A really fun adventure to run! Looking forward to running the sequel. But also a number of issues that requires signficant DM improvisation in order to fix. Not for novice DMs.

Warning: Possible Spoilers

Pros:

• Very immersive. Sets the scene with descriptions of locations and NPCs in a way that makes it really easy for DMs to run even if they aren't good improvisers, and very much makes a difference in terms of player enjoyment. In particular the DM is given enough quotes to really breath life into the Archfey without much difficulty.
• Plentiful quality maps provided for every potential scene, even unlikely ones. The dedication here is excellent.
• Gives the players a real sense of freedom of choice while still keeping the plot straightforward and uncomplicated.

Cons:

• Combat balance is waaaay overtuned. If you run the fights as recommended, TPK probability is very high. After the adventure, I punched in the numbers into an encounter calculator and every single one of them was rated beyond deadly by some distance. I get that Archfey are supposed to be powerful and all that, but if the combats were meant to be this hard then this adventure should have been built for Tier 3 rather than Tier 2.
• The permanent memory wiping mechanic needs an explicit written way to be undone rather than relying on AL end-of-adventure rules to get rid of it. Every single one of the players at my table were struck by it to varying degrees, and the way it's written that basically ended the adventure because no one would even have memories of what their mission was. On the fly adjustments required to keep the game going.
• There are 3 possible endings which is great but the adventure rewards are very strongly skewed towards only one of them. Would have been preferred to punish the players less for choosing to complete the mission as Turariel suggested, which from a roleplaying perspective is a perfectly legitimate choice given they have no info about his true objectives, or may not be a party designed to make consecutive high DC charisma checks. Having the players perhaps earn a different set of equally interesting rewards for defeating an Archfey would have been nice, especially considering how difficult and draining for the players the fights are.

Pros:

• Neat background premise
• Epic naval battles! We did the full map with moving ships and everything. The modifications on the enemy ships were cool too.
• The details given for the Naval combat was very precise and thus made running it a bit easier.

Cons:

• RP/Combat balance was kind of out of whack. 1 combat, 1 RP, followed by what basically amounted to 3 consecutive combats is pretty mentally exhausting for DM and players alike.
• The first encounter had a very silly plot hole, and I had to basically remove a small section of it so that the players would not run into it.

Pros:

• A strong mix of social interaction and combat
• Replayability. The first portion of the adventure has lots of different ways it could go, and the second part gives players plenty of choice on how to approach it.
• The combats felt reasonably paced to keep the game moving, with an epic finale.
• ALL the maps. Plenty of good quality (for 5e) maps provided for every scenario. Seriously, wish this was the standard and not the exception.

Cons

• Took an excessive amount of time to prepare, not because of the high replayability but because some things were not necessarily well explained, leading to having to re-read parts to avoid confusion.
• Some small editing issues that nevertheless should have been caught, such as a particular map and it's associated chapter not agreeing on cardinal directions.
• Had some holes that required on-the-fly DM improvising to patch over.

Pros:

• Very atmospheric scenes. From the initial big waves encounter with the fey to negotiating with a dragon to visiting an underwater village...the players enjoyed it
• Replayability. Things can go very differently based on player choices
• Neat encounters, all challenging but balanced.

Cons:

• Not really any...a bit complex to prepare as the DM but any adventure with multiple possibilities will do that.

Pros:

• Very good in depth NPCs, with pictures even.
• Neat horror atmosphere, the cave with the boss at the end was a lot of fun

Cons:

• Could have used a boat map or two for those encounters

Pros:

• Fairly relaxed, straightforward adventure
• Well edited
• Puzzle was designed for characters to solve and not the players. I personally like that a lot; often times when adventure throws puzzles at players, it's for the players to solve rather than the characters. This breaks immersion and is not always enjoyed by everyone participating, and just seems like an excuse to throw a puzzle into the adventure without a good plot reason. So kudos for avoiding that.
• Maps for every part of the adventure provided as separate files, pre-scaled to 1 inch squares making it easy to apply to virtual tabletop

Cons:

• An assumption is made that players will flee from a particular encounter, which drives a fair amount of the story afterwards. As soon as I read that I knew as a seasoned DM that 90% of parties will not follow that prescribed decision path. The author assumes that the DM will come up with a good non-railroad excuse to push the players in the right direction, but there isn't really any. The most likely scenario is (and this is exactly how it played out when I ran it) that the players stand their ground and defeat the opponents on the spot. There is a sidebar that suggests a potential sequence of events should the players fail the encounter and half the party flees, but that half party then gets walked into a ambush that is excessively deadly for 2-3 players so that doesn't really work either. Some adjustment from the DM is needed to account for this.

A clean straighforward adventure. Well organized and easy to follow. Story hooks are good enough to get things started. I rather liked the bureaucratic nature of the players having to get referred from one modron level to the next; it really got the flavor of modrons across to the players. Second act was a fairly good team building exercise, as players had to work together to solve problems. Final fight was reasonably thought out, giving the DM flexibility to make the fight harder or easier by how hey utilize the Modron allies.

First off, let me start by saying there's a cool premise here. Getting onto a mysterious Island infested by Sahuagin to find a dragon couple is compelling. Doorstop the Kobold and bizarre diseases are hilarious.

However there are several problems in this module. I would strongly recommend against purchasing this adventure. The TL;DR is that it's incomplete and should not have been published, but if you want to know more read on.

• The story hook is very weak. You get scooped up by a ships captain who is apparently too cowardly to do his job and thus tells your players to do it, except with no incentive. No promise of reward, no threats, nothing. The players are just expected to get on the train and follow the rails. More work needed to be put into this.
• There's a section to describe interactions with the ship crew, promising advantage on interactions with them if they help out...except, there's no follow up. Interacting with the crew is purely an exercise up to the improvisation of the DM for RP purposes. It affects the plot not an iota. I feel like there must have been plan here, but it is not presented.
• The decision of where to land doesn't really matter. It only changes the location where the Sahuagin ambush the players. This is an unecessary complication, and seems just thrown in there for the sake of it. The locations themselves have basically nothing interesting and do not justify requiring the players spending time to make a choice.
• And speaking of locations....maps? The one map that is provided doesn't seem to line up with any of the locations in the adventure; the closest match is the inlet, except that the inlet is described as being littered with the bones of sea creatures, whereas the map has dragon skeletons in it instead. And the one location that MOST needed a map (The Stairs In The Jungle) due to it's complexity in a combat situation didn't have one. What is even going on here?
• Amusing as the diseases are, this is another part that was not well designed. Players just automatically contract disease with no saving throw (removing player agency is bad), and two of the diseases, while initially funny, cause permanent loss of body parts to a party of 1st Tier adventurers. There then appears to be some confusion later; the author seems to imply that Greater Restoration from the dragons will restore body parts....something that spell definitely doesn't do. Oops.

A nice chill adventure to ease in low level characters. The waves of combat can wear characters down but is balanced perfectly to not murder a bunch of 1st levels. The tavern scene was a fairly nice touch as well, giving a decent roleplay opportunity for the players. Pretty basic but sometimes a nice relaxing adventure is the way to go.

Pros:

• Yalanue is a pretty neat boss. Nice touch to give players the chance to not kill her as well; the DM can just narrate as Dara to hint at the alternative possibility. And even if they prefer to kill Yalanue, she has some pretty cool moves and will certainly entertain.
• Optional Mission B is a pretty neat idea as well with the room-filling illusion.

Cons:

• The most obvious problem here is the complete omission of a map for a dungeon crawl scenario. The author went to some effort to describe rooms in detail, but halfway through seemed to run out of gas and made a lot of mistakes that editors somehow didn't find; If you follow those descriptions they start to create contradictory direction relations between rooms. Seriously, why no map? Everything is a rectangular room anyway, could have built a map far faster than the time it took to try to theater of the mind everything (and then go to editing for fixes, which seems to have never happened)
• Optional Mission A really doesn't work. If the players open the door and see the gloomweaver, they aren't all going to walk into the room. And the gloomweaver has no proficiency to stealth, so really there is no scenario in which every player just walks in and falls for the trap. There's also pretty much zero explanation for what the gloomweaver's motivations are or who he/she works for. Why is Vungio hunting the bloody hooves? Why does he/she seek the wards? Who knows.
• No stat block for Dara. Why?

As seems pretty much par for the course in season 9 scenarios, some neat ideas ruined by selling an incomplete body of work. Disappointing.

Where do I begin?

The Good:

• Wherever possible, there are multiple paths or choices for players to make to get past a challenge, which makes for good replayability.
• Making a challenge out of keeping Dara alive, while still allowing for the players to continue on even if she does die at all, is a nice mechanic.

The Bad (This is going to be a long list...):

• First off, the Call To Action premise. It took me some research to understand what was even going on. Turns out, there is a T2 plot assumption that makes it so the characters have to hide what they are doing from Mahadi. Except the author fails to recap any of this, so any DM who did not run said T2 adventure is left scratching his head wondering why anything is described the way it is. Furthermore, Why is there no alternative Call To Action? How can you assume that not only does the DM know what you are talking about, but that the players even played in the missions pre-T3? In my case, I had just finished running my players through Descent Into Avernus campaign before running AL Modules, which is a perfectly valid way to play and yet this adventure has no adjustment. Which bring up the next problem...

• Even though the T3 adventures leading up to this have alternative plot hooks for whether Elturel has been rescued or not, this adventure somehow assumes not only that Elturel was never rescued, but also that Zariel hasn't been rescued. In fact the way it's written, it seems to assume that the players never finished Descent Into Avernus, despite claiming to be designed for a party of 13th level characters. Huh? 13th level is the cap for Descent Into Avernus campaign; It implies that the characters have a very high chance to have completed that story prior to playing this adventure. This is a major editing failure; someone surely should have caught this and gotten things rewritten.

• Although there are lots of possible encounters, the variety is extremely limited. Pretty much every encounter is some combination of bone devils, spined devils, bearded devils, and imps. This gets repetitive very quickly. Some sort of big baddie would have spiced up the final encounter quite a bit.

• The Shifting Tunnels/Celestial Clues section is written in the most complicated manner possible to describe something simple. It took me several reads to understand what the author was trying to do.

• Not a single map provided, not even for the final encounter that has the complex set of events where the devils try to get past the players, then Gidor, then to Dara. Really would have been nice to have a map here.

• Gidor. The adventure allows for her to possibly join the party in the fight, yet provides no stat block (I thought i was crazy, went through the stat block section several times thinking i just missed it, but nope, Gidor has no stat block). Then in the combat description, the author just offhand throws out that Gidor is somehow throwing out Magic Circles left and right, and has to keep recasting it. Yet again, no stat block so the DM doesn't even know how many times Gidor can recast it. Overall this feels like an incomplete section.

In conclusion, this module is a mess. It's not unplayable, but it's incomplete and the DM has to fix a lot. Hope nobody is cold running this.

A real step up over the preceding two adventures.

The Good:

• Fantastic atmosphere. Elturel after dark really drew the players in, as did the fight in Martyr's Alley and the final room.
• Lots of content and very flexible. Can be run quick as you like, or you can expand it into a meaty 2-3 game session.
• Replayability with options for different encounters in the first half of the adventures.
• Martyr's alley again. Really got the player's adrenaline flowing.
• Well constructed maps

The Bad:

• Some minor edit issues, but nothing too serious.
• The puzzle was too straightforward
• The story hook between how Dara needs the Wards and how yuriall suddenly needs help is rather too convenient plot wise

Really enjoyed this one, and so did the players.

Good idea, not enough effort all around.

The Good:

• The optional encounter A is pretty interesting. It's not every day the players run across another group of adventurers and get to interact with them.
• The final encounter is pretty interesting. Introducing a possible way to interact peacefully is a good idea (the execution is not great, but the intent is good)

The Bad

• This adventure is very obviously an incomplete release. There are several issues that somehow got past the multiple editors listed on the front splash page. Besides the obvious typos, there are other problems:

  • The map. It's not gridded, and when you follow the approximate sizes given in the descriptions of the different rooms, they come nowhere CLOSE to making sense relative to each other. Furthermore, In the B1 description the author gets her cardinal directions all mixed up and it took a while to figure out what she meant.
  • The 'social' option of the last encounter relies on the players knowing about the secret MacGuffin, yet there is no way for them to know about the secret MacGuffin. So it's actually not an option at all unless the DM puts in some work to modify the adventure. This should have been caught by an editor for sure. I poured over the pages multiple times searching for an answer and found none.
• After acquiring the MacGuffin, the players return for some rest and relaxation...which turns into a way over-detailed way to screw the players over with insufficient scene transition, like a boulder in the middle of the road. It doesn't fit the rest of the adventure, particularly not at the end.

From the very first part of it, the players are railroaded through a series of bad options. Without spoiling it, players are basically required to give up their resources to progress past part 1, for which there is no incentive to do so. The "bonus objective" provides alternatives to fighting, but the alternatives are so onerous that pretty much nobody would do it, and that's the only way to avoid a fight.

After the second part, the only method to complete the adventure with the "good" ending is for a single successful high group skill check, no other options or chances. And the majority treasure in the scenario is dependent on that ending. Bad rolls in that one moment? Sorry everyone, you're SOL.

This scenario is the opposite of fun unless you make your own modifications.

Not recommended.

Pros:

• Lots of different ways this scenario can play out. Certainly has replayability.
• Excellent flavor, and the slow but steady unwrapping of plot mystery is well done.

Cons:

• NOT for novice DMs. This scenario has a LOT of moving parts. Preparation time is a must, and even then the DM will have to be flexible on determining exactly what happens depending on player choices.
• Will almost certainly run over 4 hours. Players will be spending lots of time deciding what to do.