Horribly edited. Terrible as a stand-alone adventure. In the longer series, this one is like the first level of a dungeon. You are supposed to have your characters stramroll combat while learning about Dara's mission and getting the inpression they are racing towards something. Dont run this alone, Play the trilogy and let the difficulty build steadily until they reach In The Hand.

Where do I begin?

The Good:

• Wherever possible, there are multiple paths or choices for players to make to get past a challenge, which makes for good replayability.
• Making a challenge out of keeping Dara alive, while still allowing for the players to continue on even if she does die at all, is a nice mechanic.

The Bad (This is going to be a long list...):

• First off, the Call To Action premise. It took me some research to understand what was even going on. Turns out, there is a T2 plot assumption that makes it so the characters have to hide what they are doing from Mahadi. Except the author fails to recap any of this, so any DM who did not run said T2 adventure is left scratching his head wondering why anything is described the way it is. Furthermore, Why is there no alternative Call To Action? How can you assume that not only does the DM know what you are talking about, but that the players even played in the missions pre-T3? In my case, I had just finished running my players through Descent Into Avernus campaign before running AL Modules, which is a perfectly valid way to play and yet this adventure has no adjustment. Which bring up the next problem...

• Even though the T3 adventures leading up to this have alternative plot hooks for whether Elturel has been rescued or not, this adventure somehow assumes not only that Elturel was never rescued, but also that Zariel hasn't been rescued. In fact the way it's written, it seems to assume that the players never finished Descent Into Avernus, despite claiming to be designed for a party of 13th level characters. Huh? 13th level is the cap for Descent Into Avernus campaign; It implies that the characters have a very high chance to have completed that story prior to playing this adventure. This is a major editing failure; someone surely should have caught this and gotten things rewritten.

• Although there are lots of possible encounters, the variety is extremely limited. Pretty much every encounter is some combination of bone devils, spined devils, bearded devils, and imps. This gets repetitive very quickly. Some sort of big baddie would have spiced up the final encounter quite a bit.

• The Shifting Tunnels/Celestial Clues section is written in the most complicated manner possible to describe something simple. It took me several reads to understand what the author was trying to do.

• Not a single map provided, not even for the final encounter that has the complex set of events where the devils try to get past the players, then Gidor, then to Dara. Really would have been nice to have a map here.

• Gidor. The adventure allows for her to possibly join the party in the fight, yet provides no stat block (I thought i was crazy, went through the stat block section several times thinking i just missed it, but nope, Gidor has no stat block). Then in the combat description, the author just offhand throws out that Gidor is somehow throwing out Magic Circles left and right, and has to keep recasting it. Yet again, no stat block so the DM doesn't even know how many times Gidor can recast it. Overall this feels like an incomplete section.

In conclusion, this module is a mess. It's not unplayable, but it's incomplete and the DM has to fix a lot. Hope nobody is cold running this.

I ike the premise behind this series. Since I started this trilogy for my players right after they returned from the hells with Elturel (They did not redeem Zariel), I had them meet Dara and company there in Elturel.. and then Dara explained to them her quest and its importance. I allowed them to use their renown item to "rent" a war machine to transport them to The Canyon. This is where it gets confusing.. It takes the party six hours to get through the tunnels (Dara had the wards of suffering). But how long does it take them to find the tunnels? Many of the dangers in the canyon (but outside of the tunnel) result in saves every hour. I just had them make a group Survival checks every hour to see if they find a tunnel, and if they fail, then they make the howling wind and falling rocks checks. I also had them make a group Stealth checks every hour to avoid being seen by the creatures hunting them. Those Howling Winds can concern a party pretty quick. I bypassed the first set of tunnels (wards of suffering) .. the mechanics for them were troublesome, especially the significance of the clues. This whole part will need a hard look by DMs to figure out how to make the randomness work.. consider not using the tunnel clues; maybe after X amount of tunnels have them arrive at the glyph and move on to Scene C. There I rolled high on the tunnels. They navigated them and dealt with the glyphs had us run short on time. I had to end with a quick narrative, ignoring the wave attacks. The players still found it enjoyable. They were a bit surprised when the advenure ended with a cliffhanger. I feel like there should be an alternate Wrap-Up for those not adventuring in the other modules. My rating is based on the confusing tunnel mechanics in Part One, Scene B. and the area information in Part One that seems very important to the environment, but is not completley captured here. It felt incomplete. Other than that, the players has a good time. Run it all as a series if you can!

An interesting hook in an excitingly dangerous adventuring location. I really dig the idea of having to go unfreeze some legendary warriors. The importance of the objective is very motivating and unique. The harsh environment the bulk of the adventure is set in is reflected accurately in the mechanics. The difficulty of travel is realized very effectively as well. Not all adventures get these aspects right. There is a lot of combat content to work with here. The final combat involving the defense of Dara as she awakens the riders is especially cool from both a narrative and mechanical perspective.

My players did like the setup of being a random dungeon. However, they had problems with other things. The whole module until the boss fight seems to try to bleed resources from the group. But it does not work as written.

The combat has too many easy encounters. Bump most of them up to medium. In the boss fight move the bone devil to the second wave.

The Howling Winds page 5. Increase the DC by 2 every check. The winds are present until Part 2. Only the party are affected by the winds. So 6 checks. And if a pc has 3 levels of madness, they don’t need to roll until cured of the third level of madness. Tunnel Encounters page 7. Increase the damage three quarters of max when strong party, and max damage when very strong. Increase the number of spined devils or double their to hit.

The Shifting Tunnels. My Players like this but suggest the tunnels close off retreat about 20 behind the party and will occasionally push the party forward. The boss fight room is too small. And protecting Dara is easy as all they have to do is put her to the rear of party and block the incoming devils. Increase the size to 90 feet. I put a hallway in each of the walls so the devils could enter from four directions. The Stone Tablets are AC 15 HP 10. The devils can choose to attach Dara, the party, or tablets. Lost condition is if 13 tablets are destroyed.

The group like the magic circle of Sir Gidor but think it should just protect Dara and have 5 foot area around Dara.

Bonus Objective A. Party should start off surprised. Goblins should double the number of pcs and allied creatures. Pets, skeletons, summon creatures, etc. If possible the monsters should focus their attacks.

Theme: Good - the environments are sufficiently metal. Unfortunately time constraints make spending some time on the namesake of the module a bit awkward. It's not fun for PCs to repeat the same saves 10 times in a row, so it's a challenge for the DM to make hellrocks falling on the party be exciting that many times.

Narrative: Average - The selling point of this module is that it's part of a series. It's definitely setting up a cool storyline, but it seems like the authors of the three modules (15/16/17) did not communicate with each other. Story details in the three modules do not match up.

There are also many many things which could have done with more explaining. The existence of the dungeon in the module does not make much sense, or at least, it needs more explaining by the module as I spent quite a bit of time puzzling it out so I could justify it to the players. Why did the devils only decide to attack the dungeon now? Did the Bloody Hooves freeze time inside or did Zariel? If it's the former why are they so powerful and if it's the latter how can there still be Demons inside? Why does it say that Dara needs to rest for 2 weeks if she has to go into the next two modules immediately?

No information on the arc's BBEG is provided in this module or the next two modules, it only says that he is loyal to Zariel (who is no longer an Archduke during the time of this module, so that just invites more questions), it does not state the type of devil they are, what powers he has, or his motivations.

Combat: Terrible - The module sends approximately 10 extremely weak combats at the PCs. That's not exciting, and it's definitely not doable in 4-6 hours unless the DM is handwaving combats away. There is a "mandatory" encounter table filled with under CR'd AND boring combats like "one madcap per PC, more if the party is too strong". The story significant encounters are also too weak, with the failstate of the final encounter being nearly impossible to trigger. Safe to say if you DM this you should be adjusting EVERY SINGLE COMBAT in the module significantly as the DM has no idea of the capabilities of a T3 party nor any idea of how long a single combat takes.

Editing: Terrible - Dara is supposed to be kept alive in this module, which has her statblock, but not the story award that you're supposed to give the players if she dies. Ironically the next adventure has the story award but not her statblock. The author also forgets the Levels of Madness mechanic comes from Rage of Demons storyline, not the DMG, so the mechanics of this special madness effect is not printed in the module. In general the module is also plagued with the S8/S9 module writing guidelines which are terrible for DM readability, and the author did not mitigate this at all.

Overall, this module's main selling point is that it's the setup to the first part of the trilogy- the next two modules do not provide a good recap. The skeleton of the plot is also usable, but you will need to provide the meat of every encounter yourself. The time pacing of this module is abysmal- if this is meant to be an atmospheric module, why are there so many combats taking up all of the time budget? If this is supposed to be a hellish combat-focused module, why are the encounters so weak?