A nice, short, well-done spin on a classic 'dungeon' delve you can really plop into just about any setting. Find and explore an old, forgotten, underground workshop with a bit of a steampunk feel. This series is so great! I do hope it continues. You don't have to run Lost Mine of Phandelver first, but the adventure hook handout (and my players LOVE handouts) fits so well into the loot at Wave Echo Cave. You don't need LMoP or anything else to run this module, but I like lore, so added NPC encounters and my players got to explore Kwalish and Netherese lore hinted at in the adventure. The "What's Next?" section is great offering some next chapters: run the Lost Lab of Kwalish module? buy the property in Neverwinter and have an urban HQ for whatever happens next? so many options! This one shot (we added a puzzle room before the rotating chamber, adding on an extra session) is so well thought out and put together: the maps, the stat blocks, the great tokens, and just the layout are all so well designed and just make this feel high quality. Loved this one!

This is such a beautiful story! THANK YOU! So well thought out. You don't need to know background to dive in, but it feels like we learn about the deity and their followers as we delve this dungeon. It fits really on the end of LMoP, but can easily plop into most campaign settings. My players LOVE handouts and the map in this one really helps immerse in the setting as we had to reference and decipher it throughout the adventure. I have to be honest, because of my groups' sad history with puzzles in RPGs I didn't have a lot of hope for this one...but I'm in love with these 'Trials'! There are opportunities for combat and you could expand on that, but its not needed. Favorite puzzle in this adventure (maybe of all my DMing): The Trial of Shadow! Players could fail and flounder through a dangerous necrotic darkness, but it was not instant death. So well done! This is probably my new favorite One-Shot. I only have 2 requests. 1) PLEASE, continue this series of mini-dungeons and encounters (I also loved Legacy of the Mechanist), and 2) Ditch the black banner at the top of each page. It's not needed and uses a lot of ink for us who like to print and run campaings from paper.

Clunky Start, but Epic Finish!

This started off meh for my players. They were not hooked by the call to action. At all. They spent some time roaming the Dock Ward, but were not interested in getting involved in a shakedown. We are told "The only clue the characters have is the map itself" and "Details are sparse". Sparse indeed. The investigation felt clunky and I did not get much from the module to help players navigate the Dock Ward. I used NPC Ian Forksful here to involve the PCs in a world of 'organized' crime and he basically gave them a tour of introductions to all the contacts ever needed to take down an evil gang.

Finally, episode 3 and the action starts! My players had a blast in the setting for the final showdown, The Prow, Inn and tavern. It became a beloved landmark--one of my favorite settings as a DM. Have a map for all three levels of the Inn and let the BBEG run around the map. After a bloody battle, my players welcomed an almost Deus ex Machina ending with the red sashes and the city guard showing up. They role played a Scooby Doo ending with BBEG in custody, they pull off her hat of disguise, reveal her plot, she confesses she "would have gotten away with it, if it weren't for those meddling

Dungeon Crawl My players loved going through Map With No Name leading up to this. They flexed their stealth and social interaction RP skills. This chapter in the triilogy is more a room by room dungeon crawl. It felt more board game than rpg (on your turn move, attack, roll dice, next). By the last fight before meeting the BBEG, I think combat fatigue set in and I probably could have had them just skip one of the encounters to keep the pace moving. Still, players had fun, enjoyed meeting some challenging foes, solved a puzzle (the statues and baton turned into more challenge than I expected!), and were completely surprised by the twist ending. Good fun dungeon grinding.

I will start by saying that I spent a ridiculous amount of prep setting up this "Umbral Aristocracy Trilogy". BUT, my players loved running this trilogy of adventures, and in this adventure specifically, they had more fun than any other session we've done. We started with a decent amount of roleplay and exploring Waterdeep before diving into adventure. Each of the three main locations offered players a different type of game: the house at Trollskull turned into a bloody combat disaster, they loved splitting the party and having a social interaction in the Soaring Delights restaraunt, and the gang hideout in the sewers turned into a stealthy assassination. Each character had a shining moment when they could steal the spotlight; I cannot stress enough that they absolutely LOVED playing this adventure.

Like other reviewers, I am not excited to pay this much for an adventue module with errors and typos that lead to confusion. Not okay with that. For a lower price I could probably deal with it. A quick edit should have fixed the mistake in the 'Playing the Pillars' gang hideout table. And all those photos. Yes, They're gorgeous. They're huge (some of them taking up half the page). We can't afford to print them (and I already own these photos in the hardcover WotC books they were taken from). What I want from a DMs Guild purchase is a short, easy to navigate adventure. The large pictures got in the way and up the price a lot for people trying to print these.

well if this isn't the cutest little adventure you ever did play... It worked perfectly for our party when only two of us showed up at our DM's house. The DM printed it off, we rolled up two new characters, and made it through smoothly in 1 session. As a DM I now keep this printed out and handy for when the same thing inevitably happens again. It works flawlessly as a one-shot ready to play 'straight out of the box', it fits really well into most campaigns I can think of, but I can also see it easily expanding into a trilogy for a party to work through in multiple sessions.