A centuries old quest for vengeance has been put in motion by the Faerie Queene, acting against the gods themselves from her realm of the Otherworld. In Against the Faerie Queene players of both the Legends of Avallen system and Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition can embark on an epic genre sweeping adventure to put an end to her plans.

In this full review we’ll be taking a look at what is included in the book, seeing what sort of adventures are included, and telling you if this is worth picking up for D&D players who have not yet ventured into the world of Avallen.

Massive thanks to Modiphius Entertainment for sending us a free copy of Against The Faerie Queene to review. If you would like to support the site then why not pick up your RPG goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

So without further ado, let’s dive into Against the Faerie Queene and take a look at what is inside it’s pages.

Against the Faerie Queene Review

I’ve played roleplaying games since my teens, and like many people the first introduction to that was through D&D. The setting and the mechanics are pretty much shorthand now for “RPG”, but one of the things I’ve been more and more excited about as the years passed was sinking my teeth into new settings.

Legends of Avallen is very unique in that it takes a blend of Celtic and Roman mythology and weaves it into it’s own fantasy setting with Welsh DNA and enriched with it’s own tales, lore, poetry and background to make something very original.

While this is a world of magic and mythical beasts, Humans are very much the norm for player characters and players are just as likely to solve sessions by negotiating and battling with adversaries through their words and wits as they are swords and shields.

Against the Faerie Queene is the first campaign book for the Legends of Avallen roleplaying game, which uses a novel system based around playing cards – essentially, risky actions are resolved by drawing from a deck of standard playing cards with red cards helping physical actions and black cards helping mental actions, and certain face cards triggering certain events as your try and tempt fate. But the great thing about this book is that it is also designed to run using 5th Edition too. This is a great approach as while not everyone is ready to commit to learning an entirely new system, most roleplayers are open to giving a new setting a go through the familiar structure of D&D. This gives you the best of both worlds of giving a new game a rich and exciting source book, but also introducing new players to this new narrative setting.

That’s not to say that Against the Faerie Queene simply takes some of the Legends of Avallen concepts and gives them a new skin, there’s many mechanics here that have been blended from Avallen and D&B to create something that better fits with the kind of world Adder Stone Games are trying to craft.

Talk the Talk

One of these big amendments to the core 5th Edition rules is the “Parley” system. How many times in games does convincing an NPC to do something just boil down to a simple opposed test or intimidation roll? In Against the Faerie Queene this is expanded into something more like a tactical battle, with the players trying to identify what Objections a character might have, countering these with Incentives and gently bringing them round to the idea that what they have been asked is actually in their interest or beneficial. This feels much more interactive and natural, and actually makes it easier for the GM to adlib these interactions as the outcomes then make sense – Does a guard initially stop the progress of the party because of their loyalty to the monarch, but actually their core reason for being a guard is because they need the money to help their ill son? The party can work out the motivations behind their actions and appeal to their better nature through some clever back and forth involving both roleplaying and deduction – of course there’s still a random element with dice roles, but the Parley system crafts this into something that feels more like you are breaking down the walls of defense until you get to the core truth that will lead to compliance.

While the players are doing this however, they have to be conscious of not testing the patience of the person they are trying to convince – push too hard and they may lose the chance of continuing the back and forth at all, but what’s great is that a lot of the time even if they fail initially they can try again from an other angle, at the cost of the patience of the listener being much thinner now and a more subtle and careful approach being needed.

This is something I may steal for other systems as it just feels much more real than a simple “Roll a 15 or more to succeed”

Tempting Fate

Another core mechanic seen in Against the Faerie Queene are Fate Cards. These are a normal deck of cards that are drawn each turn during particularly cinematic or risky scenes. Maybe you are tracking through the wilderness to get to a location, or you are maybe tailing someone through a city. The more you tempt fate, the more cards are drawn, with certain face cards triggering complications that will then impact the adventure in different ways. In some situations each player will be assigned a role that relates to one of the 4 suits in a deck of cards, and so the adventure has results that then relate to that specific player falling upon something during the encounter.

While other games use a simple dice roll to see if something bad happens on a journey, what I like about this is that you can “see” yourselves pushing fate as the odds of you drawing a “bad” card increases the more you push your luck – You might have a stack of non risky cards already drawn, so is it really worth tempting fate by doing a certain action? This makes encounters exciting and fun for both players and GMs.

The Tempt Fate mechanic is mostly seen when travelling from location to location. Each day travel results in a new card being drawn increasing the chances of something bad happening, which can then be interacted with by moving fast or carefully while also trying to balance your resources in the form of “Supply” which is a catch all resource that represents having enough food and water to survive for a day. There’s no need to track the individual rations, food items and water – you instead simple use Supply as a resource that ticks down as you travel.

Monster Mash

We’ve all played video games where the boss starts charging up his super attack with some telegraphed animations or audio cues – you know something bad’s going to happen and you’d better get ready to defend! Against the Faerie Queen manages to translate this into roleplaying games through a mechanic called “Ability Tells”

From a gameplay mechanic these essentially work like a reverse Reharge rule. You roll a D6 at the end of the monster’s turn, and if a certain result is rolled you read some suitably threatening flavour test like “The creature rears it’s head in a deafening roar as green smoke starts to pour from it’s mouth…” and then the following monster turn it will use the ability that relates to that roll.

This is a really nice way of having monsters able to use some devastating abilities that could wipe the entire party if left unchecked, but giving the players the advance notice to do something to stop it or mitigate the damage. This again adds to the cinematic feeling of confrontations and really leans into the narrative with players being able to craft their actions around what the enemy is about to do rather than just being subject to an unlucky dice roll.

Speaking of monsters, the book is very good in making sure that every single stat block is displayed both for Legends of Avallen and 5th Edition, with colour coded boxes to make identifying them really easy

Helping Hand

The colour coding of box outs is something that Against the Faerie Queene does incredibly well, with each box colour meaning something else – making eyeballing information mid session really easy. For example, all narrative information to read to the players is blue, while in universe lore that players may already know with the right skils is green. Very often in other games I’ve had to use post it notes or highlighters to mark this information to make it more obvious, but in Faerie Queene it flows very well.

With this being a stand alone campaign, we also get quite a lot of lore and background on Avallen too – while I suspect this is expanded upon even more in the core Legends of Avallen book, capturing it here really helps players such as myself who have not delved into the Avallen system and are playing this using 5th Edition.

With the world heavily influenced my Celtic and Roman mythology, there’s a lot of Welsh words and names that can be quite intimidating to pronounce correctly – however every time an unusual or difficult word or name is introduced, the writers have made sure to include pronunciation guides in italics following them to help you keep it consistent and accurate over the campaign. I wish more games did this kind of thing with historical or imaginary terms or names.

The Campaign

The book contains some new character options for players, and like with the rest of the book these are provided both for Legends of Avallen players and 5th Edition players. For 5th Edition these take the form of sub classes that can be used to capture the kinds of adventurers we would see in Avallen – so for example, Barbarians can opt to take the Path of the Gladiator for those wanting to have a character that specialises in bloody one on one duels with flourishes and taunts to entertain the braying crowd. Or how about the Circle of Oaks, a Druid that can shift into trees rather than animals, rooting you in place but giving you access to some suitably thematic abilities such as having a protective canopy that can be extended around allies, or to hide in plain sight as an innocent tree…

I’d encourage players to use these sub classes as they capture the magic and feel of this world and feel closer to the intended narrative than more vanilla 5th edition classes.

The campaign itself is for 3rd level players and takes them all the way to level 8 – while it doesn’t start at level 1, this does give you the opportunity to have your players come across Avallen at level 3 or to instead use the optional introductory campaign to create your characters there and level them enough to start this campaign. That level 1-3 Caer on the Borderlands campaign is not in the book but is instead a free download from the Modiphius website – I do think it’s a shame we don’t have a full 1-8 path in the book, it’s easy enough to start out with the free campaign and play that before progressing here.

What’s really nice about the Against the Faerie Queen campaign is that over it’s 5 adventure campaign we see a lot of different genres and styles. We start out with hunting an otherworldly boar across a sprawling forest, to a heist in a bustling city, then darker horror elements with a super interesting twist that I wont spoil here, to gladiatorial games before heading into some dungeon crawling and boss battles in the grand finale – there’s stuff here for everyone and it will keep things fresh from session to session.

Other than the first and last adventure, the others can actually be played in any order too, meaning that the GM can best move things around to suit the players that are with them.

It’s worth noting here that The Horror, the middle adventure does have some darker elements that certain players may not enjoy, so I’d highly recommend reading that chapter and raising any areas of concern with your players. It’s an excellent adventure with some brilliant twists, but I’d always make sure all your players are comfortable with the content – the book does a great job of signposting this and the game works just as well with that part removed.

Over the book’s 370 pages there’s lots of different flavours of content and differing play styles leading this to be something that even roleplaying newcomers will enjoy due to the variety on offer.

Summary

So what do I think of Against the Faerie Queen? While I don’t want to spoil the campaign itself, I think that both players and GMs will thoroughly enjoy this adventure. We see lots of different locations, styles and themes that keep things fresh and exciting, and lots of unique mechanics and rules that make Legends of Avallen feel it’s own thing even if only using 5th edition rules. If you’ve never played Legends of Avallen and are not sure if this book will still give you a worthwhile 5th edition experience then you have nothing to worry about, as every page is chock full of content that will give you a fun and unique roleplaying experience

Against the Faerie Queene is available to buy now

Modiphius Entertainment provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.