While this adventure has some nicely thematic encounters (more as bonus material) and you do learn a bit about the ubiquitous Adventurer’s League magic item merchant Fai Chen, the structural flaws imposed by DDAL Season 9 formatting and some other matters make me unable to recommend this adventure enthusiastically.

I was excited to finally get to read and dm this adventure as I’d been running the Baldur’s Gate portions of the season 9 content, and this is the first adventure where you get to go to Hell. Right away you have an exciting chase with some war machines (and later chances to defeat the war machine gang outright and get revenge, if you have time for the bonus material). But there are problems. One is that the chase is supposed to fit in one hour of time but it will almost certainly take about 2 hours unless you rush and cut corners. Secondly is the war machines are given no statistics (from the hardcover or otherwise) which is good because the statted war machines from the hardcover are probably too powerful, but bad because the players will definitely want to attack the war machines themselves but it will require improvisation for any game effect that would have. Thirdly there isn’t really a way to outrun the war machines at all. They WILL catch the party by round 2 under typical circumstances. That’s ok, but I was surprised it was such an uneven chase situation.

The investigation part of the adventure introduces you to a location in the Avernus hardcover that is interesting and thematic, but it's of note that there are some alterations made to some of the specified individuals encountered there, and that some of the individuals only make sense if you know what is true of them from the hardcover: for one the location has a rule against spellcasting, but one of the NPCs can cast spells on behalf of PCs. It's only later I’ve realized that this is not an exception to the rule of the location, but that NPC has a particular reason they are allowed to get away with this. But if you are explaining to players why there is a rule against something and you can’t explain why the rules are violated by NPCs, it takes you out of the adventure.

The investigation is ok IF you use the bonus material. Otherwise it seems to come down to a simple Insight check and is more difficult to see how its resolvable without success on the check.

The Adventurer League formatting is a problem. I thought I was getting used to the Dramatis Personae containing background information about the NPCs and while flipping back and forth was annoying I can see some advantages to this method of presentation. But only after actually running this adventure twice I noticed that some information about how to present one of the encounters is actually only in the Dramatis Personae and i missed it twice because of the formatting even though I thought I was being thorough. This is frustrating when GMing.

There is a stash of soul coins mentioned in the adventure, but it doesn’t seem to actually be recoverable and is not specified as to quantity. I actually think this SHOULD be a place where players can all received a Soul Coin each if they wish, because having a good quantity of soul coins is useful for many other encounters in the location and in subsequent adventures in season 9.

Its very impressive how much you get in 40 pages of this expansion for ToA. You get 3 scearios in Mezeo at three different tiers. You get a nicely detailed ruined city with thematic interesting inhabitants. You get stats for obscure dinosaurs. You get a cool thematic cleric domain and "Heretic" background. You get intriguing hints at some of the backstory for the TOA plot, and a way to interface more with Artus Cimber

All this for 4.95. Best thing I've ever bought for AL and I'd have paid twice as much!

i look forward to using this when we're done with TOA by letting the PCs pay Artus Cimber back for all the help he's been to them.

UPDATE: I had to take a point off after i noticed a bug with one of the main villains.

Nice solid intro. It makes me nostalgic to see all the factions represented and working together and disappointed that concept seems to have been dropped.

I don't know how the plot threads started here really worked out though.

Since AL at the time required monsters to defeat to get XP, and treasure lines to get gold, I was finding that my group wasn't leveling much or making much cash in Chult. So I got this to give some extra flavor and help. There are 10 miniscenarios, but I ended up only using 3, mainly because my group was all Tier 1 for most of the journeys through the jungle, and many of the encounters would have killed my group.

The 3 i used were interesting and flavorfull of Chult. My read of many of the others is they didn't really seem thematically tied well to the Chult revealed in the plot of TOA.

One example to me is the Pyramid of the Moon. While I appreciate that this is based on a bit of Realms lore that's actually located in Chult, it still seems very out of place thematically. This isn't helped by the (trite, to me) theming of the scenario around the lyrics to Hotel California.

This does not integrate well with the hardback adventure. There is a travel time issue with all of the missions as stated that has to be handwaved away to not cause failure of the hardback time limit, and it is unaware of faction bases that exist

Other than that the missions are interesting and fun to play, but I'm disappointed there isn't better fit with the things the hardback mission calls for and includes.