Reavers of Harkenwold - Best of D&D 4e

The Best of D&D 4th Edition, Part 1

If you skipped D&D 4th Edition for whatever reason, you missed out on some amazing adventure content. Wizards of the Coast was testing out a different adventure designs with a publishing layout format requiring individual encounters within an adventure to fit on two pages only (mini-map included).

This format had its pros and cons, but despite its eventual abandonment, the format appears to have wrestled the creative juices out of the designers at the time (or perhaps in spite of it). The longs and short of it is that some of the adventures written for D&D 4th Edition are some of the best I’ve ever run over the course of many editions (for whatever reasons).

In this multi-part article, I will detail some of the best adventure content to come out of the core product and Dungeon Magazine teams that can be adapted to your D&D 5th edition (or any edition, really) game.

Reavers of Harkenwold (Dungeon Master’s Kit)

For any long-time follower of the blog or my Twitter feed, this probably isn’t the first time you’ve heard me talk about Reavers of Harkenwold. Included in the 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Kit (part of the D&D Essentials line), it is one of my favorite adventures of all time alongside the classic T1 - The Village of Hommlet and Troll Lord Game’s A1 - Assault on Blacktooth Ridge. Reavers of Harkenwold was written by well-known designer Rich Baker with additional design contributions from Chris Perkins.

The PCs fight off mercenaries plundering farmsteads.

Harkenwold is a duchy that has been invaded by an outside army filled with mercenaries (including a few summoned fiends). The Iron Circle are the super-evil-bad guys who have cast down the rightful Duke. A rebel resistance has sprung up and it's up to the PCs to help liberate the Duchy.

What makes RoH so good is how it was written as a mini-sandbox.  The adventure is really a series of non-linear small encounters -- contact the rebellion, upset the supply lines, recruit more rebels, negotiate with the Elves, fight off goblins… etc. There’s a variety of challenges presented and wide latitude given to the DM on how to run the adventure.

Flexibility is the key strength of this module. Not only is it non-linear, but there is room to drop in side-quests or whatever other ideas on might have to fill it out for your group. As written, the Iron Circle are clearly “black hats”, but could just as easily be run as more “gray”. Think of the Roman Legionnaires. They conquered and pillaged, but they also brought technology and civilization along with their conquest. You could play this adventure as more political than strictly “good vs. evil”. Are the Iron Circle really the “bad guys”? Or just the most recent victors in an ongoing political struggle between kingdoms? Perhaps the Duke wasn’t the nicest guy around, so for the peasants, nothing much has changed. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

The adventure was written for levels 2 to 4… but in my own game, I stretched this content out for months on end. There was so much space to work in, that I just kept adding elements until I had a complete low level campaign built up out of what originally was a fairly short adventure. The Duchy of Harkenwold is a rich setting upon which the foundations of a campaign are easily laid.

The battle for Albridge can become an epic tactical combat!

For fans of D&D 5th Edition, this adventure could be easily converted into a low-level campaign. Porting monster abilities from 4th Edition is a little trickier than with other editions, but this adventure has a lot of your basic low-level mooks, like bandit mercenaries, goblins, undead, etc. Even the more challenging creatures to convert, like devil infantry, could be a reskin of other low level demons or devils.

The DM’s Kit is a little pricey on DM’s Guild , especially given that the PDF does not come with the scanned encounter maps. However, this adventure is still worth the $20 if you are willing to wring the most out of it. Several of the maps are available on cartographer Mike Schley’s website, but at an extra cost. If Wizards of the Coast ever adds in the maps to the PDF, it would be well worth the money.

Next: Part 2 - Wizards revisits the Keep on the Borderlands