This adventure is a welcome break from the constant journeys back and forth along the Spine of the World... Oh wait, you do that again, but to another slightly different spot. The table picked up pretty quickly that this is a shopping list, but they were good sports about it. Overall, I dialed back the serious tone, and everyone had a great time. I had to lighten it a little because of the simple fact that the hippo-man rattled off a list of improbable ingredients: dragon bits recently abandoned nearby, a rare and dangerous magical crystal substance, and an illusion converter that would work perfectly with the holographic projector he got from... somewhere?
When you run this with a large group, it is up to you, the DM, to hurry things along, and I mean hurry. The area map, the first in the series, I think, has helpful travel times. Hand-wave 100% of the travel. You don't have time for that.
If any of the characters at the table have played through DDAL10-05 and defeated Feral Tongue, odds are good that someone either has a chardalyn breastplate or remembers a cave full of the stuff. Let them do this. It makes them feel resourceful, and the DM saves a bunch of time by cutting out a pointless combat and exposition about glacier nomads and about Ten Towns, which I guess got destroyed when no one was looking. Skip that particular apocalypse too.
The dwarven fortress section is really good combat with interesting environmental hazards. I appreciate the fact that the module told me which of the many doors on the map excerpt the party would be entering. The entryway gave some good tension as long as someone had adequate passive perception to allow the DM to communicate that tension. Blundering into it would kind of suck narratively. There isn't any time for anything not on the map. Hurry it up.
The lost spire is going to burn more time than you think. You have pop-up combats and environmental puzzles. You have a plot device that is either unexplaned and pure handwavium, or explaned and is obviously something that any party is going to try to abuse flagrantly. I told my table that they could come back to it later after they had dropped two oozes out of it. I also told them they could try to figure out the riddle later if they had time, otherwise they would get it by default. They don't have time to enjoy that fully. It's still a pretty fun sequence.
The climax is straightforward but satisfying with a full group near the recommended APL. Overall, it was fun for the players, hectic to run, and absolutely required a lot of streamlining to keep it down to four hours and change. If you have six hours available, then enjoy.
One of the really nice things about this was that the layout of the print friendly version worked nicely with two-sided prints, and didn't require flipping back and forth in a scene.
One of the really bad things about this was that all of the interesting things were interesting because of information from the RotF hardcover. Plan on plenty of prep time for this one. If you're trying to prep this without access to the book, you won't have much idea what's going on and why. I had to take a star off the rating because it's not self-contained. Aside from that's its challenging but enjoyable to run.
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