I ran this module for a group of 5: 3 x 12, 2 x 11. Characters were above average in stats. Overall, this module was excellent fun and pushed my players to think hard. As a DM, there's a lot of material to work with and it's easy to adjust the difficulty on the fly, including adding your own twists to the creatures, traps and tactics.

Be aware that this module is, of course, almost all combat, but it's like a mini unending war. Your players will really hate kobolds by the end of the module.

Fantasy Grounds Issue: Battlemaps are useful and I wish even some basic ones were provided for the canyon area. Some of the maps are not properly setup (missing doors) or are missing areas (for the player maps). I had to manually drag the PC token from the combat tracker to "move" them past the missing doors.

You will need to provide the opportunity for a long rest for the party at some point, even more so if your party is weaker. I recommend that when the party is within the main structures of the module that you keep in combat throughout the entire time, never letting the party rest - this aids in the stakes and making the combat more intense. If you run the NPCs right, the party will help you with this as they will get greatly annoyed by them.

As good as this module is, the final battle can be a bit weak, especially if you have 11+ level casters, i.e. with 6th level spells. I made the mistake of not adding any "cannon fodder" to the enemies within, so there was not enough protection for those enemies to last long enough to do more interesting actions. Also map tokens should have been made for the children and creature marked on the DM's map, but not on the player map.

I ran this module (and the rest of the trilogy) recently as standalone adventures. I used both the PDF and the FG module during the game and found that module detail, contents, maps, etc were well setup and helpful for the DM and players. This took about 8 hours for our group to play including all bonus sections.

This was a very combat heavy module, but the premise was such that it was expected - it was war. So, it actually worked well. Probably the weakest part of the module was the non combat encounter in the sewers. It was an interesting idea that wasn't backed by enough information to justify why the location existed and it's restricted access. I'd suggest either heavily modifying this encounter to have it make sense, or since it was a bonus, skip it, or replace it completely.

The final battle took my group a long time, but that's because I went well beyond the optional level based changes in the module and amped up the difficulty (bbeg healed by redirecting all damage to minions; and fully regenerated in phase changes over the battle, plus I expanded the legendary action options). The phase changes I kept as written as they were quite entertaining. After it was all done, my players commented that it was one of the best combats they had ever had - thanks to this great encounter setup.

I ran this module (and the rest of the trilogy) recently as standalone adventures. I used both the PDF and the FG module during the game and found that module detail, contents, maps, etc were well setup and helpful for the DM and players. This took about 6 hours for our group to play including all bonus sections.

Overall, this was a pretty good and interesting module. The assassination encounter was good fun and was such that it was easy to modify on the fly if you want to up the challenge some more.

The themed puzzle with the 4 floors was great, only let down by the final exit puzzle. The question posed did not fit the overall theme so it felt very out of place. Unfortunately I can't think of an alternative that would work though.

If you're using this as standalone, one of the rooms can provide information about your "employer" that you could use in something in the future.

The final battle was a nice challenge for my group forcing them to switch up their tactics a bit.

I ran this module (and then the rest of the trilogy) recently as standalone adventures. I used both the PDF and the FG module during the game and found that module detail, contents, maps, etc were well setup and helpful for the DM and players. We took our time doing this module over 2 sessions with a total time of about 6 hours in the module itself.

The combats were fun but nothing too unusual, however I think the "puzzle" encounter was perhaps the main highlight for our group with the extra element of danger involved. I found some Tarokka card images and showed those to the players. I also made some tokens from the images to put on the map for the characters to manipulate as they were working out the puzzle solution (it was a fully online game, so no physical handouts). I think it helped to make the encounter better.

Overall, I think this module is worthwhile running.