Having played this adventure/DMed it a couple of times, I understand the complaints I've seen but I thought this was a well done adventure, except with length of time which turns out to be important.

Part 1 begins unusally and can take a long time since people are having to become familar with the situation and the sidekicks if present REAL fast agains a nonstandard setup. Player uncertainty is what I think could make this part run too long. I would say be descriptive, but also sum up the goal for them to get the players past any uncertainty. I agree with one comment saying the body harm should have been called out in the warnings, but I feel the descriptions were necessary to inform players of the true nature of the brood threat. That said, if there are players for whom these descriptions are not a good experience for, the DM has plenty of material to use to paraphrase without the precise body horror description to describe the nature of the threat.

Part 2 is where length of time had me truly concerned. Doing all of the encounters here can EASILY go over the expected length of time. Instead, I asked my group what 2 pillars of play they prefer and guided them to those encounters. And summarized the encounters not done (ignoring the potential combat effects as part 3 is more than enough), giving the the "things" at those encounters. If they didn't have time to finish the ones I guided them to, then I just summarized those and skipped the remaining. Some specifics that others have mentioned, I LOVE sudoku and thought the puzzle was awesome...but for time purposes, the puzzle should have had more filled in for the start (to represent knowledge the NPC already learned. The combat is somewhat easy but can also take too much time, again from players having difficulty adjusting to unusual situations. I suggest calling this fight early once the players figure out how to handle the opponents.

Part 3 is probably where a lot of people had a bad taste in their mouth and it does have "lose your actions for rest of the scene" effects. But for me, I thought the encounter had more than enough context clues to make it fairly easy. If your group attacks everything thru raw force/power, then they're in for a rough time. If you have players more concerned about doing "their thing" in a fight instead of working for the good of team, they're in for a rough time. That's my experience, but I get where others have different ones, especially given some folks expectations of Tier 3.

I would have voted this a 5 but it does require a bit more time management than it should.

Echoing the other review. Great adventure, heavy on the exploration and combat side. But it's far too difficult to fit this into a 4-5 hour timeframe. For me, it took 7 and that was with no combat and abbreviated exploration in Part 1 which could have easily went longer.

Also, the clear climax of Part 2 feels like it should end the adventure instead anyway.

This adventure, like the others in this series, is divided into 3 parts. In general, I liked it but there's some issues keeping me from rating this higher.

I didn't like Part 1. It involves the party being given the mission and traveling to Candlekeep. But along the way, the party has to deal with inconveniences, with little reason to suspect the causes are deliberate. Worse, there's not many ways for the party to address the inconveniences (they either just happen or has to be unreasonably bribed away). And even worse, even if the party did address (or bypass) it all quickly, it has ZERO effect on the rest of adventure. The party still gets to Candlekeep even if they do nothing (well almost nothing..one inconvenience involves managing a disease outbreak) and the same stuff still happens. It might as well been background boxed text up until the point the adventures go into the library.

I LOVED Part 2. The party has a library trip, talking with librarians and experiencing the super magicalness that is Candlekeep. Though some interactions are contrived, there's good roleplaying opportunities here and the researching aspect feels enjoyably interactive. There's a scene that the DM can insert whenever appropriate to lead to Part 3.

Part 3 is so so for me. It's basically a good challenging combat. However there's a "book burning" aspect to it that the party is trying to stop. But the adventure doesn't address certain obvious ploys, such as why doesn't the bad guys toss in several books at once. Also, it's a special "fire" they are immune too and they have all the books on their person, so why not just walk into the "fire" to burn all the books at the same time? But ignoring that, the combat is a nice scene to end the adventure on and lead into the next one.

Great premise but could use a bit more content. Felt more like a 3 hour than 4 hour adventure. Some of the DCs are a bit too high or the main "effect" happens too fast.

The creativity in this adventure was great and the artwork was great for immersing for the scene. My nitpicks are minor and easily correctable by a DM for their players.

I know this adventure was meant for the fey season of Wild Beyond the Witchlight, but honestly this is a GREAT adventure for just about any group in any just about setting. I think it would work great as an epliogue for a level 1-4 campaign, allowing players to "reflect" on their deeds while also presenting an interesting dilemma for the characters. I encourage any DM running this to switch things up as needed as appropriate to let your group shine with this great premise.

This is a nice adventure that has Battle Interactive elements built it. A nice way to end the Olma series.

My players did roll their eyes a bit at the "ritual," but other than that a fun time was had by all!

This is a very well done adventure. My only issue (and for me I couldn't get this out of my head), it feels too easy to attack Skull Island and it's leader, Commander Sundeth. It feels like too much is 'handwaved' to get to the Tower of Seven Woes and the fight with Sundeth was a bit disappointing for as a DM.

Season 8 uses formatting to where this can be a 2 hour or 4 hour adventure. However, as a 2 hour adventure, I think this adventure would be unsatisfying. It turns into simply a heist adventure (which can be cool) and some combat based on how much the heist is bumbled. The "optional objectives" in my opinion is really what makes this adventure shine, as they put the characters DIRECTLY against a notable NPC in some way (note, depending on the plan, fighting notable NPC can be optional).

Ignoring the formatting (because I would have preferred this written as only a 4 hour adventure), it was one of the most fun, entertaining adventures I've played and DMed. The cat/mouse game of sneaking around while avoiding setting off an alarm, all the while being required to search nearly the entire ship had me on edge as a player. When I DMed this, the players were able to go in multiple directions, and the adventure allows for the plans of action to be quite different between groups. One of the best adventures of Season 8.

A good dungeon crawl. Depending on the party make up, this will either be fast for the party or can be VERY hard and deadly. Not sure why others felt this was disjointed from the trilogy. It seems to fit just fine to me, though I do still find the overall premise (Artor is looking to move) a bit weird since he shouldn't need the adventurers to do this.

There's a lot of info about Shar having been involved, but little payoff during the adveture. It should have been clearer that some of the vampire spawn were bullywugs. Also, one of the bonus objectives with the forge feels too important to have been a bonus objective. Otherwise, good adventure.

Incidentally, I used an online virtual piano to play the musical notes for the players.

This is a well done, well crafted adventure. The NPCs worked well, the story flowed to the PCs well and the pacing appropriate. If I had any issues, the combats are just a little too easy at the end (4 person APL 3 table handled the unadjusted scaling with ease) and it was weird that the captain would be so quick to employ the adventurers as investigators given the situation (I made up an additional plot point that the party hosts distrusted the captain, so it would be better to have neutral investigators). Otherwise, great!

Many of the NPCs in this adventure are only introduced in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, so your group may connect with the NPCs better if they played (or are playing) that hardcover adventure.

The general idea is fun and straightforward, but this adventure suffers a bit from a weak intro that doesn't provide all of the info to give the DM a clear picture...unless they also read DDAL08-04 (or 08-06 which I explains the intro better).

The puzzles are fun. The moral dilemma interesting. The ending satisfying.

The bonus objectives however feel too short and not fleshed out enough to be an hour's worth of content. Also, I think Episode 2 should have placed the PCs mid-battle, to help reinforce that this was taking place in the middle of the Troll War.

My players did have a lot of fun, especially with the Archway puzzle!

I thought this adventure was quite enjoyable, leaving me with enough guidance to run the adventure how I wished. In short, this adventure is a time travel one with the PCs are given a mission from the present and given a job in the past to find vampire minions. Each area dealing with the minions made for a nice story and once they are dealt with, it concludes with a curveball conflict dealing with the time travel portion of the mission.

Some things I thought were done great

• The roleplaying opportunities were varied and numerous. Well done.
• The magic item was effectively given up front, so it could be useful throught the adventure. Nice.
• The final combat is an exciting one, worthy of a level 1-4 finale.

There are room for improvements (beyond the numerous typos).

• It was hard running the 4 hour version because it's easier to get to the last scene than it is to get to the optional scenes. The adventure has you go to 1 area and if it is fully explored, that can lead right to the end where as the optional encounters needed you to leave the area before it is fully explored. I had to be careful to give a reason for the players to go elsewhere and not fully explore the area first.
• The ending is a bit lackluster. After being propped up as an important enough mission to go back in time, the fact that the situation would not have led to anything terrible, whether the PCs found it or not is disappointing for player agency. Even if they fail, no horrible fate happens to anyone.
• There's an encounter with multiple Vampire Spawn. Even at reduced hit points, they are VERY problematic for a tier 1 party. Just 1 would cause a party a hard time, much less mutliple of them. As a DM, I had to do my best to help the party make good decisions to avoid a very difficult fight.

Other notes

• I rarely run chase scenes as they are written, because generally I think they are badly written and have poor execution based on the strict rules from the DMG. I just use the DMG rules loosely and make up my own chase, so I disagree with others feeling that missing chase rules detracted from this.
• It was a neat mention about how the wards were campaigning for their names, but I wish some of the "pitches" were more clever.
• As great as the final fight is, it can also be solved by running away and bringing the watch. This isn't exactly heroic, but this adventure really doesn't reward the heroic here (except with visions that don't have immediate relavance).

3.5 out of 5.

Good adventure to start a series with. Is about a 2.5 hours in length. Some interesting and good challenges for Tier 2 characters.

The adventure doesn't clearly show where the magic items of this adventure can be found and located. Also, the adventure gives no explanation on why the PCs are 'not affected by what happens at the end of Part 1'. After playing the entire GARY series, it's easy to figure out, but the DM should at least be given some clue why they survived so that if the PCs try to investigate that every thing, they can give somewhat appropriate answers.

Also, some PCs who are resistant to the method used for 'what happens at the end of Part 1' does leave them a bit irritated that the adventure makes it work on them anyway (for the plot). It's also unnecessarily heavy handed (the goals of that can be accomplished even if PCs are not affected at all.