4 out of 5 stars
So, Tuesday is the one day a week when I actually have no scheduled events. For WotC, however, Saturday and Sunday are the days when no new content is released. This creates a problem for me when I decide to take off on Tuesday and go skiing, like I did yesterday, as I fall behind the publishing schedule, and I can’t spend all day Wednesday getting caught up (I still have to get some work done). As a result, some weeks are going to be like this one, where I end up falling behind and it will take most, if not the entire rest of the week for me to get caught up.
So, all that just to point out that this article actually came out yesterday.
As our third level 2 Chaos Scar adventure, this adventure continues to expand the options available within the Chaos Scar sandbox without actually expanding the sandbox. Indeed, given the rate of release, I don’t expect the Chaos Scar sandbox to be populated enough for a full campaign that is run on a weekly basis for a couple of months yet. That should get the sandbox options up to level 3 or 4 (and thus the encounters within them to level 6 or 7), enabling the DM to properly convey the progressively more difficult nature of the valley and for the players to have enough space to move about in.
As is normal for Chaos Scar adventures, this adventure has just three encounters. However, unlike the other adventures released thus far, one of those encounters is a skill challenge rather than a tactical encounter. It’s only a complexity 3 challenge and there are no quests presented, on the other hand, so the XP split is still very combat heavy: 525:1,886 (1:3.59). Plus, partial failure in the skill challenge can make this worse: 525:1,948 (1:3.71). At the same time, though a complete failure doesn’t completely make up for the lost non-combat XP (2,411-2,473 XP total on success, but only 2,123 total on failure) so while the meta encourages PCs to take the skill challenge seriously, it also encourages them to walk the fine line between success and failure. End result? I think that WotC is getting closer to fitting the skill challenge into an adventure’s meta, but still hasn’t quite gotten it right.