Let's Read Threats to the Nentir Vale: Introduction
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The full name of this book is Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale. It was published in 2011 for Dungeons & Dragons 4e, and as far as I know it’s the last “proper” monster book for that edition. It would still get a few more player-focused books over the rest of 2011 and 2012, but after that Wizards of the Coast would begin focusing all of its efforts on 5th Edition.
I really love Threats to the Nentir Vale, and I’ve been looking forward to “Let’s Read”-ing it since I started writing the first Monster Manual/Monster Vault post, in the far-off past of 2019, before the Plague Years. It’s as much a setting book as a list of creatures.
Threats to the Nentir Vale sits at a point in the “generic to specific” scale I hadn’t seen before. Monster Manuals are the most generic, presenting monsters for any setting and campaign. Adventures with custom enemies are the most specific, presenting creatures built to support a single scenario. This Monster Vault is just a step more general than that, with monsters built to fit a single region. You can run multiple campaigns there, and this book will make sure the opposition you face always has that cool regional flavor. It does include a few more general entries, but even then it tries to tie them to the Vale in some way.
A Brief History of the Nentir Vale
Before we get into the monsters, we get another summary of the Vale at the start of the book. This is a bit more detailed than the one in the DMG and it focuses on what threats live in many of its sub regions.
Interestingly enough, the Nentir Vale bears some resemblance to Skyrim in its physical characteristics. It’s a roughly rectangular region delimited by mountain ranges and containing plains, forests, hills and marshes within its borders. Its northernmost areas are frosty, and most of the rest is in the colder end of temperate with well-defined seasons. Unlike Skyrim it does not border the sea, and at 150km x 225km it’s also smaller than Skyrim’s “real” size1. The Vale is crisscrossed by a small network of rivers that join together to form the Nentir River, which flows southwest and out of the map.
Like the rest of 4e’s implied setting, the Vale is a layer cake of ruins from ancient fallen empires. The most recent one was the majority human empire of Nerath, whose settlers arrived here from the south 300 years before our narrative present. The Nerathi settled the valley and lived in relative peace for 200 years. Right about then, an enormous orcish army led by Clan Bloodspear invaded from the neighboring region Stonemarch, crossing over the mountains. The local military was unable to stand up to them, and Nerath was too busy dealing with its own multiple crises to send reinforcements. The Bloodspear wrecked the valley’s infrastructure and razed many of its settlements until internal conflicts caused them to retreat back home.
The largest communities of the time managed to survive in an extremely diminished state, and it’s been only a few years since they managed to re-establish contact with each other. Travel between them is extremely dangerous, and not just because of hostile fauna. The ruins of Nerath and at least three other ancient empires still cast their shadows over the Vale. No less than three dragons count parts of it as their territory, sharing space with hostile sapient communities that filled the void left by the Nerathi. Foreign conquerors are starting to set their sights here as well, including the Bloodspear Clan.. Even within our nominal points of light, internal threats are rising in power.
Heroes of the Vale have their work cut out for them!
Introduction to the Monsters
As a late-edition book, the monster math here is entirely in sync with the latest advances from the Monster Manual 3 and the Monster Vault. The Nentir Vale started out as a setting meant for Heroic-tier characters, which would be expected to leave it behind when they hit the Paragon levels. However, this book includes monsters ranging up to the late Paragon tier, doubling the region’s potential “lifespan” as a campaign setting. Of course GMs could have done this on their own already, but it’s neat to see it done in a book.
It also helps that the monsters are set up in such a way as to allow a sandbox campaign in the Vale, which makes this a setting very in keeping with the spirit of old D&D. If your players arrive at one of the locations described here, you’ll know who lives there and how powerful they are. Carefree players might run into things they can’t handle.
There are few weird new monsters here - most of them are specific groups or individuals belonging to fairly “basic” species covered in the first Monster Vault, but with added twists that make them unique denizens of the Nentir Vale. Each monster gets more room for lore than was possible in the MM3 and on the MV, and that extra space is used to detail their unique circumstances and to tie them to specific regions within the Vale.