Plunge Into the Wilds and Discover Warlock Lairs from Kobold Press

March 12, 2022

Our awesome friends from Kobold Press surprised me with an advance copy of their new Warlock Lairs: Into the Wilds book releasing March 20, 2022. This will absolutely find a place on my shelf within easy reach because it’s my favorite kind of material and Kobold Press crushes it every time. Warlock Lairs: Into the Wilds contains 19 (wow!) short quests featuring discrete locations with strong themes, unique challenges and engaging story elements you can drop right into your Fifth Edition campaigns. Let’s get into it.

The wilderness calls your 5E D&D adventurers

It’s not an exaggeration to tell you every 5E Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’ve run includes at least one adventure from Kobold Press and it all starts with the fantastic editing and layout demonstrated in all their titles. The material is so easy to understand and follow, which for me means it’s incredibly simple to adapt for whatever adventuring party takes part. I don’t utilize their Midgard setting per se but I’ve certainly incorporated concepts from there into my own patchwork world. I can’t wait to slide some of the quests inside Warlock Lairs: Into the Wilds into my games especially because they focus on three themes I’m particularly fond of — wilderness, fey and cultists.

The 19 adventures in this book take adventurers to remote locales and plays right into my favorite style of game — discovering these forgotten places out in the unexplored wilds. A world is a huge place and depending on where a particular adventuring group’s interests lead it’s always a thrill to see what sort of narrative emerges because even when I set out to play an episodic campaign they almost always become serial adventures. Players seem to crave ongoing narratives and stringing their quests together has become a fun, creative challenge for me over the years.

Adventures in Warlock Lairs: Into the Wilds highlight Tier 2 play — my favorite 5E D&D space yay! — but there’s a handful of Tier 1 quests too. This is perfect because the adventures can flow into each other and create an entire campaign starting from 1st level. This is a quality I find in most Kobold Press books like this one and I can tell you from experience this works so well. Unlike a self-contained campaign I don’t need to read a huge book and keep tons of NPCs and plot threads in mind. Instead this allows groups to enjoy each adventure on its own and leaves all the room needed to personalize the story for each adventuring party.

My layout and design hero Marc Radle shows how important presentation is right away in the book’s table of contents. All 19 adventures are listed along with the page number, intended level range and a brief summary. These succinct entries also mention whenever they continue themes introduced in earlier adventures, which is a terrific detail. There’s also a great chart showing all the Kobold Press creatures found throughout the adventures with their suggestions for equivalent creatures from standard Fifth Edition. I love this! Kobold Press is famous for their amazing monster books but they understand everyone doesn’t own all of those. In some cases the chart even includes small tweaks to make on those standard creatures to better represent their intentions in the adventures.

Each of the adventures includes common elements to help make Game Masters’ lives easier. There’s an Adventure Background section providing a brief overview of the whole thing plus suggested Adventure Hooks to get characters involved. There’s also a section called Concluding the Adventure, which I’ve appreciated in Kobold Press material for a long time because it gives some ideas for what might happen next.

For this particular book Kobold Press brings Dyson Logos onto the design team to handle cartography. Personally I prefer the more colorful and detailed maps found in many of their other books but Dyson Logos certainly creates wonderful maps too. Combined with the cool black-and-white illustrations the whole book is really evocative of the best kinds of old school adventures and I’m here for it.

Along with clear, easy to follow descriptions of areas on these maps Kobold Press wisely adds a variety of sidebars throughout the book. These might share ideas for how to expand further on some part of the quest, refer to additional Kobold Press concepts from other products, provide insights into people, places or objects in the adventure and so forth. I also really dig some of the encounter charts because they go much further than simply giving you a monster for adventurers to stumble across. Many of these random encounters explain what the creatures are doing, which for me translates into opportunities for the players to approach them on their terms. For example one such chart result is “Two sahuagin climb onto the deck of the Wellenreiter during the night and creep below decks in search of loot.” Do they adventurers fight them? Speak to them? Ignore them completely? It’s a great story element without shoehorning characters into a specific response.

An Appendix at the back of the book provides details on new game elements found throughout the adventures. It’s quite extensive and it’s not just new monsters and magic items — although it’s got those too. There’s a perilous hazard called Quash Moss to challenge wilderness adventurers, which is awesome. There’s also four new spells! Call Shadow Mastiff, Putrescent Faerie Circle, Pyroclastic Blast and Summon Ancestor are all very cool. That last one in particular is amazing. Warlock Lairs: Into the Wilds’ Appendix also includes 11 new magic items and a whopping 14 new creatures!

I’ve got to give a huge thank you to Kobold Press for sending me a copy of the book. Many of my most memorable 5E D&D experiences got their start through the variety of similar adventure books they’ve published over the years and I’m already looking forward to the fantastic new ones I’ll make with my friends playing through these quests. Warlock Lairs: Into the Wilderness releases on March 20 but you can preorder a copy through Amazon and help Nerdarchy by doing so out right here.

If you’re interested in other Kobold Press books with similar material we’ve previewed several of them here on the website before:

*Featured image — Warlock Lairs: Into the Wilds presents fourteen wilderness-themed Warlock Lairs, collected here with four brand-new adventures. Ranging from 1st to 10th level, there’s so much to discover. The opportunities for secrets and treasures are great — and so are the risks. But you wouldn’t have it any other way. [Image courtesy Kobold Press]