Breaking Umberlee’s Resolve is the first adventure in the Dreams of the Red Wizards series, a season-independent storyline for the D&D Adventurers League. This first adventure, designed by Ashley Warren, is set in Turmish and the Sea of Fallen Stars, and sees the characters on a quest to save the missing daughter of local merchants, who has run off to sea and likely been kidnapped by pirates. As it turns out, she’s on an island with dangerous inhabitants, but pirates were involved in getting her there!

At its heart, this is a strong story with interesting details throughout to engage the players. However, it also featured areas of writing that I found unclear or poorly structured.

This is apparent in the first episode, which should be a fairly standard mission briefing. However, the text spends a page and a half describing the town, its bazaar and shops before getting to the quest-giver and the quest. If the quest were centred around the market and bazaar, this would be a great time to introduce them. However, none of the remaining adventure takes place here. It’s an odd use of space, especially as the descriptions aren’t that thrilling. Very little is of interest to the party. Yes, there’s a goods store (which is basically just labelled as such without any other description), but there’s no NPCs or activities to tempt the PCs into a bit of role-playing.

The adventure does have boxed text; hooray! I’d change the introductory boxed text to end with “as you move around the exotic sights of the market, you notice a man dressed in robes of white and blue striding towards you”, or something of that sort, to immediately catapult the characters into the action, but instead it’s on the DM and players to make something occur.

There’s a lot of potential role-playing in this scenario: with the crew of the ship, with an inhabitant of the isle, and with the object of their quest. Some of the information is unfortunately split between the NPC appendix and the text; some of it needlessly so. Here’s the thing: When I’m reading a fairly complete description of an NPC in the text, I don’t expect to then need to travel to the appendix to find the one detail left out (especially when the NPC descriptions in the appendix are less complete than the rest of the text). In this case, I’d have liked to see Malady’s origin spelt out in the main text, rather than oblique references in the text and a better description in the appendix – especially when that description is a single sentence! I often feel with recent DDAL adventures that I have to piece together the information from incomplete details; this adventure is an example of such. However, even with these caveats, groups who enjoy role-playing should find enough material to suit their needs.

The exploration of the isle is handled entertainingly, with combat, exploration and role-playing opportunities; however, I’m puzzled that there’s an instruction about something that happens during the first long rest the characters take, as there’s not enough incident for them to want a long rest! This isn’t to say that there is insufficient incident. It’s absolutely the right amount for a 4-hour session – but there aren’t directions about how long it takes them to explore. So, it feels odd. The lair of the big bad bears little resemblance of my own handling of the matter (in The Mysterious Isle/Eye of Xxiphu), but that’s fine; I just wanted a little more attention paid to what an unusual lair it has. That the final encounter doesn’t take place underwater feels wrong.

There’s one combat situation that is excellent – a fight against water elementals during a storm – where random events spice up the action. The DCs to resist the various effects seem a bit high, but the action is exciting. The other fights are fairly basic in nature, with monster abilities providing the interest, although the fight against the big bad has one significant complication.

The Big Bad is also a CR 11 foe in an adventure that could be played by level 5 characters. The scaling notes for “Very Weak” say to omit its 5^th and 6^th level spells. It still has fourth-level lightning bolts to use – and all its hit points and other statistics. Please, can we have a bit more attention to balancing?

I haven’t been a big fan of bonus objectives in adventures, and the designer manages to use a new method to annoy me: the objective adds to the difficulty of an existing encounter by adding extra monsters rather than having them work separately. This puzzles me, as it changes the difficulty of the encounter significantly. Is this meant to be run as two separate waves? The rest of this bonus objective provides a chance for the players to name their ship, which is fun, if short – my players came up with “Selune’s Dolphin” in about 5 minutes, which was awesome, but it doesn’t fill the hour very well.

The other objective, which adds to the lair of the Big Bad, is fun and entertaining – although it falls into the trap of being a player-initiated encounter; if the players don’t investigate one direction, they don’t meet the encounter.

The formatting of the adventure abandons forced support for all the Pillars of Play (hooray! – there’s a range of encounters anyway!) but puts the monster stats before the bonus objectives (sigh!). The ship has a map, but the island and lair lack such, and these would be appreciated. The monster stats are not presented in alphabetical order, unfortunately. Scaling information is sometimes lacking, other times inadequate (see the Big Bad example above).

Overall, Breaking Umberlee’s Resolve is an entertaining adventure, with good action, role-playing and exploration components, although requiring some DM expansion or adjustment. Recommended.