A fun adventure that sets up the second half of the Embers of the Last War story arc.

The good:

• The looks that players at a nearby table gave me when I announced "He kicks the baby carriage down the staircase" were priceless.
• The Fiasco-style bonus objective where players take on other personas to play out a scene the PCs are observing was a blast! I want to run this again with a full table so we can explore the other characters.
• The introduction of a couple of Eberron staples, the Wand Adept and the [redacted] in the final battle.

The bad:

• This is the third adventure of the series in a row where the plot hook is "a mysterious entity sends the party a note that is almost certainly leading them into a trap". It's not a problem with this adventure per se, but maybe someone could have noticed this when editing the series as a whole.
• If you are playing a small table at minimum level, the NPCs in the dream parlor can get overwhelming fast if a fight breaks out. I'd recommend swapping all of the Veterans out for Thugs.
• Eberron purists may not like how a certain notable NPC is depicted in this series.

I've run this adventure twice and I'm still not sure how the players are supposed to get all four checkpoints.

In both games the players opted to enter through the second floor but were caught breaking in, which ended up with them fighting the entire house full of NPCs while stuck in a single room—a two-hour slog. When they finished the combat they had to chase the lone escapee so barely searched the room they were in, they didn't go up to the attic to find the second(?) magic item in the adventure, nor did they venture down to the basement to find the trigger for the bonus checkpoint.

The combat is wildly unbalanced; the four Veteran guards out front are a Deadly encounter for five level 4 PCs, and there are ten(!) other NPCs in the house, not counting the Archer and Knight who are also CR 3 each. Ambushing the party with ANOTHER potentially deadly combat when they haven't had a chance to recover from the previous one is a jerk move. I skipped that encounter in the second game because I figured they'd rather miss out on the checkpoint than get wiped out.

The chase scene was interesting but kind of anticlimatic.

This adventure doesn't fit the new AL format very well. Prior adventures treat the bonus objectives as optional, additional scenes to extend the running time, but in this adventure they can't really be separated from the main plot. I don't know how you would run this in a 2-hour block.

The party is asked to acquire the chief artificer's ID and papers in the intro handout, but doing so is considered a bonus objective. (Why do they have to kill him? Incapacitating him isn't an option?) The second bonus objective is simply "infiltrate the facility and escape without the alarm being raised", but Episode Three seems to take for granted that reinforcements are called, meaning that they fail to get the second bonus? If the chief artificer isn't alerted or is taken out so he can't sound the alarm, what is there to do in Episode Three?

It's disappointing that the main path through the adventure works best if your party doesn't have any of the races that are unique to Eberron. A changeling can pass, of course, but there aren't even any options suggested for warforged characters.

If the characters are more than a level or two apart, some of the encounters can be really hard to scale. The hobgoblin devastator can take a low-APL group apart all by herself, as can the medusa, and both of them have reinforcements. I don't know how an APL 1 party would survive this adventure as written if their cover gets blown.

I did like the setup for the adventure, and the twist that results from it.

I liked the preparatory actions the party can take before trying to enter the ball. It's hard to judge how the adventure should run; I had a very odd party who tried to break convention as much as possible. They triggered all sorts of alarms, got into a fight with the guards, and only half the group escaped with the letter.

A fun introduction to Eberron and Sharn. The format of going from place to place to gather clues and encounter complications is a good one, letting the players set the pace and determine their path through the story.

Others have commented on the difficulty of the final fight with Yeq and the bronze scout. Unless the party has more than one person capable of dealing damage magically, I'd swap out for the variant stat block; for a larger party, maybe increase its hit point total. I ended up allowing them to shove the scout onto the lightning rail tracks to finish it off.

The only complication I found was the bonus objective with Lobana. Unless the party is willing to sneak through the house, there are no clues in the conversation that lead them to discern her (false) connection with High Cardinal Krozen. Also, it's not clear that mystery isn't intended to be solved in this adventure. My players kept trying to fit her deceptions into the larger picture of the story they were involved in now.

The rules for "level 0" characters are unique; you're weaker than a level 1 PC with class abilities, but not overwhelmingly so. When I ran this with a 4-person table, three PCs were able to defeat two CR 1/8 Bandits and a CR 1/4 Acolyte with a little luck.

Given the framework of the story as a prologue to the main storyline, I'm OK with it being somewhat railroad-y. The players get a bit of agency in how they deal with the initial combat, discovering how to fly the ship, and how to handle it when they get to Lower Dura. Sure, they can't leave until the ship is repaired—and my players seriously debated leaving the ship there and abandoning it—but having their names on wanted posters made for powerful motivation.

When it came to the bigger bad guys, I had Xen and Geryn help out. There is a note in the adventure that a particular Bandit Captain should be reduced to 35 hit points; I'd do that for every NPC unless you have a full table of 6 PCs and they're working really well together. I had Xen and Geryn help out as well. Even without prepared spells, Geryn's Fire Bolt is a good equalizer against big bad guys.

As an introduction to Eberron in 5th Edition, What's Past is Prologue is an interesting experiment, and one that I think worked.

The first four-hour DDAL adventure for the Curse of Strahd storyline season, the party has to deal with a threat to the village of Orasnou, and learn that there is more to the events of the past few weeks than meets the eye.

RUNNING THE GAME: There are three major parts to the adventure: a visionquest where the party can start to learn the secrets behind the events of DDAL04-02 The Beast, and DDAL04-03 The Executioner; the attack on the village by the minions of a powerful undead; and the exploration of Falinescu Manor. It's a four-hour adventure, which gives you more time than the previous two in the series, but it's still possible to come up short.

The visionquest is my favorite scene in the adventure and could benefit from the most time. If you want to give the the party more time for the visionquest then you could do the introduction in media res, with the party returning from an ill-fated attempt to rescue some missing villagers.

The attack on the village is handled narratively; instead of just making the party fight an army of undead, they take part in a number of scenes which can have dire ramifications for the village if the party can't prevail. Since there's no real combat in them, they can go quickly and challenge the players to think beyond simple tactics.

The Manor is an extensive exploration scene, taking the most of the time budget. If you find you are running out of time, you can skip rooms; the basement seems to have the least impact on the story as a whole. The final battle has some interesting environmental effects.

The only things that keep this from being a 5-star adventure for me is that introduction doesn't give the players a lot to do and feels like filler, and the odd disappearance of a menace from the earlier adventures. The NPC just leaves and isn't seen again in the series.

In a series of five 1-hour sessions, the party helps the occupants of an inn track down a family that has stolen items from them. But not all is what it seems, and the party may find themselves in a very different place from where they began. An Introduction to the Curse of Strahd storyline season.

RUNNING THE GAME: Running 1-hour games can be tough for inexperienced DMs, especially in an organized play setting where you might might have an enforced time limit. The missions in Suits of the Mists are straightforward enough that they should fit comfortably within a 1-hour slot, though you might miss out on some good character interation in Mission 2 (Coins) and Mission 4 (Glyphs).

Because they must be short, the plots of the individual missions aren't very in-depth; my personal favorite is Mission 2 for the interaction with the NPCs and the choices that can be made. If you can run the entire thing as a 4- or 5-hour adventure—maybe with a break or two between missions—that might be ideal; you won't have to do setup and re-explain the premise at the start of each mission, and the goals of the thieves make more sense when viewed as a whole.

You can run the first four missions in any order for organized play, but Mission 5 must be run last. There is a story award in Mission 3 (Swords) that Adventurers League players might want to claim for organized play, but it requires them to enter the mists to Ravenloft immediately; if they have not played Missions 1, 2, or 4, they won't be able to. If you are running the game as an all-in-one for organized play, I would run Mission 3 after the other three, then move to Mission 5.

As this is an introduction to Curse of Strahd and the Demiplane of Dread, some of the scenes might be intense for younger players, notably Missions 4 and 5.

The Executioner takes place a few weeks after DDAL04-02 The Beast; the party hears rumors that the storms beseiging the town are caused by a mysterious artifact, and that people who go looking for it disappear. The party explores the town looking for clues that lead them to a shocking secret.

RUNNING THE GAME: This adventure can be challenging for new or inexperienced DMs to run. It's very open and allows the players to explore locations in town at their leisure, but some of the plot points can be hard to work in as a result. (I never had a party who was interested in breaking in to the Burgomaster's home, which cuts out some foreshadowing of later adventures in the DDAL season.) It doesn't work well as a stand-alone adventure; it works best when the players are continuing from The Beast, and the payoff happens in DDAL04-04 The Marionette. If you were only going to run this by itself, I would play up the rumor about the missing treasure hunters and make it more of a "whodunnit".

If people want to run this for a group that doesn't like to take the initative, or who wants a stronger narrative, I've posted some suggestions in the Discussion. The author is receptive to feedback, and the adventure has been updated to address some of the complaints that other people have had.

The Beast is the first DDAL adventure to take place fully within the lands of Barovia. The players, fresh from their arrival, find themselves in the village of Orasnou, where they learn the town is in dire straits; the cold is settling in and a husband-and-wife hunting/trapping team has gone missing.

The adventure leads the party through the wilderness to search for the pair and learn their fate.

RUNNING THE GAME This is a fun adventure to run. The Beast introduces players to some of the dangers that await them in Barovia, sets the tone for the Curse of Strahd DDAL season, and sets up plot threads for future adventures. NOTE: As written, one of the possible endings may be a little intense for younger players.

It's a quick two-hour adventure but the possible encounters are not set in stone; the DM can mix and match to present unique challenges for repeat players, or to expand beyond the two-hour running time. (There is a separate PDF with even more information to flesh out the adventure, if you are playing it outside of Adventurers League organized play.)

The story is good, but the combat encounters seem overpowered. The adventure is billed as a single-session adventure for four 1st-level characters but the adventure has 8 combat encounters, with no apparent opportunities for a rest except after the first encounter.

It's not clear if the scroll is supposed to be a spell scroll or a part of a spellbook. Spell scrolls can only have a single spell on them, and this has two.

The stat block suggested for the final encounter doesn't match the description of the NPC; the AC and size are wrong. You could create a custom stat block to make that encounter more interesting.

There are minor typos throughout the adventure. Language names are in lowercase, which makes them harder to spot. Putting the creature names in bold is helpful, but the creatures in rooms 8 and 11 are missing that formatting.

Rather than defining what easy, medium, and hard DCs are, why not just use the DCs themselves in the adventure? It's one less thing the DM has to keep track of or remember if they see "DC 15 Intelligence (Religion) check" instead of "Medium Intelligence (Religion) check".