I really don't know where to start. I found the entire adventure difficult to follow. Is the door with the snakes in the same room as the end of the previous adventure in this cycle? Does each snake lead to one room with no exits. If there are exits where do they go? This seems poorly thought out. Perhaps a simple map would be better. There are maps and I guess they could be useful if the game is run online but they are useless for running live. Bonus objective A or is it B (both bonus objectives are labeled B) could not possibly last 1 hour. It is literally just 2 saving throws. What would be the motivation for the characters to help the party charmed by the Spirit Nagas? It seems like they might just as easily leave them alone. There is no stat block for Ouida. One of the reasons I like to DM AL is that I do not have time to develop my own campaign. I like that I can pick up an adventure and with minimal preparation run it. Overall the season 8 adventures have been very challenging. Part of the problem is the new format. The box text with the three pillars divides the narrative in an unnatural way that makes it difficult to find the information. It doesn't help that by putting all the pictures in the module it makes it impractical to print. With a print copy at least I could highlight.

Sigh.

This series of adventures have been disappointing to DM/play, there's a lot of unpacking to do here.

First off there's absolutely no reason to have tried to make these adventures into a trilogy! The APL of each adventure is so vastly different it doesn't make any sense that characters would play each adventure back to back. Instead get rid of the nonsense plot of Artor Morlin looking for a new home and let the adventures be played as stand alone modules - as it appears they were written.

Specifically to this adventure - Would it have killed the author to have spent more time thinking about why the adventurers are even there? Actually make the villain into some sort of threat from the beginning of the adventure so the characters feel like they have to find him rather than ust tick off all the boes on their check list.

Story obective A is probably the strongest part of the adventure - that being freeing the other adventurers from their thralldom. The puzzle doesn't make much sense, far easier to just have them chase the party into the room.

Story obective B would be a pretty cool fight if there was any real sense of scaling combat. Changing the villain from a vampire to a vampire spawn for a weak party of three didn't offer a real challenge. I admit that part of the issue here is that I was playing with characters that are far below the APL of the adventure, however some dynamic elements to the battlefield would have made this more interesting.

Bonus obective A is trash. It's literally "Enter the room and get hit by the traps" that's supposed to add 60 minutes of play? You are having a laugh right? Why take away all the agency of the characters and give them no way to avoid these traps other than "Don't look,"?

Bonus Obective B is straightforward, it's a fight. Not a whole lot to go wrong there. It even has an "Adusting the Encounter" box!

Overall this adventure needs a lot of work, the designer should take a look at what they are giving the DM and think if it really is enough f0ro the DM to be able to run the adventure to the best of their ability.

Good fun for all adventurers with a fun little tricks. Very enjoyable bonus missions.

In the end, not terrible. But the only reason it's not getting a 1 Star from me is that 8-04 exists.

There are glaring editing issues, and not just copyediting (those too), but those are easily fixed. A missing stat block is also not a big deal. What is not easily remedied is the ludicrous structure of this adventure. There are 6 rooms, 3 with flavor that invites investigation with nothing to find. The Bonus Objectives that aren't actually objectives, just things to do. The seemingly random order of the rooms means that the first Story Objective is a shot in the dark.

The first story objective is not actually required to complete the main quest nor is it signalled anywhere that it's necessary other than that it's a "Story Objective". Also, the wording of the objective ignores any other method besides dispelling a particular magical effect. Pickpocketing easily comes to mind.

The main fight has a "Big Bad" that can't actually do the one thing that a vampire is supposed to do, escape to their coffin. Seriously, the coffin is underwater, but mist form can't travel through water. So... it's the world's dumbest vampire, apparently.

This "Trilogy" (and I use that term loosely) is so tonally inconsistent I can't wrap my head around it. The first one is silly with fan-fiction-writing vampire wannabes, the second a dark and brooding desecrated crypt, and the third a strange swamp where weird transmutations occur, but that's not important.

Long time Living Dungeon Master and player, first time reviewer. True believer of DnD ;), arent we all.

A long long time ago.... A fellow living DM said something along the lines of: "When your Dm'ing an adventure, its not a book to be read word for word. As the DM you need to bring it life, make it better than you think it is. If the players were tested and you were true to the spirit of the game, they will walk away with stories to tell, bragging rights, and treasures earned. It is the journey that is important not the final product of just getting xp. As "The" Dm its your job to tell that tale, to challenge their wits, and test their mettle, if in the end, they somehow survive and walk away from that table they should know their characters were heroes for that short moment of time reborn through the trials and perils you put them through, if you can say that then you've done your job as "the Dm."

Why did I type that? As a long time DM. I don't like to review modules from a DM's point of view, its not fair to the module. I logged on and was very excited to buy this after having a great time Playing it. I am STILL looking forward to reading, and running it (with any luck I'll be better than the Dm that ran it for us ;), so I always hope). I was a little surprised at the review rating, and read the comments, both are well written reviews. Its a known point the system wotc is using isn't ...great...or..working....? With that said every DM is different, and prefers different things and is entitled to their own views. For Example: I personally believe Its bad form to say "x-negative" about a module while or before your running it (OR its even just as bad to say.. "when we played it, we did this here..."), its not about me the DM< (or how i adjusted this encounter for you) or how my characters did something, its about the people at your table and their characters. Prepare to give them an epic experience all the time.

the REviEw: As a player -which imo is the best way to ever review a module- I played the FULL version of this with a full group of level 8-10 approapiate characters.

Trilogy: Im going to start here, 3 mods written by three different people released nearly the same time of different varying Apls. Sorry but, Bad Wotc Bad. As a long time player/Dm its super tempting to want to play a "trilogy" with the same character. Soo with ALL that knowledge, we did not play it as a trilogy. Does that affect the actual module itself, only if you thought wotc was geniuses..... This module rocked so much that I am dying to get to the other two in the trilogy and see if there is any connection at all :), and thats just fun for me personally at this point.

Flavor: Our Dm completely set the mood for the module itself and included a little bit of the history of undermountain itself, including a lead up to new book that was coming out "Dungeon of the Mad Mage". WOW, I was impressed. Kudo's! After that I was like, DAM! I am super keyed to Play, this adventure is going to Rock!! ( If this wasn't in the mod itself, learn from this). (It also made me want to buy the new book too, huh go figure)

Combat optional: Brutal !! (see above text about dming though), But->with the right party could be a cake walk. Sadly as a DM its one of the most undesirable advantageous monster choices, so even thoguh its good ..but can be bad...(bad) because its a DM challenge to balance this to acheive the above Epic feeling. Ours did good :) -Thank the maker-

Puzzles: Our Dm did a great job of choosing maybe Two of the Puzzle pieces that connected with the DM's style, and briefly described the other puzzle pieces overall reactions to Us and the first two pieces through some skill checks. Nice work on the Dm's part, and we were SO close before one of our party members decided to engage and trigger the puzzle trap. I LOVED this puzzle, I found it unquiely refreshing and ingenious, its so nice to see something just slightly different engough to be very cool.

Fillers: This was honestly another one of my favorite parts. It was so unorthodoxed to have things related to the undermountain that were just there. The best part , they didn't produce the traditional effect and response that I would normally expect. Normally I can determine things as a player and basically forsee or just know from experience that x+y=z, as a matter of fact I was expecting certain results so much that I personally made things very bad for our party. So again, wow and ty. (for those of you who remember, it reminded me of the mentality required to play the adventure "River of Blood" ..I was like woah back then too). The other players in the group were completely onboard with all of these rooms and made it EXTREMELY Fun.

Finale: Again, DM did a Super nice job setting up the description of the encounter, great job using everything available to the end BOSS. I really LOVED this IDEA and this concept for the bad guy, I am looking forward to running it. I will definitely need prepare in advance and brush up on some special tactical rules prior to running this due to certain special circumstances that are available during the final fight. From my knowledge , it seems this could be run a couple of different ways and I am looking at exploring some of them to see whats worthy enough to make the players feel challenged. (many end fights aren't challenging enough by design- as players hold all their bigger guns awaiting that moment). Our party was challenged, and had to come up with some killer ideas to hero up.

SIDE note: our DM ran this extremely similar to the optional 1 combat so that was a little frustrating (If this happened during a playtest would recommend changing the optional combat to a different style combat, the way its written i'd skip the optional unless you knew the party had resousces to deal with it effeienclty). That will make the END BOSS fight fresh and exciting.

I was going to give it 4 stars out of 5. But I realized I really had an Extremely Memorable and Fun time playing this and isn't that what its about.

This beginning blurb is going to be copy pasted across this trilogy, scroll down for content review. At this point I'm beyond disappointed with the QC on these modules. A weeks delay on some and you seriously couldn't get another pair of eyes to proofread? You are charging $5 a module for what is turning out to be outlines with mislabeled chapter headings, spelling errors, monsters being called different things in different text blocks, missing statblocks, refrences to monsters in the some "playing the pillars" blocks are incorrect (When they appear at all, one chapter is missing a playing the pillars block.) As well as the item card title font isn't even the same as the first set, I'm having issues with printing. No consistantcy whatsoever, No printer friendly version either? I will be willing to revisit my star rating when I see a v1.1 and a PF version uploaded.

Storywise, I belive this to be the weakest of the Trilogy, Noah G.'s review sums up my concerns quite nicely.

Combat: Most player's at my store or at event's I run at have enjoyed playing through the adventures sequentially and the jump from APL 5, to 8, to 10 is some serious whiplash in prep. The APL issue cannot be ignored in that it really takes the flavor and "teeth" out of the fights having to adjust to a weak party. Some parties are going to be weak and struggling though a lot of the "Gotcha" traps and walking into enounters drained with enemies that can seriously lay them out, and I like a little bit of that don't get me wrong, but the combats feel a little disjointed, especially the bonus objective combats. Points for DMM tie-in monsters though.

Exploration: This is I think the strongest part of the module, jumping from locale to locale is interesting until you realize some of the rooms have nothing but unsolvable traps, Slitherswap is an interesting level and I think the author captured the mood, the Included Undermountain lore is pretty interesting.

Social: I strongly dislike some of the NPCs in this, the puzzle party I can see frustrating the players who also hated the Eladrin Tomb matching puzzle, I am also not excited to RP a party of stubborn and petty adventurers who only listen to a certain member, It is going to take some serious hinting to move this along. The big bad is at least flavorful though.

Overall it has a strong broad strokes idea for an adventure, but it suffers from the new S8 format in that it Puts too much onus on the DM to make it cohesive

Story rating: 3/5

I DMed all three adventures of the Vampire Hunt trilogy during AetherCon last month, and this one was not fun to run. I spent most of my time trying to parse unclear mechanics, poorly balanced fights and several rooms that went out of their way to punish PCs.

I had a consistent party for all three adventures. However, the adventures are APL 5, 8 and 10 to correspond with different floors of Undermountain. Obviously they weren’t close to level 10 by the end of the trilogy. Hopefully AL admins/Wizards will learn from this.

The first objective has a great concept, but it is nearly impossible to execute. It is written like a logic problem. If you move one puzzle piece first, then you can move the second, and so on. However, the "puzzle pieces" are NPCs. The only way for players to figure out the puzzle as written is if the DM can go back and forth, roleplaying all five NPCs in the scene. I love how this season adds more encounters that can be resolved by roleplaying instead of rolling dice, but this scene doesn't work. DMs are expected to juggle five different personalities. Unless the DM is a professional voice actor, this is going to be too difficult for players to follow. Oh, somewhere along the way the DM is also expected to invent some clue for the players that the NPCs are all enthralled. As written, there is no ways for players to learn what they need to do! I picked two of the NPCs to roleplay, made them more relatable, gave a very obvious hint, and largely handwaved the puzzle. My players liked my changes. Many parties will get frustrated and turn this in to a combat encounter, then get overwhelmed by a very powerful group of opponents.

One bonus objective is just a trap filled room. Players get nothing positive from exploring the room. There is no method like thieves' tools or dispel magic to find a trigger in advance and deactivate the trap(s). One trap in that room can give characters a flaw, in addition to damage scaled for an APL 10 party. There is no method listed in the adventure to remove the flaw, even though greater restoration removes similar flaws in other adventures. I don't know if a party can enter the room, leave, and get the checkpoint for "avoiding" the trap. Otherwise, there is no way to give players credit unless someone triggers the trap(s). Giving checkpoints for enduring a trap felt like an author versus players mentality, not an author challenging players mentality. That's why I gave a 1 star rating.

This adventure relies on portals to connect each room to the next. However, the maps provided are just illustrative. They don't match the textual description of the rooms. How many rooms have multiple portals? How many only connect to the starting area? I had to improvise all of this, putting the adventure on rails to make sure players could solve the adventure’s main puzzle. Technical details of "how does this thing actually work?" are missing in nearly every scene.

The boss fight was incredibly unsatisfying for the end of a trilogy. APL 10 means a lot of parties will be "weak" strength instead of average. There is a huge dropoff from average to weak strength. I asked my players to give me 5 minutes to sort this out and went with a "slightly weak" encounter. But the players still steamrolled it, despite having some issues with other parts of the adventure.