It’s tremendously important when writing an adventure to have a sense of its audience. When writing a D&D Adventurers League adventure, doubly so.

For a CCC adventure, it’s easy to think you know the answer: it’s the audience at the convention. Unfortunately, if you write it only for them, anyone buying it from the DMs Guild is likely to be confused; the intended audience isn’t them. If you write a Tier 1 adventure for an audience of experienced players, then things get a lot trickier when a novice group encounters it.

Another aspect of this problem is when you’re writing as part of a trilogy or longer series, and you assume that the DM and player have played (or even read) the earlier parts. That’s not a safe assumption to make. Even in a convention setting, the realities of scheduling mean that often a DM or player will encounter only one of a series. I’ve gotten more and more disillusioned with series presented as part of the Adventurers League, as many have been utterly awful when run as stand-alone adventures.

Ill Met in Ylraphon is, in the right hands, a fascinating adventure. The heroes enter Ylraphon, sent to track down an agent of the hags that mean the region ill. Once they do so, the heroes discover her plans are coming to fruition: she’s already stolen a magical gem of protection from the temple of Selune. The heroes must chase her into the ruins of the old city of Ylraphon, defeat her and recover the gem, and then return it. However, during the time while the gem was lost, a Death Knight and his minions attacked the temple of Selune and stole further artefacts! The adventure ends on that unsettling note.

There are parts of this scenario that work very well. The confrontation with the agent in the Old City is very nicely done, with terrain, traps and tricks providing interesting challenges for the party in addition to the standard monster foe. The incidental combats on the way are likewise entertaining.

However, the rest of the material doesn’t work that well. It feels very busy and confusing. After the heroes kill the agent, then a Death Knight turns up and seems to assume the characters know what he’s talking about and who he is. Later, they learn that he’s the one who attacked the temple to steal the artefacts, which at least clears some of the confusion up, but you’ve got a bunch of puzzled players in the meantime. In the initial encounter at the temple, there’s the potential for good interaction with the priest, but unfortunately, it comes just as the agent has stolen the diamond, so talking to the priest has to be abandoned so the players can chase the agent. When you have scenes like that, it’s no wonder people end up confused: all the potential explanations are brushed aside for an action scene.

The worst part of the adventure is the beginning, however. I ran this adventure with a group of novice players, who were just starting their exploration of D&D. They were utterly confused when I gave them the set-up: You’re looking for a woman who is red-haired and dresses in black and silver clothing. She’s trying to sow discord in the city, and you need to find her. What were they to do first? They didn’t know.

Heck, I didn’t know how to approach this section. The adventure describes the town leaders of Ylraphon, but how could novice adventurers even interact with them? (It doesn’t help that the suggested DCs for interaction checks were very high).

There are three suggestions for how the players might find the agent, but none felt convincing to me, and the basic underlying procedure was “make some ability checks, it doesn’t matter which ones, and you learn this information regardless of which ones you make”.

I’m not fond of investigation sections that boil down to, “Here’s the information they need to discover; you work out how they find it.” At least not without a much better understanding of the environment; and I had little idea of how to approach Yrlaphon. It’s not a place I’ve used much. The adventure spends a fair chunk of words describing NPCs, but I didn’t find them useful. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’d like more hints of personality and ideas about how the agent has interacted with them. It doesn’t help that the few personality traits that exist are listed in the appendix rather than in the section you’re reading during the investigation! Not that they give much of a clue as to how the NPCs interact with the players in any case. Answers to questions like “have you seen this woman?” or “how has this woman affected you?” are absent. The agent might be sowing discord, but there’s no hint as to what she’s doing – and that’s what I want to see when running an investigation.

There are probably DMs who will handle the investigation a lot better than me, and there’s a lot to like in the rest of the adventure. Underlying it is a good story, which means a great deal, and I think it handles its combat situations very well. However, Ill Met in Ylraphon proved to be a lot more challenging to run than I’m happy with, and I can’t help but feel that it could be better structured.