This adventure is a fun nostalgia trip for those who played the Season 1 adventures in Phlan, plus it's an enjoyable romp around the city while the players investigate what's going on and get the chance to roleplay with a bunch of different NPCs as they put their case together for who to accuse!

I really only have two criticisms of the module, if your players aren't careful they could quite easily lose a decent chunk of gold (not as bad given season 12's gold rules compared to previous ones) so it may be worth spelling things out very explicitly to your players, and the last two encounters are very similar to eachother, it would have been nice to have some variation.

This is one of the most requested modules in our local playgroup, plenty of people will play through it multiple times, and there are lots of stories in the group about "Remember when ..." and it's always some OTHER detail of this adventure. All marks of a fun story.

The Scooby Doo aspect is always brought up, half the time they just refer to it as "THE Scooby Doo adventure," so it lives up that goal.

I've run it at least a dozen times, each time it's a little different, sometimes VERY different. The unmasking at the end usually ends up with the right person, but pretty often they still end up with the wrong person. (Which is a good sign, in a mystery you want it to be just questionable enough that there's a point to continuing to look for more clues.)

The combats are hard, especially if the DM doesn't hold back a bit. I can't remember if this was mentioned in the adventure, but I've heard that the possessed enemies aren't using their FULL abilities at various points, but sometimes if I find that the party is having too rough of a time of it, I'll make sure to continue to hold back. You don't want to cream the party, so be cautious. It's VERY easy to use the monsters to challenge that party that plows through everything too. Just be careful, the guidelines for balance are not the only thing you have at your disposal as a DM.

:) So summary, 5 stars, recommend highly, lots of fun!

Really fun campaign to run! I was DM for group of 7 players and the campaign was full enough for lore and customisation where I could add in extra items or events to suit them. Players enjoyed the 'whodunnit' aspect which they had not really encountered before. Players enjoyed the continuity of the campaigns - leading into Secrets That We Keep and beyond!

Played this module last night. There was obviously a lot of care and thought put into the NPCs and the investigation sections of this module. We really enjoyed the different characters, and really enjoyed the ambiance of the ghosts. Well done.

However, there are three pillars to a great D&D adventure, and where this one fails is the combat encounters. The antagonists use their abilities in ways that simply run contrary to what's written in the monster manual. Second, the combats are very samey. There's a wide variety of human type monsters that could be chosen from, but the author chose to basically rehash the same monsters over and over again. Don't get me wrong, the fight was brutally challenging the first time it was encountered, but then you keep encountering it; more variety would have been ideal. It felt like the author had a great story and great characters, but then just phoned in the combats.

needs to prepare for players using "Divine sense" on someone that is an undead. My table just didn't do any investigation and finished the adventure.

This is a fun adventure to run and is very tough for tier 2 characters considering the number of high CR creatures being thrown at them while they are limited to what they can do in fear of killing innocents. I imagine that parties without clerics or devotion paladins are going to have a very difficult time with many of these combats.

The story is cute and I would probably run this adventure again in the future.

This module is a lot of fun but has a pretty significant problem.

First the positives: 1) You are essentially running an episode of Scooby-Doo and the RP opportunities are amazing. The shenanigans that ensue are fun and will keep your party engaged. 2) I LOOOOOVE the mechanic of nearly all encounters occuring in highly populated areas coupled with the threat of monetary consequences should "innocents" be harmed. This really forces a level of morality into the game that typically doesn't exist. Your party needs to really think about how they are addressing the fight. They can't just start dropping fireballs on everything (I mean, they CAN, but their going to pay for it).

Now for the negatives (only one fairly big one IMHO): 1) There seems to be a lack of clues pointing to the REAL antagonist which leads to mis-identification. That was a real disappointment for me running this since my party asked ALL of the right questions and collected all of the evidence then discussed it and logically came up with the wrong person, because the evidence logically pointed to that person. There needs to be more obvious clues as to who the real villain is but without putting the glaring neon arrow pointing at him. 2) As a side note to number 1, I think some parts of this adventure really rely on the party having participated in previous Phlan adventures in order to have the meta knowledge to correctly identify the villain.

If I were to run this again, one thing I would do is put the "bystanders" into initiative as well, just to provide a little more realism to the encounter by making the crowd move and get into or out of the way instead of just standing there while a battle takes place among them. I received some player comment about that.

I really liked this module. It was an interesting mystery to unravel, along with a list of suspects that needed to be interrogated. Provided plenty of opportunity for DM character playing and for player's to interact socially. The conflicts had purpose and was easily scalable to the party strength. My only criticism would be that the culprit seemed to have the least likely reason to be accused. Without DM help, in my opinion, it would be very difficult for the party to deduce correctly who was the true criminal. I did love the homage to Scooby Doo at the end though.

Before I start, I'll make the caveat that I understand that AL adventures are short-form, and so some concessions need to be made to practicalities of running in limited time frames and the like.

That being said, this adventure suffers from what is, in my opinion, the greatest sin a DM or adventure writer can commit. Rule #1 of DMing, in my opinion, is to never remove your players' agency. The entire first act of this adventure does exactly that, and the rest of the adventure falls flat because of it.

From this point on, the review contains spoilers.

The action begins with the party in an inn, and there is a bard performing, and telling the history of the town. Unless the characters (not the players) have taken part in DDEP 02, there is no solid opening information, beyond people talking in passing in a tavern. This sort of cold entry isn't my sort of thing, but I know it works for some people, so sure. But what happens next is just bad writing.

The bard uses an ability similar to the college of glamour's enthralling performance to incapacitate most of the crowd - unless the characters make an insight check (for no reason) against the bard, they are subject to a charisma save or be incapacitated. Ok, this is probably a bit poorly written - why would anyone make an insight check against the evenings entertainment? But it's not wholely unreasonable. The next bit is.

The bard attempts to incapacitate the entire party, and then ghosts possess some commoners and battle ensues. For any character that suceeded on the saving throw, or is paying attention at all, the logical first person target is going to be that bard. But the bard has no stats (because it is actually the BBEG in disguise), and the adventure says to basically hand wave any sort of interaction with the bard away. If the players knock his 'ghost' away, and don't let him leave during the encounter, he 'slips away' afterwards, when any reasonable party will have been watching him closely, if not holding onto him/tied/manacled him so he doesn't get away.

The players are then forced into continuing that night, because, for some reason, the bartender blames them for the disruption to her establishment - and not the bard that she hired for the entertainment that night. I get the 'make the adventurers think about the cost of their actions' angle - but this is a really poorly executed form of it. She is blaming them for saving her life, and the lives of her patrons, from someone she invited in and hired. The net result is that the players again feel like they've been hit in the face by deus ex machina, and left to think they've got no choice in the matter - breaking Rule #1 again.

All of this is because the bard is actually a higher level bad guy - I'm assuming one that will get confronted in the sequel, which is a tier 3 adventure. The reasoning given in the adventure is that he's too powerful to list stats for in this tier. In that case, I'd say: choose a more tier appropriate bad guy, make him act through an intermediary, or make this adventure the same tier as the conclusion. The adventure goes for a Strahd-esque Big bad guy who interacts with the party from the get go, but is not executed anywhere near as well, and ends up having the players and characters being frustrated at DM-fiat and/or the deus ex machina methods that need to be used to make the plot make sense.

The meat of the adventure (yes, everything before this was about act 1), is decent, with lots of possible discussion and investigation - all of which is trivialised if your party has a paladin or cleric with zone of truth prepared, but what investigation adventure isnt? The problem with it is that it all rests on the initial set up of the adventure, which simply does not work very well. If the first act was rewritten to be less hand-wavey, then the rest of the adventure would actually work pretty well. As is, the foundation is rubbish, and so the rest of it just can't stand up.

This module is packed with excellent role playing and investigation opportunities. A careful DM can run it to provide a great time for all.

Several flaws in execution create some hurdles to a good time. It is a whodunnit mystery that contains too little information about how they did it. It barely even covers why they did it.

• It is driven by a plot armored villain with no stat block and scant detail to provide to the players that try to interact with him in combat.
• The movements of that villain prior to the start of the module are important to the investigation and they are very weakly detailed.
• The details of how the villain set the wheels in motion, and continues to drive the plot, are never described.
• The agenda of characters central to the story is barely described.

To prep this you should

• Sort out for yourself what the cast was up to before the ball gets rolling. Determine their motives and how they would make them likely to respond to off book PC actions.
• Be prepared to have to invent many answers on the fly for PCs whose investigation leads them into one of the many plot holes.
• Be prepared to give hints, a lot of hints, as your players wander around Phlan bumping into things that go bump in the night.
• Think through how you want to play the major characters. The plot will lead the PCs to go deep into the weeds of conversation with one or more of them.

I deducted 1 star for flaws that make running the investigation more awkward than it should be.

The second star was deducted for the use of a plot armored villain. Just say NO to plot armored villains. If you're writing an adventure and feel like you need one, go for a walk and rethink it. Couldn't it be handled by projected image, clone, dominate, simulacrum, or having a dupe do all the footwork? Or any other approach that is actually within the rules of the actual game we're playing? This is a shared story telling role playing game. Plot armored villains do not belong.

This is a fun adventure with some really amazing stuff in it, it just has a few too many flaws.

Well is badly scaled. This is a "WHO DONE IT". Reading the module it is unclear, it sounds like you could end up having 5 fights or as few as 3 fights. I would suggest DM's CAREFULLY scale this depending on the party make-up. Undead are in EVERY encounter and if your melee characters do not have magic weapons expect them to die. READ READ READ this before you run it.

You have "Champion" NPC's with three attacks a round that can drop a parties healer and keep them out while soaking up a huge amount of damage and getting benefits to redo failed saves. A DM might miss the fact that the players have a chance to pick up the clue the party responsible has some of the drugs on them in the first place so later on when asked about it the players can catch them in a lie. Let the players run back and forth to the NPC's to gather and cross check info. The module says to give a 50% chance of a encounter EACH time the players travel back and forth BUT for time and balance I would recommend only running the encounter with bad guy NPC's ONCE when the roll called for it. I am SURE the module did not mean to have as many fight as it could call for with random dice rolls.

On a positive note the module uses some cute info that has occerred in AL modules in the past and in the DnD Forgotten Realms world that will make a die hard reader laugh.

This is scaled for level 9's make sure the players bring them.

A great mod for those who love role-play and mystery solving. My one complaint is that when running for a group that is not motivated by doing the right thing, there is no way it would occur to them to seek out the ending.

This is a FANTASTICALLY fun and campy adventure! This module scales well to AVP, has a bunch of investigation and use of social skills, is loaded with some Pop Culture references, and has some AL Cameos.

After playing this at a convention, I immediately came home and bought a copy. I can't wait to run this for my home table!

As a DM who favours roleplaying over combat, I have a strong affinity towards this module. A CSI-styled module is rather unique in DDAL, because even the investigation heavy modules are focused more on investigating a place, not an incident. Since the key to finding the truth is to ask the right questions to the NPCs to gather the crucial information, it forces the characters to roleplay creatively and properly, instead of the usual "I roll for persuation/intimidation to force the NPC to tell me everything".

The more curious characters will naturally want to find out the truth, the less curious characters will still want to put an end to the incidents because the whole party are being pursuited by restless undeads, thus providing the motive and urgency for the table to investigate the issue, and preferrbly ASAP. The NPCs are also quite fun for me to roleplay, as I've essentially voice acted a Rockstar, an annoyingly happy "gentle" necromancer, a dwarf who owns a thrift shop, and a human woman who is clearly VERY STONED.

However, due to some sub-optimal writing, module design, and balancing issues (which are somewhat common amongst CCC modules), I cannot give this module a full 5-star rating. Here is why:

1. The combat is significantly overtuned. The first tavern combat has ZERO adjustments made for weak or very weak parties, making it mathematically impossible for lower level parties to survive even the first encounter. I ran this module for a party of 4 people with an APL of 5, and I could have easily TPK-ed them during the first fight. Even assuming a party of 5 with an APL of 9, I can still see them facing a lot of trouble dealing with a potential maximum of 5 battles, especially when the module does not leave sufficient time for any short rests between battles. With heavily overtuned monsters and a serious lack of support for weaker parties, DMs have to use your own judgment to tone down the combat. Especially when the S7 Death Curse is active in a CCC module, and I really don't think the point of this module is to TPK your players.
2. Timing and pacing. If DMs are to run everything in the module as written, there is no way you are finishing this within 4 hours. Combats are plentiful and difficult, thus making them time-consuming. Also, talking with the major NPCs, finding out all information that are available with each and every one of them, AND the time the table will need to discuss the information amongst themselves... No, 4 hours is insufficient to finish everything up. Personally I chose to cut down about half of the combat, because I believe the essence of this module is in it's roleplay.
3. Some of the crucial information the party will need to solve the mystery requires the party to ask the NPCs how they felt about other NPCs, which most people won't logically think about asking. Provide hints as appropriate, or make one of the NPCs start talking about other NPCs. Also, abandon the "you cannot return to speak to an NPC you've previously spoken with" rule, because the possibility of the players gathering all the information they'll need in their first conversation is very low.
4. The ending of the module left behind some loose ends that needed to be tied up. For instance, why does the undead stop chasing after the characters after they decide to accuse someone? Was the curse removed after the accusation? On my table, I closed off the adventure by guiding the players to report this incident to Calypso, the Regent of Phlan. After the report and the accusation, Calypso kept them safe under her protection, thus freeing the characters from any further undead pursuits.

That pretty much sums up my experience with the module. The idea behind the module is refreshing enough for me to give it a high rating, but the flaws in writing and design prevents it from a 5-star. If the module could have been more balanced, it would have made for a much smoother experience for players and DMs alike, instead of having the DM to adjust many encounters on the fly. I agree that the experience should be challenging to the players, but a TPK in the first combat is anything but challenging, and simply unfair to characters in the lower end of Tier 2.