This is a great adventure for a group of totally new players playing with a completely novice Dungeon Master. This advetnure guides the DM through five short, simple parts of a single story. This structure allows the GM to focus on just the part in front of them. Helpful prompts at critical moments fill in details that other adventures leave unsaid. The adventure starts simple and then gets very slightly more compliacted, showing the DM how to handle situations like grappling and skill checks with helpful sidebars right as the need arises. When its over the characters should have saved their towns local brewery and the players should have a firm grasp on the basic rules of the game.

The listed run time is rather long. If run in as intended, in an actual tavern where first time players are drinking large amounts of beer, the run time may be accurate. More traditional organized play venues are going to run this in a more traditional four hours or less. Experinced parties can likely finish in two hours.

The included extras include easy to print maps and pre-generated characters. THe maps helpfully come in both color and black and white, for those without color printers. The six pre-generated characters include notes about how their abilities work; critical for new players learning the game. Every convention organizer should probably copy these and add them to their library of pre-generated sheets on offer at the convention.

An organizes looking to an adventure to be run by first time volunteer Dungeon Master's would do well to start here.

There are a number of adventures like this on the guild, designed to have 5 mini-adventures in one extra-length session. I LOVE THESE. Absolutely worth your time to run on it's own or to divide up and use as side treks.

A fantastic intro to the game! The subject matter is light in tone and maybe a little silly, but still feels important enough to warrant telling the story. Good "level 1" stuff -- you may not be preventing the destruction of a kingdom, but it beats killing rats in a cellar.

In particular, this adventure is wonderful for teaching new players, as many of the encounters, in the first section especially, are obviously designed to expose people to one specific aspect of the game -- an encounter that exists just to teach players about ability checks and narrating your character's actions, an encounter just for learning about investigation/clue-finding, an encounter to learn about movement in combat.

That said, it's fun for veteran players too; once the "tutorial level" is wrapped up and the rest of the adventure begins, the encounters are well-thought-out and tough enough to provide a challenge without being punishing. And even more importantly, they're interesting -- not just sacks of hit points to beat up until they're empty. A few really clever aspects, in particular the "healing potions" masquerading as other objects, make it even more enjoyable. My players spent several minutes investigating one of them, conveniced it was either some kind of trap or a vital clue, before eventually figuring out it was actually a beneficial but ultimately meaningless treasure for them.

I ran this during the debut at PAX, and it was a huge success. New players, returning players, veterans, adults, kids -- everyone enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun to run, too. There are a number of role-playing opportunities with interesting NPCs, but the provided (optional) pregenerated player characters have enough depth that players can get a lot of mileage out of interacting with each other as well. Sometimes it's nice for a module to take some of that pressure off the DM and let the players take the reins. It's also worth mentioning that this module, more than most, is very easy to run without a map and minis, so prep basically just comes down to reading it and maybe making a few notes.

As one might expect, it's absolutely riddled with typos, copy-paste errors, and in the case of the pregens, glaring mathematical blunders. But that's AL mods for you -- that kind of thing is assumed at this point.

This has become my go-to adventure when teaching new players the game, and I expect it will remain so for a long time.

A well thought out adventure, fun for new and experienced players alike! I did this adventure with my wife and a few friends, and enjoyed the thematic overtones while tasting beers. If you enjoy beer and D&D, I recommend this product.