Loved the creative use of basic monsters, multiple approaches to the adventure, and support for all pillars of D&D (Combat, Social, Exploration). Also appreciated seeing the continuation of the Season 3 T1 storyline. Final dungeon is thematic and well done.

Unlike previous Adventurers League seasons, the Tomb of Annihilation storyline provides a set of introductory missions for tier 2 (levels 5-10) characters. The module here gives players a good taste of the sorts of enemies and puzzles they'll face in ToA, and in that sense it's quite good. But it shares some weaknesses with earlier DDAL adventures, so DMs will want to spend some time making sure they're ready to run it. 

The hook relates directly to the factions that lie at the heart of Adventurers League. (Also, I'm mildly surprised AL still allows factionless characters, but that's another post entirely.)

As with all my reviews, SPOILERS abound. Players shouldn't read further.

Some of the missions really stand out. None as much as the dinosaur races, of course, but they still will be a lot of fun. The adventurers will investigate a highly atmospheric and creepy temple of a death cult, a fortress built into a cliffside filled with yuan-ti, a tobacco farm, a wizard's tower, and an a shrine to Ubtao. Most of the missions have some fun toys in the environment, allowing the players to make more interesting choices than "I swing my sword again". The hooks are a little improved - you don't need much, to be honest. 

Just like DDAL07-01, they've come a long way with the editing. A few mistakes still can be found, but they are clearly typos and don't detract from the text in the way that modules in previous seasons suffered. At this point, I think AL has basically fixed this issue.

Two of the missions include some story awards. (I kind of wish all of them did, but I guess this makes them a little special.) As we haven't seen the future modules in this storyline, I don't know if they will come up again, but assuming they do, it'll make players feel pretty cool.

This module is implicitly biased towards convention or store play, in my opinion. As in almost every single DDAL product, the maps look like somebody spent 30 seconds with a ballpoint pen and graph paper. (Fortunately, Gail D has stepped up and provided some really nice replacement maps.)

It also assumes the characters are already in Chult, or at least that the players don't care why they are there. I wish it gave at least a few suggestions to DMs to provide hooks, much like the ones in the actual hardcover.

In terms of usage: consider running these as encounters during the hardcover adventure rather than as standalone. In that context, they could probably provide a lot of fun while the party is out in the jungle looking for the Soulmonger.

Ask each player if this character played any of the DDAL07-01 adventures, because some of the NPCs there show up again. That can provide a nice feeling of continuity and shared worldbuilding. 

Pay attention to scaling, because in the tobacco farm it can get out of control quickly. The warlocks can each summon a fey creature up to CR 6 - which can mean an Annis Hag. I recommend being very careful in using it. Also read the conjure fey spell closely - while it is a concentration spell, it doesn't work exactly like most concentration spells.

I don't know if I'll run all of these three times each for the Chultan DM reward, just because finding players to run tier 2 adventures can sometimes be a challenge. But we have had fun with them so far!

The first DDAL module for Season 7, "A City on the Edge" attempts t o provide a pathway to the Tomb of Annihilation storyline at tier 1. It starts off a bit rough, though. The module as a whole more or less presumes that the adventurers belong to one of the five factions. It does provide a hook for unaligned characters, but even that mostly consists of "go help the factions, oh and there's a Death Curse". It then moves into a brief, if vivid, prologue with the characters arriving in the port by ship and heading to (where else) a local tavern after being directed to visit the faction contacts. Each contact then has a mission for them.

As usual, this review contains SPOILERS, so the TL;DR version is "not bad".

The scenarios (missions) themselves are, for the most part, pretty good. You have a tiny dungeon crawl, a FREAKING DINOSAUR RACE (followed by gladiatorial arena combat), a jungle fight, and another pair of tiny dungeon crawls. 

The dinosaur race stands out for the obvious reason that WE'RE RACING DINOSAURS, Y'ALL! I don't know what else you want. It has a slightly abstracted race mechanic that might take the players a bit to understand. Good DMs should still allow them to improvise additional actions and try to use the four listed as guides. The fight that follows the race felt like an afterthought, and I skipped it for time reasons on one of the occasions I ran this module.

Also, the editing and quality control in this document far exceeds most of the prior seasons. While not perfect, it more or less matches what we saw in Season 6 content. Hopefully this will continue to improve.

The introduction does not really provide much of a motivation. DMs have to invent ways to get the party moving, and while we definitely can do that, the whole point of a module is to give us what we need. 

The dungeons themselves don't suck for the most part, but one of them has a puzzle in a series of rooms that I found really useless. It mostly consists of "roll to continue" even when the players and their characters have figured out how it works. DMs can fix this by interpreting the rolls, not as whether the adventurers figure out the same exact puzzle four times in a row, but as whether they can do it without setting off traps. (This might have been the intention; however, the text doesn't say that.)

The maps have improved from previous seasons (spoiler alert: the tier 2 companion to this module has the same bad maps as before). This really matters to groups that play on Roll20 or another virtual tabletop. Instead, I paid a little extra to get the map set here on DMs Guild produced by Gail D using assets from Mike Schley. A number of groups commented on how much they liked these maps. I did create an abstract grid for the dinosaur race based on what the module shows, as I have seen other groups get confused by the layout in Gail D's map on this one.

Spend some time in advance thinking about how to get the party moving. Make sure you understand how the various traps and puzzles work; some of them might get jumbled if you read them for the first time right when the game is about to start. If you play at an actual table, the map quality will probably be okay for you, but if you use a VTT, spend some extra time or money to make sure your players see something a little nicer..

The whole module provides a maximum of 500 XP, so once players get through this, they will either need to play something else (including potentially the actual ToA book) or wait until November when the rest of the Tier 1 modules for this season come out.

Either way, it's not the worst introduction to a season I've seen, and the race alone makes it worthwhile in my mind.

The second part of the mini-storyline by Greg Marks felt slightly weaker than the first part. The adventurers receive a sudden, unexpected opportunity to destroy the entire leadership of Hillsfar in the hopes that this will end the oppressive tyranny. (SPOILERS BELOW)

The opening scene primarily consists of roleplaying and the players can really get into character for a few minutes, although time constraints might prevent them from spending a long time on this.

Other than the "hook" after the opening scene, the party has pretty wide freedom in how to approach their quest. When they reach the site, they can survey all the different locations within it. They should be given time to decide on a plan (possibly with some initial forays to gather more intelligence). Characters with backgrounds and hooks specifically tied to this storyline may get serious payoffs if they pay attention and work those angles.

At the risk of repeating myself from quite a few other reviews of this season, the map was terrible. While not to scale, it looks like somebody spent about 10 minutes scribbling on graph paper. I built my own in Roll20; while far from professional quality, I feel like it added quite a bit of flavor. Some lack of coordination with the previous module means that the text indicates it's snowing a few days after midsummer. DMs should note that and adjust accordingly.

DMs will almost certainly need to improvise, as the players will likely concoct some scheme that doesn't align with the ideas in the module. That's great! They should feel free to come up with something new. As a DM, I control the monsters and opposition to the characters, but I am not the players' adversary. If anything, the DM should be their biggest fan! Give them a chance to shine here. That doesn't mean that a heroic sacrifice or two might not occur - courage implies risk - but even that should serve the larger narrative.

Spend some time assembling a real map, regardless of whether you play on a virtual tabletop (VTT) or in meatspace. This need not be elaborate, but it should give the players a sense of planning a covert assault on a high-value target.

If you invest a bit of time into this module, the payoff is fantastic. Your players will feel like they indeed have achieved something heroic and their characters should be wrapping up tier 1.

PS: This module can be easily followed up by the CCC-BMG-10, -11, and -12 trilogy, which explores the aftermath of what the heroes achieved. Not every happy ending is neat and tidy, nor should it be.

Really good. My players have been VERY complimentary of these maps and have commented several times how much it enriches their experience. Worth everyone's time and money, and I'm really excited for the next set for DDAL07-02. The only thing I'd suggest is updating the Mission 4 map where there are two encounters and it's not quite clear which area is intended for the first (nor the trap).

Nice quality graphics and feel relatively "in-world".

Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League Season 6 (Tales from the Yawning Portal) only contains three DDAL adventures and the hardcover. All of the former are supposed to provide a hook to a particular dungeon in the book. This one introduces White Plume Mountain.

Warning: this review includes spoilers. If you’re going to play through the adventure, don’t read further.

The adventure mostly consists of an introductory scene and five puzzles. Each puzzle basically provides a wholly-contained, discrete encounter, making it easy for the DM. The puzzles provide a good opportunity for players to demonstrate their own creative thinking without become too vexing. That sort of balance is tough to strike, and I felt like this module did so.

Unusually for DDAL adventures, this one was well-edited. I only found a few very minor errors in it. Perhaps they've learned from their previous complete inattention to this - I hope it bodes well for the next season! It's also relatively well-timed, and I suspect the discrete nature of the encounters helped with this. The maps included with the adventure are about the same quality as in previous seasons, though. Fortunately a number of good maps can be found on the DMs Guild; I preferred Zovya's (acquired via Patreon) but others can be found if you prefer a different sort of look.

A couple of small details bothered me. The end of the adventure that provides the hook into WPM doesn't do it very well, because neither I nor my group understood why they should particularly care beyond rescuing an NPC with whom they had no real relationship. Additionally, the second puzzle had a bit of vagueness in its physical structure that requires the DM to think ahead about how they imagine it. But those didn't detract too much from the adventure and the fun we had.

I liked this, as it varied nicely from most of the other AL modules I've run. A bit of combat, a bit of social encounter, and mostly just puzzles and (to a lesser extent) skill challenges. This makes it a good preview of WPM in that sense. If only it had introduced WPM storywise a bit better!

This is the first part of a two-parter, and it's definitely a fun change of pace! I will try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, but players should probably just know that we really enjoyed this module and it's not all fighting.

Unlike most AL modules, this primarily will test the characters (and players) ability to handle social situations as well as explore their environment to carry out infiltration and espionage assignments. It does this pretty well for the most part, including some pretty memorable scene setting. The fact that the adventure includes - and in fact needs - no maps whatsoever helps with this, because we can run it in "theater of the mind".

In almost all situations, the adventure has a fairly open design, encouraging the DM to reward the players' creativity and come up with their own solutions. This will keep everyone on their toes as the adventure proceeds, but that also means everyone works together to create and tell a cohesive, interesting story. Related to this: the adventure has explicit failure conditions! The players can do what they like, but if they make poor choices, they could find themselves on the outs with little to nothing as a reward other than the fun of play itself.

The module does include some combat, and the final fight provided a lot of entertainment. A few "WTF!" moments from the players really cemented that for me - it was a well-balanced fight for five characters between levels 2 and 4. (Hint: clerics and paladins can really shine!)

Despite the openness, the adventure starts off with a pointless "roll to continue" mechanic. What happens if the players fail the investigation roll? That would be boring and the game session would last less than five minutes. Bleh. Also, the use of spell scrolls to get them into the Tower misunderstands how that mechanic works, because any class without that spell on their list (and indeed any non-spellcasters) can't use those scrolls.

The above are minor nitpicks. I replaced the scrolls with a frail old bard who just needed to cast one seeming. Also, the main event seems to take place at Midsummer, but the next module (Death on the Wall) keeps talking about heavy snow. You can either move this module to Midwinter or change the references in the next module to rain (I chose the latter).

This provides an epic penultimate session for the storyline and I really recommend it to groups looking for something other than "I look for traps around the door" and "I swing my sword at the monster".

Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League Season 6 (Tales from the Yawning Portal) mostly consists of the hardcover by that name plus three DDAL adventures. All of these serve as lead-ins to one of the dungeons in the book (Forge of Fury, White Plume Mountain, and Against the Giants). In effect, they provide expanded hooks. DDAL06-01 A Thousand Tiny Deaths is thus the only Tier 1 adventure for Season 6 outside of the book. Warning: this review includes spoilers. If you’re going to play through the adventure, don’t read further.

This dungeon provides lots of challenge. The opening encounter can get really rough if the kobolds fight with any tactical ability, and they should. In one of the instances I ran this (with three level 3s and one level 1), one character dropped to 0 HP in the first round. A second one followed on the next round. While the adventurers still won the encounter, at no point did they feel like the kobolds were pushover enemies or XP fodder.

4e_kobolds.jpgOnce they get into the second part and enter the actual dungeon, they get reminded even more emphatically that kobolds fighting on their own terms present a real threat. I like seeing traditional low-end monsters used effectively in ways that emphasize their strengths, and this adventure does that as well as any I’ve seen.

ATTD does a good job of leading into FoF. It introduces the players to some of the ideas of the dungeon and leading them into one of several entries into the main dungeon. Players who go through this module will be well-prepared mentally for what lies ahead: you can’t necessarily take your time through the dungeon, and you definitely cannot underestimate enemies that might seem easier in other contexts.

In general, the module is much more readable than I expected. I have previously complained about the editing – or lack thereof – in DDAL/EX adventures in earlier seasons. Happily, ATTD does not have this issue (or at least not nearly to the same extent). I noticed a few small typos here and there, but nothing egregious. One of the best improvements is removing the four pages of useless boilerplate found at the beginning of these modules in earlier seasons and condensing it down to one. Improvements to layout and design also contributed to making this one a pleasure to read. That said…

I still had a few problems with the organization of the material. Specifically, the information on the various traps felt out of place and difficult to reference during play. More than once I had to flip around just to find what I needed to deal with specific threats. Additionally, it seemed to me and several other DMs that the design of the secondary tunnels holding kobold commoners lacked clarity. How many commoners are there? How often do they shoot their blowguns? Where do they shoot from? The adventure explains all of this, but in muddy fashion such that we weren’t always quite sure about the intent.

Like many other DDAL/EX adventures, the timing estimates are way off. I have run this twice now, and both times took over four hours for a module that claims a two-hour run time. While some of that might be due to the venue (games on Roll20 plus Discord just take a little longer), I really don’t see how the party can clear this thing out in less than 3 hours. Even that would seem like a breakneck pace.

One last thing: please stop giving us maps scaled to 10-foot squares. This makes conversion difficult even when sketching on a play mat. It effectively requires anyone using the map directly (printed or on a VTT) to take significant extra time in preparing a map.

DMs should consider using a third-party map. I used Zovya’s, and they look fantastic. Also spend some time deciding exactly how you want to handle the threat from the commoners in the walls. Maybe it will be clearer to you from the text than it was to several of us, but regardless you will want to have your plan well thought out in advance.

But taken together, I liked this adventure a lot. Unlike previous DDALXX-01 adventures of the “five 1-hour scenario” variety, this probably shouldn’t be used by a new AL DM, but that’s not a negative! It keeps the DM engaged with its own mechanics (e.g. the aforementioned blowguns plus the inventors’ lab) and makes the players work for their victory.

This review originally appeared on my blog.

Gorgeous, much improved from the standard maps with the module. I also like the DM layer, although it can be a pain in Roll20 since it makes all the tokens look grayed out a bit. Still worth it!

It is difficult to overstate how much this has improved D&D for me. WotC should be paying the creator to make this an official product, because it's the best character builder around. The inclusion of UA material really goes a long way, plus (in another direction) assistance with keeping characters AL-legal. Definitely worth throwing MPMB a few bucks for this!

The Good: The chase mechanic in Part 2 is a lot of fun and I enjoyed how it was implemented: abstract areas, additional actions, complications, etc. A moonlit attack on a caravan with characters leaping onto wagons, trying to throw enemies off, and dodging obstacles? Yes, this is great!

The Bad: The faction-choice (bandits vs guards) caused more problems than the benefits it creates. This led to a lot of back and forth in the text about which opponents they'd be fighting as well as who might survive from one part to another. I really had trouble figuring out who was still around in the first half of Part 3 because of this, and I'm not sure why the text assumes that players acting as guards would immediately free the captives. Then again, my group had precisely zero interest in helping the Red Plumes do anything at all, so that didn't come up. The editing problems rife in Season 3 AL content show up here as well; DMs need to review carefully to make sure that they understand the intent of any given instruction or description rather than what was actually printed.

"Shackles of Blood" continues the theme of "The Deep Threat" in the Rage of Demons storyline. This is a more traditional adventure in which the characters investigate some missing halflings near Hillsfar and run into some complications from the local tyrant's enforcers. Spoilers follow, but the bottom line up front is that this adventure is worth the trouble.

This adventure offers a number of social encounters in the first half. From the super racist puppet show to the halfling farm area to the travel montage, players who enjoy RPing their characters will have lots to do. I threw in some hillbilly accents and changed the wrestling match to a gut-barging contest. 

After this, you'll have a fight. Others have noted the problem with the forced capture, but some planning from the DM can avoid this: either have Olisara suggest the possibility that the halflings have been taken away and thus raise the possibility of an infiltration, or perhaps have the guard captain tell his soldiers to be careful because more fodder is needed for the arena. 

And that set-piece arena fight provides such a payoff! Because we had to split the adventure into two sessions, I didn't have exactly the same players. Those who attended the second session but not the first came in as a "rescue force" led by the one character who'd escaped the earlier ambush. This scene has a lot of moving parts: ziplines, a crowd excitement mechanic, sinking towers, piranhas (which for reasons I can't understand are called "quippers" in D&D), and a second attack wave by the Big Bad Evil Guy. New DMs should spend lots of time understanding the mechanics and planning how to track the situation before running it. 

The module has some significant editing problems. I wish that it had had another solid review pass before release, both for copyediting and for adding more suggestions on how to deal with the forced capture. Had that happened, I'd probably give it a full five stars. Regardless, some work from the DM in advance can turn this into a very memorable, engaging experience.

This particular module consists of five scenarios or "mini adventures". WotC seems to think each of those should run in about an hour each. In my experience, they take about an hour and a half to two hours each. The setup for the adventure overall focuses on the rantings of a madman. Somehow, the players realize he is actually prophesying, and they turn that into clues that lead to five separate scenarios. That felt really weak, but I ran with it anyway because, with a public group, we didn't really have time for an in-depth "session zero" to get the group together. I would have liked a better introductory hook.

The scenarios themselves vary. Without getting too far into spoiler territory, the first two felt too much alike: go to a farm and discover a mystery, then halfway resolve it by trying to be heroes. (That first scenario nearly led to a TPK - some of the demonically-affected creatures can present a significant combat challenge!) The third scenario felt even more disconnected from the overall storyline. However, I really liked running the fourth and fifth, and the reactions of the players (especially to scenario four) indicated that they really felt immersed: creepy stuff was happening and they had to work to figure out how to resolve things. 

Grabbing it and making it your own will allow you to deal with that rough setup, which is mostly just a problem in the way the AL set up this particular content. Therefore, I wouldn't recommend running this as an adventure. Think of these instead as five encounters (or maybe just the last two) that you can drop into your campaign to foreshadow some great evil stalking the world or just to set the tone with demons and undead and cultists.