“Rrakkma,” by Chris Lindsay, is not necessarily the first Adventurer’s League module that goes into the planes—though I’m pretty sure that it is, I’ve had a legitimately difficult time discerning if there’s something earlier due to issues with access—but it is a far cry from what Adventurer’s League content is being made right now in 2025. As such, let’s begin with a little bit of context before we get to the adventure itself, and only partially because it’s hard to say much about such a short, lore-sparse dungeon crawl.
One of the few real successes of the Fourth Edition era came from the RPGA’s introduction of the D&D Encounters program, in which every week there would be a new adventure released that largely consisted of a single encounter, thus the name. The D&D Adventurer’s League is Fifth Edition’s rebranding of the old RPGA organized play setup, essentially capitalizing on that popularity and growing it into something more enjoyable and fitting for Fifth Edition. Here I’m going to quote from our old standby, Shannon Appelcline, at great length simply because he’s already done a great job summarizing this program and I see no reason to do my own, lousy spin on something I’ve simply never taken part in:
Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition released in 2008, but by early 2010 it was obvious that the game needed a little something extra to get it to the level of success that Wizards required. This would result in two major expansions in 2010 that were each intended to help the game appeal to a more casual demographic that wasn’t currently playing it: Essentials and Encounters.
Encounters was an organized play initiative. Wizards of the Coast supplied GMs across the nation with adventures to run on Wednesday nights. Players could either use pre-generated characters or provide their own 1st-level characters. Each night’s adventuring contained just a single encounter. These sessions were billed as running 60-90 minutes in length, but a few of the climatic encounters in Season 1 ran 2.5-3.5 hours for some groups.
By running Encounters simultaneously across the nation, Wizards hoped to take advantage of social media; they envisioned people talking about the games on Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, comparing their experiences with those of other players across the nation.
Wizards kicked the program off when they shipped Encounters GMs the first 12-part adventure, a 56-page book called “Undermountain: Halaster’s Lost Apprentice.” Like all of the Encounters books, this one became an instant collector’s item because it wasn’t available to the general public (until now). GMs ran the first of the 12 Encounters in “Halaster’s Lost Apprentice” on March 17, 2010. The season ran through June 2, 2010.
Overall, the Encounters program would prove extremely successful. Though neither it nor Essentials made D&D Fourth Edition into an unprecedented success story, the Encounters program was well-loved; it got attention on CNN and elsewhere and was successful at drawing players into game stores to play. Eleven Encounters seasons ran through late 2012, before the program took a short break and shifted over to a mixed 4e and D&D Next format in 2013.
It was at this point that the whole organized play program was rebranded, but if anything it only became more successful with early Fifth Edition. In particular, once the program became open to any organizer, not just participating retail locations, the League became briefly huge. Baldman games released many seasons of official D&D adventures during this period, which supplemented the big hardcover releases and meant that Fifth Edition players had a ton more content to choose from than DMs from just a few years prior. What’s more, the sessions were longer and divided into tie-in seasons related to the main Wizards of the Coast hardcover releases.
None of which even really covers something like Rrakkma, which was another type of ancillary product also released under the same Adventurer’s League format but unrelated to the seasons being played (it was a tie-in for Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes). Plus there were many convention-exclusive Adventurer’s League modules, including ones only playable when the actual designers were present. It was one hell of a program with hundreds of officially produced releases bringing excitement and joy across the world throughout the golden age of Fifth Edition D&D. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t.
Following 10 seasons of officially released adventures, plus a side campaign titled Dreams of the Red, Wizards of the Coast unceremoniously stopped publishing official new adventures in mid-2021. The logic of this has never been clear to me, and I’d love to read more about what really went on behind-the-scenes. Was it some hatred of Baldman Games, who authored many of these modules? Was it simply a question of profits? I have to assume that it was a cost-cutting measure, but it’s also the type of short-sighted decision that kills all interest entirely, at least from my standpoint. With the deaths of Dragon and Dungeon there was a need for momentum between large, hardcover releases, and the Adventurer’s League was what supplied a lot of this and kept people enthusiastic about D&D in particular rather than other RPG’s.
Once the Adventurer’s League seasons of new modules ended, in the place of official and well-edited products we were left with a nigh-infinite glut of fan-produced content on the DMs Guild website released through the Dungeoncraft program. Anyone could now make an AL module, so long as they followed a few basic rules, but official support disappeared without warning. Technically the AL program still exists today, and probably people are still playing it? I guess? That part’s unclear to me, but either way the officially released new content is gone, and as far as I’m concerned this ended the AL program with one, swift blow.
We’ll be diving further into the League soon enough, as the tie-in season Avernus Rising in particular seems planar, and there’s a handful of other releases I’ve got highlighted for reading even though rooting through the non-seasonal content is probably beyond the scope of this project (not from lack of interest, simply lack of accessibility—as with earlier generations of RPGA content, while releases were “official” and published by the owner of the D&D brand, often they were only available at one particular con and have never been made generally available). But for now, let’s jump back to Rrakkma, even though its actual content isn’t terribly exciting.
The basic setup for Rrakkma is barely existent. Mind flayers have “constructed a powerful psionic artifact that when powered up, will allow them to resume control over the race of gith. It is designed to neutralize them psionically. So much so that once lost, they will never regain their formidable abilities.” Both the githyanki and githzerai civilizations are either ignorant or uncaring about this development, meaning it’s left to the Sha’sal Khou to rescue the gith people from their enemies, which is another way of saying that the designers came up with an excuse to allow githzerai and githyanki characters to play together in the same party. Unfortunately, gith are the only characters for this adventure, to the point that “Rrakkma” is designed exclusively for a group of pre-generated characters, all of whom are gith. If that’s not what you’re into, then tough luck.
And likewise, if you thought that there would be some real roleplaying and not just dungeon crawling involved with “Rrakkma,” that idea will be forcibly kicked out of your head almost immediately. The PCs “begin the adventure standing about one-hundred feet from a gate to Pandemonium,” and rather than try to offer a bunch of exposition as to what they’re doing and why, there’s a lengthy list of what exactly the characters already know, most importantly, “The mind flayers have traveled through a nearby portal to the plane of Pandemonium, where they are rumored to have located a direct path to the Far Realm.” The entire first chapter of this adventure is just a quick bit of exposition and a brawl outside the portal. Hope you enjoyed that encounter, because there’s a lot more of the same in store.
Pandemonium in “Rrakkma”/Fifth Edition aligns surprisingly well with the Planescape version, to the point that the module includes a rather fun “Indefinite Madness” table for characters who fail wisdom saves against the plane’s howling winds:
A visitor must make a DC 10 Wisdom saving throw after each hour spent among the howling winds. On a failed save, the creature gains one level of exhaustion. A creature that reaches six levels of exhaustion while on this plane doesn’t die. Instead, the creature gains a random form of indefinite madness, as described here. Finishing a long rest doesn’t reduce a creature’s exhaustion level unless the creature can somehow escape the maddening winds.
It’s an excellent mechanic, and while not nearly as thorough or creative as the “Everyman’s Madness” table in Planes of Chaos, it’s still a fun addition.
However, players won’t be spending any time at all wandering the twisted labyrinth of Pandemonium, instead they’ll be cloistered away in a temple, which is described as offering “wind free reign” because of its stone walls. Which means that there was no point at all in that information about Pandemonium. None. What the hell was even the thinking behind spending so much space writing about a plane with special traits that will go completely ignored?
The temple seems to have once belonged to a suitably insane cult, and most of what’s interesting about this adventure is derived from the location. There’s a purification chamber, where “Priests would strip naked and use the wax and cloth strips to remove all hair from their bodies before scrubbing themselves vigorously (sometimes to the point of bleeding) with the pumice stones.” There’s a torture chamber, a library, a cathedral, and even a statuary. None of it is terribly evocative, though, and players will be unable to learn almost anything at all about the temple’s original inhabitants.
At the end of the adventure, PCs will find the portal to the Far Realm, which causes light confusion but is described as an incredibly boring “duplicate [of] the same space as the cathedral the adventures just left.” As such, I didn’t understand why this part of the Far Realm might cause confusion, as it’s just another room. It felt like maybe something grander was originally planned, but as it stands the conclusion is just as mediocre as the rest of the adventure.
And, umm, that’s it. Players who win can be awarded with a star spawn kitten named Grahkkl (“a fuzzy little ball of drool, love, and what is ostensibly cat-flesh … It always loves to knock trinkets, knick-knacks, and especially tea cups off of tables and countertops”) so it’s not all bad, but there’s no real denouement or explanation about where things go from here. The bigger question, which is why would the mind flayers, with access to a powerful artifact able to completely defeat their most powerful foes, forever, send a tiny squadron of half-assed fighters, never gets mentioned, let alone addressed. In all, it’s disappointing and doesn’t even pretend at being more than surface deep.
On the plus side, “Rrakkma” is the first planar adventure for Fifth Edition. On the more negative side, it’s illogical and pretty much sucks all the way through. I definitely don’t recommend playing through it yourself, or even reading through it, and can’t help but hope that the AL content we look at from here gets better. “Rrakkma” is about as far removed from Planescape as you can get, and only of interest to real die-hard weirdos—anyone interested in exploring cool parts of the planes can skip it entirely.
