Ran this last night with my friend as our first foray into Dnd so we could get used to gamplay and DM-ing. Great adventure with plenty of room to improvise and have fun. Total play time took us about 2 hours.

This is a decent little intro Adventure with low stakes. I didn't use the table of magic items included, because they were mostly pretty overpowered. I tried to roll randomly in the DMG, but that is not easy to do, so I recommend coming up with your own list beforehand, tailored to the character to make the choices harder. I wouldn't be afraid to maybe up the number of goblins in some of the encounters before the end, or only give out healing potions when needed, as my PC had no trouble at all dispatching goblins one at a time, and never needed the potions.

Played with my son. We had a blast!

[spoilers below]

He's younger so I replaced most of the "gloom" with "whimsy" (i.e. instead of fog there was a swarm of butterflies, instead of a dim hallway it was lit with torches casting a rainbow of color, etc.). He still got attacked by a bunch of goblins though LOL. And by the time he met Penelope he was way suspicious and "attacked" while I was still describing her:

Me: "... and her beautiful, curly, blonde hair--"

him: "I shove her."

Me: "Roll initiative."

Easy enough adventure with a cool premise, but the items are very high-value and overpowering for a beginning character! I did not realize this until it was too late... Still a really cool idea! Thank you!

Good concept and good basis for a plot, but overpowered as far a providing very rare and rare magic items to totally inexperienced PCs. I recommend that you restock with only common magic items of the PCs choice when visiting each room then providing their choice of only one. My character selected the Fernian Ash Wand to empower all fire based damage spells. This was an appropriate distribution.

Short, with plenty of room for a DM to improvise! I'm a big fan.