Sigh.

This adventure has some potential. It starts out great with the party already having accepted a job and is then sent off into the forest.

Then the adventure stalls. What follows is a series of uninspired combats with no potential to flex player's social or creative muscles.

And then the adventure ends. to be continued in the next adventure of the trilogy. No closure, no conclusion. I'm sure this is very help for conventions but it's bad design. Adventures should have some sort of satisfactory ending so players don't feel like they're going no-where.

Adventure picks up in the middle, so no need to arbitrarily "meet in a tavern at the request of your faction." - nice touch to cut down on 15 minutes of player and DM setup. Overall, basic hack-and-slash with some nice turns in the last encounter. I like how it ties into the series, while still being a standalone 2 hour adventure. Only reason for the 4/5 is I reserve 5/5 for modules that cover all three pillars of the game, which is extremely difficult in 2 hour mods.

A short and fun Tier 3 adventure, Ran it with a full table of 7 and while it is combat heavy using the notes on monster actions, we were able to finish in just over 3 hours including running the optional encounter (player turns take a while at Tier 3!) and if you’re not playing the other 2 in the series right away it ends abruptly. DM should be tricky with this, some of the encounters play well if you hold back info and mislead your players a bit (especially the final one, when I described one monster, the gasps of fear and awe were delicious!) So, keep up the ruse as long as you can! The optional encounter was ran, I used it for a little role play (it’s just business my friend) I did only put 4 stars as the end could have been smoother to allow for standalone play.