This is so helpful to me as a person new to DCC. It is so straightforward and easy to follow and is helping me connect some adventures!

Really enjoyed running the dungeon crawl (belly) portion of this adventure! It sloted in perfectly to an underwater campaign. My players overeacted to every encounter and became pretty invested in the whale. Made for a great 3 hour session.

Good intro to Shadowdark, here's what I like:

• includes premade PCs. A MUST for any intro game. Starting them at L2 was also good
• Watching my players RP their rumors was golden. I'm going to do this in my future games.
• Liked how it did the trek to the dungeon
• I liked the timers, but my players only ran out of time in scene
• Puzzle in scene 7 was great
• Good chase mechanics during the climax

But I ran into pain points while running it:

• Multiple scenes are unclear about if the torch timer should be on. This is a critical part of Shadowdark and should be introduced in the adventure.
• The puzzle in scene 8 killed my player's excitement, which is bad bc it was right before the climax. Needed to have more clues
• The last scene has such an evocative setting! But it's not really used imo
• What does the soulgem do to the dragon? A player was able to insert in the dragon's head before it was killed. I ruled it as a win con.

In all, I think the author can fix a lot of these problems. Giving it fours stars because of that, and because Scene 1 was all it took for my 5e players to want to try more Shadowdark. So it mostly does the job of an intro adventure.

Useful random tables for a low fantasy wilderness setting. The full PDF is available to view before purchasing. The section designed to "to inspire strange features and weaknesses", and Bob's accompanying advice, is great. Worth a look.

I've spent a lot of time trying to find a reasonable middle ground between the extremely complicated "running a business" rules i've found, the overly simple rules (looking at you DMG), and the rules that aren't fully baked (AI anyone?). This hits the sweet spot. I still had to tweak it slightly, but not too much. It's playable right out of the gate, and is excellent with a little TLC.

Easy to read and incorporate into my game! Appreciate the work that went into this and the additional flexibility that the options provide.