Earlier this year, Wizards of the Coast released Dragon Delves, the first adventure anthology published since the 2024 5th Edition core rulebooks has been released. Overall, I think it is a great book. Just like any adventure book, it depends on what you’re looking for. It is not a perfect book and I have some of my own issues with it, but the art is fantastic, it’s a great option for someone who wants their campaign to be centered around dragons, and each adventure is really unique in its storytelling and adventure style which makes it great for pulling it into an existing campaign or running it as a one shot.

When they announced this book, one of the features that the D&D team highlighted is what they call “solo adventures”, (which is a bit of a misnomer because it still relies on having the adventure run by a Dungeon Master). There are 3 adventures in Dragon Delves that they said was designed to run with just one Player Character, or PC (and again, with a Dungeon Master). I thought that this was a great idea. This is something that many in the community was asking for (minus the Dungeon Master), and my kid and I love playing D&D in this style, so I wanted to run this adventure for them.

But after running one of the adventures, I found that their solo adventure design was a good start, but wasn’t complete to make this a fun experience as is.

Blessing Of The Lone Champion Feature

In the “Introduction” chapter, Dragon Delves talks about their solo adventures and how they’re “particularly well-suited for play with a single adventurer” (which, I’ll address that here later). If you are running one of these solo adventures, the player character will gain a Supernatural Gift called the “Blessing Of The Lone Champion” feature.

This feature gives the PC Heroic Inspiration whenever they finish a Short or Long Rest and whenever they roll for Initiative, which is a solid move and I think does help a lot.

The PC will also gain a number of Temporary Hit Points equal to 10 times their level when they gain this blessing and when they gain a level. This detail omits if they receive it when the PC takes a Long Rest, however, which means that they lose those Temp HP and it doesn’t say they gain them if they take a Long Rest, so that’s either an oversight or the designers probably imagined that the PCs wouldn’t need to take a Long Rest. For… whatever reason.

In addition, each solo adventure will also make recommendations on what skill proficiencies the characters should have as well. So in theory, this sounds like this could be really helpful by having these boons.

But after running Baker’s Doesn’t as a solo adventure, I realized that these feature is not enough to run solo adventures.

The Challenges With Running Solo Adventures In Dragon Delves

As we were playing this level 3 adventure from Dragon Delves, there were a couple of things in particular that I thought was really worrisome that the book doesn’t seem to address or mention for the Dungeon Master.

First, even though the “Introduction” Chapter says that this is an adventure “particularly well-suited for play with a single adventurer,” – it wasn’t. At least, not as is. When you read these adventures, they only have a brief paragraph about the skills that characters should be proficient in and a reminder about taking the Blessing Of The Lone Champion, but everything else is written as a normal adventure.

Second, the challenge we had when we ran this is that some of the encounters, in spite of these boons for the player, were still extremely difficult as is. (Spoiler Warning for this adventure)

The two encounters specifically that I had to adjust for on the fly was the Chocatrice Barn (which include 4 Cockatrices that are made out of Chocolate) and the Gummy Mummy’s Tomb encounters. If you’re not familiar with Cockatrices and Mummies abilities, Cockatrices has Petrifying Bite, which has the potential to Petrify you. And because they’re four of them, even with having Inspiration, you are probably going to have your PC lose this combat and become Petrified for the next 24 hours. This encounter doesn’t seem to have written in a way to resolve this if this happens, either.

The encounter with the Mummy was also worrisome because not only was that encounter with a Mummy and two coconut Ice Mephits way over the recommended XP Budget for the encounter, but the Mummy has an ability called Rotting Fist which, if the PC gets hit with it, curses them. And while they’re cursed, the PC can’t regain Hit Points, its Hit Point maximum decreases by 3d6 every 24 hours, their Hit Point Maximum doesn’t return to normal when finishing a Long Rest, and if they are reduced to 0 Hit Points from this attack, then the PC dies outright. For a level 3 solo adventurer, this is deadly, especially if you can’t remove the curse.

And again, the adventure doesn’t make any sort of recommendations on how to handle these encounters if it’s a solo adventure play, probably because they thought that the Blessing Of The Lone Champion would be enough, which clearly wasn’t.

What You Should Plan For When Running Solo Adventures

So after running this adventure, here are some tips that I think would be helpful for you if you decide that you want to run a solo PC adventure. This would still include using the Blessing of the Lone Champion because I think that is still going to prove very helpful, but here are some other things you should probably do as well.

• Reminders about deadly encounters. Emphasize to your players that not every encounter has to be resolved with combat. They have options like trying to convince their opponent to join their side, to not attack, manipulate them or some other clever solution. They can also even try to run away if they want. (My problem was, my player said they are playing specifically for combat. So… none of those were ever an option for them.)
• Review and rebalance encounters. As I mentioned in the two previous encounters, as is, they were deadly. A solo level 3 character has a High Difficulty XP of 400. If you did Level 4 to take into consideration the Lone Champion feature, it would be 500. The Chocatrice Barn encounter was 400 (and one of many encounters in the adventure) and the Gummy Mummy’s Tomb was 900. Both of these were ridiculously high by themselves and neither one of these were the main conflict in the adventure. So going back through and reviewing the XP Budget and each monster’s ability to think about how it may pose a problem for a solo character is a good practice to use.
• Provide Magic Items. This can be done either at the beginning or you can provide it as a way that characters can discover during the adventure, especially ones that can help with the challenges like being Petrified or being cursed. To still make it challenging, you can give it as a one time use (e.g. spell scrolls or potions) so that way it’s like a one time “save scum” so they can have another attempt at figuring out how to resolve that encounter in a different way.
• Have a second PC or sidekick. The solo player can run two characters if they’re comfortable with that, or they can have a friend play and make it a duo adventure. You can even create a sidekick to accompany the solo adventurer, which there is guidance for this in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.

Future Of Solo Adventures

The fact that we have a few solo adventures in this book hopefully means that we will get more in the future. I think this is something that is strongly needed and desired in the D&D community, and as a father, it would be great to run more of these with my kid. But I also hope that they take this opportunity to learn that more is needed to make these solo adventures work by adding more helpful tips for Dungeon Masters and more feature options for PCs.