As I’ve previously noted, I started in the hobby with Moldvay basic and worked my way up to the Expert set. One of the first Advanced Dungeons and Dragons products I bought was Descent into the Depths of the Earth, and that adventure module blew my middle school mind. I was so excited to run this adventure that I put my players’ party of 5th level D&D characters into it right after Isle of Dread.
And they got wiped out in the very first encounter, the drow checkpoint: a TPK so egregious that I had to fall back upon my first and only use of “it was all only a dream.” Hey, it was the 80s. If the writers of Dallas could use that one, so could I.
Eventually I graduated to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I was fascinated by the Monster Manual II section on demons and spent a lot of time poring over the lists of demon princes and lords and imagining running adventures featuring these super-powerful beings.
So when I heard that Wizards of the Coast was going to do a 5e adventure around a demonic invasion of the Underdark, they had my interest. And when I learned the book was going to be developed by Green Ronin, one of my favorite publishers from the d20 period, they had my money.
Out of the Abyss certainly looked good, and it read well enough. The elevator pitch is an Alice in Wonderland take on the Underdark, but with demons. What made the Underworld of D1-2 so captivating to my younger self was it was so vast and so alien. Instead of a high-magic, Tolkien-inspired world of goblins, elves, dwarves, and dragons we got something darker and grittier, closer to the proto-pulp and pulp writings of Verne, Doyle, Burroughs, and Lovecraft.
That sense of an alien Underworld has greatly diminished over the years, in part due to over-familiarity. I’ve read dozens of Underdark supplements and adventures. In the Forgotten Realms this region is apparently dangerous but relatively known to the world at large: regular trade links tie the underground with the surface world. In contrast, the very existence of the Underworld in D1-2 was unknown to most surface dwellers. So I welcomed a return to the weird and mysterious for this setting.
Out of the Abyss has some of the most vivid set pieces I’ve ever read in an adventure, right up there with Snurre’s Hall or the Moathouse. More than anything else, the image of Demogorgon rising out of the Darklake made me want to run this adventure. And there’s an encounter with a beholder that’s hands down the toughest thing I’ve ever thrown at a party in 5e.
OotA also has some really memorable and interesting NPCs. For some reason, my players really seemed to take to Stool the myconid. But there are plenty of others, like Thamberchaud the overweight and cosseted dragon. The Pudding King and Droki both made for eerie and unforgettable antagonists.
But if OotA has great individual components, the whole assembly is somehow lacking. The adventure claims to be a sandbox, but if the hallmark of a sandbox is player choices, then OotA falls well short, starting with the initial setup: the PCs begin the game all prisoners of the drow. Even free, the PCs are stuck wandering around the Underdark until they reach a high enough level to exit to the surface. Yes, they can visit various locations in any order, but eventually they really need to hit all these locations before they can leave. There’s no real consequence to progressing through the sites in order A-B-C or C-B-A or B-C-A.
Contrast D1-2: as a pair of tournament adventures, the module had a specific, overarching goal: track down the drow who had engineered the giant attacks. But even with a set goal, players still have some level of choice with real consequences. Routes in the Underworld were divided into primary, secondary, and tertiary tunnels. Primary tunnels were larger and allowed faster movement, but carried a greater chance of encounters with organized patrols. Tertiary tunnels were cramped, forced slower movement, and were less patrolled. But they were also the haunts of powerful horrors such as mind flayers and beholders. In theory, players could select their own risk/reward tradeoffs.
Similarly, although the players begin play with a fairly linear map to the Vault of the Drow, several set encounters along the way can be sped through or circumvented altogether if the players wish. They don’t need to collect a particular set of items or cultivate specific allies before they reach the Vault. Despite the eerie, Lovecraftian coolness in the Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, I have never had a party actually do any exploring there: every party I’ve DM’d has avoided that fell place and its dark mysteries.
Players really don’t have that level of choice in OotA. Almost all of the set encounters contain some pretty important elements, be it knowledge, items, or contacts that are nearly essential for completion of the adventure.
Because the players are expected to spend levels 2 through 7 wandering around, the encounters are generally geared for challenge levels 4–5: early encounters will be pretty hard, but later encounters will be pretty easy. It didn’t help that I had a larger group of players, either. (Though the default set up saddles the party with a whole coterie of NPCs.) There’s no real advice on how to scale encounters up or down. And with this structure, XP is pretty broken. You could spend years trying to amass enough XP with only the random encounters: story based awards are probably the only way to go for this adventure, but again there’s no real advice or guidance.
I know that many players enjoy the grimdark survival element of the earlier chapters, but my players were pretty bored with it. They had a large enough group, which included a drow wizard and a ranger with Underdark as his favored terrain, so they were very rarely lost or out of food, and didn’t need 12 NPCs to explain the difference between a Kuo-Toa and a Duergar.
A DM is supposed to track several different mechanics that might be affecting PCs and NPCs in different ways: disease, fatigue, hunger, light, magic-warping faerzress, and madness. And few of them really seemed worth the tracking. I was particularly disappointed with the madness rules, which require a lot of record keeping. For better or worse, 5e abstracts most game effects into pure “damage,” and by the end of the adventure I felt like a better madness mechanic might have been to simply have madness inflict psychic damage that could not be healed without long rest. Players understand hit point loss in a very immediate and visceral way, better than sanity mechanics that rely an awful lot on role-playing.
OotA also suffers from a problem that seems endemic to many WotC books: terrible organization. There are chapters where it’s almost impossible to find important information in a hurry. The dwarven city of Gracklstugh would have been unplayable if not for some helpful third party guides that broke down the city and gave page references for key information. The adventure cried out for an index, flowcharts, summaries, and so on to help the DM.
On a related note, the maps for OotA are generally terrible. Pretty to look at? Oh, yes. But usable at the table? Not really. Many have very wonky scales and are overly busy, and the adventure lacks good battle maps for many key encounters.
I really like that 5e generally backed off from making miniatures a requirement for play. But I use them myself, and I played most of this game on Roll20. So I could have really used some good tactical maps in 1 square equals 5 foot scale.
In some ways, I think OotA would have benefited from embracing the adventure path that it really is, rather than pretend to be a sandbox. The adventure could have been much tighter, better focused, and encounters better balanced. One problem with the pseudo-sandbox structure is that the players can become enmeshed in storylines that appear to have tremendous urgency, like stopping Zuggtmoy’s wedding—but with no way to resolve this plot for months and months of game time.
In general, the adventure is just too overstuffed. It spans too many levels, and has too many themes. Although it sounded metal to mix demons and the Underdark, each are expansive topics all by themselves. I think this adventure would have been better focused on a smaller number of sites, with fewer themes, and spanning a narrower range of levels: say, 5–15.
I realize this comes across as very negative, and I’ve struggled to write this review because, although this adventure occasionally drove me crazy, I also had a blast running it. But in the end, I was running for a group of good friends in the midst of a pandemic, and it gave me a weekly occasion to connect with people I love, during a time when that was otherwise very hard to do. I have had many great nights with good friends at terrible restaurants, dive bars, and lousy concerts. It doesn’t mean those places were actually good: it just means that with good company, anything can be fun.
After 56 sessions of playing through this adventure to completion, I feel comfortable writing that while Out of the Abyss is not a terrible adventure, it is an overstuffed, poorly organized, underachiever. That’s all the more frustrating because there are some truly great pieces within it, and I think with better editing and tighter direction, this might have been a spectacular adventure.
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