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This is an ecellent adventure. Fairly easy to prepare with plenty of content to scratch the social and combat itch of the game. Not really anything that covers exploration sadly but that may ust be the way my players played.
It's very wordy, the authors are very impressed with the lore they have made here about the Knights of Dawnfire, which results in a hell of a lot of exposition in boxed text.
Some of the organistaion in the final part is wonky, where it isn't clear when the players should find out that there is a trial going on - I would have put that section later in the chapter. The players are also epected to have an opportunity to explore one of the rooms but it isn't clear that they should then move forwards to the trial.
I like the idea of the trial a lot but it's far too easy for the players to just focus on saving the kids and ignoring the other prisoners. It's also too easy to 'win' - the inustice is incredibly obvious and the twist that the judges are being controlled a little too obvious.
A lot of criticism I admit but the adventure is still very good.
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This module is ok. It has a very weak backstory that doesn't make much sense and the villains don't have much to them. For all the build-up about Shar there isn't really much to it which is a let down.
Also the vampires are bullywugs! This is not made clear enough and appears to have been a last minute edit done to forcibly link this adventure with 08-09.
I like the basis behind the Bonus objectives but it would help if there was more to them than "Kill all the undead in the room" When you have two clerics in the party destroying undead this becomes pretty simple. It would have been neat for there to have been a way to cleanse the forges without needing to cast 7th level dispell magic and put them out entirely.
This module can easily be run in about 2 hours along with bonus objectives, if the adventure designer wanted it to take more of the time they should have included more robust exploration and social encounters.
Lasty, the way to get into the tomb is kind of obtuse. Especially when silver tankards or jugs aren't available to be purchased in the PHB.
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This a great set of adventures to play with new players. Sadly the maor driving force for adventure has been lost in Season 8 however thee are still enough potions and story awards for it to be worthwhile.
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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.
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A good adventure tha suffers from the new style of layout. Ran all the objectives including bonuses in 2.5 hours.
I really like the premise of this adventure and the content in general. What's stopping me from giving it five stars is the way the information has been organised within the text. I have to jump between page and page as I try to link all the details of the investigation together for the players. This leads to a lot of confusion. For example when the players get ahold of the page of the story they're going to want to immediately go to the City of the Dead without any of the things they might need to deal with the altar.
This could lead to a lot of back and forth with the players getting frustrated at the situation.
Also a general thing with these adventures - Please put the bonus content in the main text rather than the appendix, there's no need to leave it to the end of the document.
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This is an excellent adventure.
It hits all the right notes of combat, social interaction, and exploration. The story is believable and solid, while the setting is underused in current AL-legal material resulting in a unique play experience.
Some of the combat is too easy, Gith warriors aren't close to being a challenge for most tier 3 parties, at least not at the numbers involved. Other combat offer a good amount of challenge though, the inclusion of creatures showcased in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes is welcome. It should be noted that those creature in particular are included in the module, meanwhile ones found in the Monster Manual are not so don't forget your books!
The only other criticism I can offer is that it isn't clear how the characters are transported to the Astral plane, it would be helpful to know if they are plane-shifted or astrally projected there.
Nice work!
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Creator Reply: |
Thanks Jonathan, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Regarding how they get to the astral plane, column 2 of page 4 says "Janara can plane shift them there safely, as she knows the sigil sequence of a secret teleportation circle in Tu’narath."
cheers!
MTB |
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I've yet to play/run any of the other S8 adventures so I'm comparing this one to pre-S8 adventures.
Ultimately this is an ok adventure that is fun to play, but it lacks a lot of direction. It opens with what is presumably a cliff-hanger from the previous adventure - not an ideal way to start if there aren't any characters that played 8-02. But it can be forgiven as it then gives the players a clear goal - stop whoever is distributing the maps.
Then it becomes messy. There is no clear path through the different scenes, the adventure instead making presumptions on what the players might come up with as leads on where they should go next. This can lead to a lot of head-scratching which isn't ideal in conitions where you have to play these adventures to a specified time. The Bonus objectives, while fun, aren't made clear why the players would even bother with them in the adventure text. I also dislike how they are placed in the appendices of the aventure rahter than in the sections where they must be completed. It leads to a lot of scrolling when running the adventure off of an electronic device.
The finale is also very confused. The clues aren't even close to being obvious about where the characters need to go, and when they get there, there is no guidance on what the villain will do if confronted. Also the lack of a peaceful resolution for this adventure is disappinting.
Overall we had fun but I was disappointed with the disjointed nature of this adventure. I'm not sure if I am a fan of the new format yet, I'll run some more of these adventures to see.
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This isn't my favourite module of the Season 7 Tier 3s but it's still pretty good. Standard dungeon crawl with plenty of traps and things to keep the party on their toes. The final encounter has a lot of moving parts that could be overwhelming which isn't ideal. The centerpiece trap of this particular area is also very easily avoided by most tier 3 characters so it doesn't really add much.
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This one isn't nearly as strong as the previous adventure. It struggles with being part 2 of a series as it doesn't have a satisfying conclusion. I advise running all of the encounters given as it can run a bit short without doing so.
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This ia a pretty fun adventure to run, there's good replayability and expandability with multiple possible encounters which is great! I enoyed the characters that were introduced and the idea behind the story is solid. Overall a goo adventure to run stand-alone and as part of the series.
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Sigh.
This adventure has some potential. It starts out great with the party already having accepted a job and is then sent off into the forest.
Then the adventure stalls. What follows is a series of uninspired combats with no potential to flex player's social or creative muscles.
And then the adventure ends. to be continued in the next adventure of the trilogy. No closure, no conclusion. I'm sure this is very help for conventions but it's bad design. Adventures should have some sort of satisfactory ending so players don't feel like they're going no-where.
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This is a fun adventure to run and is very tough for tier 2 characters considering the number of high CR creatures being thrown at them while they are limited to what they can do in fear of killing innocents. I imagine that parties without clerics or devotion paladins are going to have a very difficult time with many of these combats.
The story is cute and I would probably run this adventure again in the future.
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There's a lot going on in this adventure! The guantlet at the end is incredibly difficult to survive, especially for small parties. I had a lot of fun playing and running it however and I would recommend this series to any experienced DMs that want a challenge.
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An interesting start to the CORE series. There are some problems in the writing in that it isn't clear why certain encounters are occurring. It's also easy to miss certain aspects as a DM for example the automaton encounter - players are supposed to try to avoid destroying them, but there isn't really a clear way for that to be done.
My other maor gripe is more CCC related than adventure-specific - Allow writers to make the changes to creature's statblocks! There's nothing more frustrating than having to jump between two pages, one of the original stat block, the other of modifications to that stat block.
Ultimately I enoyed this adventure a lot and I will certainly run it again in the future.
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So I ran the adventure after the update was done and while we had fun there are still serious issues with the module. Mostly that there are so many layers piled onto the area. First there's forbiddance which is used to prevent someone else from casting it in the area, of course they can still dispell the forbiddance and it an be recast. Then there's the perpetual darkness, doors of fire that aren't explained at all, wild magic surges, so on and so forth.
Keep things simple, you shouldn't try to challenge players by overcomplicating the map.
Sadly I probably won't run this one again unless it's requested, there's just not a good enoug reason to.
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