One of the weirder situations in my gaming career occurred yesterday. For the last several months, we’ve been playing Adventures in Middle Earth, a 5E-based RPG in the Lord of the Rings setting. In the previous session, we killed a dragon, which – as you might imagine – was a pretty big deal.

Yesterday, we were in a tavern, investigating a missing metalworker.

This was a pretty big disconnect.

For this campaign, I had built a Dunedan Herald, who is meant to be good at negotiating with kings and courts. And I felt that now, after we were incredible heroes – killing a dragon in the legendarium of Tolkien is incredibly rare – surely that’s what we should be doing. But no, we were back to dealing with common issues. It felt utterly wrong.

The Games Master is using a published campaign – known as either The Laughter of Dragons or Eriador Adventures, depending on whether you’re talking about The One Ring or AiME version. And I discovered today that in this review of the product by Antonios S, he notes the same disconnect.

Campaigns need a flow. Even in the picaresque campaign that I adore, it’s no good to transition between adventures with no thought as to what came before.

It’s one of the reasons I adore Tyranny of Dragons. During the latter half of that adventure, you’re recognised as competent adventurers and your advice is sought – so much so that by the end of the adventure, you’re advising the Council of Waterdeep on what to do.

My campaign of Shadow of the Dragon Queen is reaching its conclusion. We’ve got one chapter left to play – so about three or four sessions. We’re playing weekly, so we’ll finish just before the next big hardcover adventure comes out from Wizards – Phandelver and Below. Which we’re entirely planning to play.

Shadow of the Dragon Queen is odd. It doesn’t have that disconnect I describe above – its tone is such that one thing follows from the other pretty effectively. It is a very linear adventure, and it has some significant flaws the structure of individual chapters, but the main story works pretty well.

As a Dragonlance adventure? It’s by no means as inspired or as intelligent as the original adventures. There have been a couple of times it has reference things from the classic story which it’s completely gotten wrong from a narrative perspective. For instance, it has a missing dragon egg in a side quest. This is a reference to a pretty big reveal in the original series. Unfortunately, there’s no pay-off for it here. It’s a mystery that is introduced to which there isn’t a solution within the adventure.

And the less said about how it trivialises the return of the gods the better. The big point of Dragons of Despair is utterly lost on the designers.

I think it also compresses the original timeline a bit too much – the timeline feels off compared to what was happening in the Dragonlance Chronicles. This I’m not so sure about. The end event is something referenced in the Chronicles and is a pretty good idea for the adventure. I think as a side story of the War of the Lance, this ain’t bad.

But not being bad doesn’t mean that it is as compelling as the original. It’s a long way from that mark.

I feel it lacks the moral dimension of the original tales – and that moral dimension was a massive component of the setting.

One thing I’m really looking forward to in Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk is a more in-house approach. The use of significant numbers of freelances to write adventures has been an absolute disaster. It’s produced some of the worst adventures in the 5E era. I’m looking at you, Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus.