D&D 5E - Justin Alexander's review of Shattered Obelisk is pretty scathing
Most of The Shattered Obelisk is built around dungeons. And these dungeons are filled with the most amateurish design mistakes:- Multiple NPCs with no viable route to get where they’re located.
- A hydra in a crypt that’s been sealed for centuries. (What does it eat?)
- A barricade (Z7) that stops goblins from going to the lower level of the dungeon… but the dungeon key makes no sense if the goblins can’t/don’t go down there.
- Maps that don’t match the text, and vice versa. (For example, room keys like X8 that list doors that don’t exist.)
On page 98, midway through Zorzula’s Rest, the PCs enter a new level of the dungeon and… The map is no longer numbered. The description of the dungeon bizarrely shifts from keyed entries to rambling paragraphs describing various unnumbered rooms.
In Whither the Dungeon? I talked about the fact that the Dungeon Master’s Guide no longer teachers new DMs how to key or run dungeons. (It doesn’t even include an example of a keyed dungeon map.) And I talked about how this has had, for example, an impact on adventures published through the DMs Guild, with an increasing number featuring dungeons with no maps or maps with no key.
It’s a disturbing trend that bodes ill for the health of the hobby.
But seeing it in an official module published by Wizards of the Coast was truly a surreal moment.
And, unfortunately, one that is repeated later in the book.
This poor design is, of course, not limited to the dungeons. I’ve already talked about the NPCs with nigh-incoherent backstories and incomprehensible motivations. To this you can add innumerable continuity errors and timelines that contradict each other, to the point where the adventure can’t stand up to even the most casual thought without collapsing like a waterlogged house of cards.
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