The latest Dungeons and Dragons book is Critlcal Role – Rise of the Netherdeep, the second in the line of Critical Role branded books for D&D 5th edition after the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. I have to admit I didn’t really have an interest in this book, as I don’t watch much critical role except for some best of videos here and there, and so am not fully invested in this universe. Also, I had not gotten the Wildemount book to review, so with those 2 things going for me, I wasn’t too terribly excited going into this one.
The background to this one involves a legendary hero, long disappeared from the world the Apotheon, who once fought as a champion. One day he fell into immortal slumber in the ancient area known as the Netherdeep. The heroes stumble upon one of his artifacts, and go about trying to find and retrieve him from his watery sleep.
This adventure is interesting. It opens with a festival, at which the adventuring party participates in non combat oriented events like pie eating contest and races. It also introduces a 2nd competiting party of NPC’s that will act off the actions of the PC’s party, this is an interesting addition to the campaign mechanics. This section culminates in a swimming race, mini dungeons that reads extremely well, and I expect would be a blast to run.
The whole adventure which runs for levesl 3-12 feels a lot like this, with character moments built in with great action set-pieces. The only issue I have is that since this campaign is set in the Critical Role world of Exandria, it’s not easy to slot into existing campaigns. Most regular D&D campaign books have suggestions if you want to set the adventure in Greyhawk or Krynn rather than the Forgotten Realms, there is so much advice here. With that said, this is probably one of the highest quality 5E products out there, with an excellent balance of action and role playing, and should appeal to audiences looking for something new to fill their next campaign void.