Pretty good actually, my players enjoyed the early parts, especially gaining entry to the town. Some of the other encounters are fun too. Plenty of support material for the DM in here also.

“The Slaying Stone” marked Wizards of the Coast’s second pass at heroic tier adventure modules for D&D 4e, and as such it incorporates several years’ worth of innovations and lessons learned. The whole thing is written in a way that is very helpful for beginning DMs but never patronizing or insulting to experienced DMs. The storyline is pretty much in the “search for a MacGuffin, with complications” mold, but there are enough interesting NPCs and competing factions to keep things interesting. The layout and presentation are very nice, and the module makes the transition to PDF well, with just a couple of caveats about that. First, the module was originally designed for print, with the assumption that the writeups for tactical encounters would span two facing pages. Thus, if you’re running the adventure from the printed book, you just lay it flat and you have everything you need—all the maps and stat blocks and such—right in front of you without having to flip pages. This gets slightly more complicated if you’re running the module from a computer screen where you have to scroll up and down a lot, or on a tablet where you’re seeing one page at a time. The other big limitation, of course, is that the PDF version does not include the poster map that came with the printed version, so you’ll have to find an alternate way to construct those tactical encounter areas on your tabletop. On the other hand, the PDF is well bookmarked, something that doesn’t apply in print. Each version uses its medium well, although WotC could have gone one better by including printable maps.

HS1 is a first-level adventure, originally released in 2010. Its non-linear sandbox style was a nice change from the usual linear module, but required work by the DM to fill in the details. As this adventure has been extensively reviewed on the internet, I will review the PDF format itself.

The PDF consists of the 32-page adventure and a large two-page map. Like other book-to-PDF products, the adventure is in color, with color art. 1/4 page diagrams of areas for combat are included.

The PDF version of the two-sided map prints out as two sides of nine pages each (print in poster mode). Half of one side is a ruined level of a keep, with the other half a garrisoned bridge. The other side is the gate of city. While this gamer would prefer a poster map over a printout, you can conveniently make a second printout of the map for your own use. If you're up for it, you can cut and mount parts of the map onto cardstock and make your own tiles. The map does not cover all the areas used in the module. You will need a battle map or dungeon tiles.

Most of the monsters are of the common variety, albeit with specializations to spring on the players. Thus, the Monster Vault tokens should work with this adventure, and you should be pretty well covered if you already own the D&D Adventure Games, or are collecting the Dungeon Command games.