DEADFALL: ARCANA UNLEASHED - Seize the Means of Undead Production

Welcome to Thay, where the dress code is red, the government is run by homicidal wizards, and your spy agency's severance package is either magical memory loss or death.

Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall takes D&D 5e from cloak-and-dagger espionage to rebel wizards, pirates, demon-powered skeletons, legendary magic items, and eventually a full-scale assault on Szass Tam's evil wizard lair. Along the way, we discover that the real secret to saving Faerûn is apparently making friends with pirates, hoarding magic items, and knowing when not to punch the lich who can cast Finger of Death whenever he feels like it.

Also, there's a dragon turtle named Bitey.

Obviously, this is serious espionage.

Arcana Unleashed (affiliate link)

Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall (affiliate link)

Forgotten Realms Wiki

Szass Tam

Show Notes

We're wrapping up our Arcana Unleashed review with Deadfall, a high-level D&D 5e adventure that drops characters into Thay for an espionage campaign involving Red Wizards, political scheming, undead armies, absurd amounts of magic, and the small problem of Szass Tam attempting to take control of everything again.

Before the spying begins, we dig into Thay itself, including the Zulkirs, Red Wizard society, Szass Tam's long history of being spectacularly evil, and why living in Thay mostly involves keeping your head down and desperately pretending you didn't see anything. Deadfall also offers advice for running a D&D espionage adventure, complete with secret identities, codenames, magical disguises, compromised covers, hidden bases, and consequences when the party inevitably decides subtlety is for NPCs.

Once the campaign gets moving, Deadfall becomes a rapid-fire series of covert missions. The party hunts spies, blackmails messengers, recruits dissident Red Wizards, collects increasingly ridiculous magic items, befriends pirates, meets a dragon turtle named Bitey, and watches their earlier choices come back in meaningful ways. The adventure even accounts for the traditional player solution of murdering someone important to the plot, which earns it considerable respect from the group.