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Fiendish Transactions
Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild
by Michael Z. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 10/12/2019 00:05:31

I playtested the encounters of this supplement, so I will relay my experiences with it as a player.

Fiendish Transactions is a supplement containing seven short encounters whose individual durations range from 30 to 90 minutes. They are not intended to be run all at once; they work best when interspersed with a Descent into Avernus campaign, but they also work well with other campaigns that involve the lower planes. The encounters come in the form of either puzzles or moral dilemmas, and they provide opportunities for the adventurers to earn soul coins. It’s best if the adventurers have reason to collect soul coins, but the rewards can be replaced with regular currency or plot MacGuffins if that works better for your campaign.

The encounters I playtested are as follows (full spoilers ahead):

Heart of a War Machine: This short encounter introduces Sandra, a young girl whose heart was replaced with a war machine such that she needs soul coins to live. She has a few soul coins, so the adventurers can steal her means of survival or help her in some way. She has the ability to find more soul coins, so she can act as a quest giver if the adventurers befriend her.

Stolen Contract: The party meets a bone devil who offers to pay them to open an infernal puzzle box. The box requires a combination that can be found by solving a number puzzle. The puzzle itself can be quite difficult unless the party make some requisite leaps of logic, so be ready for the devil to provide some hints as needed. Like all the other puzzle encounters, the encounter has a “Fiendish Difficulty” option for a more difficult puzzle. The normal puzzle is hard enough, so I recommend not choosing that option.

Chained Negotiations: The party encounters a chain devil holding two civilians hostage. This encounter provides a difficult moral choice as the characters have to choose between the two hostages, or they can try difficult heroics to save them. I recommend having the devil mention the identities of the two hostages to make the moral choice more interesting.

A Fiendish Shell Game: This is a comedic encounter featuring a few imps running a shell game for soul coins. The adventurers can bet soul coins in this (potentially rigged) game. It’s a very fun encounter, especially if you run it in real life and play a real shell game or three-card monte.

Wingmen for a Succubus: A succubus wants the adventurers to help her seduce a target in exchange for soul coins. Her ulterior motive is to trick the target and his wife to break their prior contract and lose their souls. Morally upright parties might not be interested in helping the succubus, so either make the succubus offer something the adventurers really want, or give them the opportunity to find out the succubus’s plans and foil them. Overall, it’s a fun situation that requires some effort to get the adventurers involved.

An Erinyes’s Judgment: I didn’t get a chance to play this one.

Goristro’s Escape Room: This is a really excellent puzzle encounter that works like an escape room. The adventurers teleport into a locked room with four different mini-puzzles which combine satisfyingly into the final answer when put on a pegboard. The players might need some initial hints if they have trouble getting started or are not used to escape room puzzles, but once they get going, the pieces just flow into place. This encounter is the best one and is absolutely worth whatever contrivances you need to pull to justify the scenario.

In all, this product provides a lot of fun encounters which can improve any foray into the lower planes. The moral dilemmas play well with the themes of Descent into Avernus, and the puzzles provide a nice break from combat-heavy sessions.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Fiendish Transactions
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CCC-BMG-MOON2-2 Army of the Unseen
Publisher: Dungeon Masters Guild
by Michael Z. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/15/2019 17:43:26

This is the best horror adventure I've seen in AL, with a better handle on atmospheric horror than all of the season 4 Ravenloft DDAL adventures. It's a four-hour adventure, but it's easy to finish within three and a half hours, or even sooner depending on where the adventurers go and how much time you want to spend in exploration and descriptions. It's part of a trilogy, but it can easily be run standalone.

The story of Army of the Unseen is built upon a specific monster from Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, and the adventure uses that monster's lore and mechanics to its fullest. The adventurers arrive at the town of Dynnegal and explore the area, slowly realizing that something's gone horribly wrong in town and that there are unseen horrors all around them. Eventually, the party must defeat the horrors that they can't even see and try to find a way to stop the curse before it spreads. The adventure features two major NPCs with a lot of personality and depth, as well as a ton of well-crafted letters and handouts which reveal the story of the town in a deliberate and natural manner and which really reward attention to detail from the players. I would strongly recommend having a player read most of these handouts aloud when they receive them, since they really add to the atmosphere.

In terms of mechanics, the module includes several battles which don't feature a ton of monster variety, but are still tactically interesting due to the unseen monsters and the method of revealing them. Battles with those monsters around town are best handled with theater of the mind to keep things simple and add to the creepy atmosphere, but the set piece encounter in the library is best run with a map since the adventurers can move things around and position their assets ahead of time, so a battlemap can really reward them for planning ahead. The first and last battles can be run either way, though climactic fights are always best handled with a map. The adventure features two battlemaps for the library and the final battle, as well as two gorgeous maps for the town and the nearby farmstead.

Besides combat, the adventure also has a simple puzzle that the adventurers need to collect and assemble to proceed. The puzzle is very easy for players who are familiar with D&D spellcasting, and even if they can't figure it out, it's not hard to just try all the combinations, so it's not going to be a bottleneck on the adventure. Mostly, the puzzle pieces help flesh out a major NPC's personality, and provide a good reason for the party to explore around town.

The editing is of high quality overall. The adventure is laid out and structured in a natural manner which provides the DM with all the information they need by the point that they need it. I didn't notice any obvious spelling and grammatical errors, and the adventure has solid internal consistency. My only complaints are that the background info has a stilted, passive style which makes it a bit harder to understand than if the sentences had clearer subjects and more active voice, and the box texts are overall quite helpful, but can be a bit too long and flowery at times. There's also one point of confusion regarding consistency: the bell tower atop the library is supposed to ring at dusk, but there are no monsters or anything else of interest on the upper floors of the library, so my table wasn't sure who was pulling the bell. I handwaved it by saying it was a magical bell, but it would be nice if the adventure provided an explanation. The NPC and Location summary is also laughably brief, so I would have liked to see the entries fleshed out there, or to have the page removed entirely (since the exact same info is in the adventure primer).

Overall, Army of the Unseen is an excellently-crafted atmospheric horror adventure which is a great showcase for how the lore of a monster can inspire an entire adventure around it. This is truly one of the best AL adventures I've ever seen, and I can't recommend it highly enough.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
CCC-BMG-MOON2-2 Army of the Unseen
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DDAL08-14 Rescue from Vanrakdoom
Publisher: D&D Adventurers League
by Michael Z. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 03/14/2019 14:28:27

This adventure is not good. It is a straightforward adventure with very few interesting elements, and the challenges it presents are entirely inappropriate for the tier it is written for.

The primary and most egregious problem with the adventure is that the combat encounters are handled very poorly. The challenge level is not even remotely appropriate for tier 3; combats range from moderately difficult tier 1 fare (six shadows), to moderately difficult tier 2 fare (vampire and giant centipedes). Worse yet, there is nothing interesting about any of the combat encounters. They all consist of one or two Monster Manual creatures, with no major terrain elements or special features to spice up the combats. Even if they weren't laughably easy, the combats are unoriginal and unmemorable. Even the boss fight is just the aforementioned nameless vampire(s) plus centipedes, which is nearly identical to the vampire boss fights in 8-13 and 8-15 (both of which handle it slightly better). There aren't even adjustment suggestions for the boss encounter!

The only redeeming elements of the adventure are the puzzles, which are interesting, if problematic in their own ways. There are two puzzles in the adventure, both of which have decent graphics accompanying them. The first puzzle is in Episode 1, and starts off well, but the leap in logic between the letter and how to use it is not handled well. The key to the puzzle relies upon facts that can only be discerned with an ability check, which theoretically means the adventure is just over if the characters fail the check (something that adventure designers should always avoid). The puzzle also hides room descriptions in an appendix and has difficult leaps in logic that really need additional clues to solve, clues which are not present in the adventure itself. The second puzzle is in an optional obective, and it has a very interesting setup, but again, it really needs additional clues from the DM to be solvable for most parties. There are leaps in logic which are difficult without additional clues. The graphic that comes with this puzzle is very cool, even if it's hard to read and mostly unnecessary.

The story is pretty generic and doesn't feature any interesting twists or turns. Party needs to go into Undermountain to save captives from an evil ritual. They do some dungeon crawling, they save the captives, and they leave. The adventure mentions villains from 8-13 and 8-15, but no such interesting characters show up here. There is a single unique element of the dungeon in Shar's Perpetual Darkness (HP max goes down by 1 each hour), which is a novel way to discourage resting, but it's a very minor penalty for tier 3 characters, and it begs the question of why the 4 HP commoners haven't died yet. In addition, the adventure doesn't mention how to cure the max HP drain. If Greater Restoration is the only way to cure it, that's a very mean thing to do to every character playing this adventure in an AL season where gold is so limited. The bonus objectives tie into each other in a unique way, and hint at a deeper story, but that story isn't presented in a straightforward manner and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Apparently, Ganloch the dwarf falsely accused Ambergris of a crime, stole her ring, and banished her from the clan. Then, she found him, locked him in a chamber, and used (allowed?) shadows to kill him. If she was able to overpower him like that, why didn't she just take her ring back then? For that matter, how does Ganloch know where she's living in the Shadowfell? The adventure explicitly says that "Very few know her whereabouts... only people with whom she has the utmost trust," which Ganloch clearly doesn't number among. In short, the main adventure story is thin and uninteresting, and the bonus story is deeper but doesn't actually make much sense.

Finally, we have the editing. Adventurers League has never had very good editing in its main adventures, so it's hardly worth even complaining about at this point, but suffice it to say this adventure's editing is very bad. The map is unlabeled so it takes a while to figure out where any of the rooms are (for the record, the portal is in the top left room). There are numerous points where information is just missing (you can convince vampire spawns to tell you about Seabordt's plans, but the adventure doesn't mention what those plans are; the adventure says some pendants may prove useful in later encounters, but they never come up again). The adventure seems to take for granted that the DM has read Dungeon of the Mad Mage, since it mentions a relationship between Keresta Delvinstone and Seabordt which doesn't make sense without knowledge of who Keresta is in the hardcover. It also mentions in the conclusion that the adventurers can use the shadow dragon's Dimension Door Breath to go back to Skullport, without ever mentioning what that breath is, how it works, or why the adventures might know that it can be used this way. The organization of the appendixes is a complete mess. You have DM puzzle solution appendixes far from the puzzles themselves, and interspersed among the bonus objectives. I can imagine reasons for why it's organized this way, but it certainly doesn't make things easier for the DM.

Overall, this adventure is bad, and not worth running or playing. The Season 8 Tier 3 trilogy is mediocre as a whole, but even if you want to run them, you can safely skip 8-14 without missing almost any of the story.



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
DDAL08-14 Rescue from Vanrakdoom
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