How Did This Happen?

The rumors that I heard were that Hoard of the Dragon Queen wasn’t actually written by the D&D development team. The story claims that the team was busy finalizing the 5th edition rules so the adventure was sourced out to another company. However, this company wasn’t given the complete 5th edition ruleset, because there was no complete ruleset to give out at this point. By the time that Rise of Tiamat was written, the rules had been locked down so this explains why that book was so much better than the first one.

It’s five years later though! Clearly, if Wizards thought it was important enough to reprint these books into a nice new collection, they might have gone back in and tweaked the adventure to make it more worthwhile? Well, according to the announcement, there was going to be some reworking of the first half of the adventure. This interested me enough that I asked to get a copy of the new book so I could see if they fixed this disaster.

Narrator: They Didn’t.

That’s not entirely true. They did fix something, in the entire premise of the adventure. Originally, this whole adventure was based on the idea that a group of adventurers would travel into a town, see A GIANT F*#$KING DRAGON, and not go running for the hills like any normal person would. Now, they modified the adventure to have you already in the town and interacting with the townsfolk when the dragon attacks. This way, you have some connection to the people getting slaughtered by cultists. Isn’t that so much better?

That’s it. That’s the main change that the Special Edition added to the story. All the other complaints about how the story progresses were largely ignored, probably because it would have needed a rewrite from the word go. In fact, one thing that I noticed as I read through the Special Edition is that Wizards goes out of its way to downplay Hoard of the Dragon Queen and hype up Rise of Tiamat. For instance: