Last night I ran LFR, specifically AGLA 2-1 the Undumor Connection. I don’t care for AGLA 2-1, let me tell you. The premise is good enough, it’s basically a situation where Aglarond and Thay are at war, it’s going poorly for Aglarond, and the party gets recruited by the Aglarond intelligence service to extract a spy from the occupied side of the country. So the party crosses the border, infiltrates the city, finds the spy, completes the spy’s mission, and gets back to Algarond. There’s a fight on the way across the border going in and another one going out, and a fight during the extraction.

So, here’s the stuff I don’t like. One, there’s this lengthy briefing about the elaborate system of castes the Thayan occupation has set up in occupied Aglarond, which has zero to do with anything in the adventure. The briefing indicates that the higher-caste identifiers can’t be forged, but there’s no explanation about that and no guidelines for forgery. This derailed the adventure early on as the party became convinced they needed to forge some identifiers and I ad-libbed. Second, the party is presented with a few different options for getting across the border, but it’s all a smokescreen because they’re funneled into a fight regardless of what their plan is. What ought to be the most exciting part of the mission, sneaking around the occupied city and searching for the spy, is completely abstracted down to a single Perception check. And finally, getting out of the city is another situation where an apparent skill challenge is really just a smokescreen for a combat.

I only ran this adventure because I prepped it for another LFR day with a different coordinator, who had picked it for some reason, and I had to cancel on that, so I had the combats adjusted — that is, I boosted the damage on the foes by about 20% and cut their hit points by 20% also, which shaves a round or two off of the combats. Things might have gone more smoothly if I had spent an hour that day reviewing the adventure and changing more — this is something I usually do, but I didn’t have time yesterday — but I shouldn’t need to change that much to get a workable adventure for me and my group.