Excellent adventure. We had such a fun time running this. Was a perfect side adventure in our Waterdeep campaign.

Excellent adventure! I had loads of fun with the various tricks, puzzles, and traps. There's enough of an old school Gygax dungeon vibe that was perfect for the players at my table. It's been two weeks now, and I'm still smiling at how much I enjoyed running this.

Tip #1: Consider making one of your players a mapper. That way you're only drawing/showing parts of the map pertinent. And the tactile aspect of drawing and referring to their map is helpful for the players.

Tip #2: Although I guess it's technically possible to run in 4 hours, there's loads of stuff in this adventure and it can easily run 8 hours. Plan accordingly.

My players enjoyed this storyline SO much! It brought about some incredible homebrew side missions, including a heist during a masquerade where my players double-crossed Mirt and got the Unicorn back and freed her from her crystalline form. 11/10! So fun!!! We ran this mission at least a year ago and still talk about it all the time.

Overall, this is a great adventure you and your players will have a lot of fun with.

This adventure is a "fun-house" style adventure with loads of traps, puzzles and riddles as well as six combat encounters (seven if you include the wandering monsters) for your players to deal with. This adventure is set in Faerun, starting in a Waterdeep tavern, leading to a classic, mad mage's dwelling dungeon crawl.

It struck me as odd how the location is presented. It's essentially a dungeon in town, but described as an alley with "sandstone walls, cobblestones of blue sodalite ...with a permanent wall of force preventing ... flying or climbing". Personally, I find this hastily contrived and purely there to inhibit character abilities. I get it, this is a dungeon, located within a town, so some sort of explanation is necessary, but I was unsatisfied with what was presented. This could easily be explained by the alley leading to a structure carved out of a hill or steep embankment in the town. Whether you need to update this is entirely dependent on your players' level of suspension of disbelief.

The adventure background and wrap-up is not very compelling and may end up consuming a significant portion of your game time. I would suggest a canned introdction, in-media-res if you are running this as a one shot.

The presentation of each map key does not include "boxed text," but instead includes "The area has the following features: Dimensions & Terrain...." (repeated 28 times...) followed by often innacurate or missing dimensions and often with information the players would not gain immediately or with rules text. I am fully on board with providing sensory details (what you can see, hear, feel, etc.), which are especially helpful for theater-of-the-mind games, but also useful otherwise. However, it is as if the map was drawn after creating the descriptions, or not consulted, as many do not actually include dimensions, and about half that do don't match the map. I would have preferred a delineation of what the players can discern with a cursory glance, then the rest provided as DM-only information. You can like or dislike boxed text, but having information that includes game rules or details only available with further inspection in the initial description is sloppy at best and may cause grief for the DM, even after reading. In my case, I rewrote all the map keys, with information the players would glean immediately separated from information they would not. For example, while mostly inconsequential, there are several descriptions that include information about what the door or wall is constructed of, like silver plated wood. I know I'm being pedantic here, but that is simply not information a player character would understand on a glance. None of this detracts from the overall excellent adventure, but may cause some misteps by the DM. There are some locked or secret (or both) doors without explanation. While the initial Area Information includes some broad details, none of the undescribed interactive elements have a "default". Futher, only one of several secrets has any information as to why or how it's secret. The rest simply list DCs. While this isn't all that uncommon, I find it much more interesting to include a description as to how or why it's locked, secret, or trapped, how to open it, etc.

The map is fine, but potentially difficult to use with modern VTTs. I can tell from previous comments and reviews, I'm not alone in decrying this presentation of maps. If you are customizing this, note, the map scale is 138.75 pixels per inch, with dimesions of 7704x9288. That's simply not going to line up. You can add a horizontal offset of 105 and a vertical offset of 110, then crop the map offsets to end up with a 54x55 grid map. I would guess this presentation is intended for printing, but who does that any more? An easy to use, no border, or cell-aligned border is what most DMs are going to find easiest to use. Any background coloring, especially when using a pattern, is only going to make it more difficult to use and is nothing the players will ever see. In my case, I pulled it over into dungeondraft and added some walls (the map only has shadows, no actual walls).

Again, you and your players will enjoy this adventure and it comes highly recommended.

I have played this and am now DMing it. It is a nice filler for Dragon Heaist for me if they don't have much to doat Trollskull alley. I do wish the map would just plop right into roll20 and fit the page but it does not. Still working on tweaking that. You can use this to add some mystery and fun to the search for the Stone of Galorr

Ended up running this as a one shot for my Waterdeep campaign when a few of my players couldn't make it. They had a blast navigating all of the traps and even managed to befriend the minotaur instead of fighting it!

Really fun adventure to run, and due to it's gimmick quite easy to slot in to existing campaigns. Had to adapt one of the puzzles since it depends on specific words and I'm running my games in another language, but most of the rooms worked well as written. Players enjoyed it and it was a great addition to our Waterdeep Dragon Heist campaign.

Excellent starting adventure for new players and new Dungeon Masters. After running this one-shot with my gaming group, I realize I'm hooked. I purchased all the starter books, and Waterdeep:Dragon Heist. There's something about the City of Splendors that just clicked for me, and knowing there's a crazy wizzard who built a trap infested fun house for his own amusement was a large part of that. Highly recomended.

Currently running Blue Alley as a side dungeon crawl for my Storm Kings Thunder campaign. Despite the module explicitly stating that this shouldn't be run for players higher than level 4 (why?!) - my players are level 7 and with a few easy mods (added extra monsters as needed and a few blasts of fire in the room with hanging platforms) they are half way through (took 3 hours so far) and absolutely loving it. Highly recommend - even for higher level players - just be a creative DM and add more monsters or glyphs/traps as needed. Easily adaptable to add as a dungeon crawl - I added mine in Luskan and told PCs that the Arcane Brotherhood created it. 4 stars because despite creator advice it IS playable with PCs higher than level 4.

Edit: Updated to add that my party refused to return the celestite Unicorn (Lady Primara) to Mirt. They pretended not to have recovered it and thus begun a whole new ongoing side quest which I thought I'd add here for future DMs to add onto the back of Blue Alley - party discovered Celestite Unicorn is a sentient unicorn trapped under an evil enchantment and have to return her to Shadowtop Cathedral in High Forest (ties into Storm Kings Thunder as party had to go there anyway). Party druid fell in love with said statue and made it their mission to safely return her to the forest weeks later (in game) where, under the light of the full moon she was restored to her Unicorn form. As her true self, Lady Primara the Unicorn gifted the party a magical item to summon her at great time of need (at such time i think i'll allow her to do a high level buff or mass healing word etc). Party loved it and now have a slight enemy in Mirt from Waterdeep

Had the pleasure of both running this as a one-shot for a group to fill a gap week, but also to play it in as part of a Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign. Very much a classic, funhouse style dungeon -- which isn't for everyone -- but I enjoy them, and this is a good modern example of the type.

This is a solid, enjoyable adventure! It has a nice dungeon crawl structure/setup, but translated to an urban environment. Puzzles, traps, combat, and having to backtrack to get the full experience and context - it's all there!

The flavor is solid, as are the encounters - though many of them feel like they have the potential to be highly-lethal with small or inexperienced parties, so you might need to keep an eye on that and tune it on the fly. Structurally/conceptually, it feels a bit like a "White Plume Mountain for Beginners" in the variety of encounters and elements.

The ALCC suggests that this works best alongside WDH when dropped into chapter 2. I haven't run it as anything but a standalone, and I think it really shines that way -- an isolated dungeon feels a touch at odds with the Ch. 2 "getting to know the city" vibes, but since it's still in Waterdeep, and it does connect to certain important NPCs, it does still make sense/further that purpose. With the eventual macguffin and the choice at the end, I think it could also work as an extended scene for one of the keys required later on (Ch... 4?), especially as it adds a touch of the "heist" vibe that is, perhaps, weaker in the main hardcover.

Telegraphing the "phrase order" puzzle might be helpful, as well - perhaps handouts of the elements as they're found that can be physically moved around? I might also broaden the trigger for the statue to being directly addressed, as well as the listed one, if characters are struggling a bit.

Reward: The rewards are decent for a 4(-or-more) hour T1 adventure. They mostly lack flavor, though -- only 1 of the 5 MIs has flavor; I actually found, when playing it, that the trinkets you can pick up along the way are just as, if not more, fun. Still! 2 Uncommons and a top-tier common with choice make this a solid adventure. Note that, perhaps because it's classed as a hardcover, there is no Rewards handout/summary page, so make sure you're tracking it as they go.

I've been runnign this as a standalone adventure, and my group absolutely loved it! The mix of combat/exploration/puzzles with the overlaying silliness of some aspects was just a blast. In terms of length, it did take 2 full sessions of 4 hours to run, the players having dived full into the schenanigans and explored almost every piece of the dungeon.

I've been running Waterdeep Dragonheist (Alexandrian Remix) for my friends, and took over as DM after Chapter 2. I introduced Blue Alley to the party early in the adventure but they waited until level 6 to enter it. I ran the dungeon as is except for adding more monsters into each encounter in order to adjust the CR of the encounter.

What I liked: This is a fantastic adventure Even for a level 6 party, just adding in some more skeletons, specters, mephits, etc still does a great job draining party resources combined with all the clever traps. The different keys give a lot of incentive to go back and forth through the dungeon, same with the riddle puzzle. My party got Primara right away, but stayed in Blue alley (mistakenly thinking that the Stone of Golorr was in the Alley) and it slowly chewed them up. The only thing I added to the dungeon was a mini-tiamat in an additional side room. A trapped door leading to a chute with 8 kobolds and 5 chromatic wyrmlings. The adventure as written though it terrific and I see how dangerous and deadly it would be for a level 2 party!

What I didn't like: No real complaints here aside from Primara needing to be a wondrous item in her own right, I turned her into a magic statue that could heal with a version of the Unicorn's Horn ability. But other than that just FANTASTIC!

I ran this as a side quest during a weekend the whole group couldn't make it. Those who made it had a blast and said how much fun the had.

This is a wonderful product for anyone looking to run this iconic piece of Waterdeep in fifth edition. I particularly appreciated the adjustability for parties of different levels, because Blue Alley should always be a deathtrap, but I think there could have been more of that. That said, the alley is a fun romp and a great challenge for your players. I miss the Guild Adepts program!