5E Adventure Review: Knights of Balduran, Part 1 – Protectors

Protectors is a new adventure released on the DMs Guild set in the famous city of Baldur’s Gate. It is a sequel to the Murder in Baldur’s Gate adventure, one of my favourite Realms adventure, and I was very interested to see what the D&D community – in this case, Hillel Genesove – did with the setting.

Unfortunately, while Genesove has some nice ideas, there are significant problems with his presentation of them. The adventure begins with the adventurers in a tavern looking over the body of a murdered halfling, and then immediately transitions to a lion attack in the street, without first establishing that the adventurers are investigating. This is if they’re even investigating! It’s quite likely that the party may be beaten to the body by the innkeeper and another guest, but there’s no suggestion that the NPCs ask the party for help.

If the adventurers do help, the investigation mainly leads to a lot of nothing. The adventure is severely underwritten when it comes to explanations, and is incomplete in any case – there is text missing in several places where the author skipped over it and never returned.

In those cases where the text is complete, it isn’t well-written. The grammar is often wrong, and there are many stylistic issues.

Ultimately, I can’t recommend this adventure. The material is too slight: the investigation isn’t fulfilling, the adventure is poorly realised, and it needs a thorough overhaul just to correct the errors in the text.

Leave a Reply