A QUICK REVIEW OF ROAD TO DESTINY
I’m an art professor by trade and have worked as both an occasional illustrator and layout artist over the years. I have no connection with Legendary Games and provide this brief review for those DMs looking to expand their Jade Regent campaign. I have well over 30 years of DM experience and provide this review as someone who has actually used the product. This review does contain spoilers though, so players should wave off if they don’t want their experience ruined.
Tldr: Pretty darned good, 4/5 would buy again and is a big hit with my players. Highly Recommended.
PRODUCTION VALUES
Fine work for the most part. In spite of the glowing reviews above, there are a few typos and the like, minor glitches, but the product certainly looks like professional, agency quality work. Not quite to the standards of WotC or Paizo, but a solid effort nonetheless. I would have liked to see some variety in the illustrations, but Juta’s work is fine here (the Ogre piece being particularly evocative). Just some variety provided by a second artist might have worked better. The cartography is solid one of the strengths even of the product, but I regret the missed opportunity of providing a “no tags” option as we have with the Paizo interactive maps so that they can be better used by the DM without spending some “clone stamp time” in Photoshop. This is such a simple thing to do really and seems like a "no brainer" to me.
MODULE CONTENT
Really good. Plenty of entertaining bits are provided that do an outstanding job of replacing the poorly-executed part 2 of The Brinewall Legacy. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to role play the existing NPCs (a challenge for most DMs I think) as they travel along the road for 16 days. This module really brings Varisia to life with just enough focus on each stop along the way to make things interesting. I would have liked the option of a brief encounter at Windsong Abbey , but other than that, this product really delivers some fine, entertaining content.
HOW IT PLAYS OUT
Really well I think. There are a few missed opportunities and tiny holes in the premise. Clever players who have some knowledge of Varisia will look at the Varisian map and protest the entire idea of going through the forest to avoid Ravenmoor. The module just assumes that players will ask around in the previous towns about the road ahead, when really, this is more likely something that Sandru would be concerned with. This can easily make Sandru seem quite daft for taking the caravan right into an ambush if the players don’t understand or have missed those key Diplomacy checks. Even if we go with the premise that Ravenmoor has some issues with its overnight guests, it just doesn’t make any sense to avoid it if only to save one day by going through a notorious, bandit-infested forest. Certainly a reason can be made for this if the party realizes that Sandru is trying to avoid the villain Ranulfr or his raiders.
I would be remiss to not give credit for the outstanding moral dilemma in Wolf’s Ear. This is a fantastic addition to your AP and I’m betting will be one of the more memorable moments in the early levels of your story. My players absolutely loved it. I advise would-be DMs to perhaps play up the lycanthropy angle here, which the module strangely omits. Kindly farmers on the outskirts of town seem much more suspicious if the players are made known about the town’s troublesome past.
Though I didn’t go into this module expecting to find such, no mention at all is made about buying and selling loot, magic items, etc. activities that low level parties will be quite interested in doing while stopping in any community. There’s clearly an opportunity here for enterprising DMs to fill this part in I think. DMs may want to use the gnome illusionist NPC encounter in just such a way. Perhaps he’s buying or selling some item or items to the party and that is the initial contact.
Finally, in spite of the fact that Sandru seems set against a stop in Riddleport (according to TBL 1/6 at least), this module assumes that the caravan stops off there and then heads north. Shockingly, nothing at all happens while they’re in Riddleport. Given that Sandru wanted so badly to shave off a day by skipping Ravenmoor and dare the Churlwood to do so, it would appear that he could do just the same by making a beeline for Brinewall after leaving Roderic’s Cove. One surely gets this impression in the original material which only serves to beg for something to occur while in that most notorious of Varisian cities.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
On material alone this module works so much better than your standard option for part 2 of TBL that it warrants a 5/5 stars. I think the production values are short of what I would consider 5 stars (Paizo, WotC, GW, Privateer Press, etc.) though and I think that even the artists themselves would agree with me. Still, this is very solid, professional work that I subtract just a bit from my score when compared to the very best in the field. I really want those maps to be more useful without me being forced to take a snapshot and doing some retouching in PS. I concede that for a lot of DMs, this makes no matter either way, but doing so is such an easy fix that I’m baffled by their absence. There are a few slight problems with the basic premise as described above. These aren’t critical problems if your group knows very little about Varisia, but the DM should be aware of them and be prepared to deal with skeptical players who start looking at the map. I think that as written, if those Diplomacy rolls are missed or simply skipped altogether, Sandru comes off looking quite incompetent. All-in-all, I am very satisfied with the product and highly recommend it to you. I can’t imagine a DM purchasing this for their Jade Regent campaign and being disappointed with it. 4/5 Stars.
