My happiest experience writing adventures for play in the D&D Adventurers League came courtesy of Robert Alaniz in 2017. He asked me to be one of a team (along with himself and Richard Jansen Parkes) to write the fourth (and final) trilogy of adventures set in Phlan for Baldman Games. On Good Friday, 2019, I finally had the chance to run the entire trilogy of adventures.

I’m going to burble on about some of the aspects of the trilogy which make it, in my opinion, one of the better series to play. Yes, I’m utterly biased in this assessment, but as long as you go in knowing that, let me introduce you to PHLAN4 – a trilogy of adventures for levels 5-10.

Each adventure does something different. There’s an overarching theme – you’re tracking down people who have been kidnapping children in Phlan – but each adventure handles it differently.

The series begins with Ghoulies and Ghosties, in which the Lord Chancellor of Phlan asks you to investigate recent kidnappings. This investigation is set against the latest bout of tension between the Welcomers (the old Thieves’ Guild of Phlan) and the Coin Spinners (the new Thieves’ Guild), and is the most Phlan-centric of the scenarios, as you’re visiting different places around the town to look for clues. You can see the many hours I spent playing the old Pool of Radiance computer game in this. It was important to me to emphasise that Phlan has districts, and hopefully individual DMs can run with that.

The investigation is fascinating because it’s not a breadcrumb trail. There are numerous clues, and they point in different directions. What interested me was how the players would put together the clues, and which path they’d take to the solution. I’ve seen several! It does demand a lot from the DM to run. I’ve never been quite happy with how the locations and clues are laid out – of the adventures, it most needs pre-reading – but the DMs who have run it have very much enjoyed it. Not every group experiences every encounter.

Also, newer events in Phlan do come into play. The tension between the Coin Spinners and the Welcomers makes for a brilliant backdrop for the adventure. I wonder how many groups inadvertently set off a civil war in Phlan when playing this? It’s not taking place in a vacuum, and having the two guilds blaming each other adds extra spice to the tale.

The adventure can run long (one report of a 5-1/2 hour tale!), although I’ve built trapdoors into it to allow quick advancement of the tale in the case of the characters getting bored or the group running out of time.

The second adventure, Long Leggity Beasts, does something quite special: it allows the players to role-play as other characters for a bit, using pre-generated characters with predefined traits for role-playing. This section provided many special moments on our table, as the players very much got into role-playing these characters. When you get situations where the characters get to interact with each other, it’s a lot better when the players get into it – and they did with me!

Hey, they’re playing children at a birthday party! And things become creepier before the end!

The second half of the adventure returns you to playing your regular characters. It could be extremely difficult, depending on how the DM structures it. It’s a lovely scenario that allows the DM and players a lot of freedom about how it plays. I’m very fond of adventures that allow other inhabitants of an area to react to the adventurers’ actions. Importantly, it’s not overwhelming. How does it do this? It gives starting locations for the main foes and gives a basic plan of how they react. However, the DM can then alter things to suit their table.

The imagery in the encounters is inventive, and it also features interesting terrain.

Part three, Things That Go Bump in the Night, managed to surprise everyone at our table a few times. Did you think you knew what to expect? Think again! It’s very clever because it, at first, appears to be the most standard of the adventures: It’s an infiltration and rescue mission featuring a stronghold. But lots of things provide twists that recast what you thought you knew before.

Here’s what’s I like most about it: It’s another sandbox. You’ve got different options as to how to proceed. All three of these adventures, while they still have constraints, allow the players a lot of agency in how they play. Do you role-play? Do you try to sneak past the enemies? Or is combat your thing? The third adventure nails the idea of giving a setting that then allows the players to choose how to tackle it. This structure is the sort of thing that Season 8 of the DDAL wants; this adventure shows you how to do it!

Some paths are easier than others – my group was lucky and took the quicker, less dangerous way. I’m fine with near-impossible monsters to fight when the characters can bypass them! The final encounters are likely to be challenging, though. The adventure rewards players who think. It punishes those who can’t do anything but fight – unless they’re very good at it!

It’s a great conclusion to the series. As with all the adventures, a lot will come down to how the DM chooses to present things. These are on the higher end of challenging to DM, partly because the actions of the players make a lot of difference to how they play.

Are there flaws in the series? Undoubtedly. As the work of three different authors, some of the links between adventures don’t work quite as well as I’d hope. Others work much better than I dreamed.

What I can say is it was a dream project, and one I’m very glad to have done. At some point, I hope to revisit Phlan and look at what might have happened to the city after the events of this series!

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggity beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
— traditional prayer from the UK