The good: The production values are great. Has an old-school feel to a lot of the dangers, and very few encounters are the boring old “bag of hitpoints” type.

The Bad: Threats are super disconnected from each other narratively. Map design feels weird sometimes. Relatively few rewards for overcoming the arbitrary-feeling challenges. Encounters are crazy dangerous in ways not immediately obvious on first reading. There are a lot of encounters where players are expected to do or not do specific things which run counter to a veteran player’s instincts.

Spoilers follow:

The first floor expects the players to do some side-quests in town before actually going down, so they’d be second level. No one has ever done this any of the times I’ve run it.

The first floor also has a giant hole that constantly vomits undead in a never ending stream so the DM can “restock” floor one with monsters. The module expects players to “figure out” it’s an endless stream and just ignore it until they can seal it off after doing things in the lower floors. If you’ve run more than a few games of DnD, you know this is a TERRIBLE assumption to make. Players will never want to leave a knife at their back. I had one party actually try to descend INTO the hole to shut it off. (There’s no provision in the adventure for this, not even a cop-out line telling you to “improvise.”)

Floor two has a setpiece encounter with an ooze monster... that has a reach of 5 ft and a 10ft movement speed. In a huge room. This is a set piece that is entirely torn apart by cantrips. Weird design decision. If you want to run this, give it at least a 15 foot reach so it can smack people some before it dies.

By contrast, the alchemist in the next room which made it is CRAZY DANGEROUS. At the level she’s encountered, her “Take this, swine” ability is effectively an instant kill move on anything within 5 feet of her. It deals around 10 acid damage minimum with the potential for about 46 on a max roll (2d8+3d6+3d6+2d6), leaving them prone, restrained, not breathing, and with their gear melting. Her minions breathe tons of damage with no attack roll and explode on death for more. She also has an environmental hazard that the party and I just ignored because things were going crazy as it was. You can just leave her alone, but she’s got a hair trigger and just bothering her too much will set her off.

Floor two also has another problem. It describes only one door as locked, one as hidden, and gives no direction on any door from that point onward. Which means an unlucky level 2 party can walk directly towards the caster/demon combo that is supposed to be a challenge for level 5 parties. Which happened on my second attempted run through this module. They tried to negotiate, which led to a betrayal and hilarious misunderstanding, but it still would’ve been a TPK had one of the party not rolled well on his death saves.

Floor 3 is where I called it quits. There is a huge “murder hallway” which has no narrative reason to be there- they’re supposed to have been barracks underneath a fortification, why would the builders have constructed a murder hallway in the middle of their sleeping quarters/workshops? They didn’t carve this place DURING the siege, it was before.

The real reason I called it quits is because there are dire owlbears and lich hounds. The dire owlbears are bags of hit points and damage with a CR 5. The party tore through three of them no problem, that’s okay. They’re supposed to do that. The lich hounds have MORE hp, can knock players prone then tear at them for extra damage as a bonus action, fly, pop into and out of an alternate dimension to ignore terrain obstacles, and Resist non-magical damage and a few elements. And are CR 4 for some reason. Oh, and if you don’t have a magic weapon (which you won’t at this point unless you’re given one by a class ability), then there’s nearly 2,000 HP worth of Lich Hounds to chew through. That doesn’t count the HP of the Owlbears or the occupants of the floor who are adding to your problems.

It’s a challenge all right. There’s a ton of good, inventive, and surreal puzzles and fights, and the Roll20 module is well-constructed for easy use. But with the weird expectations of player behavior and the borderline unfair “Gotchas” it expects me to spring onto the party… it just wasn’t fun for me to run.