This review is for Giantslayer

I ran "Giantslayer" as introductory adventure that will influence and kick off both Lost Mines of Phandelver and Storm King's Thunder, and I have to say, that as a table we loved this adventure for its story, its NPCs, and the learning opportunity it presented our one brand-new player.

The satyrs taught them that murder is a last recourse, the mephits that there is always a risk for reward, the NPCs that there are lovable albeit with flaws in a living world, and the giant taught them that comradely, planning, goodly intentions, and elbow grease can go a long way against the least reasonable and mightiest of foes.

I highly recommend this adventure for any party (level 1–3). To those DMs who run this, might I recommend the following: 1) Keep a mental image of an abandoned Scorton in case your PCs decide to head there and investigate, 2) Write a short script that gives Pello, Grigor, and Tastra some personality. I played Pello and had two volunteers from the table read the other two. This was the true highlight of our session, 3) You can always ramp up Yegor's hp if you have a large or capable party. I gave him +40, and they still made short work with zero casualties, 4) Yegor is easily linked to Grudd Haug in Storm King's Thunder. That area is too difficult for them now, but if you make it clear that Yegor came from the south, they'll connect the dots later on, 5) Link the giant that Jahan slew with a giant, tomb, or monument that your PCs can discover somewhere down the line; and 6) pre-roll some random goodies from the "giant's bag" table in the SKT hardcover. My party found a barrel full of bees and honey. Risk-to-reward, my friends!

Even though Little Shrine of Horrors is scaled for 4th and 5th level characters, I ran a group of 8th level players through this adventure just before Gen Con 2018.

This adventure is trap/puzzle heavy and combat light, which was a nice change of pace from other adventures we've been playing.

For the GM, the adventure is well written and easy to grasp, requiring one or two read-throughs to prepare. You can definitely do this adventure as a theater of the mind, use battle maps, or both. The player handouts are terrific, however there is a small mistake on the handouts for for the symbol room that has not been corrected, so make sure review it carefully before you go into your game (some of the symbols on the player handout do not match on the GM handout).

As for flexibility, there is plenty of options for the GM to adjust the adventure to their group as they play, with plenty of obstacles and challenges for the PCs to overcome. For example, I added more flint golems to one of the encounters since they were higher level characters. Our sorcerer decided to send a fire bolt into the room and then slam the door, which incidentally had a large amount of flammable liquid in it. Needless to say, there was a huge explosion that destroyed the room, and the flint golems. But the explosion also blew her and another PC down hall, through a door and into a wall of spikes, taking both fire, bludgeoning, and piercing damage. The other players got a kick over seeing two players fly down the hall past them in a huge ball of fire.

There is plenty of subtile things in this adventure that the players must pay attention to in order to successfully complete the adventure, else they have to back-track. But the twist at the end was most memorible for the players, creating ethical dilemmas for them and a real test of their alignment.

This is absolutely a 6-hour adventure that can be played in one or two sessions. There is so much to do, that the time flies while running or playing the adventure.

But Little Shrine of Horrors is definitely an adventure scaled for 4th-5th level characters (just as it says in the description). While I thought I beefed up the boss encounter, I didn’t scale it enough as my pole-arm master fighter chewed up 2 PCs and almost killed a third in one action (he was rolling 20s like crazy).

I highly recommend Little Shrine of Horrors as a one-shot adventure, particularly as a break between longer campaigns. Your players will love it. I had a blast running it and give it a solid 4 out of 5 stars.

The "Complete Adventures of M.T. Black Vol. I” bundle at $US 9.95 itself is a great value, and you can defiantly use all of them as a complete campaign starting with characters at level 1. $10 for at least 56-hours of entertainment is a real bargain for budget conscious DMs.

This is a fantasic set of modules!! I ran Into Ivy Mansion and it was a huge hit. There was lots of unexpected monsters and the players had a really good time with a classic 'explore the spooky house' trope. It was really easy to drop this adventure into my homebrew world and the encounters were well balanced. I really like that the Harpell family in this module are in many more of the other modules in this set; lots of options for story lines. The modules are really well laid out and organized as well as well written and easy to follow. I now look for any new products by MT Black because I know it will be top quality.

I DM'd be first ever session last night.

I think it'll give you an idea about how good MT Black is at writing adventure modules if I tell you ...

This was on short notice.

Found out on Friday that our DM coulnd't make the session, was asked to take over Saturday Night ...

and it went really well. I ran Tower of the Mad Mage.

Everyone enjoyed themselves. We went 2 and a half hours (could have been three and a half but guys were making their characters.) and we got through half of the tower and all the encounters leading up to it.

It plays fast and smooth, the guys liked the story and characters and thanks to Mr. Black, my first DM experiance was a good one.

I can't recommend this collection enough, and I even saved the best three adventures (that I've read so far,) Giant Slayer, Terror on the Tri-Boar and Shadows on the Long Road, for the regular weekly session I'm planning. So I'm gonna get a crazy amount of adventure for only ten bucks.

Thanks, Mr. Black.

I ran Into Ivy Mansion. I read Giant Slayer, The Dawn Chaser, and Shadows on the Long Road.

What I love about these adventures is that I can read them once, and I immediately know both how to run them and the atmosphere they are trying to set. At the same time, they offer a fair degree of flexibility. I primarily see them as one-offs / side-quests, but they can probably be incorporated into a larger campaign with a little work (The Dawn Chaser especially adds a hook for the next adventure).

Into Ivy Mansion went off very well (despite the adventurers going straight to the boss room) with fun NPCs, a great villain, and opportunities for clever solutions and little discoveries.

For $10 you can't beat it. These modules are nicely written and should provid DMs and players with many adventures for characters ranging from levels 1-4. The strenght of this download lies in its versitility. Where a $50 Wizards of the Coast module (i.e. Tombs of Annihilation) would serve for groups that meet consistently over long periods of time, these adventures can be done in a session (2 at most) and don't require all party members to be present each time.

Having DM'ed without precons for a long time I know how hard it can be to craft an engaging and exciting adventure. But for the first time I knew that my schedule wasn't going to allow me to produce decent plot necessary so I started looking for precons to help me to keep playing without the hard work. I've just finishing running King of the cats as the first part in a longer story arc and it was perfect. It had a good balance of intrique, characterisation and combat and a nice final battle. I still had to do a little legwork, finding the monsters in the DMG and working out how to manage combat. More importantly I had to come up with fun voices for the characters. I have a feeling, gus, bombalina, and the rat boss will be making future appearances. It was a DM's dream. Just open enough that the characters felt like they weren't being railroaded, but closed enough to keep from getting too complicated. I'm looking forward to seeing how the next adventure runs (giantkiller) but this purchase has streamlined and improved my DMing experience considerably.

A year ago I decided I wanted to start DMing but I didn't want to do Lost Mines of Phandelver. I heard about DMs Guild and honestly, I just looked at what the highest rated and most downloaded thing was. I saw this and decided to go ahead and buy the whole pack since it gave me so much material.

Boy was that a good decision. The first adventure, Temple of the Nightbringers was fantastic. I modified it slightly to match a direction I wanted to go and the town of Melton has become a fixture of the campaign. I've since used Into Ivy Mansion and Magic Village for sale. These things are just so well written, with plenty of thought put into most of the things that could happen, while still allowing for freedom of the characters and the DM. My players hated Tristan Harpell so much that I'm going to make him a villain going forward.

I strongly recommend this for anyone who wants something different from what WotC puts out, or just needs a little adventure to insert into a low level campaign. Thanks M.T. Black!

So far only played Little Shrine of Horrors with my group. Heavy puzzle and trap oriented adventure. I think 3 small encounters that all but one can be skipped. Make sure your players are in to this sort of thing. Think Tomb of horrors - Light.

I loved the setup and the story and fun characters. There is a really nice plot-twist that you can spin in several different ways. Adventure can easily be shoehorned in with little tweaks in to your campaign. I simply hooked them with that the relic they are looking for was owned by the Shrines creator. At the end they found his deed.

My PC group had a lot of fun.

So to the bad.

There is one puzzle that is not so good, the god room. First the images on the player handout and the key does not match. Was confusing. The once they figured out the mechanics of the puzzle they could not solve it. They had to dice roll so many times in order to get the information they needed. That was tedious and not inventive (60 dice rolls that you need to get above 15 if you want to clear the board, and on a not so common skill). Actually replacing this room with an empty corridor would be an improvement and something I would recommend (or put in your own puzzle). Good place to add an encounter instead if you feel you want to mix it up a bit. The puzzle in it self is not critical for the storyline or the mecanics.

There are also parts of the place where in order to proceed the players HAVE to succeed in dice-rolls, there is no real thinking involved. They know they need to throw dice and the only way to get past it is to succeed in checks. For example in the bone tunnel. No creative thinking. Just throw dice until you are past it. If your party has a bad dice run it ends up just being tedious. The best puzzles are when you get to think about a solution, and figuring out is enough. Adding skill checks to it just makes it boring. If you want skill checks, do something that you could use a couple of different skill-checks. Like you need to jump over this chasm or disarm this trap.

If you want to teach your players to look for traps and question everything this is the perfect adventure. I also advice you think hard on how you want to do trap detection before you start. If each player is going to detect for traps for every single tile then this is going to take a long while. Be generous with the trap detection, there will be enough of them, so they will fail at some point.

That said. Great adventure. We had a good laugh and I recommend it.

One of my players was out-of-town, so I was looking for a detour to take the rest of the party on. One of the random hooks that I dropped to save for a later date happened to be a large, smarter-than-your-average cat. I was sold on this package as soon as I saw there was a module called The King Of Cats. It was as glorious as I would have imagined, from the astonished and/or bemused looks on their faces when they went in front of the Congress of Cats to the increasing exasperation of the characters in Sideshow Alley. From the stink of rat central to our 800lb Tortle cleric choosing to belly-flop on the traitorous [redacted], I'm pretty sure this will go down in history as their favorite session (so far). The only dilemma I have is how many of these to use to interrupt the "official" campaign they're currently on. Fabulous job!

The material published by M.T. Black is always top notch and a lot of fun when i can make use of it during one of my sessions.

I would only ask that M.T. Black puts the recommended lvl range on his covers. Since his collection is growing rapidly it would make finding the right one quickly a lot easier. ;)

Great pick up! Played 3 of them already and they are perfect one-shots that are easily modified to throw at any party inbetween epic story arcs when I don't have time to write a major story arc. I usually have a rotating group from game to game so these are perfect and noob friendly.

I ran the Mad Mage tonight, adding my own twists to it to fit in with my story. So, for example, the players were already in the tower because the mage had kidnapped them to do experiments on them. Skwelch helped them out of the cell they were in, and convinced the players to help him save his goblin friends who were being experimented on by the mage. So some of the goblins had extra arms, others fire breath, others had wings. Anyway, the players had such a blast with it, and they got super duper attached to Skwelch, even using their healing magic to help him instead of themselves during battle. I guess the point of this is that this module and all of your stuff is excellent, whether you are running it as is or modifying it! Thanks for providing such awesome tales!

The adventures are superbly done. Just, fantastic really. I plan to use them all in time but have only used a couple of them so far, but I've read through all of them and there's not a single one I don't want to run.

I'm tempted to buy each one of them again individually as I run them just so I can review them each as I go, but for now I'll review the two that I have run;

Into the Ivy Mansion was not only fun, but a great way to get into DMing for the first time. There's such a unique variation of encounters here that it really just has everything a starting DM needs to get a grip on running the game. No only that, but it was just fun and funny. My players had a blast, and after their first encounter with a particular couch, it just became a running gag of attacking a random piece of furniture at the end of every combat enounter! Siegfried Harpell was absolutely dismayed to see the condition of his library once he was saved, and it made for a hilarious and memorable scene.

Magic Village for Sale! was, at a glance the adventure I really wanted to run first. I went with the previous, Into the Ivy Mansion, because it seems like an obvious starting point and prologue to this adventure, and easy to link together. Into the Ivy Mansion turned out to be better than I originally inspected, but Magic Village for Sale! was still even better. It was just such a simple and fun idea that turned out memorable beyond belief. Giving a believable sceario where I as the DM could reasonably use a Roc's statistics against characters of only 4th level, was just absolutely cake. And the most 'unnecessary' of the optional side treks was still way too good to resist; when else are my players ever going to have the chance to square off against a giant bunny? I told them after the game that it was punishment for all the terrible things I know they did to the bunnies in Skyrim, and they laughed and agreed. Just a fantastic and memorable adventure.

I look forward to running all these adventures. hey require little if any work at all (though I am going to have to take a few and crank up the notch for difficulty as I plan to run them later in the campaign). I feel like these are an easy and fun way to run the weekly games I've recently adopted after the drop-out of an old DM. These are a gift for me to learn my own style of DMing, while requiring less prep time and thus giving me the chance to work on the sandbox I dream of someday running.

I haven't run this yet, but the scenarios are well detailed and encounters seem very well crafted. My only real gripe is that there are few to no places where the writer provides an overview of the entire scenario so that DMs can instantly get a clear picture of what's going on and how they might be able to insert these locations into their games.