This is fun little starter adventure for beginning characters. There is a mystery to solve, npc's to rescue, villians to thwart! Its a lot of fun.

This review concentrates on the printed version of the product. The printed module is taken from a scan of the original module that was produced in 1981. The cover reproduction is superb. It faithfully captures all of the important points of the original and the colors are vibrant. The interior text is legible but comes close to the page edge in some cases so you have to open the book wide to read the text on the right side of the leftmost pages. The scanned interior images lack the detail of the original and some are quite dark but overall they are not bad. The main drawback of the printed version is that the map of the Sea Ghost is missing. It appears that the back cover was inserted as an interior image (in addition to also appearing on the back of the book) in place of the Sea Ghost map. It's easy enough to print the map from the PDF and insert it as an unbound page but I purchased the print version so I wouldn't have to do this. I had the same issue with another print module (B2) that I purchased a year or so ago. If you buy the print version, don't expect everything in the PDF to be present in the hard copy.

the module is perfect! will definitely buy again! thank you!

I actually purchased this module shortly after completing it as a player. I really enjoyed my playthrough and wanted to see how much more depth there was to the adventure.

I have to say that Sinister Secret Of Saltmarsh is very a much a product of its time. In my experience a lot of older adventures have a lot of locations (rooms in this case) where there is nothing of importance and nothing happens. In most adventures I found that to be really tedious but in this case it actually works really well. The lack of encounters and traps early on does a great job of building tension and when the big mid-module reveal that the 'haunted' house isn't really haunted at all comes along it suddenly makes a lot of the emptyness make sense.

My one complaint about this product would be the quality of the images. I don't actually think this is the result of a bad scan or poor print but a lot of the original art is VERY dark and once scanned and reproduced it doesn't look very good at all. Most of the pure black and white images came out okay but a lot of the stuff that works more through greyscale is very rough. The worst case is the second image of Ned Shakeshaft which I can barely make out at all. I did also have a number of pages with the left margin cropped about halfway through the book which was more than a little disappointing.

Overall one of the better 1st ed adventures (in my opinion anyway) and a must for any Scooby Doo fan.

For an AD&D 1e module it's pretty well organized with inline monster stats (though you'd still need to look up THAC0s if you use 2e of course). If you want to run this in 5e, just use Ghosts of Saltmarsh. The module comes with two adventures: a haunted house and a smuggler's ship. There is a danger of your party not finding key secret doors that are needed to bring any sort of satisfactory conclusion in the haunted house.

When I ran this, my party ended up allying with the smugglers -- mostly because they weren't evil enough (they're just evading taxes). Of course if I hadn't decided that the drawer with the papers in it had the deed, they wouldn't have been able to. If you don't want your players to do that (and potentially rendering the smugglers' ship and U2 moot), I suggest you keep that in mind. Overall, it was fun to run.

Easily adaptable to 5e. I added some Scooby Doo style materials to make house more "interesting" - footprints, ghostly noises. You likely have to reduce numbers / types of baddies in certain areas to avoid TPK. Watch out for the ship encounter, especially if your players do not approach stealthily.

This is more of a rating of the scan and the support process, rather than the adventure, which others have covered here and elsewhere.

This adventure was put up for sale Nov 1, 2013. It had problems with cropped text from the beginning. Despite two updates (that I can recall), cropped text still exists in the version downloadable today.

I've contacted dtrgp/dndclassics/rpgnow about it at least twice, and contacted WotC once, as they are apparently who handles the scanning and updating/errata, etc... The issue still remains.

We're coming up on nearly 18 months since this was released, and this issue hasn't been resolved. I'm not sure who takes the blame for that, but I don't really think this is acceptable. I also don't think this is the image drivethrustuff and wotc want to put forth. So come on guys, get this, and the other adventures in a similar state, fixed. Pretty please.

Great module for a low-level introduction to a larger campaign. I would give it 5 stars but some of the pages were cropped on the scan. They really need to fix this.

As mentioned above, some pages are cropped in the scan. Also, after WotC recently reversed their block on PDF sales of old products, I read that these scans were re-done and OCRed. That did turn out to be true in the case of The Temple of the Frog, which I bought before the ban, and re-downloaded from RPGNow when it was available again. The maps that had been missing before were suddenly back in the new and improved scan. But The Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh still seems to have been scanned in the old haphazard way with no one having checked if the images scanned right, and it's of course not OCRed.

Still, it's worth not having to slog through the garage to run this module again.

The scan quality is very good EXCEPT for several pages which are cropped on their left margin. All of the odd pages starting with page 21 share this fault, although it doesn't impact the maps or handouts in the appendix.

The start of one of the best known TSR series. The scan is very good compared to many of the TSR scans and the adventure has 2 parts with a good combination of sneak, think and fight to occupy most if not all players.

Both the Danger at Dunwater and the Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh are flat-out classics to many D&D players. While they aren't as pretty or developed as modern DM's might be used to, they're still a fascinating read and a good insight into some of the better known early adventures.

This is a classic 1st Ed. module, with the flavour of a Scooby Doo story. As far as I can tell, there are no problems with this particular scan. <br><br> <b>LIKED</b>: It's a pretty good low-level adventure that allows for a fair amount of flexibility in the players' actions, especially the second part.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: By comparison to more modern adventures it feels quite slight in content, and the concept now seems a little cliched, but these are minor problems.

Actually, the problems really occur if you decide to run the whole U1-U3 mini campaign (sorry 'adventure path'). U2 can potentially be an even more slender adventure if the players use diplomacy, or failed utterly if they act like typical adventurers. U3 is perhaps much tougher than the characters will be ready for when they get there as well, although that's part of the design plan to enforce a more tactical scouting style of play over frontal hack 'n' slash.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Acceptable<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Satisfied<br>