Beginning with Season 9, the D&D Adventurers League is moving to a new form of character creation, advancement and play restrictions. Dubbed as “Seasonality”, it links characters more to individual seasons. (You can find a brief description in the latest Dragon+)

The effects of this are primarily the following:

When you create a character, you choose a Season for that character to belong to. Seasons 1-8 are treated as one season. (pre-Seasonality season) Seasons 9 and onwards are treated independently.

For that character, you gain special benefits: Special character-creation rules Ability to play all adventures in that Season with full rewards (story awards, magic item unlocks) This means the Hardcover and the DDAL adventures!

You can also play any non-Seasonal content with full rewards, such as: Community-Created Content (CCCs) Season 0 material (e.g. Dreams of the Red Wizards, Lost Tales of Myth Drannor, etc.)

However, you only gain limited rewards for playing adventures from other Seasons No Story Awards No Magic Item Unlocks Still full Advancement and Treasure Checkpoints (and renown, and downtime).



So, the main restriction on this is that you can’t create a Season 10 character, then jump into Season 9, gain the best items from that, then return to Season 10.

What’s Good About This?



The major benefit is that it allows the D&D Adventurers League to play around a bit with its parameters (character creation, rewards, etc.) without worrying about those benefits causing problems when combined with those of other seasons.

I’m thinking of it as the PHB+1+1 rule – you can use the Player’s Handbook, one other rulebook, and one season’s special rules to create your character.

That said, it might be that characters belonging to a season might not follow the PHB+1 rule exactly – the season’s character creation rules can be as different as desired.

What’s Bad About This?

It’s a lot harder to run adventures from previous seasons. Players will tend to want to play the current season or non-Seasonal material (mainly CCCs and Dreams of the Red Wizards).

Your existing characters are unlikely to want to play Season 9 content.

How Should I Approach This?



If you want to play Season 9 content, you probably should create a new character, play through all the Season 9 content, and then move onto non-Seasonal material.

For existing characters, they probably should ignore Season 9, and just play CCCs and Dreams of the Red Wizards. (Have you seen how many community-created adventures there are now? There’s a lot – and more are coming!) However, you can still play Season 9 adventures, even if you don’t get the special awards (and your character might not care about those in any case. Your existing unlocks still work).

What’s Dreams of the Red Wizards?

It’s a new sequence of adventures for D&D Adventurers League play. It is non-seasonal, and covers Tier 2 through 4 adventures – as well as containing its own Epic. As a result, any character – regardless of their initial season – can play them.

What I’m not Sure of Yet (but hope answers come soon!)

When you create a character, can you choose one of Seasons 1 to 8 for that character? The FAQ implies you can – it says you can’t choose Dreams of the Red Wizard as a season for your character (it’s non-seasonal material), which implies you choose a season for your character as part of creation. This occurred in the original conception of the DDAL, but the “Story Origin” didn’t quite work. Answered: You can choose any previous season – with Seasons 1-8 treated as one season.

Are each of Seasons 1 through 8 counted as previous seasons? (It occurred to me that they could be taken as one “pre-S9” season. I don’t think this is the case, though). They’re treated as one season.

Do Epics count as part of the Season they’re in, or are they non-Seasonal?

What rewards will CCCs be able to give out going forward? (It might be that the list of items is reduced, or it could just be that non-Seasonal content is a lot wilder in scope!)

When characters playing high-level S9 content are all S9 characters, it may be easier to judge their power and write adventures for them. Or not. We’ve seen some *very* wild characters in our Tier 4 games!

What season does Ghosts of Saltmarsh belong to? (I get the impression its non-Seasonal content).

For older characters, do you assign a season to them based on what sounds good (as long it’s from season 1-8)? Older characters belong to the “Pre-Seasonality Season” or “Seasons 1-8”.

Merric’s Overall Impression

I think some really good things could come of this, although it’ll be interesting to see the particulars in play. Honestly, this is a much lesser change than the Season 8 rule changes (which I generally like, except for how gold is awarded).

I do think it’ll push a lot of people towards the Community Created Content for the D&D Adventurers League, but as it looks like that program may be expanding, this isn’t a bad thing.

More thoughts as they come to mind!

But what’s the special unlock for Season 9 characters?

Not 100% sure, but may be this: