Do you want to quest throughout mystical realms, battle monsters, and continue your journey across various adventuring groups? Then D&D’s Adventurers League may be right for you!
Below, we cover the basics of Adventurers League, from what it is to how to start running AL adventures as a Dungeon Master to finding a playgroup.
- What Is Adventurers League?
- How Does Adventurers League Work?
- Participating in Adventurers League
- Finding an Adventurers League Group
- Adventurers League Resources
What Is Adventurers League?
The D&D Adventurers League is the official organized play system of D&D. It allows your character to travel from one game table to another–across the world and even through digital play–all while keeping your character's progress and loot intact.
You can play Adventurers League at conventions, your local game store, or even at home. Just create your character, choose your setting, and join in on the adventure!
How Does Adventurers League Work?
Adventures in the Adventurers League are episodic. Each session is structured as a one-shot that lasts between two to four hours, but some recurring campaigns can be multi-session games that take you on a journey week after week. This modular approach allows players to hop in and out of games as their schedule allows, making D&D more accessible than ever.
After each session, player characters level up, and between sessions, they keep their loot, gold, and any other rewards they acquired during play. They also can perform downtime activities, like scribing spells and brewing potions.
What Adventures Are Compatible With Adventurers League?
Every official fifth edition adventure is compatible with Adventurers League. There are resources available for DMs to convert these longer, hardcover adventures into episodic sessions that can be run efficiently in Adventurers League play.
There are also Adventurers League adventures that follow storylines from official releases, like this fourteen-part series for Rime of the Frostmaiden, available on DMsGuild.
These series of adventures share settings, plot points, or NPCs with official modules and are referred to as "seasons." They feature storylines adjacent to the main plot found in published modules and are optimized for Adventurers League play.
If you’re looking for Adventurers League adventures created by the community, DMsGuild contains a wealth of options. Head to the DMsGuild Adventurers League hub to browse the catalog!
Participating in Adventurers League
Players
All characters created for Adventurers League must follow specific guidelines, which can be found in the D&D Adventurers League Player's Guide.
In Adventurers League, creating a character starts with selecting a campaign setting, such as the Forgotten Realms or Eberron, which determines the adventures your character can undertake. This choice is permanent for your character once you start playing, as some character choices from one setting don’t work within other settings.
Your next steps mostly follow the typical path of character creation, with some limitations. The list below is a generalized overview of the steps in the Adventurers League Player’s Guide. It’s recommended to read the guide thoroughly before creating your character:
- Choose a species or lineage, using the rules for a custom lineage found in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything if you wish.
- Pick your class.
- Assign your ability scores. You have two methods for this process: standard array or point buy.
- Pick your background, which you can choose from the options available or create using the Customizing a Background rule from the Player’s Handbook. You also choose a feat from Skilled or Tough if your background doesn't offer a feat.
- Pick your alignment, as long as it’s non-evil, your deity, if you want to worship one, and your faction, if you want to belong to one.
- Equip your character with their starting equipment or sell it for gold and use that to decide your loadout.
Be sure to reference the "What Rulebooks Should I Use?" sidebar in the Adventurers League Player’s Guide to determine which character options you have to choose from.
Congrats! Your AL-legal character is ready. All you need to do is find an Adventurers League game to join and start your adventure.
Dungeon Masters
The unsung heroes of Adventurers League are the DMs who spend their time and resources to make adventuring possible. If you’re interested in starting your Adventurers League tenure as a DM, be sure to thoroughly read through the Adventurers League Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Part of what makes the Adventurers League episodic structure attractive for DMs is that you only need to prep for the immediate adventure; you don’t need to worry about the setting’s lore or history. These adventures are only two to four hours long and include a relatively high amount of combat, which makes prep even more straightforward.
To sign up for Adventurers League events as a DM, search for your local game store using our store locator and contact the organizers. They will have information on what modules will be run and what materials you will need to bring.
Finding an Adventurers League Group
Part of the fun of Adventurers League is the flexibility to play with various groups, allowing you to enjoy a new set of companions each session. You can find groups at local gaming stores, connect with players on the official D&D Discord, or participate in in-person and virtual play events through the Yawning Portal.
Adventurers League Resources
Supporting Resources and Documents
- D&D Adventurers League Player's Guide v14.0
- D&D Adventurers League Dungeon Masters' Guide v14.0
- Adventurers League Adaptation Guide
Additional Links
- D&D Adventurers League Article Hub
- D&D Adventurers League Forum (includes "Resources and Links" pinned post)
- DMs Guild Adventurers League Adventure Hub
- Wizards Play Network Store and Event Locator
- D&D Adventurers League X (formerly Twitter) channel
- D&D Adventurers League Discord channel on the Official D&D Discord server
Join In on the Adventure!
Adventurers League is an excellent way for players and DMs to venture to new realms and play with new companions.
Whether you're an experienced player seeking fresh adventures or a newcomer to tabletop roleplaying games, playing at a convention or your local game store, Adventurers League provides an easy way to jump into the game and start playing D&D!
Keep an eye on D&D Beyond for more articles and updates featuring the Adventurers League!
Mike Bernier (@arcane_eye) is the founder of Arcane Eye, a site focused on providing useful tips and tricks to all those involved in the world of D&D. Outside of writing for Arcane Eye, Mike spends most of his time playing games, hiking with his girlfriend, and tending the veritable jungle of houseplants that have invaded his house.
ooh interesting, for years I heard about AL but never looked into this, thanks
Thanks for the answer.
AL is great, glad to see it getting more attention and being rehoused here where everything else is! Discord is all well and good for community chats but itâs a terrible place to have to go to hunt down basic information quickly.
AL has long suffered from a problem of being hard to find and hard to understand, which sort of defeats the purpose of how it is also a great way for new players to get involved.
I think an âorganized playâ tab on the right or at the very least a link from the sources tab is important.
My bigger-picture two cents that probably no one will care about: organized play was at its best when Wizards put out one big adventure hardcover a year and the AL season was based on content related to that hardcover. I love the Dungeoncraft program because itâs a great way for us to make our own AL adventures, but I miss the big seasons. Thereâs no reason we canât have both.
Seems like wizards could consider putting out fewer books per year, with a higher focus on cohesion and quality of the one they do put out.
The inclusion of third party content here with some hype from wizards is a great and extremely low-cost way for them to have more stuff for people who want it, but having that one big flagship adventure with a thematically connected AL series of level 1-20 adventures seemed to pull the community together with more of a shared experience.
Some really great books in recent years have kind of vanished in the relentless drive to put out more and more content, which no doubt comes from a corporate pressure to put out more quantity, sometimes at the expense of quality.
At the same time theyâve had to cut staff for different corporate pressures, mostly due to losses in other parts of the parent company. So with a leaner staff youâre really much better served to focus on quality, not quantity. Leave the quantity up to the masses of third party creators and take your cut by selling it here or on the guild, seems like a no brainer to me.
Anyway, I have no say in such things and people with MBAâs do seem to know how to ruin everything for short term gain, so Iâm sure this point of view will be ignored by anyone with actual power.
I hope this means WotC is going to stop neglecting AL. Someone tell a marketing exec that AL nights in a local game store is still one of the best ways to get people into the hobby who don't know anyone who plays D&D.
Bring back commissioned Season Adventures! Tell the authors to write more adventures that are easy to run at a table and can easily fit within a tight 4 hour time slot. Big open ended adventures which are great for home games, but very difficult for AL DMs with tight time slots who need to finish the adventure in a single session.
Pay an intern to fix the errors in the previous season adventures! Just ask in the D&D AL Discord channel which adventures have errors and we'll point them out for you for FREE!
At the very least, highlight the "good" community AL adventures on DMsguild! There are so many CCC adventures that it's hard for an AL organizer or DM to sort through and find the gems. Earlier in this thread someone mentions "Premiere Organizers". If they are the replacement for season adventures, they should be featured in their own section on DMsguild. Meanwhile, you should also run a monthly "Featured" CCC adventure for the rest of the authors, you can make it a contest with the "prize" being featured on the site.
All you need is one single employee dedicated to AL with the support to update the website in a timely manner to do all of this. Give the responsibility to Ma'at Crook and give them the support they need to update the website easily. You have a passionate community willing to do a ton of free work, DO SOMETHING WITH IT.
There probably needs to be an option in the main navigation for Adventurers League. I was telling a friend this was on DDB, but he could not find it because it was now buried under new posts. Perhaps a new option under Sources?
An entry under the New Player Guide section wouldn't go amiss. AL is a great place for new players to come in and try out D&D and meet new people
I mentioned that to them on Facebook but I don't think they got it. :D
Yeah, thatâs a really good point. I think it would be great to have pro designers make the AL âseasonâ that lines up with the latest big books, and make the DC program much more open and flexible (seems to be moving in that direction, at least?)
Just so you know, you can set DCs in Chult right now. They have Forgotten Realms opened as an evergreen dungeoncraft. No deadlines, and no restrictions on areas within the realms OTHER that it can't be a place that one of the POs is controlling. (So no Moonshae Islands or Bandit Kingdoms.)
While you can't do spelljammer anymore or the Feywild, you could connect to current season and have it in the border kingdoms of the Feywild, or have a spelljamming vessel dock and have the players end up in a border town or Sigil.
One of the fun things I've done the DC program is find a way around restrictions, they tend to breed creativity.
Anyhow, sounds like you should look at the latest rules, they have everything you've asked for.
You literally had a post in this conversation complaining about how not everyone wants to deal with space-clowns and beholders and such, and how you wanted to make an adventure in Chult. Now you don't want to make an adventure in Chult, but want to make it in Spelljammer? Are you actually interested in making a DC? :)
I say that as a joke, but honestly, you have all of the Forgotten Realms to write your adventure in, you can even make mention of Spelljamming... you just can't go off-planet. If you want an example of a Forgotten Realms adventure with spelljamming elements, look at the tier2 DDAL stuff from season 10. (Heck, I wrote one that had a spelljamming vessel in it in season 10, I had no idea that Spelljammer would be coming out in a few years.)
Now, as far as the "Crunch" -- we had over a year between when the option opened up, right when the book came out. They even extended the deadline because they had a delay at getting the updated docs for planescape out, so we had a long long time to do spelljammer adventures. I'll tell you from my own experience: players are looking for something OTHER than spelljammer right now, so ... It's a good time to switch anyhow.
And speaking as a serial procrastinator, you can certainly finish in a year. I finished my first one for this season December 2022, and I finished three more December 2023. (though my editing on the last three is bad, and I should feel bad about it.)
Just... trust me, give it a shot if you are actually interested. Clench your jaw a little, force yourself to look at it with as positive a light as you can, and you might find that you enjoy the process a bit more than you think you will.
AL is an organized play campaign, they've had seasons for quite some time. I mean, you remember "Season 1" and "Season 2" and so on.
They really encouraged us to PLAY the latest stuff, and we did. And they were tied to the books, and I don't remember it being much of a big deal.
Now that they've let the community create content, this is just a way to encourage us to create content in a similar fashion.
Looking at the closest analog, Pathfinder Society, they also have seasons. (When I had last checked, they didn't have a similar "PFS legal" program to the DungeonCraft program, but they might by now.)
You are free to write Planescape adventures, however. Just write it for the DM's Guild and publish it. AL is only a small subset of the overall DM's Guild titles, and you're free to use whatever you want for that, with a lot more open restrictions. (and they're pretty darned open, albeit you can't write for Greyhawk right now, for example). But you can mix Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, and Forgotten Realms all in one adventure if you wanted to, in that program.
However, "most of the DCs are made being rushed and poorly made." Hey, dude, we work hard on those. :) I know I did rush my last few, but my first was something that took a lot of effort, I had help from lots of people, and I'm really proud of it. And I know that a lot of other DCs are also labors of love. We're not getting paid very much for the work, so you know that if we're doing it, it's because we really want to see our stuff played. (Look up "Lone Survivors" for the one I mentioned here, but you can search my handle and find the rest of mine.)
But... I dunno, we just kind of disagree about the fact that there "shouldn't be a deadline." Having a deadline keeps things fresh, and I don't mind it. You do, and I can accept that you do. That's fine. :) I mean, I certainly hate the deadline when it comes rushing at me full steam ahead, but in an abstract sense, I don't mind them.
But I did want to make sure you knew about the Forgotten Realms being wide open and without deadline. That should provide you plenty of landscape to set at least one of the adventures you said you want to make, let me know when you do, I'll definitely check it out.
Maybe a visual guide would help, I couldn't find the toggle to indicate a character was AL to only see supported AL options, nor the AL log to keep the record of the sessions, items, and level up controls.
I didn't see any mention of those features in this article?
Anyone know where I can find an up to date logsheet?
The player's guide says "You should use a character log to track rewards and note any other important information from play of an adventure. See âAdventurers League Resources & Linksâ on the D&D Beyond Adventurers League Forum for more information." but the post in question says "D&D Session Log - available in May"
It's currently late June.
I can't even find the old one since the Yawning Portal site is down now.
EDIT: I found the old one. Last updated 2019. đ
I'm new to online D&D. Does D&D Beyond have it's own built-in system for video and chat, or does a secondary system need to be used?
I've no personal experience but You may want to look into Roll20 and Discord. It's currently in Beta but at some point should be free to access Roll20 via Discord.
Iâm looking for ALPHB version 14.1. Baffling that it would be posted on a third-party walled garden site before appearing here.
Nope, not at all. POs existed long before the AL team stopped creating storylines. Baldman Games and GameHole Con were POs with their own dedicated corners of the Forgotten Realms waaayyy back during season 7 in 2018.
The PO program is more like a replacement for the orignal version of the CCC program, when it was still "Convention Created Content", and only a couple handfuls of organzations were able to create adventures, before it evolved into the "Community Created Content" program right around the same time the PO program kicked off.
The replacement for the AL team-created seasonal storylines is the DRW storyline, which is done by Baldman Games these days, but is kinda incidental to them being a PO. Baldman still makes their Moonshae Isles storylines too.
Heartily agreed. Weird that the forum post dedicated to collecting these rules and pdfs in one location is controlled by a WotC employee who doesn't bother updating the links when said rules and pdfs get updated. That post could be one stop shopping for all your AL needs, but nah, I gotta go crawling through discord posts and hope I find the latest docs instead.
We're now on 14.2, I have applied both to the poster of the resources and the AL admins to get the resouces list updated, to no avail.
I am presenting AL to a large group of teenagers this week, and it would be nice being able to point them to a place with updated info without having to search discord for it.