Compently constructed, more or less, but frightfully dull.

Kobolds are threatening a town or something from a hundred miles away. You must kill their leader for 500 gold per first level adventurer (this kind of money from a village?)

There are many maps that convey very little. You get to see the layout of the huge peninsula and its position in the wider world. Nowhere is the dungeon your party must travel to marked. It hardly matters though because on the way there almost nothing will happen.

The party will notice 65 kobolds encamped. No information about what they are up to really, nor what they're doing encamped. If I ran this I would probably give the party a chance to realize they shouldn't be on the roads and then have them see huge parties of kobods moving on them in the distance, but here we get a little map with slopes and streams and so on. Fighting them would be instant total party kill. Capturing a scout makes sense but the GM is given no information to go on.

There's a set of cavern full of random kobolds and orcs, and a conversation to run into that the party probably won't be able to understand with the hook to drive the adventure onwards. So as written the party will likely have no idea how the adventure will progress from here.

In short, like many adventures it would take more time to make this playable than to create my own from the start.

The weird part is how much effort was clearly put into it. THere's many pages about the region and the history that barely matter and won't come up. Photos of real world places have been added to provide color to the locations being described that the players won't visit. New magic items are kind of neat and some have backstory the players will never know.

This feels more bad 3rd edition materiel than OSRIC, to me.

I didn't like it, but for somewhat opinionated reasons.

The art is great.

The framing is a little awkward to me (the town has Houses over a Random Dungeon and they get prestige and whatnot for raiding it). However it means that you will encounter both politics and factions underground in the form of competing parties which is a plus.

But I found too many of the encounters hodge-podge (there is handwaving to excuse the hodge-podge but I still don't like it). Also overall there was neither enough focus nor enough strange to hold my attention. The little strange that there was is appreciated.

There's also some strange gamification going on. You have to visit every room in level one before the gate to level 2 will open. To me, that spoils the choice of the megadungeon of deliberately choosing higher danger for quick spoils. Also it just limits choice in general. Also .. what? I dunno, that sort of thing just kinda ruins my immersion on either side of the table.

But what really turned me off was an adventure that's presumably a campaign starter with traps that do 3d6 damage, potentially wiping the party, without the party doing anything dumb. Yeah oldschool is supposed to be harsh sometimes but this just felt lame to me. And it isn't an isolated incident.

So low-coherence (though there might be more in later editions), high arbitrary mortaility, and some gamey-game mechanics. Some people might love it for these same qualities.

Personally, I found this fairly clunky to read through and get a handle on. There's a lot of stuff semi-detailed which might be ideal if you want to take raw materiel and mould it to your own ideas, but many of the elements of the area seem without clear concept or purpose.

There's definitely enough going on, built in, however, to make the adventures work without a lot of creativity from the game master.

What I really did not like was the organization. The numbering scheme led to a lot of duplicated numbers and repeats which made referencing maps and items unnecessarily clunky. In print this might be mitigated, but in a PDF it really hurts, at least for me.

This is all WITHOUT playing it. I might find a hidden brilliance when doing so, but it didn't really turn my crank in terms of the mini-adventures or setting either, so I probably won't get around to giving it that fair shake.

This is basically my favourite published TSR work ever. I love the puzzles, mood, setting, coherence, goals, everything.

However there are flaws with the pdf. No one corrected the OCR, so there are the typical errors like Ld4 and HDLL, but more importantly the map is very awkwardly cut into pages which makes it difficult to read in spots.

I've cleaned up my copy using ABBYY software and by scanning my original map, but really if WOTC is selling this they can do the same.

I'm loving this book of maps. I'm in the middle of crafting a quick little side journey and flipping through to pick out something suitable just instantly gets the mind churning.

Five stars for content, but with a portion of the map missing, it can only score three.

I found this to be simple and effective tool at doing what it says -- helping to keep resource tracking in the game and playable.

This is probably a 1e vs 3e thing, but these cantrips are way too strong for my idea of cantrips. They'll serve as inspiration for creating some, so I'll still enjoy it, but they seem more like 1st and 2nd level spells to me.

Unfortunately this adventure just doesn't work for me at all.

There's a ton of creativity here, but it's difficult to figure out what the creator meant in many places.

An example. While walking down the hall, a portcullis cuts the party in two! Is this meant to be special tests? 20 minute later I conclude no mechanism exists in the dungeon for raising the portcullis, so probably the party just has to force it up again somehow.

So it's just a time-waster. And there's no conjoined stuff going on nearby. Maybe it might be exciting if any wandering monsters show up, or if I decide to make some nearby kobolds be interested by the noise. But all the wandering monsters will be a TPK for the level 0 party with no weapons at this point (as per the adventure).

There's other clumsiness. i can't figure out how the dungeon levels connect. It's not stated, and the maps are ambiguous (and in places wrong). Sure I could wing it, but at that point I'm not sure what the maps are for. I can create my own at that point.

The first dungeon level features nearly unavoiadable NPCs who are described as soulless. It's implied that the party could theoretically end up fighting one of them, and more likely that they'll end up accompanying the players for a way. No stats are provided at all? I can make up stats for them sure but it's pretty weird when 2 rooms away there are extensive stats provided for a Lich that isn't even in the adventure. The author basically says "If you want to be a bastard to your players, you could make this skeleton a Lich... like these stats" complete with spell lists and magic items. It is quite haphazard to provide stats for what would be an immediate TPK (no stats needed) but none for NPCs who are expected to come with the players (they're described as combat-ready too!)

There are instant deaths everywhere. I can sort of understand instant deaths, especially when the players take an obvious risk. However in this case there are multiple problems. Many of these instant deaths involve no way for the players to know in advance (some may be fine with this). There are a large number of them so avoiding most is quite unlikely. To combine with this the given structure of the adventure (the party has been cut off entirely) means there is no means to replenish the party after a player's characters have died. Sure, I can retcon prisoners from the next room but this adventure might run out of rooms.

Meanwhile I'm fine with sexual themes being in adventures, but it seems awkward to me, in 2014, to presume that adventuers could only ever be interested in women, and that theme is repeated often. There are many female trophies to be had, and it's implied that the adventurerers must all be male. Ingoring gender themes in fantasy games seems fine with me, as does incorporating pulp themes of sex (provided all the players are on-board and comfortable), but doing it WHILE insisting that sex is primarily exploitative and only by men is pretty awkward. Of course another reader and party could see all this differently, but that's what I see here.

Overall, while there's a lot of creativity and good mood here, it's really just a confused sourcebook more than a coherent adventure. If you like pulp and remixed Lovecraft, then you may find it interesting as a pile of seeds, but running as an adventure would either require a careful cleanup, or more work to adjudicate on the fly than inventing from whole cloth.