Reign of Madness is the next quest pack that runs at level 17 and another in the line for higher level characters. It’s loosely tied into the Harbinger of Madness in that it has a distinct horror theme to it, but also dealing with Xoriat, the realm of chaos and insanity and the Taken making another appearance. So this is a sequel in feel, but not necessarily in story. We also get to revisit one of my favorite free quest areas, Delirium in the Sleeping Spell Inn. Nothing like drinking beholders under the table.
This time around, in Acute Delirium, you’re trying to retrieve a scepter, once rumored to have belonged to the Lord of Eyes himself, who happens to be the Prince of Madness. It seems someone was showing off and it once again opened up a portal in this poor inn to Xoriat and you need to retrieve it and close the portal. Like the fun and crazy with the first Delirium, this one uses different parts of the inn, and there is no shortage of insanity as you have to chase down a Mimic that got eaten by a beholder that happened to swallow the scepter. So you build an airship out of bookshelves and beds to follow them in and fight off incoming beholders like you’re on the Millennium Falcon and they’re Tie Fighters. Cause that’s perfectly sane, right? And then you have to go into the Beholder to find the Mimic that ate the scepter. It’s a brilliant and fun quest and one of my absolute favorites in the whole of DDO to date.
The Sane Asylum forces you to go into an asylum where they apparently only lock up the sane as Xoriat has taken over. No surprise as the last quest you may have accidentally, kind of sorta, let out the Lord of Eyes from his imprisonment. You have to run all over the Xoriat infested area and solve one of the more complicated light trail puzzles in the game. The mini-bosses are wonderfully done and you get to see some of the more, colorful, NPCs pop up from quests earlier in the game here as well.
The Lord of Stone shifts gears as you head into the Underworld to ask the quests namesake for help in putting the Lord of Eyes back where he belongs. Nothing is as easy as it could be and there is a lot of traipsing around taking out the Lord of Eyes’ spies and proving to the Lord of Stone that you can handle yourself and then convince him to help you fix your little oopsie.
The last quest in the chain, The Lord of Eyes, puts you against the Lord and his minions as they’ve invaded the Tower of the Twelve, which is a center of power near Stormreach and is definitely not a good thing. To help the Lord of Stone’s forces you have a unique set of options to go through to help get them in, and even with his help taking on the Xoriat forces isn’t easy, but it is a lot of fun in a very unique quest area.
I loved this quest chain. Acute Delirium alone is worth the cost of this chain. All of these are very unique, and while less horror driven and more crazed than the Harbinger of Madness, these are all very much in the same genre. Nothing here feels like anything we’ve run before, and there’s enough for all the classes to do throughout. The experience as usual in here is equally good and the unique and named items are very much worth running through the quests more than once per character. While there are some quest packs I’d pass up, this is one I recommend easily to anyone.
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