After playing through Death Queen And The Life Stone I was optimistic about the next solo adventure in the series hoping it would build on and improve on my prior experience. That's not quite what I got here but in fairness that's because the creators decided to try something really different that some players will probably find more appealing, unfortunately in my case it wasn't really what I was looking for.

Forest Of Secrets breaks from the traditional mold of linear solo quests where the narrative is driven by branching player choices and instead replaces that mechanic with a randomly generated map. The big upside in this is that it drastically increases the replay value of the adventure and means multiple play throughs can yield significantly different experiences. The downside is that there is effectively no linear narrative. All the key story beats happen in the first entry and the final encounter, in between the start and the end there is efffectively no change or development in the story.

For players interested in a solo play experience similar to a 'quest' style dungeon board game this adventure will probably be right up their alley and very satisfying. For players hoping for more of a story-based or RPG style experience this adventure may fall a bit flat.

Objectively well designed, just not my cup of tea.

Solo adventure with a time constraint: the final encounter is harder if soldiers reach the end cave before the character. Lacks meaningful choices: the end reward is the same whether your character opts to be honourable or mercenary. Would be improved by the addition of codewords, for example HONOURABLE and MERCENARY, that may change according to character actions; some encounters should play differently according to which codeword, if any, is held. A potentially interesting encounter with a satyr may be missed. Otherwise variety in replays seems to depend on random encounters rolled. A good addition would be areas where profit is available at the expense of time.

After playing and enjoying "Death Queen and the Life Stone", I tried its sequel, "Forest of Secrets".

"Forest of Secrets" is not as linear as Death Queen. Aside from the first and last encounters, most of the adventure is determined by the route the hero chooses to move from one end of the forest to the other. The player is given 25 tiles representing the encounter sites (start tile, end tile, and 23 others). There are some duplicates (5 copies of one tile, 2 copies each of three other tiles, the other 12 are unique encounter sites). The player is instructed to randomly place, upside down, all but the first and last tile within a 5 tile by 5 tile grid. As your hero moves into a tile, the adjacent tiles are revealed so you can plan your next move provided you survive the current situation.

Tiles may indicate terrain based obstacles or site specific foes or challenges. There is also a chance for a random encounter on every tile using a four entry "wandering monster" list. The hero must navigate across the forest within a certain time limit (based on time it takes to traverse the tiles and specific obstacles on those tiles) before a competing party moving around the outside of the forest reaches the end square. If the competition gets there first, the situation for the final scene changes significantly.

The tile system, with their random layout, makes this module much more appealing than its predecessor for replay. Very little is fixed in place, and in my first run through the mission, I actually missed a lot of interesting scenes that would have provided additional challenge, deeper atmosphere, and some interesting clues about the mission.

The difficulty I had with this module is in understanding how I was supposed to use the tiles. What counts as "adjacent tiles" is not clearly explained. Do diagonal's count? I assumed yes, but maybe not. A visual example would have helped. A hex based tile system would have been clearer, but hex's are tedious to cut out (or snapshot and paste as images into a VTT).

The other issue I had was in knowing what resources were available for one specific fight scene. Since I was using my character from the previous adventure, I had the necessary tools to prevail. Had I simply generated a 2nd level Fighter for this adventure, I would not necessarily have come across the tools I needed for that fight. At least, not as the adventure is written. I suspect this might be due to an oversight rather than a deliberate hurdle the character is expected to face.

The randomness, replayability, and the inclusion of an interesting NPC are the things I like best about this module. The best way to improve on it would be to provide greater clarity about movement across tiles, and the reduction in the number of duplicate tiles/scenes in the set.

I really look forward to the next entry in this series!