I am in the process of running all of DDAL09 as a campaign, so will be reviewing each adventure as I run them. For context, I have run 7 adventures in this campaign already, a homebrew one where the party needs to get out of Elturel with as many civilians as possible as the city is being sucked into hell, and then Baldur's Gate: Fall of Elturel, also on DM's Guild for a different group of adventurers, finally I have run DDAL09-01 through DDAL09-05.

What I liked: This is a solid dungeon crawl, with a layered dungeon location to explore in The Dump. There is plenty to explore, fight, and negotiate with. There are some optional objectives that the players can decide to pursue or not to pursue as well as different approaches of attacking the base and infernal or abyssal monsters to collaborate or engage in conflict with. I really liked the ability for the party to get partial maps of the dump ahead of time and the secret areas not included in those maps that could still be found. It was a really great 10 hours of adventure split amongst 3 sessions. So I would also say this adventure is over-full, plenty to do!

What I didn't like:

The initial goal is unclear. I kept the general idea (pull resources away from Plagueshield Point) but there doesn't seem to be a good mechanism for destroying the forte, the bombs you're supposed to plant aren't defined, nor is there a way to succeed or fail at placing them in a particular location. Also, there is often discussion in the module about not being seen, but I feel as though the consequences for not taking a stealthy approach are not clear (other than more combat).

But still a solid structure and with the use of an adversary roster to run the dungeon it's a lot of fun!

Bad editing, bad maps, confusing flow, confusing story hook. Just nothing is really well done about this. Really just need to be proofread and updated to actually make sense. Is it fun? sure, it is D&D right, the fun is in the group and DM.

That said, this episode sure does not make it easy. Worst AL episode I have had to run yet

I really like this mod. I personally found the exploration elements of this trilogy to be really intense, and has fostered my love for exploration mods in general. This is one of my signature T2 mods that I would happily run in a heartbeat!

Intelligence gathering and sabotage. Another great module to test those charisma-base skills and stealth.

My players had fun but some problems exist. The bad maps really hurt this module. Redo the maps into black and white. B1 to B5 hints or out right says the cliff over hangs the dump and the river but B6 reads like there is a trail down to the dump. Correct B6 or correct the map to show this. C4-6 on page 13 again mentions Mugmerch having a way down. When did spies arrive at the Emporium? Add in a very weak encounter where the group meet the spies. No one is accepting the soul coin contract for information. I offered a different contract. This is Story Award in which if the pcs fail to recover the guard drakes, war machine, or the devil; the group has disadvantage on all social check inside the Emporium. I shift things around and downgraded the bonus objectives to get them in the store’s closing time limit. For P.R.A.T. place the plans in C10. Place the guardian in C19 and remove everything else. For the capture the devil I just remove the extra guard drakes. I did do two dm ruling. If the group hires the mercenaries it cost 200 gp to outfit them. I had the group lose 40 GP off their level gain at the end the session. The math was easier. I had a player buy the displacer beast. He has as pet companion which sticks close to him. During combat on a 1 on a d10 it explodes in flames for a d6 every one within five feet roll a dex save for half damage. Insert standard rant of having to create my own box text.

I did have the opportunity to play this adventure and had a good time ...but, I did not forget the noticeable frustration that my DM had when he was running it. Nonetheless, he provided us an enjoyable experience. Now, as I prep this adventure to insert into my weekly Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus game, I noticed some aspects of this product that I thought important to share.

There doesn’t appear to be clear consequence for getting caught sneaking out to carry out the mission of this adventure, although stealth and discretion is implied. If it was noted that players were not to leave the emporium, I could see potential concern, but nowhere in the Call to Action, nor within the adventure is this addressed; however, players are given a way to ensure that they can sneak in-and-out without issue in Part One, but again, to what end? It appears that they can go, come back and everything will be good to go.

I liked the Social Pillar of Play opportunities throughout Part One, but I can tell that 90 minutes of it might be a bit excessive for some. Within that timeframe there is nothing that I can see impeding the players from gaining information needed to complete their objective, and the segues to Bonus Objectives can be omitted simply by removing NPCS or just not have certain dialogues come up. Infernal Contracts are present, which can result in players risking their souls to get crucial information. Rich NPC environment .. including Fai Chen’s Donkey. Part One's timing appears sufficient to achieve this part's objective and move to Part Two.

Part Two is enjoyable for Combat and Exploration Pillar-focused players. Getting there can prove to be fun with a random encounter table and environmental effect that is appropriate. Getting in-and-out of the location here seems manageable enough, but if players have the weight of Infernal Contracts on them, it could keep players here longer! Make sure that you consider this when you are presenting this part .. that your players at least have some time to engage their contractual obligations. The adventure's Wrap Up provides some cinematic-esque options for those that may need some help closing the adventure.

It may be a matter of production timelines that caused the noticeable background/transitional incongruency with this module, it's predecessor and the Baldur’s Gate: Descent Into Avernus book (booth names, Avernus environmental dangers, contract limitations, Infernal War Machine types, etc.). However, these were minor and could be overcome with reading and adjustments. I’m an experienced DM, a theatre-of-the-mind DM primarily, so the area descriptions were sufficient for me. I can see newer DMs being challenged by knowledge gaps, limited familiarity with the story arc and maps provided. This is not my favorite module of the Avernus Rising Series, but it’s got all the Pillars of Play, and can be presented to player enjoyment. If you have enjoyed the other mods, add this one to your collection.

DM’d this in 3.5 hours at a weekly public event. We…kind of/sort of…completed both bonus objectives. It was crazy fun, but it is also the worst edited adventure I ever read, which, surprisingly is the least of its problems.
--Incomplete maps with colors that made them unreadable when printed black & white. I screengrabbed to PowerPoint and adjusted the brightness all the way up and the contrast all the way down. Also added more info and box text--contact me (nado.hopsong@gmail.com) if you want to see if it would work for you.
--Maps are not in order bottom to top. Rooms are not numbered in logical order either.
--There are war machines with no way to go anywhere but into the River Styx. I added a road to the South, which seems especially important if the party steals a car to get away.
--Read up on the Barghest in Volos in order to understand the motivation of this key NPC.
--The secret tunnel in room C15c is tied to Bonus Objective B. It’s easy to miss. I moved this entrance to C19.
--There is an overwhelming array of story lines in this module: The platoon of friendly NPCs, the merchant with a secret, the demon attack, the original owner of the chateau, the mad scientist, the refugee with a secret, the traitor seeking redemption, and the BBEG showing up at the worst time. It took hours of preparation. Here is how I did it:

1. I did the Wandering Emporium quickly by laying out the plan then giving each player a write-up for who they talked to. This allowed players to decide how they will tell their part of the story. I made Biergroach’s chest a story item from the last adventure; the puzzle worked well.
2. When scouting, I proposed 3 options: Climb down the cliff south of the Dump and entering at the Garage; climb down the cliff to the dome on top of the Dump, although they see some demons already doing that; or run to catch the wagon going down the road to the middle-level of the Dump. I said other options were possible. My party did the first.
3. I planned for an RP encounter for each entrance: Mugmerch, Chalice Void in the dome, or delivering a message to Nuldrath whose office I placed just off the garage. (I combined the storylines of the two Abashai into one story: The message was the broken shell from the brother he ate just after hatching and, since that is such a dragon-like thing to do, he understood that Tiamat was telling him that he was forgiven so he broke down and cried.)
4. Since the rooms are not populated, I picked encounters from the Random Patrol Table to man the rooms, including: Bored goblin guards, a succubus mechanic, and an incubus engineer.
5. I planned for mostly role playing with 1 fight in the middle (Swamphair) and the boss fight at the end.

I think DDALs should have better production standards than CCCs, and this adventure falls short. That said, this was fun and felt refreshingly different than other 5E modules, so be forewarned but not afraid to try it.

This module is a nightmare to prep. Extremely poorly organized. Information about NPCs is split between the scene they appear in and the Dramais Personae, which is "conveniently" placed at a random page somewhere in the middle of the adventure so that it is as difficult to reference as possible. There is very little guidance on how to run each scene, with key information frequently missing, leaving you to essentially write half the adventure yourself. And possibly worst of all, the adventure isn't even presented in chronological order—it goes Part 1, then Part 3, then all the NPC statistics, then Part 2, then Part 4. I hope you brought post-it flags, or you'll waste a quarter of the session flipping through the pages to find things. Working from a digital copy? The PDF does not include any bookmarks, so same thing, but with scrolling.

Don't get me started on the box text. Not only is there hardly any box text at all (leaving you to make up your own descriptions on the fly based on [checks notes] no information, because the body text only tells you the lighting and the weather), but the few instances of box text there are are almost all in the wrong place! In the introductory section, the NPC's opening monologue appears on the second page of the encounter. Then on the next page, you get a lovely description of the PCs walking into the camp, which they never left in the first place. There's a box text describing the Dump, but it's under the wrong header—it's placed as if the Dump is another stall in the Emporium. Then there's another box text four pages later describing the same location. And then in the wrap-up, there's multiple different endings, and it's not clear which one(s) the box text is supposed to go with.

That's on top of a mess of typos, continuity errors (off the top of my head: Mahadi suddenly refuses to let customers leave his store without permission even though this is never an issue any other time; every member of the Terror Troop inexplicably changes their name between Part 1 and the Dramatis Personae; and Z'Neth has a drastic, unexplained personality change compared to the hardcover), and other editing mistakes.

I'm not impressed with the gameplay either. The whole first part is all about wheeling and dealing with NPCs, except there's no real stakes because all of them are basically already on your side and require no convincing in order to help you as long as you agree to do a fetch quest for them. It's like 90 minutes of shopping and exposition. Meanwhile, the Dump itself is a pretty standard location-based adventure, except it's just kind of generally half-assed, with only barebones descriptions, confusing layouts, contradictory information (like is Mugmerch using a secret entrance to get in like it says on page 15, or is he driving his cart off the side of the cliff like it says on page 10?), and a lot of events that are supposed to happen during the infiltration but don't have any indication of how they play out if the PCs don't interfere with them. Not to mention the confusing maps. Why is there an extra garage upstairs? There's no ramp...do they just drive the war machines through a second-story window any time they need to leave the Dump? Why is there a dock at B1 that's as big as the entire mansion but is never mentioned in the body text? The whole thing is a big mess.

Anyway, bottom line, "Infernal Insurgency" reads like it was pushed out to publication before they finished writing it. There are some good ideas here, but they're either poorly executed or not executed at all. I give it a thumbs down.

Awesome and well-made adventure! A great addition to a Descent Into Avernus campaign.