There are a few more 5E adventures out in the world of cyberspace than the Rise of Tiamat and Lost Mines of Phandelver adventures. For the most part they are made with old OGL claiming to be 5E compatible. I noticed one around a week ago on RPGnow.com and bought it last night. The title of this adventure is Reclaiming the Caves on the Borderlands.
http://www.rpgnow.com/product/142240/Reclaiming-the-Caves-on-the-Borderlands
The expectations of this adventure title and the throwback art on the cover raise expectations of the adventure Keep o the Borderlands. The Caves of Chaos from that adventure were used in the 5E playtest. The adventure is for level 2-4.
Anyway the adventure refers to the area being cleared out and miners have taken over the area and you can play humanoid races to go and clear them out. The adventure is 23 pages in size of which around 15 are text the rest of the pages are a mixture of arts, maps etc so it is kind of small. Still it is hard to argue with the cover price of $1. For that price my expectations are not really that high.
The adventure is also being sold as very bare boned as only a few locations as such detailed with encounters and it is up to the DM to flesh it out. This is a throwback to some of the old BECMI adventures such as B1 and B3 where it was up to the DM to stock some of the rooms. I do not mind this sort of approach but I prefer a more normal adventure in that regard.
On the plus side the layout is easy to read and you do get racial stats for playing Bugbears, Gnolls, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Kobolds, Lizardfolk and Orcs and some of them look fun even. The adventure itself is a dungeon hack through more or less an exact copy of the Caves of Chaos although the map is quite nice and better than the scanned map they used in the playtest materials. The plotline is thin, the contents sparse and I would be hard pressed to get interested in playing in to be honest.
One thing I did like to see was abbreviated stat blocks. For example.
Beserker (AC: 13, HP: 67, greataxe: +5, 1d12+3 dmg, reckless, XP: 450)
Guard (AC: 16, HP: 11, by wpn: +3, 1d8+1 dmg, XP: 25)
Knight (AC: 18, HP: 52, 2 greatsword attacks: +5, 2d6+3 dmg or 2 heavy crossbow attacks: +2,
1d10 dmg, leadership, parry, 700 XP)
Nice and simple and even Hoard of the Dragon Queen generally doesn’t include stat blocks in the adventure.
So overall an average to bad adventure really although there are quite a few positive things in the adventure I liked.
Pros
The price- $1
Monster races stats
Nice looking Caves of Chaos map
Some of the layout such as stat blocks is clever/useful.
Cover art evokes the Keep on the Borderland
Cons
The adventure itself
Lack of plot hooks, NPCs that matter
Sparse content
Overall I would give the adventure itself 2/5. However I can recommend this as for $1 you can’t really expect that much and the adventure has potential and one could dress it up a bit and it is not an outright mess which is a problem and it cost me $30 to boot. The adventure is useable and the parts of it you can mine are well worth $1 IMHO. Being generous as an overall product I would rate it a 2.5 as it is not outright terrible and I did like a few of the things in the adventure. For $1 I would say this is excellent value for money even if you never run the actual adventure itself. Relative to the price it may be a better product than HoTDQ although Lost Mines of Phandelver retains its title as best 5E adventure for now.
) and make your own version of the adventure....