Prince of Undeath Brings a Chaotic End to Your PC’s Career
YOOOOU SHALL NOT...ah, forget it.
If your D&D 4E chgaracters have been following along the original set of adventures (starting with H1), the grand finale has finally arrived. Prince of Undeath is the final battle, the ultimate adventure that will bring your characters up to 30th level. At this point, the PCs are basically little gods themselves, so you might as well fight some deities before you retire.
All the plot threads that have been dangled before you in the prior adventures in this series come together here. It all leads to a tangled, insidious plot by Orcus himself, an already unpleasant evil god with plans to become the Lord of Death and create an infinite army of undead. To defeat him, you’ll have to descend to the deepest depths of the Elemental Chaos (literally — you will actually see the bottom).
Prince of Undeath suffers from a problem common to all high-level D&D adventures: things get increasingly weird and abstract the more powerful your PCs and their foes become. This is certainly just a personal preference on my part, but I enjoy more grounded fantasy RPG settings. Give me a nice haunted ruin to explore, or some earthly political intrigue to negotiate. Once we start flying around other dimensions in magical spaceships and having conversations with deities, my interest starts to fade.
On the other hand, if you’re into that sort of epic level tomfoolery, there’s plenty of it here. You’ll capture a dimensional ship that trawls the Elemental Chaos, invade the very heart of Orcus’ citadel, teleport around to a few other planar places and finally have it out at the Raven Queen’s citadel. Along the way, you’ll combat dozens of demons, a lich or two, meet Vecna at least once (again), and receive aid from some unusual angels. Some elements are essentially planar dungeon crawls, but there are mysteries to be solved and puzzles to be unpuzzled as well. Indeed, a particularly clever party can skip past a whole lot of demon fighting and dimension hopping and still achieve their goals.
I do have to take issue with the inclusion of only one poster map with this adventure. Actually, this is a gripe my gaming group and I have had with most of the adventures released since Keep on the Shadowfell. Poster maps are ten kinds of awesome. They look cool. They allow the DM to depict exotic locales and unusual encounter locations. They improve the flow of game night, since the DM just has to flop down a poster map and start the encounter. Without the poster map? It can take a good ten minutes of sifting through tons of map tiles trying to find ones that can roughly duplicate the encounter map shown in the adventure booklet, and even then you can rarely get it right. “That stairway’s not actually there. And those runes are actually statues of Umberlee.”
With Prince of Undeath, this problem is even worse. There are lots of encounters in really weird locations, like strange crystalline elemental rooms, or the bizarrely shaped passages of the Red Keep. No one has map tiles of those! But sadly, all we get is a map of the magical spaceship (which will come in handy for sure) and one other encounter. One other poster map could have given us the encounters in the Forge of Four Worlds, the Abyssal Nadir, or most importantly, the final battle in the Raven Queen’s Citadel. Even if it increases the price by a few bucks, I really think Wizards ought to include more poster maps in their published adventures.
Poster map deficiency aside, this is a rather spectacular ending to what has hopefully been a long and rewarding career for your PCs. You’ll face hard choices, battle new and bizarre enemies, gain astonishingly powerful magic items and achieve your epic destinies. You can get a copy of Prince of Undeath from TrollandToad.com (at a nice discount, too). Hurry up and order it, your PCs will be level 27 before you know it.
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October 30th, 2009 11:57 AM
Man, yeah, I am all about spaceships flying through voids of universal flotsam! Also grounded stuff; I like to cram the two together, personally. Epic’s big problem with me has always been number grind & the increasing inability of the DM to make player’s actions of consequences, since they can come back to life at the drop of a hat. Sure, you can always mess up the WORLD based on their actions….but still.
This sounds fun, to me. Maybe one day I’ll play it!
October 30th, 2009 12:49 PM
See, I can’t imagine my party making it that far. The Naked Cleric would be busy trying to punch gods in the face while the rest of us are politely asking him to get the hell behind the pally and use his freaking daily right! I have no idea why he thinks he’s a battle cleric but that man takes more damage than all of us.
November 16th, 2009 1:51 PM
I never did understand why pit fiends have always been smaller and usually physically weaker that Balors (or type VI demons back in the day). They are both he pinnacle of their particular brand of evil aren’t they? Still its a pretty cool picture.