Dungeons & Dragons: Red Dragon’s Tale, D&D’s crossover with Lego, is now available. As I mentioned back when further details were announced, however, the full set’s a smidge pricey at $360.
In fairness you’re getting 3,745 bits of Lego for your buck—but still, it’s a dragon’s ransom unless you’re a hobbyist. Fortunately, you don’t actually have to buy the full set to play the adventure, which can be downloaded in PDF form for free on D&D Beyond. You’ll need to make an account to do so, however.
The conceit is that you’re a group stumbling into a tavern called the “Inn Plain Sight”, which is famous for its delicious hot wings. Not everything is as it seems, though—evil lurks in the shadows, a cat is missing, and the food seems suspiciously reheated. If you’ve ever been to a chain pub in the UK—imagine that, but there’s an ancient crumbling tower slapped onto the side.
The adventure is designed by Christopher Perkins, a prolific designer at Wizards of the Coast who has worked on adventures like Curse of Strahd, Out of the Abyss, and Storm King’s Thunder—though he’s been working for Wizards since 1997. As such, it’s surprisingly well-put together for an adventure that’s mostly hot wings focused, and—oh, right. Because there’s a dragon in the adventure. It breathes fire and has wings, very clever. I’m onto you, Perkins.
The adventure is designed for a party of four level 5 adventurers, though it’s extra designed for the prefab characters that the adventure (and the Lego set) comes with: an orc rogue, a gnome fighter, an elf wizard, and a dwarf cleric.
If I’ve got one point of complaint, it’s that the prefab characters included in the PDF read more as a shopping list than a sheet you could actually use. If you want to play, you’ll need to root around your books to take note of what their features actually do. Granted, if you’re playing a D&D Lego one shot, chances are you’re already familiar with the system and have the books in print or unlocked via D&D Beyond already. Still, this isn’t a starter set.
There are, however, rules for playing without using the D&D 5e system—wherein damage is dealt via coinflip, and you can avoid negative consequences by removing an accessory from your Lego figure. The displacer beast’s paw curls, though, since getting the full rules-lite experience requires buying the $360 set to make use of it, at which point you might as well have just bought the source books and done some reading.
Either way, the adventure itself looks like a fun romp through a corny version of your standard D&D setting, and great one-shot fodder if your usual group’s down a DM for a week.
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