It has been a rough time for the Tier 3 D&D Adventurers League adventures from season 7. I approached DDAL07-13 Old Tomes and Older Bones with some trepidation. My one consolation was that it was written by Robert Alaniz, who has designed some excellent adventures in the past.
The basic story of the adventure is that you accompany two sages from Candlekeep as they search a strange tower in Chult for their missing compatriot. The tower is full of puzzles and traps, and also contains a couple of very deadly combats. This is not an adventure for the faint-hearted!
It’s also not an adventure for players who dislike puzzles, which – upon last count – was all of the eight players who played it at our tables. So, that already puts me on the negative side of assessing it.
Upon re-reading the adventure and considering the mistakes I made when running it, some deficiencies in the adventure come to light. Most are fixable, but I found them to make the adventure more work to run and play than I would have liked.
Judging the flow of information to the players as to the nature of the puzzles and, indeed, what they should do first, gave me problems. Upon entering the tower, the Big Bad gives the PCs a welcoming speech and then may converse further. The exact instruction given is “The adventurers may converse with him if they wish.” However, if the players don’t converse with him, they’ll spend a lot of the next few hours frustrated and unsure of what to do. The conversation is also given in the form of his responses to various topics. Ignore those topics – the information is absolutely required by the players, even they don’t ask the Big Bad specifically about those topics.
The way of retrieving the books the adventurers need to proceed is – by design – flawed. But, in practice this means the players spend a lot of time guessing combinations of language and subject and taking damage each time. This wasn’t fun and greatly frustrated my players. It doesn’t help that the adventure describes this as a flaw of the Bibliomancer. It’s not; it’s the flaw of the puzzle that is set for the adventurers.
The text explaining what the books contains is scattered, and not always in obvious places. I would have much preferred to have a description of what the adventures find when they retrieve the book.
There’s a combat against a marilith in a fog cloud. It’s a challenging combat if the party has dispel magic. If they don’t have it, then prepare for a potential TPK. There’s a solution in the adventure, as one of the sages has dispel magic, but there isn’t a note in the encounter that this is the case. I missed the connection, and between all the handouts the players missed the capabilities of the sages as well.
The puzzles are clever. The situation is interesting. The combats are challenging. However, I suggest you need to become thoroughly familiar with the material beforehand, and then give out more information to the players than the text might suggest. There’s a lot of good design here, but I struggled to run it at the table; I didn’t prepare enough beforehand. If your players don’t like puzzles, this may be one to skip. Otherwise, you’re likely to have fun with this one.