Search for the Diamond Staff is the adventure that was used for the 14th series of D&D Encounters, which ran over eight weeks from the 12th of June to the 8th of August 2013. The adventure is set in the Forgotten Realms and was written by long-time Realms designer Rich Baker.
The adventure follows on from the game day event, Vault of the Dracolich, where the diamond staff was taken by agents of the sage Imani from the dracolich Dracoroyaster. The player characters are hired by Imani to escort him to the Vault of Song, an elven ruin which the staff can unlock. From there, everything proceeds to go wrong.
My friends and I joked a lot about the title of this adventure: it was amusingly obvious that the staff would have to be stolen from Imani at some point so the group could actually go in search of it. It doesn't take long after the adventure starts for orcs and mercenaries from Zhentil Keep to attack the small town of Hap (in Battledale) and take the staff from the sage. And then the chase is on: first to the Sembian merchant who had hired the mercenaries, and then to the Vault of Song where staff can be retrieved and the Vault unlocked.
I have written about my frustrations of the previous encounter season, Storm over Neverwinter. I'm happy to say that the same frustrations did not reoccur here. Although the adventure is mostly linear, the connections between sessions did not feel forced; the adventure flowed naturally and there were plenty of opportunities within individual sessions to negotiate, explore and fight. The plot is also a lot clearer, despite having several factions competing for the staff (three, not counting the players). Storm left me as a DM feeling confused about the motivations of the various factions, but Search not only made them clear to me, it made them clear to the players as well. It was still a struggle for some of my players, unused to Realms lore, to keep some of the factions straight (Zhents, Cult of the Dragon and Shadoval), but it used the lore of the Realms well to enhance the game.
We played the adventure with the D&D Next rules, and didn't have too many troubles with encounter balance; indeed, we had a few very tight battles, where one or more of the characters were knocked unconscious. The one particular observation I had was that, without a magic-user, the group could struggle in the larger combats. This was exacerbated by the players not always having advanced their characters to the proper level; there was a big difference between 4th and 5th level in the June packet, which was very noticeable in play.
I'll give some brief synopses of the sessions, along with highlights from our play:
The first session saw the group meeting with Imani and going shopping around the township of Hap, interacting with the locals and generally preparing for their journey to the Vault of Song. The adventure gave a pretty decent overview of Hap, which allowed us to do quite a bit of role-playing (with the group pushing the limits of the budget Imani gave them to buy supplies) before the orc and wolf attack gave us the second half of the session. The ranger managed to charm one of the wolves and take it as his companion.
The second session continued the raid, with the group reaching Imani's tower where the bulk of the orcs had attacked. There they saved Imani from his own berserk Flesh golem; this was a fun three-way combat with the golem fighting orcs or players depending on which it was nearer.
The third session brought the players to the caves the Zhent mercenaries had used as their lair. This gave the rogue of the group a chance to scout ahead and surprise the mercenaries, but the group decided to send the Zhent's horses running through the caverns as a diversion and didn't follow up with an attack quickly enough and wasted their advantage. The group also discovered the signature spell of the Zhent warmage this season: Stinking Cloud, a spell that actually managed to be better than fireball: it lasted for a minute, and did 6d6 damage each round you were in it! The high proportion of dwarves (resistant to the poisonous cloud) in the group allowed them to win through, and questioning a survivor allowed the group to discover that the Zhent leader, Phoedele, had been hired by a Sembian merchant to steal the staff and where the merchant was waiting for her.
The fourth session saw the group reaching the ruined manor where the merchant was waiting; the halfling rogue sneaked up towards him without any trouble, but the elven ranger flubbed his check badly, knocking a stone down the well he was trying to hide behind. When challenged by the merchant, he had the opportunity to gain the information he needed without a fight, but, completely tongue-tied, he just managed to convince the merchant – also a necromancer – that he and his friends needed to be killed. After the merchant was killed, the group waited for Phoedele to arrive – only to realise that she'd double-crossed the merchant and had gone directly to the Vault; she wanted it for herself!
The fifth session was partly taken up by a cross-country trek towards the Vault of Song, and a little role-playing in the nearby hamlet. And then some cultists from the Cult of the Dragon attacked the group, seeking (a) to stop any other people getting their hands on the staff and (b) to have revenge for the players stealing the staff in the first place. I really enjoyed that; it's nice to see the competing factions and past events catching up with the group.
The sixth session saw the group negotiating the ruins above the Vault. This was written in a style where the group would encounter a number of features in a linear fashion (no map provided); it was something of a surprise to me, but I was able to run it so the players still felt they were making decisions. The actual features did a good job of evoking the elven ruins and their age. The session ended with a fight against some chitines – a battle that went very, very badly for the players; they were badly damaged and without a magic-user for this fight. They were very lucky to get out of this one: the adventure noted that the chitines can be bribed (it's possible to bypass the encounter entirely), and the halfling tried throwing gold near them whilst looking for a way to gain some advantage. This allowed me to move into the negotiations, where otherwise a Total Party Kill was looking extremely likely.
The seventh session, much like the sixth, began with exploration of the underground ruins – again presented mostly in a linear manner without a map. There are some interesting features here to explore, and the group really wanted to go through a malfunctioning portal. The session ended with the group fighting Zhents and ancient defenders of the Vault.
The final session was given over to a big battle against Phoedele and her mercenaries. Well five Zhents – the biggest trouble was created by the terrain, with a tiered room making it difficult to move around and reach the spellcasters and missile-throwers quickly. Once against, Stinking Cloud made a reappearance, and the group took quite a bit of damage as it was thrown over the entrance by the Zhent mage accompanying Phoedele. The dwarf fighter launched himself at a Zhent – and, despite disadvantage on the roll, rolled a natural 20! I allowed all sorts of advantage bonuses, but the Zhent was still standing at the end of it. The party's magic-user almost died (one hit point away from instant death) when the Zhent mage hit him and the ranger with a second Stinking Cloud spell.
Things got more interesting when the Cult of the Dragon arrived (a number of them dying due to the original Stinking Cloud spell). The players accepted an offer of alliance with the Cult (they also could have allied with the Zhents), and continued the battle. Phoedele was eventually slain as the halfling launched himself from an upper tier and attacked with surprise – but the halfling himself impaled himself on Phoedele's sword and passed out from his wounds.
With the Zhents taken care of, and not at all surprisingly, the Cult then broke the alliance and attacked the party. More magic did some major damage to the party, but a fog cloud from their ranger negated some of the worst of it, and eventually the group were triumphant. After gaining some benefits from the Vault (I mostly skimmed over them, as the PCs won't be used again), the group returned to Hap, where Imani decided to abandon his own plans to visit the Vault – "Too old for adventuring," he told them. He took the staff off the group, promising to give it to someone who'd be better able to look after it, and gave them a map to a wondrous place he'd planned to visit… but "perhaps someone younger should explore."
Search for the Diamond Staff is a perfectly good D&D adventure; not one of the greats, but one I'd be quite happy to run as part of a regular campaign. The basic adventure was written for five 4th level characters with the 4E rules, but D&D Next conversion rules were given as part of the playtest packet and were used by our groups (or two or three tables depending on numbers). It followed on from an adventure I would count as one of the greats – Vault of the Dracolich – and did not disgrace the memory of its predecessor.
The 15th series of D&D Encounters is Murder in Baldur's Gate, the first adventure in the series that needs to be purchased by the DMs – and can also be bought by anyone who would like to. I'll see if I can't give an overview of it once I acquire it. As for the 14th series, it repaired a lot of the damage done by the 13th and provided us with two months of mostly entertaining sessions. It's well-constructed, and provides more than just straight combat. You can actually talk to people in it, and I love the evocation of the former glories of the elven peoples. It's not a big part of the adventure, but the small touches here and there make me very happy to have run this adventure.