I haven't had a chance to run this for a group yet, but I'm absolutely going to be keeping it in my back pocket for when the time arises! It has a bit of everything for new players to experience, including fun encounters.

Fun adventure. Slightly linear, but good for beginner group. Combat and tactics make room for group innovation. Enjoyed playing and running it.

Well met ADVENTURERS!!! The Black Road was an entertaining journey through the desert. The game mechanic of the RELENTLESS heat that was only lessend by a hard plot twist was great for RPr's to think around corners on. The intruige of night attacks and how to assault a fortress. Should we assault a fortress? Players had to make hard decisions in hard climate. The MOD kept them second guessing and rewards are wonderful for T1 ranged characters. Keep a weather eye on the horizon in the desert! ALL THE ADVENTURE!!! xVxORIONxVx

This adventure has it all! Roleplaying, combat, puzzle encounters and a nice rewarding finish.

The questgiver and its patron give a very nice mystique feeling ot the adventure.

The simple gobling encounter has an edge on so many other encounters in diffrent modules. The goblins have a goal, which gives them purpose and their right to be there. Following the next day, you can scare the group with the Zhents riding up and create some tensions. (If you didnt try and scare your group a bit at the strart its a good moment to name Adult Blue Dragons as inhabitants of the desert). After the riders, if the castle rolls up, the first thougth will be "Dragon". This thougth empowers the element, think on your feet and forces players to be creative. Dont be affraid to give them a hard time if they fail to grasp the need of the situation. Even when they lose a lot, bringing the statue to Parnast forces creativity then as well.

I personally like the encounter at the blockade more then the one that follows, but they are both solid final encounters before reaching their goal.

if you ran Tyranny of Dragons, it makes the town of Parnast a nice callback, which contributes to the adventure in a way.

I've played this module once, and run it twice. It is FANTASTIC for new players. Lots of RP problem solving with consequences later in the story. Hard decisions to make. Trickery from enemies, ambushes, and just solid action throughout. It's got everything most brand new players are probably looking for. Even the loot is great, with some fun unique flavor!

tldr: Perfect intro module for new groups.

Very good adventure, with a good mix of combat and roleplay. The last two battles is open to vary solutions. The magic Item is nice. Very Good.

A great all around mod with a great balance of RP, exploration and combat. A great mod for beginners to give them a good feeling of what the game can offer and get them invested.

One of my favorite modules to run for beginners! The desert environment allows huge opportunities to embellish the story and give the players some reality checks for the environment they operate within. Nicely balanced with combat, environment and social interactions. As a DM, role-playing Azim was a lot of fun.

One ofmy favorite mods to play and run. It is a great example of how a T1 mod can be used very well to introduce players to the various pilars - role play, exploration, and combat. Creativity is rewarded. It introduces the Parnast story nicely and really makes players want to invest more time in Parnast.

This was a fun adventure, and I enjoyed how it gave the player the ability to roleplay and an encounter other than combat. My one issue would be that if you have already played DDAL05-01 then the players are already in Parnast, and so having them have left only to journey back is a bit awkward.

The Black road is the 2nd adventure in the Storm King's Thunder, Spoilers ahead.

There seems to be some confusion on the APL for the title, It says 3 in the module, but I've seen comments from the author that it's 2. The group I had was 3 PC (1 level 1 and 2 level 2's). All of them very experiences D&D players.

This adventure was interesting. It starts out with Faction Hooks for each Faction. I didn't expect my players to take them so seriously, they really felt they had to destroy the goblins on the road. They felt that was there real purpose and not really escorting the statue.

The intial part of the adventure where the goblins attack went well. I always like when an adventure starts off with a quick fight. The goblins went down easy, but not before taking a driver with them. I thought that it was a good touch. I decided to do the optional Zentarim Mercenary RP encounter, they liked that, especially since one guy was from the Zentarim Faction. It was obvious that any fight with these guys would end up in a TPK.

When the Sandstorm hit, I was skeptical of my players coming up with ideas on how to save the caravans or the camels. A little prompting helped and I offered them to make rolls to find out what they could do. Maybe my guys aren't too creative, but it was an interesting problem but they didn't really have interesting ideas. They managed to save two carts and 4 camels.

The road block with the toll was also great. They immediately suspected some of the Hobgoblins were fake, but there rolls were really good enough to figure it out. The real humans were smarter than their PC's on this one. They decided to pay and then managed to figure out some where fake and decided to pay a visit later.

In the next part of the adventure, the party has a chance to figure out there is an ambush ahead, but it was way to hidden from them. Basically, you mention there is finally a bird other than a vulture and that's supposed to prompt them to investigate. That comment just blew over their head. Because of that, once they got to the fight, the rolling log really hurt. Save for half meant everyone took damage and with such a weak party, that was problematic. Lucky for them, the caravan driver was able to feed them some potions. I think it should have been more obvious about the ambush

After that fight, they wanted to go back and kill the hobgoblins, they adventure didn't really account for that and they would have been bummed to have killed them and then found no treasure. Someone had to leave, so we just finished the adventure.

One thing that did bother me was that the if you follow the adventure exactly, with the right party number and level, you won't even earn the minimum XP. You obviously get it, but I want my players to earn that XP, not just get the minimum.

Overall, my players liked it.

See my detailed review of DDAL05-02 The Black Road on my D&D blog without the spoilers that ruin the fun!

http://www.wizardslaboratory.com/the-black-road-ddal05-02-review/

Easy to run, a good starter adventure for new players or new DMs. I like how Season 5 really made exhaustion a possible thing and made travel interesting. We run this all the time at our game store.

Easy to run, interesting locale, and a good mix of combat, ability and skill challenges. I played through this with the authors, and had a great time and it taught me how to run it. So when I had to run it with no preparation, I was able to quickly and easily run the adventure and give the players a good time. Part of that is due to the layout of the adventure.

Good mix of combat and roleplay. We had 2 tables of this running simultaneously, and each ended up solving the various challenges differently. It was excellent to have good options to roleplay around an obstacle, or fight through it.

It is pretty likely that your players will fail the main mission, which feels bad, but is a good lesson in how life is failure. There are still decent rewards, even when that happens.

This is on my short list of adventures to keep ready in case I end up with an extra table.