My group lapped this adventure up! I love the sense of dealing with forces far beyond the party's ability while they're still at a lower level, letting them get a taste of the chaos to come. There's a lot of room for variation here, while still maintaining a basically linear story.

Some highlights from when I ran it:

• I swapped the roles of Ma and Pa, making Ma the exasperated head-of-house with a useless, distant husband. One of the players ended up flirting with her and taking her out for a drink, where they learnt more about her fears of Tobbi leaving.
• The players subdued one of the guards on the lower level of the ziggurat, and got the low-down on what was going on. They convinced Vizzax they were trying to join his army, which of course he didn't question too much given how desperate he was for more recruits. The rouse worked and they nearly launched a surprise attack, but then the player with the planar key stepped towards the gate and opened the portal, giving the whole thing away!

I ran this as my first ever time DMing and it went down really well! It's quite thin on detail so I printed it out beforehand and scribbled notes all over it.

In particular, when the players are meant to discover an "underground operation", rather than having the players invent it, I made a room filled with different clues and had the player deduce what it was (an animal fighing ring). Then, between scenes they got to overhear chatter about a particular noble, who had young money. If they found the noble and brought him a drink, he says he got rich betting on a "big game". At the end, I gave the players bonus XP for discussing the mystery and working out certain details (what the operation is, how the noble got rich, why he sent the spy). I think we all had a lot of fun with this variation!

I found the lavatory scene wasn't very compelling and didn't seem to keep the pace as well as the other encounters. Otherwise, a cool first adventure! :)