I enjoyed running this. I hadn’t done a proper intrigue session before where I had the motivations and secrets of multiple NPCs to manage. At first, I was worried about finding this overwhelming, and fretted over whether I would be able to keep everyone’s facts straight. I knew it was important not to mix up information as if I did it could lead to players and PCs being confused and no longer knowing what was going on / getting off-track. I want my players to succeed, so if they had failed because I wasn’t clear, I would have taken that as a failure on my part.
The various red herrings presented were incredibly effective in giving the PCs other avenues to explore and suspects to consider. They all found the actual murder to be suspicious at first, and I’m glad that they decided to dig in and investigate rather than go with their gut! One of the PCs is a physician and so she wanted to do an examination of the murderer’s foot because they seemed injured, the murderer refused, and it was only after their guilt was revealed that the Player went “THAT’S why X didn’t want to examine it!!” which was very satisfying.
I do think this adventure is better suited to smaller groups - running this with a group of eight would have been challenging to manage, and I imagine also would have made it a much shorter encounter. If being used in a party situation, I would suggest running it with PCs who already know one another - it makes for a great interlude on those nights where you’re missing one or more people, and while it can be used as a stand-alone session, there is also the option to have it tie into other goings-on in the city!
If you have the option to either print out the NPC cards, or have them up on a second screen for easy reference, I recommend doing that - I wasn’t running from my usual setup and think my biggest challenge was keeping track of their motivations and secrets. Cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed how the NPCs all tied into this story and how they were almost all being shady about something - it really added to the intrigue of this adventure.
In short: the NPCs and their intrigue add a lot to this adventure and leaning into that makes it even more fun to run. If you’re looking for a mystery to solve when someone is absent, or a game for afternoon play, give this one a look - you can’t go wrong!
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