In Which We Talk About… Adventures & Mad Mages & Stuff!

It’s that time again – let’s jibber-jabber about D&D Adventurers League things!

I’m here at Gamehole Con and there’s a pretty awesome aura in the D&D room. We’ve got people traveling in from all over the country to check out the brand-new Epic, DDEP08-01 Chaos in the City of Splendors, a number of Waterdeep premiere adventures, a plethora of Author Only content, and a literal ton of Border Kingdoms adventures. It’s… nutty. Also, yes, I did mean a “literal” ton; there are so many adventures set there for this event that I believe the organizers used an actual ton of paper and ink to print them. WHEW.

So let’s chat about those points right quick!

DDEP08-01 Chaos in the City of Splendors

This adventure premiered here at the show to the tune of something like 56 tables of excited gamers. Shenanigans ensued, daggers were drawn, and – from what I’ve been told – at least one interpretive dance-off took place. Sounds pretty chaotic to me! If you’d like to get this adventure for your events, please hit up our request form when you have a chance and our Resource Managers will be in touch!

Waterdeep Premieres

Several Waterdeep adventures premiered here:

DDAL08-07 Into the Dark (tier 2 adventure)

DDAL08-08 Crypt of the Dark Kiss (tier 2 adventure)

DDAL08-09 Fangs and Frogs (tier 2 adventure)

These adventures have been pretty well received from the brief conversations I’ve been able to have here. As we trend down through Waterdeep and into Undermountain, you can expect that things are gonna get strange. Mad, even. I’m excited to see where these adventures go once they escape from snowy Wisconsin and into your hands!

Author Only Adventures

I think we’ve all picked on Travis Woodall sufficiently – he’s finally agreed to publish at least one of his AOs to dmsguild! There’s some pretty great content here from some powerful designers, and I gotta say that listening to players at the other tables was really an excellent experience. Every designer, be they in our AO pool, a homegame DM, a new DM, or an experienced DM, has their own hallmarks. I was able to see Robert Adducci spin some draconic tales, hear some great player stories from Claire Hoffman’s table, observe Bill Benham rant and rave (completely in character), and check out Chris Lindsay’s card tricks during his game.

Border Kingdoms Adventures

The section of the Forgotten Realms known as the Border Kingdoms was recently granted to Gamehole Con as part of the CCC program. They’ve really decided to run with the torch here by delivering not just a trilogy of adventures, but TEN adventures and a Special for the gamers here at the show. The decision to expand the CCC program was not made lightly and as of right now we only have two organizations that have been approved (Baldman Games with the Moonshae Isles and Gamehole Con with the Border Kingdoms), and we’re extremely pumped by the reaction. Fan reaction has been pretty solid so far, and I’m very much looking forward to conversations with GHC, the gamers & DMs, and our team over the next few weeks.

MAD MAGES!

Dungeon of the Mad Mage released to WPN stores today and I’ve seen a number of people walking around the show with it. We’ve released our guidance on the adventure over on dmsguild (check out the D&D Adventurers League Player’s & DM’s Pack) and will be pushing the DM Quests out later tonight. This adventure is an iconic location in the Forgotten Realms and we’re extremely excited to see it in the wild – the entire admin team and a handful of additional trusted & awesome designers poured their heart and souls into this tome. It’s crazy times, but has been a ton of fun to design and deploy.

There’s a TON of content in this book – 23 levels of dungeons to explore, to be exact. And then there’s Skullport, and links back to Dragon Heist, and… it’s crazy how much is contained on these pages!

We’d like to stress to DMs that are preparing to run this that they work with their players to determine how best to proceed. This adventure does use a tiering approach (similar to the Tales from the Yawning Portal book) rather than an “open the floodgates and let everyone loose” format. There is content to get people from level 5 all the way up to 20, but in order to deliver the experience that we’re targeting we worked with the team at Wizards of the Coast to set this up. Full details can be found in the Player’s and DM’s Pack as linked above; please note that it is the opinion of the admin team that encouraging your players to take a slow leveling approach would be ideal for this book so that they can experience as much of it as possible.

Eberron’s Embers of the Last War

We’ve been adhering to the weekly schedule for the ELW series, but unfortunately we do need to state that we will not be releasing an Eberron adventure today. With nearly the entire creative team here at the show, we decided that the adventure just wasn’t going to get the final review that it deserves so next week on Friday, November 16th you will be getting TWO Eberron adventures to make up for it! Both ELW07 and ELW08 will be releasing on that day. Fan reaction has been great here, and the constructive feedback has been excellent, so our designers are energized and ready to deliver killer stories laced with intrigue and airships.

Until next week, I’m signing off. I’ve got to get this charity stream set up for the admins tomorrow afternoon and this pesky otyugh keeps trying to steal my popcorn.