Faces of Fortune is an adventure for level 5-10 characters set in Avernus, the first layer of Hell. As the first of the DDAL Season 9 adventures at Tier 2, it has the job of introducing you to Hell and the place that will be your home base for the next few adventures: Mahadi’s Travelling Emporium.

Along the way, you get chased by Infernal War machines and try to discover a spy in the Emporium, while interacting with its rich array of characters.

There’s a lot to like about the adventure. Setting-wise it does everything right, and I very much appreciated the chance to do some solid role-playing in the Emporium. The chase through the desert of Avernus also gave my players a chance to use their spells inventively and pull off some remarkable manoeuvres.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. The initial chase scene has one significant omission: The war machines have no stat blocks and no listed speed. Only a reference to how far they dash in the text allowed me to work out their base speed. The adventure presents a few partial stats, but these didn’t correspond to any of the war machines in Descent into Avernus, so I was left blind on how they functioned. When the players asked, “Can we attack the war machines”, I couldn’t give them an answer without making stuff up.

Also, a chase over eight rounds with six war machines, six drivers, six gunners and six bearded devils (who try to board the players’ vehicle) can take significantly more than the 45 minutes allotted for this section. Be warned!

The investigation section does an outstanding job of allowing you to meet the strange and intriguing characters that inhabit the Emporium. Unfortunately, the investigation’s ending is weak. It’s entirely too possible to guess the culprit immediately and, with a single successful Insight check, solve the mystery. However, if you’re trying to put the clues together, there’s no definitive answer. Even once the spy is unmasked, it leads into a section where the pacing of D&D adventures expects a big battle to take place, but instead, you get to fight a single CR 2 foe. Well, you might get to fight that foe; I’m not sure because the text is somewhat imprecise about what happens.

The big finish, where you face the spy’s employers, is in one of the bonus objectives. If you don’t have time to run it, the adventure may end in an underwhelming manner. Given this is a four-hour adventure that you can increase to six hours by using the bonus objectives, not all groups will have time to play it all.

The other bonus objective deals with further interactions you can have with the residents of the emporium. The interactions are fun, but the presentation is flawed. The splitting of NPC descriptions into “What do they know” and “What they want” with the S8 format has led to some diabolically difficult-to-understand explanations in these adventures and Faces of Fortune is no exception to that. With this adventure, you get material that should be in “What do they want” in “What do they know”, and you’re also trying to juggle stuff that is in the Bonus Encounter appendix with what’s in the main adventure text – with the placement of material seemingly arbitrary rather than well thought out. A lot of the concepts aren’t hard once you understand them, but the presentation is poor.

One other thing: I would have appreciated advice on what Dara does during all of this. I enjoyed that the NPCs often had reactions to Dara, but some information on the other way around would have been useful.

I like Faces of Fortune, as it presents engaging situations and has good characters to interact with, but the implementation of the investigation’s structure and some details is often lacking. You can have fun with it, but it requires some reworking.