Dungeons & Dragons Adventurers League Season 6 (Tales from the Yawning Portal) only contains three DDAL adventures and the hardcover. All of the former are supposed to provide a hook to a particular dungeon in the book. This one introduces White Plume Mountain.
Warning: this review includes spoilers. If you’re going to play through the adventure, don’t read further.
What I liked
The adventure mostly consists of an introductory scene and five puzzles. Each puzzle basically provides a wholly-contained, discrete encounter, making it easy for the DM. The puzzles provide a good opportunity for players to demonstrate their own creative thinking without become too vexing. That sort of balance is tough to strike, and I felt like this module did so.
Unusually for DDAL adventures, this one was well-edited. I only found a few very minor errors in it. Perhaps they’ve learned from their previous complete inattention to this – I hope it bodes well for the next season! It’s also relatively well-timed, and I suspect the discrete nature of the encounters helped with this. The maps included with the adventure are about the same quality as in previous seasons, though. Fortunately a number of good maps can be found on the DMs Guild; I preferred Zovya’s (acquired via Patreon) but others can be found if you prefer a different sort of look.
What I didn’t like
A couple of small details bothered me. The end of the adventure that provides the hook into WPM doesn’t do it very well, because neither I nor my group understood why they should particularly care beyond rescuing an NPC with whom they had no real relationship. Additionally, the second puzzle had a bit of vagueness in its physical structure that requires the DM to think ahead about how they imagine it. But those didn’t detract too much from the adventure and the fun we had.
Wrapping it up
I liked this, as it varied nicely from most of the other AL modules I’ve run. A bit of combat, a bit of social encounter, and mostly just puzzles and (to a lesser extent) skill challenges. This makes it a good preview of WPM in that sense. If only it had introduced WPM story-wise a bit better!
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