Much appreciated! This inspired me to seriously consider an urban adventure for the next campaign with at least some heistyness - maybe the Alexandrian's rework of Waterdeep, but likely something more swords & sorcery. I could see using several of the articles, or using them as spurs to develop my own ideas.

I agree with the author's opinions on a lot of 5e and setting flavour, yet wish he'd spent less time and vitriol on them and more time on game-relevant content. The love for Lankhmar shows through, and I liked the reviews; it'd be nice to have more thoughts about selling Lankhmar to modern players without the Appendix N familiarity.

The adventure shows experience running heists and careful attention to detail, but is far too high-magic / anachronistic for my tastes; it feels like it belongs in a Victorian/Edwardian realm, or maybe BitD's Duskvol, not my pseudo-medieval low fantasy.

Could have used an editing pass for clarity, precision, brevity.

When the document said it was about non-hexcrawl maps, I was expecting pointcrawl / pathcrawl, or pure maps, but what we get instead are totally-scale-free "areas" which are a little more divorced from actual concerns of time and distance than I'm keen to play with.

Uses a settled lands / wilderness dichotomy; I personally find the civilised / borderlands / wilderness three-stage division works well for world-building even if it's not quite as apparent in play.

Overwritten, random collection of ideas which are variously trite or underdeveloped. Claims to be about exploration but full of player-authored worldbuilding which undercuts that pillar. Makes grandiose claims that it doesn't deliver on - "Connections create goals", but they aren't goals, they're post-facto NPCs.

We could use a dozen pages of discussion of world design around Zones - we get one-half page that's oversimplified & doesn't integrate well with everything that follows. Then we get something like six pages of "Travel Roles", which there are already many implementations of for 5e; it's not clear how this one stands out from the others.

It reintroduces skill challenges, which took a lot of discussion and examples to make work well in 4e, but doesn't do that work. There's a bit of "extraordinary actions" that seem unrelated to everything else in the document.

Filler text "in character", meant to be humorous, particularly with a heavy-handed accent, makes me wish I could give 0 stars.

Reminiscent of some of the early fundamental texts of the game, in both good and bad ways:

full of ideas! far too many ideas. jumbled, disorganised, hard to follow; really needs an editor reads as if it has been designed but not developed. Great that playtesters were credited, but were these other DMs? Or players, with the author being the only one who directly engaged with this material?

My biggest problems intersect:

1. linear adventure with no player choice and a complete assumption of what the party will do, and
2. the party is assumed to ally with somebody whose actions are deeply unsympathetic, if not outright evil.

There's quantum treasure, if not a quantum ogre, there's poorly-written read-aloud text, there seems to be a general lack of thought about how to make the adventure legible at the table.

There are some clever ideas / nice bits of design here, but

"Written to provide the game master the options of running it as a straight delve, humorous repast, roleplaying endeavour, or OHMYGODFLESHEATINGBEETLESEVERYWHERE!"

The tongue is thouroughly in cheek, and I don't see remotely how to run this except as total anachronistic humor. Which might fit your games! But it doesn't fit mine, so I don't think I'm getting much value out of this, unless I want to rewrite heavily.

The swords and sorcery feeling is great, and I'd love to run some of the lower-level adventures if I could convince my players to sign up for a classic S&S campaign, but as you read further and further through the book it keeps hitting the themes of seduction & betrayal; those are important spice in a game, and can be the things focused on in linear fiction stories that are understood to be crucial points in a fictional character's career, but if they happen to PCs on every single adventure in a campaign, the players become jaded and start expecting the trope. So I'll need a larger source of S&S themed adventures that bring in the rest of the feeling, without having every attractive woman an agent, every patron a betrayer...

Original for its time, but there are a lot of better-written "level 0 funnels" in newer adventures.

This looks like a totally random one-page crawl without any context, but it's a little better than that: the very brief room descriptions show some thought, design, connections... Perfectly servicable.

Verbose, padded, should be edited down to a third the length or less; a good editor might clean up some of the seeming self-contradiction & bits of dubiosu accuracy. This does have the longest lists of ideas that I've seen in a product like this, but with rather mixed quality & sometimes surprisingly narrow focus. The author assumes very strongly a AD&D 1E/Unearthed Arcana world mode. The thread of the writing gets even harder to follow in the City State extension, and the assumptions a lot stronger, although there are also more novel ideas there.

There are modern game systems or supplements with better hexcrawl/campaign-building advice, and several series of completely free blogposts do a better job of the core procedure.

Some interesting ideas, but could have used multiple editing passes, significant development work.

I'm not particularly fond of the map or some of the details, but the ideas here were quite good, and were easy to move into a map that better fit my needs & taste (Eastbury Manor House, Barking) and rewrite/expand just a little bit. This made it a great scenario for a bunch of first-level 5e characters trying to secure themselves access to the run-down base they'd been promised. The magic item from the shed seems ready to give us a lot of fun when the players figure out how to use it, and the escaped Halftail is a potential recurring frenemy.

I don't like Lesserton, but as far as 16-page (not too densely laid out) players' guides to campaigns go, this is pretty well done. If you want to run in the anachronistic Victorian town this will let your players know something about the culture, the well-known merchants and their prices, the various neighbourhoods and their reputations, and campaign-specific character generation rules. Nice player-facing maps!

This was an interesting idea for a supplement, but the subject matter is heavier and more 'adult' than any group I've had to play with, so I don't think there's much in here that I could salvage for my own campaign. The history/status of the sample city is actually pretty cool, but that's a tangent, and the development of the idea is pretty heavily tied into the themes my group won't go for.

I like this on reading. A medium-sized, very-strongly-themed dungeoncrawl with the potential for faction play with several different groups of (evil) cultists showing up after the players enter. Creative treasure, particularly interesting consumable magic. One nearby probably-hostile settlement briefly sketched. The separate player-facing map is quite appropriate: of high enough resolution & detail for oldschool play; fancier than dungeonscrawler output, but not as unreadably cluttered or illegibly shaded as you find with a lot of commercial 5e maps. The "Continuing & Concluding the Adventure" section isn't an explicit timeline but it has a really nice spread of discussion of faction goals & possible evolutions, ties to nearby parts of the world.

Downsides: really verbose, hints of quantum ogres (the competitive factions explicitly scale with party level), and perhaps a bit too on the nose with the elemental theming - the vast majority of the native opposition is "two mephits of (appropriate quasielemental subtype)".

I'm not sure about the skill checks - there sure are a lot of them, but then players having advantage on knowledge checks from their background ought to be really common, so there's not too much information hiding or "roll to make progress", and the range of physical DCs seems reasonable.

Nits: both the terrain map and the dungeon map in the book have critical material in the center of the page - which means it's cut by the "gutter" of the book layout, and thus really hard to read. Art is really mixed stylistically and varying in quality, so for every piece I'd be happy to show my players there are two I wouldn't.

The 4/5 rating assumes you're playing Swords of Kos or a generic anything-goes D&D setting. I'd give this only 3/5 in any of the other pseudo-Greek settings - the shrine is particularly wedded to a Gygaxian inner planes and the Swords of Kos cosmology, and there'll be a lot of work to drop this in another world cleanly. For example, Arkadia has four great titans, but they don't line up so cleanly with the elements, there's not a lot of support for paraelemental lesser titans, the geographic associations of the titans are different which pushes one to rearrange the dungeon, redrawing the map; this in turn suggests replacing at least some of the mephits, etc... Even less of a clear fit for Theros or Thylea.

Preliminary review; will update if I can get my players to head toward where I've dropped this into the world map.