I really struggled with how to rate this adventure. Truthfully I kept bouncing back and forth between 3 stars and 4 stars and if I could give 3 and a half stars that would have probably been a more accurate and fair grade, but I'm going to err on the low side for a reason I will get into shortly.

First up; I purchased The Hauting Of Eliuska Manor completely on a whim. It happened into a search for another product I was after and it sounded interested (I love haunted house scenarios) and has a really nice thematic cover. Ultimately I feel like what I got was a bit of a mixed bag with more positives than negatives so your individual experience may differ from mine.

First up; the writting. I really like how this adventure is written and laid out. It is extremely DM friendly and has background and motivations spelled out in the encounter/location blocks for every encounter. This means a minimum of page flipping and searching during the game and really keeps the DM focussed on 'why' things are happening and helps maintain focus on a tone. This kind of clarity is a huge boon when trying to run an adventure where atmosphere and mood are important as it prevents DMs from accidentally breaking that tone and potentially confusing players. In addition I felt the objective quality of the writting was quite good as once again it contriubted to the mood without any of the prose becoming so flowery as to feel forced. The author does a great job in creating tension and making everything feel like part of a larger story instead of a simple set-piece.

The art and cartography. This is where I really struggled to formualte an opinion. I really like the style of the artwork and there is certainly enough of it. Likewise the maps look interesting and well done. Having said these things I purchased the print copy of the book and the clarity of both the art and the maps is terrible. Although much of the adventure could be thought of as occurring in darkness the art and maps themselves are printed so dark that details can be difficult to make out or lost. I'm not sure if this is a print quality issue, or something to do with the original files itself but I was really disappointed that some imagery that looks like it's probably pretty fantastic is dimished by how it's been produced. My other visual issue with the cartography is that it feels like there is a lot of wasted space and the maps are presented smaller than they need to be, basically if most of the manor maps were printed in landscape rather than protrait format they might have looked better.

Value for money. And this quite honestly is where I decided to err on the low side of that 3.5 star comment from earlier. Although I like the adventure and will definitely run it, looking back at my purchase $19.99 feels like a lot for 50 pages of this print quality. Had I spent $10-12 on this I would probably have considered a case of I got what I paid for.

Overall I recommend The Haunting Of Eliuska Manor as an adventure but would not recommend paying for the POD version.