things down. I advise you to find some other resolution mechanism.

Some other areas irritate me with the adventure. The maps look awful, as their rooms are far too big. Even though I appreciate large rooms to accommodate D&D combat, these are bigger even than that. And something’s gone wrong with the transferral of the maps to the adventure document. They’ve all been distorted so that the grid squares are now rectangles. They’re not pretty. Take the sense of them, but the maps as presented aren’t good.

Another problem lies with the formatting. For the most part, it works and is readable, but occasionally it hits multiple indent hell, where there is far too much white space. The leads to ludicrously narrow columns with huge blank areas on either side, making things very hard to understand.

But even with these niggles, this is still an adventure that I admire. It gets the core of things right: It provides a compelling mystery for the players and allows them to investigate it in their own way and discover different things depending on their methods. It has a great backstory and villains, which provide plenty of material for the DM. I enjoyed running it at my table (converted for my World of Greyhawk campaign), and I hope it will do the same for you. Recommended!