It’s the start of day 3 of the Conquest Games Convention in Melbourne. It’s Easter Sunday. It’s a slow start for the day – I assume some people are going to church, while others are sleeping in. The main action at the convention at present is the gaming going on at the D&D Adventurers League tables. This pleases me, as I’m the one who organised them.

It’s been a good convention so far. We’ve got great players and DMs, and they’ve been good at turning up to sessions. This isn’t the biggest convention in the world – we can run up to six tables of DDAL at one time – but, even so, it’s a challenge to organise.

This is my day off, as far as I get one. The session I was signed up to run isn’t going ahead (we’ve got five tables running in the first slot rather than six). I’m still wrangling tables and sign-ups, but I’ve got no more sessions to run today. That’s fine. I DMed five of the seven slots on the first two days – about 15 hours of DMing!

The main attraction of this convention are the Border Kingdoms adventures from GameHoleCon. Ten of them have dropped on the DMs Guild, and we’re running all of them. I hope they’re going well – I haven’t ended up running any of them. But they’ve been well attended.

We’re also running the Moonshae adventures, a few of the Season 8 adventures, and some other adventures that tickled my fancy. In particular, three adventures that I’ve written: Ghoulies and Ghosties, The Mysterious Isle, and Eye of Xxiphu.

I’ve run G&G; that was the first session of the convention. My Tier 4 adventures will be the last things I run at the convention. I’ve got a bunch of eager players and DMs who will play on my table, and they’re very excited for Monday. They think they’re going to break the adventures…

…my interest is whether they have fun when doing so!

Here are the five adventures I’ve run so far, and notes on how they worked:

Ghoulies and Ghosties. Set in Phlan, the characters need to discover the culprits behind various kidnappings happening in the city. This is the first investigation adventure I’ve written, and I’m very pleased with how it came out. It does require pre-reading though, as it’s quite complex. There are numerous clues that can be followed up by the players, with a selection of red herrings (though interesting ones) and real clues – but you need to assemble several clues to find the solution. Every time I run it, the players take a different path! That’s brilliant – it’s so great seeing in action.

Because I wrote the adventure, I feel more confident about departing from the text. This time around, someone used speak with animals on some dogs that attacked the kidnappers. This led into a digression about the “dog telegraph”, which is the communication between the dogs barking at night. One of the potential clues is about dogs being killed, and the players were able to determine where it was happening by virtue of the telegraph. This is an adventure that can run long – and I was running it in a three-hour slot – so I was happy to let the characters use that clue to take them to the solution.

The information I used is there in the adventure, but the method changed. All good!

Long Leggity Beasties. The second of the Phlan trilogy, and written by RM Jensen-Parkes, this adventure starts with the players trying to find how to activate a magic circle the kidnappers used to escape. The method used is quite unusual and is the distinguishing trait of the adventure: the players get to relive the memories of some adults who were present as children during the last set of kidnapping. Each player gets a new character sheet, with a selection of personality traits to help them portray the child.

This is great! It’s a lot like the old classic D&D adventures, where everyone used pregens. My table was made up of six players who adored the role-playing. By the end of this section, they all had inspiration.

The second half of the adventure involves dealing with some hags, and it’s written in a way that could have all the hags gathering together and attacking. It didn’t quite work that way – the players were very good at taking out each hag individually, so a mass combat (which would have been very challenging) didn’t occur. It did on the other table running the adventure, though – and that didn’t go so well for the players.

Good adventure, though. Nicely written and fun to play!

Things that go Bump in the Night. The final of the Phlan trilogy, written by Robert Alaniz, who also commissioned Rich and me to write the first two parts. This one has the characters infiltrating the lair of the kidnappers and dealing with the final boss.

There are a few twists here that are really interesting, though I don’t think I conveyed them well enough to the players. The success of the infiltration depends greatly on how tough the DM is on the players. With some DMs, it’s a cakewalk. With others, it’s potentially a TPK. It’s one of those situations that, regardless of how the adventure is written, the way the DM approaches it is key.

I tend towards the nicer type of DM, who allows the players to succeed if their plans sound reasonable. With the use of disguise self and other disguises, they did a great job of finding the best route to their targets, and avoiding potentially deadly situations. For instance, they didn’t fight the golems! And, while persuading one kidnapped child to come with them, they said everything right that was suggested in the text.

Some DMs call for Charisma (Persuasion) checks, but I don’t like doing that when they’ve said the right things. So, they succeeded brilliantly.

There’s a lot of very interesting things to find in the adventure. Some are quite disturbing. I love adventures that reward exploration!

Tyranny in Phlan. While I was trying to fill slots in the schedule, I put in both Tyranny in Phlan and its sequel, Escape from Phlan. These are great adventures from the first season of the Adventurers League and very memorable ones. It’s a real delight to introduce players to the early scenarios, especially ones that were so important in the development of the story of the DDAL Realms.

(Most of the Melbourne DDAL players only started last year, so there are a LOT of scenarios they haven’t played!)

If there’s one frustration in this scenario it’s that it blocks off a lot of potential escape routes; of course, that’s because the Cult of the Dragon also thought of them as well as the players! The players did feel very much that they were being corralled towards one solution; something that I haven’t seen as much with previous groups.

This was a smaller group, but with some powerful characters. Scaling for it was pretty difficult, especially as they lacked a melee character. I kept things relatively weak, so the party got to do a lot of cool things but weren’t threatened that much.

The Skull Square Murders. The one Season 8 adventure I ran at this convention, this is – as unfortunately normal for S8 adventures – problematic. It’s an investigation, but it’s a depressingly linear investigation. Each encounter has just one clue that leads to the next encounter. There’s no gathering of separate clues and choosing different paths based on what you’ve discovered. No, while the adventure allows you different approaches in gathering the clues (combat, exploration or social), you end up with the same clue and path to the next encounter.

To make things worse, some things don’t make sense. A clue says one thing, but the encounter it leads to doesn’t follow. “This guy paid someone gold” – you go to investigate the guy, and he didn’t pay gold to anyone at all! Why did the murderer kill the initial victim? That’s left unwritten. I worked out a solution while running it, but it felt tremendously sloppy.

It’s also underwritten. We ran through four hours of content in two hours, and it lasted that long because we encouraged a lot of fun roleplaying. It wasn’t always on the point of the adventure, but at least it was entertaining. We had a necromancer on the table, which led to a brilliant interaction where they purchased two more zombies, then looped the ropes used to lead those zombies to their own (superior) zombies, and put a palanquin on top of them all – he was escorted through the streets of Skullport in style – at least until a flaming skull flew down and demanded his permit for a vehicle and set the palanquin on fire when it wasn’t forthcoming. That was fun!

It’s not a dreadful adventure, but I’ve seen a lot of good adventures recently and this one underwhelms.

Conclusion.

It seems like people are enjoying themselves! It’s great to see that the Melbourne DDAL community is supporting the convention by running and playing games here. I’ve met a lot of lovely people that are now part of the hobby – and I’m looking forward to seeing them again in future.

I’m very, very grateful for the support of my DMs – Andrew, Annie, Luke, Joel, Tasha, Robert, Lauren, Alek, Shawn, Kaeleb and Kye. The work of the local Melbourne community to support D&D in the past year has been phenomenal. At Conquest last year, we had only two or three tables running. This time… more!

Friday 12:30 pm: 6 tables, 34 players
Friday 4 pm: 6 tables, 34 players
Friday 7:30 pm: 5 tables, 28 players

Saturday 9:00 am: 5 tables, 25 players
Saturday 12:30 pm: 6 tables, 33 players
Saturday 4 pm: 5 tables, 28 players
Saturday 7:30 pm: 4 tables, 21 players