While this adventure has some nicely thematic encounters (more as bonus material) and you do learn a bit about the ubiquitous Adventurer’s League magic item merchant Fai Chen, the structural flaws imposed by DDAL Season 9 formatting and some other matters make me unable to recommend this adventure enthusiastically.
I was excited to finally get to read and dm this adventure as I’d been running the Baldur’s Gate portions of the season 9 content, and this is the first adventure where you get to go to Hell. Right away you have an exciting chase with some war machines (and later chances to defeat the war machine gang outright and get revenge, if you have time for the bonus material). But there are problems. One is that the chase is supposed to fit in one hour of time but it will almost certainly take about 2 hours unless you rush and cut corners. Secondly is the war machines are given no statistics (from the hardcover or otherwise) which is good because the statted war machines from the hardcover are probably too powerful, but bad because the players will definitely want to attack the war machines themselves but it will require improvisation for any game effect that would have. Thirdly there isn’t really a way to outrun the war machines at all. They WILL catch the party by round 2 under typical circumstances. That’s ok, but I was surprised it was such an uneven chase situation.
The investigation part of the adventure introduces you to a location in the Avernus hardcover that is interesting and thematic, but it's of note that there are some alterations made to some of the specified individuals encountered there, and that some of the individuals only make sense if you know what is true of them from the hardcover: for one the location has a rule against spellcasting, but one of the NPCs can cast spells on behalf of PCs. It's only later I’ve realized that this is not an exception to the rule of the location, but that NPC has a particular reason they are allowed to get away with this. But if you are explaining to players why there is a rule against something and you can’t explain why the rules are violated by NPCs, it takes you out of the adventure.
The investigation is ok IF you use the bonus material. Otherwise it seems to come down to a simple Insight check and is more difficult to see how its resolvable without success on the check.
The Adventurer League formatting is a problem. I thought I was getting used to the Dramatis Personae containing background information about the NPCs and while flipping back and forth was annoying I can see some advantages to this method of presentation. But only after actually running this adventure twice I noticed that some information about how to present one of the encounters is actually only in the Dramatis Personae and i missed it twice because of the formatting even though I thought I was being thorough. This is frustrating when GMing.
There is a stash of soul coins mentioned in the adventure, but it doesn’t seem to actually be recoverable and is not specified as to quantity. I actually think this SHOULD be a place where players can all received a Soul Coin each if they wish, because having a good quantity of soul coins is useful for many other encounters in the location and in subsequent adventures in season 9.
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