Deadfall Impressions

 Well, I blazed through Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall, reading the whole adventure once it became available on early access on D&D Beyond.

After finishing season two of Andor, my mind buzzed with the idea of a D&D campaign all about spycraft and underground rebellions. Who'd have thought that the folks at WotC were thinking the same thing? Yes, Deadfall is an adventure in which the party has to work clandestinely to subvert the tyrannical and mass-murdering schemes of Szass Tam, the once and would-be future tyrant of Thay.

It might be apocryphal, but I think the initial concept of Thay was birthed when Ed Greenwood wanted to prevent players from exploring farther east in his map of Faerun - a nation of all Archmages who were super evil and would just kill you on sight.

Naturally, it's been fleshed out a little more, and while Thay is still explicitly defined as a fascist state, its people are not 100% evil, nor 100% archmages. Indeed, much like Zenk in the D&D movie from a couple years ago, there are some from Thay who would like to see the place cease to be an evil, totalitarian regime. And then there's Szass Tam, who would like it to be a more evil, more totalitarian regime under his thumb (ideally in which most of the populace is his own undead minions).

While I've suggested that a game of spycraft seems suited for lower levels, this takes the opposite approach, and I can kind of see why: assuming you build a party for this adventure rather than carrying over a party that did some 1-10 adventure, you can really lean into a lot of classes and subclasses that are ideal for subterfuge. Truly, this is an adventure where I think Knowledge Clerics, Eloquence Bards (ok, they're kind of good in any campaign,) and Rogues of all sorts will probably thrive.

Admittedly, the spycraft stuff does eventually give way to more traditional high-octane action by the end of it, but the earlier part of the adventure does incentivize social skills, maintaining cover and ensuring that you're doing things discreetly.

I will say, I think if I ran this I'd want to lean into players' paranoia. While there's no point in which the adventure says that Szass Tam's agents are scrying on the party or anything like that, I'd lean into what your players throw out there: if they feel that they need to be running spells like Nondetection, for example, have little moments where such spells pay off.

While Thay is not all archmages, the NPCs in this adventure are of quite high CRs. If you haven't had a chance to use any of those CR 10-12ish humanoid NPCs from the 5.5 Monster Manual, well, get ready to see a whole lot of them. I didn't sit down and calculate the difficulty of combat encounters in this, but I suspect that they tend to the high side, with plenty of high-CR demons and undead as well as Bandit Crime Lords, Archmages, Archpriests, etc.

The book is written in a way to really get you from one plot point to the next with alacrity, but it might be useful as a bit of inspiration to build a more complex underground resistance if your players are willing to play a fairly long campaign.

But yes, by making this a tier 3-4 adventure, you're going to have players that are using and relying on powerful Expertise, things like Reliable Talent and high-level spells. It's levels like this where having a DC 18 Persuasion check shouldn't be that difficult if you have a character who leans into such things.

It is interesting to see Thay fleshed out as more of a setting rather than a big "don't go here, it's bad" sign. Red Wizards are infamous as the most monstrous humanoids in the Forgotten Realms, and yet there are a number of good-aligned Red Wizards in this (including the effective group patron, who is very highly positioned in Thayan government).

Again, I think I'd lean into the John LeCarre of it all, and maybe even play some of the party's allies more morally grey. I'm far from the first to say it, but Stellan Skarsgard's character Luthen Rael from Andor is a fantastic example of a person who is working for the greater good but uses very dark methods to accomplish this. I think this adventure can certainly use antiheroes of this sort.

Anyway, there's a lot to look at with the Arcana Unleashed package. Admittedly, I've already written a fair amount about the character options, but I will say that the hit-to-miss ratio for subclasses here is a lot better than it has been in other 5.5 books (though to be fair, that's comparing it to like, just the Faerun and Ravenloft books, and actually both had some nice hits, but here I think the worst subclasses are like a B, and there are a ton of really fantastic ones. I think that the Mystic Arts Monk is almost certainly the most powerful Monk subclass in all of 5E).