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 10 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 DDAL09-09.
What I liked:
The idea of the adventure is interesting, the retrieval of a Silver Dragon ally from a devil in a swamp filled crater is a neat adventure! Descending into the swamp is an interesting series of encounters.
What I didn't like:
The execution isn't great. A random encounter table that doesn't do much, the two add on quests aren't interesting, and the actual problem to solve (Is the devil cheating) is both too easy and not interesting. I ended up changing a lot here.I made the swamp a small hexcrawl with 9 encounters to explore to get to the cave. I also changed the nature of the Dragonchess match, the devil in my adventure was the one that was legitimately winning. And toying with the Silver Dragon in hopes of corrupting them, the goal being to make the silver dragon cheat out of desparation and forfeight his soul. The party was then able to solve that issue by talking to the dragon and convincing them of the trap, breaking the contract, or playing in their place. This helped clear things up a lot.
Overall, this is not a great adventure to just run as is!
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