Reviewing ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Dragon Delves — Death At Sunset Adventure’

Welcome to the table,

I very rarely put my players against dragons. In the decades I have run various tabletop roleplaying games, there have been very few times that the iconic entities have ever actually made their way onto the table to tangle with the players as they are going about their various adventures.

The reason for my apprehension of including dragons in my games: if you run a dragon at your table, taking into account their lore, their amassed wealth, magic items and weapons, and the connections and influence in the world they have built up, a dragon could easily dispatch a party of low to mid-level players with very little effort on their part.

A group of wererat assassins, some cultists, a doppelganger, or even an invisible stalker could easily be dispatched in the employ of a dragon and set about a chain of events to take down the party or divert them from their goals long before they would even come close to finding where the dragons lair was, much less figuring out how to navigate through said environment to harrow the things that calls it home.

With Wizards of the Coast’s newest release, Dragon Delves, I’m not the only one who has struggled to find a place for dragons in my D&D landscape. The book contains ten short adventures, each based around a particular dragon and environment, and provides storytellers and game masters a chance to run their players through adventures that feature dragons without having their players, in a majority of instances, needing to be way over-leveled to survive the winged wonders and their boundless supplies of minions and magical resources.

This will be a series in which I explore each of the adventurers and provide some feedback and thoughts, in the same way we review comics, novels, and films here at Comicon.com. I’ll also be providing some suggestions on what you could use at the table to enhance your state of play.

Death at Sunset is a low-level adventure that is suggested for 1st and 2nd-level characters, set in a redwood glade in the middle of a forest. It once served as the home of a green dragon who would plague and harrow the elves who called the redwoods home.

The adventure kicks off a hundred years after a group of elves led by the warrior Ethvan slayed the green dragon whom they had come to call Death-at-Sunset. Unfortunately, as such stories go, Ethvan lost her life in the conflict, and the elves pulled back, leaving only a small number of wardens in an outpost called Redwood Watch — a location that slowly grew into a small village whose inhabitants tasked themselves to oversee the forest as it recovers from Death-at-Sunsets’ blight.

The adventure begins with signs of corruption returning to the land and villagers going missing from Redwood Watch, an event that sets the stage for the storyteller or game master to introduce the party to the adventure in the form of the village reaching out for help from heroes who can investigate the odd happenings that have started to occur.

What I think this adventure does really well: one of the two Redwood Watch natives, Gwenhumara — yes that is her name — offers to make antitoxins for the party if they accept the mission, but she tasks them with going to the various redwoods in the grove to gather samples of the strange growing corruption.

It serves as such a solid vessel for carrying the story along, giving the players the ability to explore the surrounding area, test out their low-level characters while exploring and learning the landscape, and gain access to an item that will be helpful in the coming adventure in a very natural way. As someone who has multitudes of adventure modules, this got a grin from me as I thought it was terribly smart.

There are some fun encounters in the adventure that also serve to showcase a low-level party’s various skills without being too overwhelming. A Dryad, a scared elf and his mastiff hound, mud mephitis, zombies, and a personal favorite of mine, a giant centipede.

The adventure eventually takes you down into Death-at-Sunset’s lair, where you discover a bunch of snakes of varying sizes, a Yuan-ti Malison, Vine Blight, Twig Blight, and the surprise wyrmling offspring of Death-at-Sunset, the green dragon wyrmling Sunset-Is-Night.

Death at Sunset is set up as a really cool two-part adventure. It has a lot of opportunities to allow your fresh players to test out their various abilities and feel out the other players at your table. The adventure says that you could set this up over two adventure sessions and I think, all in all, you could fast track that and make that an accurate number. But there is a lot of material here to explore and with a low-level party I think it makes a little more sense to run this in three parts, the introduction and exploration to find the various locations and collect samples, a bit of shopping, antitoxin creation, the trip to the entrance of the tunnel, some minor rescue, and then finish it out with the dungeon dive into the green wyrmlings lair.

Dragon Delves – Death at Sunset is a really fun low-level adventure that has some solid ideas and the potential for a wide variety of encounters showcasing what is available in the low-level space. It provides thoughtful combatants and some really cool story moments that can serve as a quick two-to-three-night adventure, a long day of convention play, or a seed that grows into a much larger campaign.

For those who are playing at an in-person table, the D&D Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures – Green Dragon Wyrmling & Afflicted Elf from my pals at WizKids makes a perfect miniature pairing for this adventure’s penultimate fight.

Additionally, the D&D Icons of the Realms: Undead Armies — Zombies can add some spice to the table for the Zombie camp encounter.

There is a rad giant centipede mini that has one of my favorite insect sculpts you can score at this link.

You can also score a Tuan-Ti Malison in the D&D Nolzur’s Marvelous Miniatures: Yuan-Ti Malisons two-pack at this link.

This collection of minis should get you pretty far in your various encounters running this adventure, and between this, some good folks at the table, dice, and the theater of the mind, you should be able to set yourself up for a pretty rad time.

Until next time, pre-published adventures are jumping-off points. You can stick to them as much as you want or pick and choose what you want from them to enhance your TTRPG experience. The important part is that you are having fun with the people whose company you enjoy.