A very fun mod and great intro to the Parnast mini-campaign, especially because it gives an extremely convenient set of hooks to bring a party of new characters together if one is A) lucky enough to be starting such with a regular group, and B) said regular group cares at all why their characters happen to be gathered together. Pacing is just right, there are good opportunities to use skills, and the encounters are well-balanced for the target group level. Last but certainly not least, excellent selection of magic item with a very useful minor property.

This is my favorite season five tier 1. The traveling part is tralky great and smooth. The hobgoblin encounter is great with lots of options.

One of the very few modules in DDAL that I keep DMing over and over again. Everytime a new player wanna play a game with his friends - this is a a go-to module for me. Options are amazing and everything seems to be work smoothly. However the only problem I find is the lack of reasoning of how players actually got to oasis without buying the desert gear first.

Really good little module here. I have run it many times, mostly for players entirely new to the game. It works really well as an intro adventure for a couple of reasons:

• It's short - around 2 hours of runtime keeps new players from losing focus, and forces the action to keep moving
• Good mix of roleplaying and combat encounters - This one presents a really challenging roleplaying moment as you have to decide what resources you have to sacrifice. The combats are fun and engaging
• Player choice - player decisions have a VERY real impact on how the story and events unfold

Overall, a great module. It has a unique atmosphere in relation to the rest of season 5 given its desert setting, and transitions players in a great way from the Moonsea setting of previous seasons and CCC into the Sword Coast. This will continue to be my go-to for new players, even over DDIA or 5 episode modules.

A brief and fun escort mission, which leads directly to "Uninvited Guests"--one of my favorite modules.

Good start to the season, a fun little escort mission. Looking forward to how this all plays out.

The Black Road is a good adventure that introduces one of the story lines in Storm King's Thunder. Bad Fruul's name will be mentioned and it will be important because it is the storyline's antagonist. The adventure is straightforward and simple and there is a fun combat in the end. The players may interact with the NPCs or with the enemies in the end but the combat may hurt the new players. Overall it is a fun adventure

Very good adventure. My group never saw the sand storm coming. I will be running this adventure again and again. We had wished it had more combat scenes.

Solid tier 1 adventure. For a target of 2 hours, I felt that this adventure did a great job of having a hook, the middle, and a conclusion; it felt very well encapsulated for a stand alone. The author did a great job anticipating player choices, giving the ability to handle some encounters in different ways and then had potential repercussions to follow up on some of those actions. The sand storm was a great player decision point as they needed to figure out what would be best save from the caravan and how to accomplish that. Incredibly good starter adventure for season 5.

*This review is written from the standpoint of an Adventurers League game

*Review contains spoilers

Overview – The adventurers find themselves being hired to transport a statue across the Anauroch desert to Parnast. But of course, there’s no such thing as a simple escort mission! Sandstorms, raiders, and villainous tollbooths all threaten our heroes and their cargo from reaching its destination. Will they survive? Will their cargo?

General thoughts – This is a fun mission with a twist. Not only do the characters have to kill their enemies and not get killed, they have to protect the cargo. It is entirely possible to survive and get a partial reward while still having failed at their objective. This makes for a fun change of pace. The adventure provides a good variety between combat and social interactions, and allows for a little bit of variety in taking different paths to reach the objective. Overall, it is a solid outing.

Combat – The combat is fairly engaging. Raiders attack the caravan at night, and whether the characters are alert enough to stop them quickly might have a significant impact on whether their cargo survives. Characters can choose to pay a toll or fight the toll keepers, but if they pay the toll, they’ll be ambushed later down the path. All the combat occurs in nice set-pieces that help provide engagement.

Exploration – There are some alternate means of handling encounters, which is always a nice bonus.

Social – Early in the adventure the characters will have to determine how to protect their cargo from a terrible sandstorm (stirred up by a Cloud Giant’s castle!). Role playing and skill checks determine the success or failure, and this has a significant impact on the outcome of the adventure.

I thought this was a great module. I really liked that there they to deal with the environment/weather and having a good variety in the encounters. I like that the players had options at the gate in how to get past and that it was just not a choke point (even though might have thought it was). I also liked that the monsters tatics were shown by their tatics at the gate.

This mod needs a better maps for the gate. I was luck enongh that another DM had created a better map to be used for that encounter.

This adventure was very fun to run through. It has some combat, some diplomacy, and some out of the box thinking in it. Overall it's very straight forward but each encounter the players come up against has multiple solutions. Our store had multiple groups running this adventure at once and each group had a different path entirely.

Overall I had a very fun time running this for my players. The skill chalenge from the sand storm allowed for some really creative problem solving. I had ruids who were talking to the animals, and a soldier driving wagons. Pacing it was ok. I completed the adventure in just over four hours. Roll playing the hobgoblins at the wall and the merchants at the camp took the longest. My party bypassed the Zhentarim and that saved time. Overall it was a fun adventure full of skill chalenges, interesting combat, and was well scaled to challenge the party.

This makes a good introduction module for new players and a big breath of fresh air if you've been playing the previous season. You can see the sun and lots of it!

There is no back story, everything is new and simple. The party is recruited to guard a caravan across a desert: Basic soudning adventure, and it is pretty simple to play. Like any road trip, you travel and have an encounter, then travel and repeat. There are enough battels to challenge any party and some good role playing opportunities as well.

The only danger I found with the module, was that my group all paid more attention to their faction mission than to the job they were hired to do, it led to some characters getting a little crazy, though in the end it all worked out fine.

The module finishes by arriving in Parnast, which will be the base of operations for the season and this modules gives a few hooks leading inbto those adventures.

I really enjoyed this mod. I enjoyed running it. I enjoyed the combats. I enjoyed the challenge of the desert. This and DDAL05-01 were the modules that informed me that this would be a great season to run. I felt that the combats were challenging with no holds barred. The players were scared just to the brink of being beaten, but they weren't, they won! I also liked the introduction of Bad Fruul, the main antagonist of the season 5 tier 1 series. It was well done, allowing for the players to realize that something was wrong without too much information being shoved into thier faces. I feel that the challenge of saving the carts really made the players think about what to save and what was going on, although I would've liked slightly more description on what would happen if the players lost the food or water wagon, or if they lost the stuff that they were selling generally, etc...