Harlequin is a classic, sure, but it falls well short of other First Edition adventures like Mercurial and Dreamchipper. Ultimately, it's closer to a 3 than it is a 5 but I'm giving it a little lee way for being an adventure that paved the way for much of Shadowrun's early lore. Let's get in to specifics though:

Harlequin follows the player team through a series of about 8 adventures, with most of them seeming to be disconnected unrelated jobs to all but the most perceptive players. This is by design, truly Harlequin is meant to be played alternating with at least one other campaign but given the length of the book it's a lot easier to play it straight through even if it weakens the mystery. That's because at 8 adventures, and each adventure being about two or three lessions in length, you're going to be spending half a year or more just on this campaign. Which can be a good thing if you want a longer story to bite your teeth in to!

The greater story itself is interesting. The ancient elven battle between Harlequin and Ehran that the players don't even realize their pawns in is very interesting, and many of the characters are intriguing. Even at the highest point of frustration my players had with the writing (we'll get to that) they were still so intrigued with the mystery they never wanted to stop. Especially because they had been so diligent in collecting clues and putting together that every single job had, in some way, revolved around Ehran.

The biggest weakness of this campaign is all the "cutscenes", that was how my players coined it. Every Shadowrun adventure has a "Tell it to Them Straight" section to introduce each scene. In Harlequin they're long, very long, sometimes a page or two or even three long. I know this is a game from an older era when tabletops were finding their feet, but I can't imagine even back then players enjoyed being read to for 15 or 20 minutes. It seems as if the adventure intends for you to pause or stop to get player input during these cutscenes, but doing so often requires you to awkwardly stop in the middle of paragraphs.

Often times my players felt like they had very little agency compared to other 1e adventures like Mercurial, and often disgruntled on how the adventure seemed to wisk them along or imply thoughts or actions that didn't meet the players view of their characters requiring some small rewrites. Now, to be fair, most campaigns have a little of this, but I want to emphasise here that Harlequin clearly crosses the line from it being an acceptable part of pre written adventures and getting in to frustrating territory.

Many of the missions themselves are fun, well balanced, and interesting, especially the break ins. The old German town you go to, breaking in to the Policlub, stealing a manuscript, and the last mission in Althian all have the feeling of diving in to places you're not supposed to be and it all works very well. Not just the smaller missions however, there's a lot of globetrotting too. The trek through Aztlan will forever be a highlight of my table, as will boarding suborbital flights and being thrown around the world to other countries. It's a great way to show your players just how big thr world of Shadowrun is. However,

The maps are bad, and a few of the encounters are badly designed The perfect example of this is an early mission where you break in to a policlub office building. The layout is nonsensicle, whoever drew the map forgot to put a front entrance, and if you walk in the back door the entire way the mission is written falls apart. This isn't the only bad map in the game, or the only time where a mission can fall apart because players do something that's not even that hard to expect, but it's definitely the worst case of it. Even in the cases of very well designed maps like Althian you have several rooms the players will almost certainly never go in to, that have art and wistful descriptions.

Some of the tone is inconsistent and the humor is often, uhm, just bad. About halfway through the campaign you go to Germany, you have what I think may just be the best and most intriguing adventure in the whole book, only for me to realize at the very end you were supposed to play it...tongue in cheek? Like a joke? Even re-reading it i'm not sure what the 'joke' is supposed to be, other than German accents are funny I guess. The old tired baron and the castle on the mountain, there's a lot of intrigue there. I recommend you play it straight. But I tell you that to tell you this, the campaign's tone is often inconsistent as is a lot of it's humor in a way that isn't offensive but IS definitely eye rolling.

Overall You have an intriguing campaign with a great overall story and characters but with the glaring flaws such as too many "cutscenes", bad maps, and inconsistent tone. As much as I thought about it, I decided not to deduct anything from the adventure for it's outdated writing and language, no writer can see the future, but there's a few things in here that will make you roll your eyes.

One of the best season 8 modules so far. I don't typically enjoy "Theater of the Mind" games, that is to say games that largely rely on not having a map available, but this one in particular is well laid out and structured in such a way that it generally doesn't need a physical map. Describe it simply as "A maze", the characters finding their way through it is less literally telling you if they go left or right and more making skill checks and putting it together.

Pros: Well written story with likeable NPCs Feels like the first game since Season 7 that's actually an adventure; A true blue dungeon dive. Encounters are well balanced and setting it to strong presented a real but not impossible challenge to my five level five players. Side content is meshe din well as long as you read it ahead of time to know where the passenges splinter off in to. An absolute wealth of options between social, exploration, and raw combat.

Cons: The plot hook, or the call to action as you may call it, suffers from the same weakness as the previous trilogy. Just listing the characters that are present and what those characters know really isn't sufficient in my opinion. I understand maybe Wizard's wants to move away from pre written stat blocks, but there needs to be more guidance in this opening scenes. Nomatter how well the session is written around it, the lack of maps is still a problem. I had to make and prepare maps ahead of time for the combat encounters. DMs should never be afraid of prep work, but if i'm paying money for a module then it should at least have decent maps. The sketches in this module are the worst i've seen in all eight seasons.

I absolute adore this adventure. When paired with the HD maps, also available here on DM's guild, the adventure is both exciting and interesting. Players have the freedom to investigate the source of the map through several avenues, giving a much needed feeling of player agency to AL where it's often lacking, and the side quests felt like they integrated in pretty well. This is also the first truly challenging module of the season, and I have a special place in my heart for challenging games.

Story After finishing up the last game and discovering the maps were traps to send you in to the waiting jaw of a vampire, the players set out to solve the problem. The plot hook is fine by itself, but it does present a problem: You're always going to have that one player that says "I'm not going to do this just because i'm being extorted by a vampire." There's plenty of ways to play around this, and don't be afraid to have Artor bear down on those players with his power. After that you have a fun romp through Waterdeep, discover a dead body if you do the side quest, then find a Drow disguised as a woman. In our first playtest we saved the guns until the last encounter, and the shock on the players face when a firearm was unleashed was worth it. The "Strange Wand" was a wonderful part of the arc.

Challenge We ran this module twice, and while we didn't have any player deaths (Unlike other reviewers, it seems) we had some people on the brink. The last fight is hard, don't get me wrong, and if your players don't play well they can die. It didn't happen to us, but I can for sure see the potential for it. This is a good time to teach your players how to get good. If they played the last two modules, even with slow prog, they should be at least level 2. Go for it.

You can tell right off the bat this module is halfway written because it's easy to scroll past what you think is the preamble and find yourself in chapter 2. What they call 'Chapter 1' is basically a half page with nearly no scene direction that just says "This NPC what these adventurers to go back in time for this reason. The players accept. Send them back in time." and that kind of sets the tone for the entire module. As the DM, I feel like i've put in less effort setting homebrew scenes compared to the sheer amount of holes I had to fill for this module.

First, let's good the positives out of the way because there are precious few of them.

Positive The PDF itself is slick, with the a version being in full cover and having an impressive amount of artwork. It's easy to navigate and if you buy the seperate map pack you get a beautiful map of the yawning portal.

[Edit]There are a lot of incentives to roleplay in this module, and having run it three time now we've always gotten off the rails with big character introductions, huge roleplay moments, and other thins that didn't really happen in other starters like, day, 07-01. I'm adding this because, having run all three versions of it now, I realize the roleplay aspects can be a lot of fun and my initial 2 star is overly harsh. That said, my primary criticisms still stand and moving it from 2 to 3 stars isn't exactly glorious.

Negative The adventure's concept is intentionally half baked, you're supposed to poll the players on what they wants to do, and sort of make the adventure while you play. This is a lot less fun than it sounds, and is a pointless gimmick to push in an AL game of all things. Making up NPCs on the fly is not fun for most DMs or for their players, and if you make everythign ahead of time by polling your players a day before (As I did) you still end up basically writing half the module.

The same negative as usual with AL. You have to buy the maps seperate if you want anything near to workable maps, as the standard maps that come in the core module are bare bones and ugly. If you're a map focused game and, say, you stream Roll20 on twitch so aesthetics matter, you're out another two dollars.

Finally, the adventurer itself is both poorly balanced and not interesting. The brooms are a huge issue for level one players, and the overall hook (Likely due to the fact that it's all made up on the fly) is not interesting or fun.

Verdict I saw someone say that people just didn't like this module because it requires too much rping. This isn't the case, the real problem is that even the most heavily role play oriented tables usually have sufficient prep work. This is the equivilant of a halfway set up homebrew game. Sometimes it's fun to do stuff on the fly, but usually it's just a huge mess and a lot of pausing. My final verdict is to not buy this module unless you're really starving for DDAL08-01 to become available. Otherwise, just wait.

While the adventure itself is middling, these maps are beautiful and well made. Not only do I use these for the adventure, but I will continue to use them as my primary maps for any interaction at the Yawnin g Portal.

The maps are nice and work well in the game, but I find the way they were spaced out a little odd. I suppose it's because these are small areas and you're meant to print it and cut the maps for the table, but as a constructive criticism it might be better in the future to have a version with seperate images. Doing online play having to cut and crop them was a little more time consuming than i'd usually like for a product I paid for. That said, the art is good and if that's your primary consideration then these maps are worth the dollar you'll spend.