This week I will be reviewing the DnD module Storm Lord’s Wrath on Fantasy Grounds Classic. My weekly Saturday campaign started with the Lost Mines of Phandelver. After that the party wanted to make the town of Phandalin their base of operations. I was able to stretch the lore a little bit and insert a forgotten city in the Sword Mountains and ran The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan out of Tales From the Yawning Portal to level the party up to levels 6/7.
From there the adventurers passed through the town of Leilon on their way back to Phandalin. The town was previously abandoned but now that I had the Storm Lord’s Wrath module loaded we had a map of Leilon and an immediate hook for the characters. Thanks to Fantasy Grounds there is a lot of immersion as images and maps that are usually printed in a book tend to be for the DM’s eyes only.
After spending 4 or 5 weeks of dungeon crawling this module was a breath of fresh air. The adventure contained outdoor/wilderness quests that were typically finished at the end of each or our 4 hour sessions. It introduced two new enemy factions for my players; the Cult of Talos and the Cult of Myrkul. Interestingly it also created some friction for my players in the form of Lord Neverember of Neverwinter since he ordered the reconstruction of Leilon while the party was out adventuring. (They seemed to think they had the rights to the town and took issue with the Wayside Inn being built too close to their turf)
After the hook things got a little awkward for me as a DM. The module as written uses a quest board system found in the center of town and doesn’t award experience. Instead it uses a milestone system awarding a level of advancement for each quest completed. Of course that was tweaked to match my style but did require some prep work to introduce quests through existing NPC’s that the party was starting to build relationships with.
From beginning to end this was a well thought out storyline that is building up to more adventures in the series. It introduced the characters to new NPC’s that I enjoyed roleplaying and created contacts for me to use later to insert more adventures.
The conversion to Fantasy Grounds was top notch. The story was properly linked, images and maps looked great, and encounters and parcels logically placed. The module itself took about 4 sessions to complete. My guys do like to go on tangents so I think there were technically 5 sessions, but we could account about 1 day just roleplaying in the world we were creating together. If you are a DM and used either The Lost Mine of Phandalin or the intro adventure from Dungeons and Dragons Essential Kit this is a great module to incorporate into your ongoing campaign on the Sword Coast. At $4.99 you are going to be hard pressed to find a better deal with such great content.
Until next time,
DM Greg