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The next two adventures  — Fang and Claw and Where Devils Fear to Tread – form the Red Hunt series and the conclusion of Season 9 of the Adventurers League.

FANG AND CLAW (DDAL 09-19): The Red Hunt duology is about the PCs hunting down Commander Rotger’s corpse. Or possibly his soul? (The authors seem collectively a little confused about this.) In any case, this is essential, because the Bloody Hooves have absolutely no chain of command, so without Commander Rotger they are completely incapable of doing anything. (No wonder the Hellriders got utterly wrecked on the battlefield.)

The usual litany of senseless continuity errors aside, Fang and Claw gets off to a good start. The PCs are ambushed while receiving their mission briefing, and the encounter is given a unique flair because the bad guys can make the PCs’ allies’ heads explode. Will Doyle provides a random table of Exploding Head Effects (splatters of brain, shrapnel shards of skull, and so forth) to provide a memorable, cool, and totally gross experience.

Doyle continues to deliver the awesome when the interrupted mission briefing resumes and the PCs are told they need to stage a raid on a mobile, quadrupedal colossus built from the corpses of devils and demons slain during the Blood War and piloted by followers of Yeenoghu (who have intercepted the Commander’s corpse).

The interior of the colossus is a three-dimensional dungeon (which, blessedly, has a properly keyed map), studded with memorable locations chock full of devilish flavor as the PCs worm their way into the heart of the machine.

• Grade: B+

WHERE DEVILS FEAR TO TREAD (DDAL 09-20): Fang and Claw ends with the PCs staring into a portal into the Abyss, through which Commander Rotger has been hurled. Leaping through it themselves, they arrive in the Death Dells, where Yeenoghu is now hunting Commander Rotger for sport.

(Commander Rotger, however, is a floating ball of light that is completely defenseless, so I’m a little unclear on what “sport” is to be had here.)

The structure in Where Devils Fear to Tread for hunting down Commander Rotger is rather well done:

• There are multiple methods of potentially tracking Rotger, some being generally applicable and others being specific to the individual scenes along the way (which are triggered as random encounters).
• If the PCs are following a good path, they get an Advancing encounter.
• If they are not following a good path, they get a Delaying encounter.
• The situation they encounter at the end of the trail depends on how many Advancing or Delaying encounters were done, dynamically responding to the PCs’ success (or failure).

The confrontation with Yeenoghu is weighty with purpose: With the Commander as unwitting bait, Yeenoghu has been lured into a confrontation on his home plane. If he’s destroyed here, the multiverse will shift. (It’s even possible for one of the PCs to end up as a new Demon Prince.)

The PCs then return to Avernus and discover that a huge battle has broken out around the colossus and its Abyssal portal. Using all of the allies and resources they’ve gained over the course of Season 9, they now have the power to turn the course of the Blood War.

This all adds up to a fairly satisfying finale, but there are two major Chekhov’s Guns left curiously unfired and a squandered opportunity:

• In the last adventure, the PCs have the opportunity to learn how to control the quadrupedal colossus. As they stand on top of the colossus’ head and gaze out at the raging battle between demon and devil, it curiously never occurs to anyone that the PCs might just take control of the giant demon mecha.
• I don’t understand why Season 9 framed itself as, “Save the Hellriders, save Elturel,” knowing that it was absolutely, positively not going to deliver on the “save Elturel” part of that equation (since that was reserved for the Descent Into Avernus campaign). As a result this final adventure just kind of goes… “Gee, I really don’t know why you did all of this.” Even Dara, who has ostensibly been on a holy mission this whole time, literally just shrugs her shoulders.
• Where Devils Fear to Tread also struggles to explain WHY this battle is of such crucial importance in the balance of the Blood War. But the answer is right there just waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it: Zariel has disappeared, leaving Avernus’ forces disorganized and vulnerable to the sudden demonic assault.

Regardless, despite the overall disjointed and discordant mess which is the totality of Season 9, both halves of this final adventure do an admirable job of delivering a satisfying and momentous conclusion.

• Grade: B-

REMIXING SEASON 9

As I just mentioned, Season 9 is inconsistent at the best of times. Large chunks of it are, sadly, utterly useless. So what are we to make of it? What can be salvaged from it?

I think the first step is to cut away the cancerous material and assess what’s left.

The first chunk of the season consists of the PCs leading a refugee caravan into Baldur’s Gate and then getting tangled up in a second-rate carbon copy of the Zarielite murder investigation from Descent Into Avernus. The refugee caravan scenario is passable, but the rest of this is (a) poorly conceived and (b) poorly executed. So my first suggestion is to cut it:

• Escape From Elturgard (DDAL 09-01): The PCs help defend a refugee caravan from the ruins of Elturel to Baldur’s Gate. Twist this up so that the murder victim is a Hellrider, establishing that the Hellriders are being targeted At the end of the adventure, Dara, the leader of the caravan, reveals that she is actually the Chosen of Ilmater and has been approached by two celestials with a holy mission. She was impressed by the PCs’ deeds of heroism and asks them to accompany her.

At the beginning of the next scenario (picking up from that exact same moment), Fai Chen appears, kneels before Dara, and says, “Milady, I have awaited your coming and am in your service. What would you have me do?”

And then Dara says, “We must journey to Avernus to save the souls of those Hellriders wrongfully imprisoned there. Can you take us to a place of safety within the burning fires of Hell?”

And Fai Chen smiles and says, “I know just the place.”

This sets us up at Mahadi’s Wandering Emporium. You’ll want to cull the disparate references to the caravan and its denizens from across Descent Into Avernus and the Season 9 adventures to give yourself an authoritative reference. It might also be useful to:

• Use a long-term party-planning or Tavern Time™ structure to bring the Emporium to life.
• Develop a more coherent motivation for Mahadi’s interest in Dara, preferably with some sort of conclusion or, at least, intended endgame.

Now ensconced at the Emporium and running missions for Dara, let’s simply pull out the adventures that are worth keeping:

• Faces of Fortune (DDAL 09-05): PCs arrive at Mahadi’s Emporium.
• Infernal Insurgency (DDAL 09-06): PCs raid a munitions dump.
• The Diabolical Dive (DDAL 09-07): PCs raid Plagueshield Point and get the Bloody Hooves’ battleplan.
• Ruined Prospects (DDAL 09-09): PCs raid Weatherstone Keep to save a Hellrider.
• The Breath of Life (DDAL 09-12): PCs perform a heist at a devil’s party to steal an angel’s skull.
• The Swarmed Heist (DDAL 09-13): PCs invade a hellwasp nest to save another dead angel.

But now we run into a problem, because hypothetically all of this has been leading up to rescuing the Bloody Hooves, but those adventures are garbage.

What we can do is reach over to our copy of Descent Into Avernus and grab Haruman’s Hill and the Crypt of the Hellriders. To do this, we just swap a couple McGuffins:

• In The Diabolical Dive, instead of retrieving nonsensical “battleplans,” what the PCs instead recover is information indicating that the souls of Hellriders taken during the Fall of Elturel and the subsequent murders in the refugee caravans and Baldur’s Gate are being taken to Haruman’s Hill.
• In Ruined Prospects, the Hellrider in suspended animation is one who fled with Jander Sunstar during the Charge of the Hellriders, but later returned with an expedition who attempted to rescue their former companions. They discovered that those who remained loyal to Zariel until the end had their souls bound to the Crypt of the Hellriders and they attempted to rescue them, but ultimately failed.

Okay, so now the PCs know that the Hellrider souls they’ve come to save are at Haruman’s Hill and the Crypt of the Hellriders. What about the angels? Well, Dara needs those powerful allies to form a triad that can perform the ritual at both locations which will free the Hellriders.

(Throughout this section you could also have Dara uttering cryptic prophecies alluding to the ongoing events of Descent Into Avernus. For example: “The Tome of the Creed has been destroyed, clearing the path of salvation for these false-damned souls.”)

With all the pieces in place, the PCs mount raids on both the Hill and Crypt. The Hellriders are freed.

Honestly, this is probably a pretty solid campaign and you could easily have a big, satisfying conclusion right here.

But the last two scenarios in Season 9 are quite good. Is there some way we could incorporate them?

• Fang and Claw (DDAL 09-19): The PCs infiltrate a demonic mecha to save the Commander of the Bloody Hooves.
• Where Devils Fear to Tread (DDAL 09-20): The PCs pursue the Commander’s soul to the Abyss and then return, only to find themselves in the middle of a giant battle that will determine the future course of the Blood War.

Here’s my suggestion: While the PCs are mounting their raids on Haruman’s Hill and the Crypt of the Hellriders, a demonic strike team raids Mahadi’s Emporium and kidnaps Dara! Dara takes the role of the kidnapped Commander and the PCs have to go rescue her.

A few things:

• Structure the mecha raid so that the spectral Hellriders the PCs just freed can help. For example, the Hellriders can engage the demonic outriders defending the mecha while the PCs sneak onboard.
• Information onboard the mecha reveals why Dara was kidnapped: Demonic divinations have revealed that recent events in Avernus may soon leave the Stygian defenses vulnerable. To bolster their forces, the local demonic commanders have kidnapped Dara in order to offer her as a hunting sport to Yeenoghu in exchange for troops. Lots and lots of troops. (You might leave this mysterious for the moment and then later reveal that the “recent events” are the death and/or redemption of Zariel; or you might just spill the beans here.)
• When the PCs get back with Dara and look out over the battlefield, have Dara say something like, “I thought our purpose was to save Elturel. But I see now that task belonged to others. We stand here upon the brink, and I see with divine clarity that we have gathered the strength to turn the demonic tide. If we are brave enough to use it.”

Finding opportunities to lace this concept – that without the eternal vigil of Hell’s fiends, the multiverse would be overrun by demonic hordes – into the rest of the adventure (Zarielite cultists prattling Asmodean ideology; devils discussing Blood War logistics at the party; additional strategy documents found at the munitions dump or Plagueshield Point; etc.) will help sell this ending.

And then the PCs lead the Second Charge of the Hellriders while piloting a demonic mecha.

Go to the Avernus Remix

Go to Part 1

The next three adventures – Maddening Screams, Honors Unforeseen, and In the Hand – form the Doors and Corners series.

MADDENING SCREAMS (DDAL 09-15): “Meanwhile, Zariel’s forces have taken note of the repeated interference of the adventurers in her plans.”

I know I’m something of a broken record when it comes to the shoddy cross-continuity of these adventures, but I do invite you to briefly peruse the previous adventures and ask yourself, “What plans, exactly? And when have the PCs done anything to interfere with them?”

In any case, the main thrust of Maddening Screams is that the PCs have recovered the battleplans of the Bloody Hooves, a company of knights who rode with Zariel into Hell. These battleplans said that if the Bloody Hooves were forced to retreat, then they should retreat into a box canyon.

Which, to be blunt, would be literally the LAST place you could possibly want to retreat into.

Also, it turns out the canyon was haunted and all the knights were driven mad.

So the PCs head to the Canyon of Screams to track down the Bloody Hooves. The structure for this, broadly speaking, is mass illusionism: Make a bunch of choices, absolutely none of which matter because “all tunnels eventually lead to the Bloody Hooves.” Sneak past somebody? They find your tracks, catch up, and attack you. Pick a tunnel? Something totally random happens to you. Repeat until the DM arbitrarily declares that you’ve picked the right tunnel this time.

At the end of that arbitrary tunnel the PCs will find an elaborately locked door which (checks notes) opens when literally anyone touches it. Huh. Like putting an automatic door on a bank vault.

Beyond the door, they do the random tunnel thing again, but this time there’s a puzzle they have to solve to find the right path. (The puzzle is… not very good. At each intersection, there are four symbols written on the wall. What these symbols are is not specified, but one of them will match a sentence written on the wall. For example, at the intersection that says, “May your sword strike true,” you have to pick the tunnel labeled with the symbol of a sword.)

Open another automatic vault door and, at long last, you have reached… more random tunnels. Their navigational choices are, once again, completely irrelevant, with the DM instead rolling 2d4 to determine how many tunnels they have to say they’re walking down before reaching the next section of the adventure.

Despite the players passing through locked doors that haven’t been opened in centuries, the devils pursuing them are inexplicably always in the chambers ahead of them. This, of course, makes no sense, but by this point your brain has probably given up on rational thought in self-defense.

The adventure wraps up when the PCs discover that all the Hellriders have inexplicably turned into stone tablets (???) which Dara raises from the… dead? Sure, let’s say dead.

The Hellriders tell the PCs that this is a cliffhanger and the adventure continues in DDAL 09-16.

• Grade: F

HONORS UNFORESEEN (DDAL 09-16): Honors Unforseen opens with the “super security doors that open if literally anyone touches them” gimmick and then the PCs proceed further into the dungeon to save the clerics who had ridden with the Bloody Hooves.

A good portion of the problems these adventures have can be summed up as: Don’t design a dungeoncrawl without a map. The convolutions these authors are going through to design incredibly bad dungeons that de-protagonize the PCs is kind of nuts. (I’m straight up blaming the long-term decay caused by D&D no longer teaching people how to design or run dungeons, but seeing it in official adventures really emphasizes how bad it’s gotten.)

As another example of the disconnect between design and table experience, after passing through the world’s worst vault door, the PCs enter a 100 foot long passage:

A number of tiles are trapped with a symbol. There is no rhyme or reason to the symbols’ placement. For each 5 feet that a creature moves through the area, roll a d20. If the result is 15 or higher, they pass over a symbol, triggering it unless they’re a wood elf or Yalanue herself.

Ho-ho-holy shit! Notice that it’s not per 5 foot square; it’s per creature moving 5 feet. So if you’ve got a group of five PCs, go ahead and roll that d20 one hundred times, generating on average thirty random symbols. What an amazing experience that will be at the table!

This installment of Doors and Corners also emphasizes how absurd the entire premise is: The Bloody Hooves fled from battle, retreated into a box canyon, and then… engaged in major infrastructure projects? They even painted elaborate murals on the walls! We’re told this was all made possible by Horst Atheraice… who later turns out to be a 9^th level spellcaster who definitely can’t have done all this through his magic.

• Grade: F

IN THE HAND (DDAL 09-17): In the previous two adventures the PCs have rescued all the knights of the Bloody Hooves and then all the clerics of the Bloody Hooves. In this adventure, the PCs discover that there’s a third level to this dungeon (behind yet another automatic vault door) in which the Commander of the Bloody Hooves was entombed.

Horst Atheraice will tell the PCs:

The third level of the tombs is the most dangerous of all. The constructors wove trials into the tombs to ensure that only the most loyal and strong Bloody Hooves could reach the commander.

Oh! Great! Y’all built these defensive wards! What are they?

Past that, they can’t recall anything else about the defenses.

Wow! That’s incredibly convenient amnesia!

Well, that’s okay. You said that you built these defenses specifically so that Bloody Hooves could bypass them. So I guess y’all will be heading down there, then?

No? You’re all leaving and sending us instead? By ourselves?

…

Look, I understand that this is an Adventurers League scenario and it carries with it the expectation that the players will accept the Call to Action. But that’s precisely why you shouldn’t design the Call to Action so that it egregiously insults the players’ intelligence.

By the way, there’s also an absolutely stunning mechanic in these adventures: The PCs are frequently escorting Dara. If they fail to protect her and she dies, she instantly resurrects but she randomly loses one of her four divinely gifted powers. If she dies four times and loses all four powers, she also loses the ability to resurrect angels and Hellriders.

If Dara dies during an adventure, the players are given the You Let Dara Die story award which keeps track of how many times they let Dara die.

Now, you might notice that the entire premise of these adventures is that the PCs are taking Dara to the varied corpses of the Hellriders so that she can resurrect them.

Which means it’s quite possible for a player to play this scenario at a convention or gaming club and immediately discover that, due to the other members of the group, the scenario simply can’t be played. (Oddly, none of the adventures give any guidance on how the “Dara raises people from the dead” scenarios should play out if Dara loses the ability to raise people from the dead.)

Anyway, the PCs go down by themselves and discover that, in order to protect their Commander’s corpse, the Hellriders… killed a bunch of their fellow knights and turned them into undead puppets who will perform small interactive morality plays so that would-be tomb robbers can “prove” they have morals.

…

What the actual fuck?

There’s also an absolutely bizarre meta-puzzle which works like this:

• After building an elaborate tomb, killing their fellow knights, and then turning them into undead to staff it, the Bloody Hooves installed text mosaics in every room providing the answer to the puzzle and/or interactive morality play in that room.
• However, the devils have somehow gotten here ahead of the PCs again, and they’ve been smashing the mosaics in each room after using them to solve the puzzles.
• So in the first room the PCs find the smashed remnants of the mosaic and what they do is:

Next to the door is a mosaic that has been shattered, with letter tiles littering the floor. Characters who collect the letter tiles can use them to puzzle out the challenges when they enter the Tomb of Trials.

It’s possible your brain broke while reading that, so let me just reiterate: The PCs take the unassigned letters from one random word scramble and then they use those to solve completely unrelated word scrambles.

I don’t even know if this puzzle can actually be solved, because they forgot to include the solution for it.

To be brutally honest, I gave up on In the Hand before finishing it. I skimmed ahead to determine that the adventure ends with the devils kidnapping Commander Rotger’s corpse.

• Grade: F

CONSEQUENCES OF CHOICE (DDAL 09-18): Although not technically part of the Doors and Corners series, Consequences of Choice follows immediately on from the events of In the Hand. Rather than following the tunnel the devils dug to grab Commander Rotger’s corpse, Dara decides that the best place to find a lead to the corpse’s location is back at Mahadi’s Wandering Emporium.

Unfortunately, the Wandering Emporium has wandered off, so the PCs have to first track it down. To do this they have to make a DC 15 Wisdom (Perception) check… and I guess if they fail, they just can’t find the Emporium and the rest of the adventure doesn’t happen?

In any case, along the way the PCs discover that there’s a demon army which has crossed the Styx and is looking to attack the Emporium. Consequences of Choice is about the PCs helping Mahadi mount a defense.

This defense – and thus the adventure – is built entirely around a mechanical mini-game which, as far as I can tell, received zero playtesting and even less critical thinking.

The way it works is that the PCs have 150 minutes to create defenses which earn them Survival Points. If they can get 45 Survival Points all the named characters live; if they get fewer points than that, people start dying during the fight. They can earn points by:

• Spending 150 minutes to build a siege engine = 5 points
• Spending 20 minutes to make a trap/obstacle = 3 points
• Casting a defensive spell = 2 points

You can immediately see the ludicrous lack of balance here. The DM is told to “reward creative thinking,” but this is completely unnecessary because the default group of five characters can just spend all their time making traps and generate 110+ points.

The system also includes adjustments for variant groups, but these are also laughably bad:

• If the group has fewer than 5 characters, the required number of Survival Points is reduced to 40. But, as we’ve seen, each character can trivially generate 21+ points, which is absurdly out of sync with the 5 points adjustment being made to the target. (The adjustment is also applied in reverse – increasing the Survival Points to 50 if there are more than 5 characters.)
• If the group’s APL is lower than 13, the points required are reduced by 3. If the APL is higher than 13, it’s increased by 3. (This is doesn’t make any sense at all because APL has no effect on the Survival Points generated by various activities.)

But that’s not all! The adventure includes two bonus objectives, each of which can generate 6 Survival Points.

But if the DM decides the group is going to do the bonus objectives, they only get 45 minutes (instead of 150 minutes) to make defensive preparations. In a standard five member group, this drops your group output from 110+ points to just 42 points… which means you fail and somebody dies. (In practice you can probably make that up by casting a couple defensive spells, assuming you have them prepared, but the point is that the system is so badly designed that it systemically discourages DMs and players from playing the full adventure.)

I can’t emphasize enough that this entire scenario is fundamentally built around this system, which I would not so much describe as “broken” as “criminally negligent.”

• Grade: F

Go to the Avernus Remix – Go to Part 6: Red Hunt

Go to Part 1

The eighth through eleventh adventures of Avernus Rising are a sequence of stand-alone, Tier 2 side quests with the PCs based out of Mahadi’s Emporium.

IN THE GARDEN OF EVIL (DDAL 09-08): This adventure has an interesting premise – a knight of Zariel’s crusade and her unicorn mount fled the battle and were chased down by devil outriders who forced the unicorn to make an infernal pact in exchange of the life of her knight and companion – but it doesn’t hold together.

In the Garden of Evil takes place in a forest which is supposed to be a primeval remnant of the paradise that Avernus was before the Blood War tore it apart, but this concept doesn’t really go anywhere. The forest is primarily “explored” through a series of random encounters, which are mostly confusing in their execution. The adventure states that the Ride of the Hellriders took place long ago, but nevertheless repeatedly frames encounters as if it happened like three days ago. (For example, with devils still hanging around the corpse of a fleeing Hellrider they pursued and killed.)

Meanwhile, the pact at the center of the story makes no sense: The devil promised to save the knight’s life in exchange for the unicorn submitting to captivity, but it didn’t actually do that. It killed the knight and “hid” the body like three feet away from the unicorn where the unicorn can clearly see it. Nevertheless, the unicorn remains imprisoned as if the pact were still in force until the PCs helpfully show up and tell her that she could leave at any time.

Which she does.

• Grade: D

RUINED PROSPECTS (DDAL 09-09): Is it just me, or is the rigid formatting of Adventurers League scenarios actually pretty awful? You can see this really clearly, I think, when an author just wants to present a simple dungeoncrawl and the format forces them to contort it into a weird linear-ish narrative built around “Story Objectives.” But even scenarios that would ostensibly be suited to the milestone-obsessed AL formatting nevertheless seem to founder on the rocky shores of its bloated, repetitive presentation (which never seems to sequence the information in a coherent fashion).

But I digress.

Ruined Prospects is a pretty straightforward dungeoncrawl in which the PCs are attempting to reach yet another errant survivor of the Charge of the Hellriders who wandered away from the battle and is now held in stasis within Weatherstone Keep. It’s quite literally a 5 Room Dungeon, following the recipe fairly strictly, but to good effect before culminating in an entertaining boss rush.

• Grade: C

TIPPING THE SCALES (DDAL 09-10): The PCs learn that there is an adult silver dragon who has been playing a game of chess against an ice devil for the past 1,000 years in an effort to win back the soul of his lady love. The PCs journey to the deep Avernian pit where the chess game is being played to intervene and rescue both dragon and lady love.

My favorite bit in this adventure is the bearded devil Sadazah, who carries with him a lemure in a bowl. The lemure was a devil who displeased their master and was demoted, but Sadazah hopes that their master “will eventually promote his friend once more. They had plans together.” The adventure has a lot of really nice details like this.

Where the adventure falls down, unfortunately, is the execution of its central premise.

When the PCs show up at the 1,000 year old chess match, they attempt a DC 15 Wisdom (Perception) check. If they succeed, they realize the ice devil is cheating and can use this knowledge to force him into a wager for the souls of the dragon and his lady love. If they fail… I guess the PCs just shrug and go home?

Even the successful result on the check is kind of a head-scratcher, though: Despite the relative ease of a DC 15 check, we are told that the silver dragon – who, it should be noted, has a legendary action that specifically allows them to make Wisdom (Perception) checks – has simply never noticed (in a thousand years?!) that the devil is cheating!

I’ll note that, like In the Garden of Evil, Tipping the Scales involves trekking across a swamp to reach the devil lair. The swamp trek in In the Garden of Evil is significantly superior (in detail and structure), while the finale of this adventure is significantly more interesting (and its weaker bits relatively easy to salvage). You might considering breaking these down for parts and combining them into a single adventure using all the best bits.

• Grade: D

LOSING FAI (DDAL 09-11): “Fai Chen has gone missing from Mahadi’s Traveling Emporium.”

To be honest, my first reaction to that premise is, “Good riddance.”

This is not, however, James Introcaso’s fault. In Losing Fai he’s crafted a decent little mystery in which the PCs are given three leads to pursue, each of which can lead them to Fai Chen’s kidnapper, albeit with varied consequences depending on which leads they choose to pursue and how they pursue them.

These consequences, coupled to the camp politics surrounding Fai Chen’s disappearance, provide a nice amount of texture to the scenario. Everything wraps up with an utterly creeptacular boss fight against Fai Chen’s kidnapper.

• Grade: C+

The next three adventures – The Breath of Life, The Swarmed Heart, and The Vast Emptiness of Grace – form the Call for Aid series.

THE BREATH OF LIFE (DDAL 09-12): In The Breath of Life, Dara informs the PCs that she has been given a divine vision of a dead angel’s skull that is being held by an archdevil and she needs the PCs to get it. Fortunately, the archdevil is holding a party and Mahadi has invitations, so the PCs just need to get themselves invited as Mahadi’s +1s and then perform an improvised heist once they’re inside.

Jared Fegan does a good job here, creating a multi-layered security system around the skull that the PCs can unravel if they pump the party guests for information. The party guests themselves are colorful, entertaining, and well-drawn.

I’m picky about party-based adventures and there are things I would certainly do to enhance this scenario if I were running it at my table. (Notably adding a main event line and some topics of conversation would go a long way. The latter, in particular, is a missed opportunity here, as the conversations could’ve been linked to other Avernus Rising adventures that the PCs might have been part of or will become part of in the next tier.) But what’s here on the page is good, and very ready to be built upon.

• Grade: B-

THE SWARMED HEART (DDAL 09-13): In Bianca Bickford’s The Swarmed Heart, Mahadi’s Emporium is attacked by a swarm of hellwasps and the PCs have to figure out why.

The main event here is invading the hellwasp hive, which is distinguished by being the best-realized dungeon I’ve seen in Season 9 so far. It’s got some light xandering, three-dimensionality, a solid key, and support for multiple approaches.

The only blemish on this adventure is a weird interlude where the PCs have to protect a cleric for multiple rounds of combat while the cleric casts plane shift… a spell with a casting time of 1 action.

This is definitely a highlight of the season, and I’ll most likely be looking to incorporate it in some fashion into the Remix

• Grade: B-

THE VAST EMPTINESS OF GRACE (DDAL 09-14): Over the past couple adventures, the PCs have brought a couple angel corpses back to Dara, who has used her mystic connection to Ilmater to return them to life. Both angels hear the tortured call of a third angel named Yuriall who calls out to them even across planar boundaries!

… so they definitely won’t be joining you in saving Yuriall. And, in fact, the only reason they’re bothering to send you to save Yuriall (who has been imprisoned and getting tortured for decades) is because they’re pretty sure he has an artifact that they need.

Celestials in this series are just the worst.

The thing I find almost overwhelming about this adventure is how broken its continuity is.

At a high level, the premise is that Descent Into Avernus is over and Elturel has been returned to the Material Plane… but the overarching plot of Season 9 nevertheless assumes that Zariel is still in charge of Avernus, which doesn’t seem to be the endorsed ending of Descent. The DM is told that they can choose to keep Elturel in Avernus if they want, but they’ll need to make a bunch of only semi-specified adjustments to the adventure. And then, later, the DM is instructed that they MUST do this (i.e., adapt the entire adventure on the fly) if the PCs are only playing Season 9… which makes sense, because the PCs are literally going to Elturel to retrieve an artifact that will help them get another resource in the next adventure which can help “turn the tide in the struggle to save Elturel.”

The whole thing is dizzying.

At the low level, there’s a constant stream of contradictions. One of my favorites is when a group of bandits is said to attack the PCs because they mistook them for undead, and then in the very next paragraph we’re told that they attacked the PCs so that they could murder them and steal their stuff. It also seems as if the PCs are assumed to know that the place they’re going is infested with vampires, even though, as far as I can tell, they have absolutely no way of knowing that. And so forth.

Other aspects of the adventure are inane. For example, there’s a locked door that requires the PCs to solve a puzzle to open it. The solution to the puzzle? Someone has conveniently nailed it to the door. Later, a system of random encounters is proposed in which the GM should check once each hour… for a dungeon with only six rooms that the PCs are virtually certain to clear out in less than an hour.

The Vast Emptiness of Grace, however, is not without its moments. For example, there’s a very atmospheric encounter with chain devils in a library where all the books are chained to the shelves. And the dungeon that the PCs are seeking (and eventually find) is a decent bit of horror, only somewhat sabotaged by poorly executed boxed text that is constantly telling the players what their characters are going to do.

• Grade: D

Go to the Avernus Remix – Go to Part 5: Doors and Corners

Go to Part 1

The next three adventures – Faces of Fortune, Infernal Insurgency, and The Diabolical Dive – form the Behind Infernal Lines series.

FACES OF FORTUNE – THE STORY OF FAI CHEN (DDAL 09-05): At the end of our last adventure a couple celestials revealed that they had been hiding among Elturian refugees from the very beginning! A mission to Hell is proposed… and apparently the celestials immediately bow out. A conversation which I imagine going something like this:

Celestials: Our work here is done.

PCs: You did nothing.

Celestials And you’re welcome!

PCs: People are dead.

Celestials: Celestials out, bitches!

In any case, the PCs and ten-year-old Dara are heading to Hell to rescue the trapped souls of innocent Hellriders. So they all hop in a cart drawn by a goat and driven by somebody named Fai Chen and somehow they all end up in Hell.

I’m so in the weeds on Fai Chen!

Some research indicates he also showed up in Season 8 of the Adventurers League, but even with this information I’m at a loss: Who is he? What does he want? How did he know to show up in Baldur’s Gate (but then not know anything about Dara or her celestial connections in this adventure)? What power does he possess to bring people to (and from?) Hell?

No idea.

Which seems particularly perverse given the subtitle of this adventure.

This was a frequent malady back in the ‘90s, when RPG supplements were more heavily driven by serialized metaplots which would slowly evolve their worlds over time. Often these metaplots were driven by J.J. Abrams-style mystery boxes and, in order to preserve the sense of enigma, these secrets were even kept from the GM reading the book. Which becomes a problem when the GM lacks the context necessary to understand how they’re supposed to be running the adventure at the table. That’s what happens here: I don’t know what Fai Chen wants, so I don’t know how he’d respond to anything the PCs might do or say. I don’t even know what he is, so if he gets into a fight (with the PCs or anybody else) I don’t even have the tools to resolve it.

But Fai Chen does, in fact, bring everyone to Avernus. At which point, apparently, Dara reveals she has no plan whatsoever. She doesn’t even have a plan to make a plan. So Fai Chen shrugs and says, “Weird. Well, I guess we’re all heading to Mahadi’s Emporium, renting a stall, and joining the flea market!”

Which is what this adventure is all about.

The frankly surreal framing aside, Ted Atkinson carries off the adventure itself adroitly.

The one thing we do discover about Fai Chen is that he’s basically the Han Solo to Mahadi’s Lando Calrissian. As the PCs approach Mahadi’s Emporium they’re attacked by an Avernian warlord gang, and after fighting their way through they discover that this warlord has been regularly harassing travel to and from the Emporium. Mahadi believes that there’s a traitor within the Emporium who’s assisting the warlord and he wants the problem solved.

This “traitor within” plot has a significant similarity to the one found in Hungry Shadows. This creates an interesting thematic resonance (the evils of the Material Plane are echoed in Hell), but the contrast largely just serves to demonstrate how this sort of plot can be handled without making your eyeteeth ache.

Mahadi’s Emporium is detailed and enhanced with a dozen or so colorful and well-rounded inhabitants, there are several side-quests designed to both accent the main quest and draw the PCs further into the social circles of the Emporium, and the whole thing is studded with some flavorful combat encounters.

Faces of Fortune is just solid adventure design, and well worth grabbing for any campaign that will be featuring Mahadi’s Emporium.

• Grade: B

INFERNAL INSURGENCY (DDAL 09-06): Fai Chen can now infinitely duplicate himself and the PCs are suddenly not allowed to leave the Emporium so they need to sneak out. (This will never be mentioned again.)

Would someone please hire a continuity editor for the Adventurers League?

Speaking of poor continuity, the Firesnake Forge from Descent Into Avernus which became Gears of War in DDAL 09-05 is now the Gearbox. Other than that, all the Emporium NPCs and locations which have been previously established are abruptly swapped out for a completely new roster. (The silver lining here is that you can pillage from both scenarios to flesh out your version of the Emporium.)

Weird inter-adventure continuity aside, Infernal Insurgency is a pretty good scenario. The concept is that the PCs need to raid an Avernian munitions dump. Their goal is to wreak enough havoc (i.e., blow stuff up) to pull devils away from a nearby facility (leading into scenario DDAL 09-07). The scenario struggles a bit as it gets awkwardly forced into an inappropriate structure, but a simple adversary roster and just ignoring the scripted elements of the ending will go a long way here.

• Grade: C

THE DIABOLICAL DIVE (DDAL 09-07): Having successfully drawn defenders away from Plagueshield Point in the previous adventure, the PCs are now ready to raid Plagueshield Point and steal the original battleplan used by the Hellriders when they charged into Hell! They then promptly discover that nobody knows where Plagueshield Point is, so they’ll have to start by finding someone who does.

… uhhh. If the people planning this operation don’t know where Plagueshield Point is, how did they know that raiding the munitions dump in the previous adventure would pull defenders away from it?

Seriously. Continuity editor. Look into it.

There’s a number of internal continuity errors and other oddities, too, like a creature without telepathy inexplicably communicating telepathically.

Once again, annoying continuity glitches aside, The Diabolical Dive is a rather nice adventure featuring two modest dungeon crawls. The first, Shadowswimmer Tower, is rather cleverly designed to be handled through either a frontal assault, social maneuvering, or sneaky stealth. It also features some nicely evocative touches of lore which help bring to life its owner’s obsession with studying the arcane properties of the River Styx.

The second location, Plagueshield Point, is starkly memorable in its concept: A drow citadel built around a magical geode which serves as a prison and which has been transported to the bottom of the Styx as part of an infernal bargain gone wrong.

• Grade: B-

Go to the Avernus Remix – Go to Part 4: Interlude at Mahadi’s

Go to Part 1

ESCAPE FROM ELTURGARD (DDAL 09-01): It’s not really surprising that both I (in the Avernus Remix) and Rich Lescouflair in Escape From Elturgard conclude that the best way to start the saga of Elturel’s fall is in a refugee caravan heading from the outskirts of the fallen city to Baldur’s Gate. There’s just no better or more immediate way of introducing the PCs to the crisis and, importantly, the lives most dramatically affected by.

Escape from Elturgard employs a clever design that can be used as four stand-alone, one-hour sessions or one longer, cohesive session with the caravan encountering multiple challenges. Three of the scenarios involve gathering supplies for the caravan before it departs, while the fourth takes place on the road.

The custom illustrations of every significant NPC in the caravan are a particularly nice touch and a great resource for this kind of adventure.

The grit in the wheel here, however, are the continuity errors. None of them are particularly large or fundamentally crippling, but they are everywhere – a constant, pervasive annoyance that never really goes away.

A good example of what I mean is the opening paragraphs of the second interlude/adventure, which has the quest giver say, “See that cart? It belongs to Ippon the Miller. Take it to the mill and gather supplies.” So the PCs walk over to Ippon and he says, “See this cart that definitely doesn’t belong to me? I think we should take it.” You can see how that doesn’t really break anything, but is nevertheless remarkably jarring.

The three “prep the caravan” sections of Escape From Elturgard are the scenario’s best parts and easily scavengable for a Remix campaign, with a couple provisos: First, the wacky “go on a shopping trip for paper and ink for a poet who otherwise refuses to join the refugee caravan” is, in my opinion, tonally inappropriate for the post-apocalyptic setting. Second, some of the adventures include devils roaming the countryside around Elturel as if they had “attacked” the city, but the continuity leading to that is a little hazy. (Elturel was sucked into Hell; it wasn’t attacked by devils.)

The fourth section of the scenario involves a secret cultist in the caravan murdering one of the other refugees and the PCs needing to solve the crime. This section of the adventure is not very good. The mystery is simply not handled very well, in no small part because the murder doesn’t actually make any sense.

• Grade: C-

The next three adventures – Stopped at the Gate, Hungry Shadows, and The Day of the Devil – form the Betrayal in Blood series.

STOPPED AT THE GATE (DDAL 09-02): Like other seasons of the Adventurers Guild, Season 9 reflects the events of that year’s major campaign book, in this case Descent Into Avernus. But this one reflects the campaign book rather more closely than other seasons that I’m familiar with, and, frankly, the effect is rather ludicrous.

Whereas Descent Into Avernus features the PCs being hired by a Flame of the Flaming Fist to investigate a Cult of Zariel in Baldur’s Gate murdering refugees under the instructions of a devil named Gargauth, these Adventurers League scenarios feature the PCs being hired by a different Flame of the Flaming Fist to investigate a different Cult of Zariel in Baldur’s Gate who are also murdering refugees for a different reason while being instructed by a different devil whose name starts with G (Gharizol).

With all the fascinating stories that could be told within the period of upheaval created by the Fall of Elturel in both Elturgard and Baldur’s Gate, the fact that the only thing the Adventurers Guild could think of was, “I dunno… I guess just the exact same story?” is not only incredibly disappointing, but also a huge disservice to anyone playing in both an AL and Descent Into Avernus campaign.

And it’s a millstone that none of the individual scenario writers are really capable of overcoming.

In Stopped at the Gate, the PCs need to investigate the murder of Marcus Hallgate. The poor design of the mystery can be exemplified by the first scene. The PCs can get two clues, both delivered by the victim’s wife:

• There have been other murders. The PCs are not expected to investigate any of these, but they can talk to a city watchman who “knows more.” (He doesn’t.)
• A friend of the Hallgates purchased a gift for the wife several days ago. (The gift has absolutely no connection to the murder, but apparently the PCs are supposed to follow up on this out of desperation.)

So the PCs leave the scene with two clues (sort of), and then this happens:

If the characters choose to see Dovis first, he’s at his post by the Heap Gate (Scene C). If they choose to go to Harwin’s shop first (Scene D), they end up encountering Dovis before they get there.

It’s not just that it’s railroading. It’s that the railroading is both transparent and completely pointless. In any case, they (hopefully) go to Harwin’s shop and his assistant tells them:

A couple of days ago, Harwin left to check on the shearing operations outside of town. This was strange; they had wool and Harwin didn’t like the sheep. Harwin must have left before Zook got to the shop this morning, since the tea in Harwin’s mug was still warm.

So he left a couple of days ago, but the tea in his mug was still warm this morning?

It turns out that Harwin is being controlled by a devil named Gharizol. Gharizol hatched a “brilliant” plan for killing Marcus Hallgate:

• Make a fancy dress for Marcus’ wife so that she would go dancing!
• She will not, of course, take her husband to go dancing with her!
• Then, having gotten his wife out of the way, kill Marcus… while he is walking down a busy street and in no way in a location where his wife’s presence or absence would be meaningful!

Just… astounding.

In my opinion, this scenario is completely unusable.

• Grade: F-

HUNGRY SHADOWS (DDAL 09-03): In Hungry Shadows, the PCs are engaged to investigate another murder related to the Cult of Zariel.

The fundamental problem here is the continuity. Initially, I thought it was just presented in an utterly baffling fashion, but having read backwards and forwards through this thing several times, I’m forced to conclude that the whole thing is, in fact, utter nonsense.

A cultist has been “murdered” in their own home with all the doors and windows locked. How did he die? Well, either some sort of devil broke down his door and killed him (what all the evidence says) OR he was casting a summoning spell, it went wrong, and something appeared in the room with him and killed him (which is what the appendix says).

Who found the body inside the locked house that no one had been inside? No idea. The adventure doesn’t say. What we DO know is that the first members of the Flaming Fist on site are actually moles who are loyal to the cult. So what do they do? Well, first they report the murder to their superior officer and wait for the PCs to be called in. And THEN they arrange a meeting with a cult member at a local tavern to tell them that they need to cover up all the evidence of the cult’s involvement.

Where is the cult located? UNDER THE MURDER VICTIM’S HOUSE.

“Features” of this adventure also include:

• A group of moles working within the Flaming Fists who conveniently self-identify themselves as moles by all wearing black kerchiefs around their necks.
• A dungeon map that not only lacks a numbered key, but also labels of any kind, making it ludicrously and unnecessarily cumbersome to run.
• A serious recommendation that PCs pause in the middle of a six room dungeon to take an eight hour long rest while the cultists in the next room politely wait before starting their ritual to summon a devil to fight the PCs.

I would consider this scenario nigh unusable, and certainly not worth the effort required to salvage something vaguely serviceable out of it.

• Grade: F

THE DAY OF THE DEVIL (DDAL 09-04): I talk about this adventure in Part 3J of the Remix, where I loosely adapt the continuity around Duke Portyr’s assassination. And the reason I wanted to adapt it is because M.T. Black has done a bang up job of it.

The Day of the Devil opens with the PCs listening to Duke Portyr give a speech to a large crowd. Midway through the speech, he’s shot by an infernal arrow that causes his body to explode as several devils leap out of it. The PCs’ first order of business is to deal with the devils in the midst of a panicking crowd. It’s both an explosive opening (pun intended), but also handled with great elegance through a combat complications table that neatly captures the chaotic nature of the scene in an easy-to-run mechanic.

This is followed by the revelation that the cultists are also targeting some of the refugees the PCs have befriended, triggering a great chase sequence across Baldur’s Gate to reach the warehouse where the refugees have been staying in time to stop further tragedy. This is followed by a decent siege scenario (with the PCs defending the warehouse from cultists and devils).

The only real false step with the adventure are the loose ties to the other AL adventures, which mostly crop up in the final scene: Dara, who was the leader of the refugee caravan in Escape From Elturgard, has confusingly de-aged into a ten-year-old girl (this is just a continuity error). Then she reveals that two other refugees have secretly been celestials this whole time, she has just been consecrated as a priestess of Ilmater (as a ten-year-old child?), and they’re all heading to Avernus to rescue some souls.

At which point a character the PCs have never seen before blows up one wall of the warehouse (that the PCs have just bled to defend and which the refugees are still living in) and comes riding in on a mule-drawn cart, offering to give them all a ride to Hell.

All of which I recognize is supposed to elicit a response of, “WTF?” But I suspect not quite in the tone of derision I have for it.

But, honestly, if you just ignore that entire tacked-on ending, it’s a good adventure. (It does not, however, bode well for where the series is heading.)

• Grade: B-

Go to the Avernus Remix – Go to Part 3: Behind Infernal Lines