OMG I just realized (while sharing a list of playlists I made specifically for this module lol) that I never wrote a review of this!!! This is honestly my favourite module. I ran it Spring 2022 (we play somewhat infrequently) over 7 sessions of 2-3 hours each in our sometimes very RP-heavy group, as part of an ongoing campaign.

I did change a fair amount of the lore/names etc to fit my players' backstories and the plotlines & hooks in my campaign (ie the wizard in the vision who helps the druid is instead replaced with the BBEG in my campaign, and the orcs had additional relevant info to provide to a player who hailed from their tribe at one point but left on bad terms). I also used the Better Boss Battles bundle to beef some stuff up, including the Meenlock lair, using magical darkness and a captured PC to raise the stakes. I ran the dire wolf combat on a gridded battlemap (we play on roll20 or that would have been a LOT of dire wolf minis! lol) and the chaos that ensued was beautiful. Same goes for the final battle at the end.

The module is written very well and it is an absolute STEAL For the price. There are some great themes and locations to explore, interesting monsters, and every encounter has a purpose in the story.

These are the playlists I made for some of the combats: Dire Wolves: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5xrmrCI2nLBRtTrmGyqDKQ?si=a0f451e19b2a495d The Druid's Creations (generally any of the plant combats / combats around the Druid's Hut can use this one): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/09HtnlBNDoziZCVPk0ihIT?si=bd04863180184e10 Meenlocks: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4BBB8ipL0AdMzrK6rCu0DL?si=ef066307c6a64925 The Wicked Wort: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1mCdygl3z4tdIcfGZ03lrh?si=77405d867f124e49

I love loredump pieces like this that just make for quick reference / extra details to include and save me several rabbitholes of research. Several PCs in my game are involved with Selune in some way shape or form so the campaign is very Selune-centered, so this was definitely a must-have.

Just finished running this with my group... well, sorta. I modified the lore of it HEAVILY to fit seamlessly into the lore of my campaign world. I'm not counting that as a negative or anything; modules get weird after first tier. I loved that there were details like that the walls were covered in murals but without the specifics - good writing prompts haha. I spent sooooo much time creating an entire history of three fey realms and everything to fit into and flesh out scraps that I had previously cobbled together in my world. Had to add a bit of time warp / dream world stuff into the mix too for my own reasons, but it also helped explain how the drow (re-skinned as winter eladrin and kenkus in my runthrough ;) ) were inside already if the vault only opens for one day. How/why there were so many undead/fiends (or agents of lolth for that matter) wasn't fully explained, but I just came up with my own reasons for that since I conveniently have a powerful archfey messing around with undeath/immortality in my campaign anyways.

This module was super easy to read though, and my players thankfully went to most of the rooms in order so there wasn't too much jumping around in my notes. Took us about 5 sessions (~3h each?) to get through with our roleplay heavy group, though since every wall except the crypts was covered in murals of my creation, there was a lot of extra padding on my end. Some people and places that seemed familiar to certain characters... so time spent discussing that sorta stuff in character as well. Not to mention they decided to team up with the drow-reskinned-as-eladrin-and-kenku... and also brought the xorn along... so the end battle with the firefly guardians until the end of the module took a LOT longer than it would with a more hack'n'slash group even though the firefly guardians themselves went down pretty quick, since there were so many moving parts and things to wrap up, like the sudden and inevitable betrayal of the eladrin group lol. All in all I really enjoyed dissecting this module. For 4 (normally a bit OP) players at 7th level, the APL 7 suggestions seemed very appropriate with average HP for the monsters all the way through UNTIL the final battle... though that was likely due to me not buffing the firefly guardians up enough to counterbalance the entire troupe they had brought along by that point, and could also have been that they had gotten fairly lucky on the max HP/STR reduction things up to that point. The firelfly guardians seemed to go down pretty fast, would have liked to see some legendary actions or something in the stat block, or more HP (should have stuck with my gut and maxed the HP out on those). Made me glad I had "boss battle part II" in store when Faradanna and my reskinned archfey faction tried to take the goblet that one other character needed to get for their own character development/backstory/RP reasons. All in all, I really enjoyed running this module and the opportunities I had to tweak things as well as the opportunities the players had to interact with things. This was my first time running a true "dungeon crawl" type, and it was exactly what my campaign needed to shift gears for a bit.

This was a really great one-shot that we ran as an "intermission" during travel / between two longer modules (changing the hook to be the sheep rushing up to them on the road rather than in a town). This took us like maybe 6h if I had to guess, but only because we were a roleplay heavy group, and much of the first session was introducing new players, travel, etc. That session ended with the emergence of the bed dragon, with the 2nd session being the bed dragon / gibbering mouther battle as well as the aftermath, travel to the next town, etc. I ran this last Spring, and just a couple months back, the Modified Wand of True Polymorph had a chance to shine again as the barbarian (who was still holding onto it while attempting to find a buyer) managed to succeed on the Int check to turn that plotline's BBEG into a cow! All in all, I think I'd definitely run this again as a one shot. It was very fun and memorable.

This was the first module I ran (oops, finished it a year ago and only reviewing now) and my first experience DMing. I found that it was very obvious that it was 3 different people writing 1/3 each because the style/voice changed a bit. Some sections were easier to follow than others, etc. I also used it as an intro to D&D for a completely new player, and I found that it really showcased the three pillars well, and provided for all sorts of weird scenarios. I remember changing some stuff around near the end of it... some things just didn't make a ton of sense / didn't offer strong motivations for the players so I had to pull some stuff out. They wanted to know where all the other wannabe adventurers flocking to the town were and why they weren't helping, so I had to really play up the psychic waves thing and say that they were the newest group to town and that their detour a few days out to the yuan-ti pit and back got them out of the area long enough that the psychic effect wasn't as strong vs them (cue making some madness saves and shit to save face at this point...). I also found that travel time was really glossed over; it was written without any mention of how far away the yuan-ti area was for example. If you're trying to use the Forgotten Realms as a setting for a larger campaign and don't catch this travel time thing early on, you might find your version of the Realms to be quite a bit smaller. The other thing was the dreamstones and nightmare stones. They're not explained at all, not even whether they're the real deal or fakes, simply that they can be sold (for practically nothing) in town... kinda good and bad depending. So anyways that's the story of how I have an entire campaign that centres around what was intended to be a random loot item mentioned offhand in a module lol. All in all, I do think it's a good module, especially for introducing new players, and it definitely sets up the idea that monsters just exist in the world and the solution is not always "kill all the monsters"... but new DMs should be aware that it isn't a module that you can pick up and play without reading/highlighting through first.

Love this resource. As others have mentioned, my only gripe is that the text in the PDF is not selectable (I would like to be able to create menus with the descriptions included).