I have long felt that factions should be a role playing aid rather than a directed set of missions. That is, faction members should be looking for opportunities to further the goals of their group. A weakness in AL has been that cycle of NPCs handing out missions. The Verdantium brings that back. Senior members of factions (Player characters) have made decisions here and that allows individuals to step forward and commit to their faction's goals. After this, you go and play AL modules just as you always did, but you can enjoy them more as your character now has a vision to follow.

For a collaborative project, this is well put together and a really good aid for AL players who want the Red War to have meaning for their character.

Rashemen is one of those under used but unique countries in the Forgotten Realms, so it was a pleasure to visit the Hathrans once again. The module has a simple plot that feels complex. That is it is easy to run and yet feels to the players to be complex.

What it offers the opportunity for some complex and specific tacits from the NPCs and so the DM has to spend more time preparing for the battles than for the plot.

Because of the way the level adjustments are written (Spell caster classes and spell lists are changed between weak, average, strong etc) it becomes hard to prepare the tactics thoroughly and I found myself looking up spell descriptions during play.

It adds a race that is different to the standard races, so it is a usefull addition to the core rules. Your Turtle has natural armour and weapons and a few quirks.

This alone makes it valuable.

It also adds a short adventure which can be useful when there is time to fill or you need something simple to run. I wouldn't go out of my way for it though.

City on the edge is a great introduction to the port and the faction leaders.

As always, simple one hour adventures that are easy for a new DM or player to get through.

This module just seemed too short. There are ways the Dm can pad it out and options for the players to do more work, but if you follow the plot, it is over quite quickly.

It probably needed another encounter thrown in and a DM should consider adding something jungle related.

This module is fun and different, but perhaps relies too heavily on the idea that there are dinosaur races in Port Nyanzaru. This was already dealt with in City on the edge, ToA hard cover and Peril at the Port so its really only going to spark the imagination of new players.

This achieved what it sets out to do. It is a little fun for the Christmas season.

It is nothing big or grand or even worth going out of your way for, but if you enjoyed Leonard's Santa scenario in the Big Bang Theory, you'll get a kick out of this one too.

It can be a quick module and should be. Don't drag anything out.

This is a fun but complicated adventure. Players all enjoyed it, although some got a little frustrated along the way.

There are over a dozen NPCs in this and being a murder mystery the DM needs to know them all well to have effective interactions. This takes more prep time than the average four hour module, so be prepared.

The setting is quite good as the Hillsfar region has a lot of flavor both before and after Death on the Wall. This module can easily be set on either side of that. I ran it straight after Bane of the Tradeways and didn't have to change much. It does make a good addition to season 3.

I did find the hook a little unclear. When the murder occurs, the party has neither the motivation, nor the authority to investigate until the next morning when Biff speaks to them. There are also two points where you need to get the party to stop investigating so the plot can advance. My party resisted these, so it got a little awkward.

This is what I want from a two hour module. A simple scenario that is fun to play out. It tok us three hours, but I did allow the players to spend a lot of time investigating in the early parts of the module.

There is enough plot to get the characters to role play and make choices, but not so much that they lose focus. The combats are good and have variety.

Highly recommeded.

I was running it for only three characters, so I needed to take it easy on them, but it still worked well.

I do think the provided map of the keep was not useful, though it was easy to improvise around that. The second encounter needed a little tweaking, but would still have worked as written so long as nobody was paying too much attention.

You can get this for free, so there is no need to complain about anything. If you want a quick path to teir 2, this will do it. The adventure has a few phases and will take six to twelve hours, but it introduces the trouble with giants well starting with the sound of drums. Players come away knowing something is up but they won't know what exactly, yet they will get to experience several great hints about the stories coming up.

Storm King's Thunder is an excellent hard back adventure and this makes a good starting point.

A much better story than Dire Need with a few interesting NPCs. This still requires a journey and random encounters, but at least when you get to the destination, information needs to be gathered, choices need to be made and ramifications come with that. The module has opportunities for different parties to approach things differently as violence, stealth and diplomacy can all take the adventure in different directions. There is also a fun mission for one of the factions.

This is an odd start to the second teir of the season. We learn about the problems giants are facing in the area and the problems they are causing, but the mission itself is a little too simple. The party must journey, then sneak in and rescue. This relies on random encounters en route and then the main art of the module can be down in several ways. A violent party can just wade in, while a stealthy party can do the sneaky way. That is the only real choice in the module. Otherwise its a "follow the train" story.

Chelimber's Descent is a good little dungeon crawl. There are monsters, traps and puzzles. The challenge is for the players to pay enough attention to key pieces of information. When I played it, I wasn't in the mood for unravelling clues from poetry and that hurt my character. Essentially the Chelimber dyptich is an optional side quest during a night Parnast story arc. It has its place and woulkd probably work best as a double header with part 1.

A short simple dungeon crawl. As it is designed to be a trigger for Forge of Fury it lacks a bit of plot itself. I played this twice and both times the party lacked motivation to follow the plot and found ourselves staring down the final encounter without the motivation to fight. My feeling is that the DM has to engineer a bit of motivation for the character and particularly highlight that they will need to travel this way again in the future, or at a minimum make the villainy of the kobolds clearer.

I played this twice. The first time took one hour and the second time took almost four so you can strecth it out by paying more attention to the details and the options, but mostly this is a short module and really just half a story. It would have been far better to put the two halves into one module.

There is also very little linking this to the rest of the teir one story arc and for that reason I mark it down.