Beneath the City of the Dead is an adventure for level 1-4 characters. It is part two of the Umbral Aristocracy trilogy of Season 8 of the Adventurers League. Set in Waterdeep, the adventurers investigate a crypt in the City of the Dead, which was the destination of the map in The Map with No Names. The adventurers believe it’s the location of a great treasure! The adventure runs for 2 to 4 hours, depending on how many bonus objectives you include.

For the most part, this is an entertaining dungeon crawl. The opening sequence takes place in the graveyard, as the adventurers attempt to find the way into the crypt. The next sequence is the dungeon crawl, where four rooms of traps and monsters stand between the adventurers and their goal: the great treasure of Dagult Neverember! In the final sequence, they discover that not all maps can be trusted.

The two bonus encounters involve a search for missing sheep in the graveyard and an encounter with the ghost of a treasure hunter with unfinished business.

The main problem I encountered with the adventure is that there’s too much material for it to be run in the suggested times. When you’re running games in a store or convention setting, that is a problem. I enjoyed most of the encounters, as they give a good range of experiences. The bonus encounter with the ghost is especially poignant and has a few surprises. You get to experience all three pillars of play here (role-playing, exploration and combat), and that’s appreciated.

The combats may be too difficult; I’m constantly adjusting adventures for the capabilities of my players, so I didn’t notice it so much but potentially running four or five combats in a 2-hour session? That takes a significant amount of time and resources! The scaling notes recognise that level 1 characters are likely to play this adventure and remove the higher CR monsters for very weak parties. I appreciated this, as many adventures don’t. I advise always running a level 1 group at “weak” or “very weak” in a Tier 1 adventure; a CR 3 monster is often too much, especially as part of a suite of combats.

The formatting of the adventure leaves a lot to be desired. While I appreciate that the intention with the new format is to give more freedom to the DM in their presentation of the adventure, and not to constrain the players unduly, important information is presented in unexpected locations. The lack of boxed or explanatory text is occasionally keenly felt. For instance, in one room a set of animated armour attacks the players, giving a warning as they do so. If that was mentioned in the paragraph that describes the attack, all would be good. Instead, it’s under a different heading (“What do they know”), which may not be obvious to the DM, especially in the middle of running events.

Also, the map doesn’t have a key, and the directions in the adventure don’t match the map we have.

The adventure also lacks an effective ending. When I ran this adventure, I took material from the beginning of the third adventure, Dock Ward Double Cross, and used it to explain what the party had discovered, what had actually occurred, and to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. It was possible to make a great ending here, and the underlying storyline of the trilogy is excellent. More attention to how the parts fit together and the transitions from one to the next was needed when overseeing this series.

There are a host of typographical errors, as well as a few sentences that don’t seem to end properly. I particularly like the regularly spaced scones in the crypt; just the thing for a hungry party. (Sconces, not scones!) The magic item listed in the rewards does not appear in the adventure!

I like Beneath the City of the Dead, but its presentation and the number of combats make it harder to run than desirable.