This was just sort of WTF? I even had the chance to playtest this, our group submitted our feedback saying it was off, and nothing was fixed. It just doesn't fit with the rest of the season, if you got rid of the Innocent and the Raven, you would have a much better flow to the overall storyline, When I ran season 4, I almost skipped this one, but I was after that season completion, so I ran it anyway. Avoid if possible.

Out of the NPCs from season 4, few are as Memorable as Luca. Fewer still are the adventures where you can actually avoid most of the fighting... but the broken one stands as one of those few. The final boss is pretty amazingly disturbing and this adventure leads well into the subsequent one, unlike some of the later adventures Cough the raven Cough.

For the culminating adventure, it was a bit underwhelming. The first bit of exposition and the first combat counter were pretty amazing. The castle was a bit meh, if you are going to make her have minions, make the minions relevent, don't just give her garbage and expect her to be memorable. The horseman would have made a better "final boss" than the Darklord. I will say if you switch out her minions for something that actually makes sense, say npc's from volos? Then you have one hell of a fight, but as it is written the entire thing is pretty lame.

Why? Why did you make the greatest boss fight out of any module I have played or ran (I have played or ran pretty much everything to include available CCCs and Baldman Games), and put him into a disposeable story. It would have been so easy to build up this fight, foreshadow stuff in earlier adventures, just someone mentioning in passing, hey there is this headless horseman dude. But no, instead you create one of the most memorable characters and fights and make him barely relevent to the overall storyline except for the out of the blue thing that he has that the party needs.

If you get the chance to play this, I would definitely recommend it, but I would just note that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense within the overall season 4 storyline.

Skip it, it is like the person who wrote this module had no idea what was going on with the rest of the season and just did his own thing following the few guidelines given. There is a touch of story tie in, but the later modules have ways to explain not having done this quest and still having access to those story things. It isn't worth the time to play, it has a forgettable story and frustrating combats.

One of my favorite modules out of all seasons, decent role-play, decent combat, enduring consequences for player decisions. It has a little bit of everything, but still does it well. I would recommend this for almost any group were it not for the fact that it will get your character trapped in barovia and wind up either costing you downtime to get out, or it will take playing one of the later adventures. Still worth the play though.

A more investigational type adventure, with all the experience really tied to one brutal combat. Be careful to note the APL and how to scale as it is nearly impossible to have a very strong party. I Looked at the adventure wrong and I wound up killing everyone in the final fight. It is a decent module to play with a very popular reward.

I won't say so much as to spoil the mod, but it can be very combat light, and there are several twists and turns that have thrown off every group I have seen play through. I like puzzle mods, but for puzzle mods it only takes one person to spoil it for everyone.