Pools of Cerulean is the second adventure of the Tier 4 D&D Adventurers League adventures for the Tomb of Annihilation season. The adventurers are tasked with recovering a shard of the Soulmonger before a party of Red Wizards recover it first.
If this seems like the plot in Streams of Crimson, you would be correct. It is the same plot. What differs is the location – the adventurers need to cross the Land of Ash and Smoke to find the shard, and the land has been corrupted by manifestations of the Feywild.
The resulting adventure is not brilliant. It’s adequate, and there are some nice narrative tricks, but the action feels like a set of disconnected set-pieces. The one aspect that does work is when the party find survivors of the Red Wizards’ expedition; they give the potential for some entertaining role-playing.
The first encounter commits the cardinal sin of being skippable – there’s no reason the characters can’t make their way around the edge of the glade and find the trail again. Even if the players wish to fight, poltergeists and banshees do not make a terrifying encounter for 17th-level adventures, even with the environmental effects in play.
The second encounter is far better. There’s a reason for characters to engage – trapped mercenaries fused to rocky trees from the band they’re following – and the combination of flameskulls and rock worms (reskinned remorhazes) is interesting. The concept that the flameskulls are, in fact, corrupted pixies is a brilliant and horrific one, and it gave a nice frisson for my players.
The penultimate encounter, an ambush, suffers from characters having weapons of warning and the Alert feat. Surprise ain’t what it used to be! What’s nice is that there are options to negotiate with the attackers, especially if the party paid attention to information learned previously.
The final encounter runs into a basic problem of many high-level encounters: all the enemy is visible when the encounter begins. My table used a high-slot banishment to remove all the foes except for the archmage, disintegrated his wall of force, and then killed him from range. High-level encounters when the party has spell-casters? Yes, this happens all the time. Incidental note: a globe of invulnerability is not an anti-magic shell. You can cast spells from within it.
Throughout the adventure, corrupted creatures from the Feywild have a chance of appearing and attacking the party. These are reskinned regular creatures, but their horrible appearance may fool the party into underestimating them – there’s a zombie beholder amongst them! They’re weaker than the party, however, so they tend to be flavoursome rather than threats.
There are nice touches in the adventure, but they can’t save it from feeling distinctly average.