Weakness of Rock is a DDAL-legal adventure for level 11-16 characters set in Hulburg, a mining town on the north of the Moonsea. As with many of the towns in this region, it’s rebuilding after several disasters befell it, and the trouble it’s currently facing comes from below.

The initial situation is that three miners have fallen into comas after mining some of the magical tar stones that have been bringing wealth to the town. These stones radiate unusual magical energy, and while interest in the stones has made them quite valuable, it now appears they have side effects; they’re drawing the emotions out of people, leaving them in an enfeebled state! The party are hired to help deal with the situation.

The adventure has four encounters: the party see the miners and protect them from a purple worm attack, then two quests to recover ingredients needed for a potion to revive the miners, and finally a confrontation with some mind flayers who are using the power of the stones deeper in the Underdark. It’s very combat-heavy, with few chances for role-playing or exploration. The links between encounters are very abrupt. It felt very much like shuttling from one set-piece combat to another.

As a result, despite the actual encounters being entertaining (if deadly), I found the experience underwhelming. Yes, there are NPCs you could interact with, but they’re mainly there just as quest-givers. One exception is a group of hags who will talk to the party for a bit; this allows the potential of enslaving a PC as payment for the ingredient needed, but if a player doesn’t want to sit out the rest of the adventure (quite likely!) it ends up in combat anyway.

Some of the descriptions of settings and special rules are also confusing. An encounter that has the PCs swimming down to a kelp bed to harvest special kelp notes, “It takes two rounds to swim to the kelp” but fails to give distances. At this level of play, there’s a lot of magic that may change this – the PCs might have swim speeds, they might use teleportation, or something else is possible. Indeed, is that swimming using the Dash action or just normal movement? Knowing the actual distance would be far more useful. The party only have five rounds to harvest the kelp – three rounds after they swim down – but the defence of the kelp requires the party to succeed at DC 23 Intelligence saving throws or start attacking each other. That’s not a save you can expect any party member to make. There’s a high chance that, as written, the party will fail this encounter.

And what then? There are no results of their failure described.

The hag encounter starts with “A DC 15 Survival check points the characters in the right direction”. What happens if they fail this check? Do the characters wander around lost until making their way back home with no way of making things right?

Failure states at the end of adventures are easier to deal with, but failure states in the middle of adventures cause problems. If you fail to get one of the ingredients, is it even worth trying to find the other?

There are many good things about the adventure: it has inventive situations and challenging combats, but its structure and a lack of attention to some of the details made it frustrating to DM. Your players are likely to enjoy it, but it just has too many problems for me to recommend it.