First of all, I want to state right off the bat that I've been running this adventure for my players for weeks and they are LOVING it, and I am overall enjoying DMing it. I would definitely recommend the adventure overall.
The backstory and way the party finds out slowly in many ways how how badly the city was built was a great read and fun to watch the players uncover. You can really feel the weight of the setting and the history of The Pristine City from finding out a little more in exploring each location. The variety of setpieces have been great at keeping a very long adventure fresh, and truly makes it feel like you're exploring an entire small city. I also loved the very sandbox feel of the adventure, after the first two locations, the players were very much set loose in the city to explore where they wanted, and they loved having that much freedom of choice.
The slow collapse is a great mechanic, although I haven't been keeping score as outlined in the adventure and have just been slowly adding more and more description of collapse and dangers, but it works and adds such a great background threat, giving the players a real sense of urgency.
It's been very easy to adapt into my own campaign, so there's some pieces I've thrown out nearly entirely (like the reason the party is there in the first place) and places where I've added a lot to it to further plotlines I'm working on elsewhere.
I was afraid that such a big adventure would grow stale, but my party has explored almost everywhere except for the gardens and the tombs, we've probably put 14 hours into the adventure already and I'd guess have at least 6 to 10 more to go.
That said -- I do have several suggestions for improvements.
1) It's possible the adventure is just still a little too big. I've cut out all of the random encounters with the rolling the die while travelling mechanic, and have instead turned all of those into more minor collapse events, unless the player rolls a 1 on the die, and even then give them a decent chance to sneak away unnoticed. I cut several other repetitive extraneous encounters throughout the module. There's just so much in this module -- which is a good thing! -- that so many random encounters just aren't necessary.
2) Going along with that -- there are still too many repetitive encounters. I ended up making a few of the ettercap and other "yep the party has already fought these monsters two or three other times" enounters into other monsters that still made sense in the setting.
3) This is the big one -- The file is too big / poorly optimized. I have a fairly beefy gaming PC and scrolling through the PDF is a nightmare. Every page takes two or three seconds to load, making hunting for information cause awkard pauses in the session, unless I can control+f to the right place. I took other measures to get to that information easily as much as I could.
4) The content of the PDF is somewhat poorly organized for some places -- because the file was so big and the scrolling difficult, I wasn't as descriptive of some of the neighborhoods as was probably intended since the descriptions of neighborhoods was in a different location as some of the buildings themselves.
5) And again with the file size... The maps need to be extracted and in their own file(s). Trying to extract them, then resize them, edit them, and put them into the VTT was a hassle. A lot of them weren't easily alignable to the grid. Also often the poor optimization made them appear broken on my screen and I'd have to page up/page down several times before I could even get a clean shot of the map to extract. Also, there's no player-friendly maps so most of the time I'd need to photoshop the DM info out. The style was also a bit plain and dull, I ended up finding other maps online to subsitute for many locations since working with the maps provided was a chore.
6) And finally, again with the file itself -- there should be a printer-friendly version. I ended up printing a few of the most important pages off so I wouldn't have to scroll as much while trying to play, but the background which looks great in the file, uses a lot of ink while printing. So there was no good solution except to try to minimize my need to scroll in the pdf during each session. (I also screenshotted other pages I thought I'd need to reference occasionally, which also helped cut down on scrolling, but I wish I hadn't needed to.)
But again -- overall the adventure itself is fantastic and I highly reccommend, with just some suggestions as above to make it better and easier to run.
|