DMs Guild Adventure Review: The Throne of Bone

Jeff C. Stevens’ adventure, The Throne of Bone is a 6+ hour adventure for 6th-8th level characters and includes recommended adjustments for characters of level 9th-10th.

The adventure is 28 pages long. Of those, 17 of them cover the actual adventure, and the rest of them contain a lot of useful appendices, which I will talk about later. There is enough backstory provided for the Dungeon Master to have a good idea what’s going on; moreover, an idea on how to incorporate this adventure more intricately into your campaign is provided.

The adventure has a rather slow start, where lots of roleplaying takes place. This can be a hit or miss for your players. If they like roleplaying, they will appreciate this part of the adventure; however, it might become tiring if they aren’t that much into it. So, I suggest not using all of the content from this part if you believe your players will not enjoy it.

I found the dungeon part as a whole quite interesting. There’s a number of rooms the players will have to visit, and I think most of them are fun. The only problem was in the first room. It’s a little tricky, and that’s also stated in the adventure, but after that everything is good.

The adventure maintains a balance between combat and non-combat encounters. The non-combat encounters are not very hard so they won’t get the players stuck. However, this doesn’t mean the players won’t have to use their heads.

As for the combat encounters, the adventure contains a variety of monsters and this variety feels natural. None of the monsters felt they shouldn’t be in the dungeon. The difficulty of the encounters depends on the strength of the party. In the adventure there are some advice on how to make them more challenging, and I suggest you should not be afraid to use them.

I also want to talk about the appendices. The adventure contains a lot of them, and they are all helpful. One contains detailed maps of the areas the characters may visit. Two of them can be used as handouts. There’s even one for a new monster stat block.

But I think the best one is the Battle Stat Tracker. It contains every combat encounter the players may face in the adventure. And for every encounter there are notes on everything the DM may need to run it. Modifiers, AC, damage, monster traits and more.

Ultimately, The Throne of Bone is an interesting adventure. It contains enough of everything(roleplaying, combat and non-combat encounters) and I believe your players will be satisfied.