I've run this a few times, the early combat sequence is a lot of fun. The extra friendly NPCs can make it a little too easy, but play them a little weakly for the party to get the full challenge. The social encounters on the trail offer a ton of RP opportunities. The chase scene at the end is a little sketchy but with some tweaking gives players a chance to mix their spell slots, skills, and RP into a solid encounter. The box text at the end is a bit much, a little judicial editing brings it inline though. All in all a great chapter in the story.

The who-done-it module is a lot of fun. Both times I've run it the party has figured it out and had some great RP along the way.

I ran this for a consistent table that has played all of the previous modules together. We have only 1 arcane caster in the party, so I ravamped the module to focus on them (recasting the store elementy about Tangleleaf to be about the PC). Party had a blast and learned a few things about their dwarven sorcerer. The final encounter was great, super thematic! Tons of great RP opportunities!

Almost all of the DRW modules I run over 2 sessions, so I'm typically not worried about trying to squeeze this into a 4 hour block. That said, I LOVE this module. DRW-10 and 11 just start hinting at how much worse things are going to get. DRW-12 pulls back the curtain and lets the players get a glimpse of the horror show that is yet to come. Having echos of Father Llymic popping up in their peripherial vision, the icey cold gripping them, the insectile infections. Almost everything that happens in this module is foreshadowing what is to come. Being able to work in a bunch of lore about the old Elven gods of Myth Dranor is a bonus too, getting the players to engage in world exploration is so much fun when you have an elf or cleric in the party.

When running this in strict time slots, I bring the party in on the ridge line right over the temple for a quick entry and turn the final encounter into a skill check challenge mode to abstract out the final fight into a ~15 minute lightning round.

The writing is good and the art is fantastic but the balance... oof. Multiple concentration spells as a second level feat makes this a easy dip. The ability to hand out multiple inspirations at fourth level. Paladin's Devine Sense, only better. Mage's Find Familiar only better. Cleric's Guidance only better. Turn Undead only better. Upcasting spells for free. Screwing with Counterspell. And that doesn't even get into the sub classes, all of which have very powerful effects.

If you're running a table filled with min/maxed characters and over powered homebrew, this class will fit right in. If you're running a table of average characters from the core books, this class is going to stick out like a sore thumb.

The first 2 sections of this are absolutely brillaint. Lots of great traps and interesting opportunities for players to come up with solutions to problems and learn about the world, along with a couple of quick crunchy combats. Lots of opportunities for the DM to crank the creepy/far-realm dial by adding commentary to perception/investigation checks. Tons of creative space to get the PCs very excited to never come back to Xorvintroth again. This is absolutely a great representation of Xorvintroth in all of it's creepy glory and a really well rounded set of encounters and gameplay. Only thing that would make it better is some more opportunities for non-Perception/Investigation skill checks, but that's a pretty minor issue.

Getting into the far realm, things get a bit wonky, not bad, but it's feels like stepping into a cartoon. Totally workable, just different.

Then comes the problem. The end fight, or, I should call it, the end show. The "fight" only lasts 2 round. The first thing that the BBEB does is cast psychic scream with a DC 27 save. If you don't have a Paladin, anticipate that most if not all of the party will be stunned and may not be able to get unstunned. As one of my players said, "Well, I may as well pack up and head home." At a table of 7 (with no paladin), 3 PCs had the possibility of making the save, 1 did (with a flash of genius), 2 did not, the other 4 just sat there. Round 2, the 1 unstunned character cast dispell magic on 1 other character, who got to use his turn to do a bunch of damage. Which the BBEB promptly healed almost all of by using his Necrotic Burst ability to casually throw out 200+ damage (100+ in healing). And at the start of round 3, the fight abruptly ends. Sure, the PCs can continue to be stunned while hordes of far realm broodspawn come at them, but that's at the end of a 5-6 hour adventure and has no impact on the story, so handwave it was.

After an amazing campaign, a great adventure, and the build up to what everyone expected to be a truely epic fight, having a complete loss of player agency and watching two wizards cast at eachother while waiting for the TPK was a significant disappointment.

Went through it once as a player, and it was frustraiting, ran it for my table as-is to see if they would have better luck and I think it was just as bad for them. I'm running it again later this week for another group and I think I'm going to have a "far realm" intevention on the Psychic Scream spell to make it a Slow effect instead of a Stun effect.

Update: Swithing Psychic Scream to do a mass Slow effect and running the encounters for 4 rounds make the final encounter SOOOOOOOO much better. Night and day. If you're going to run this one, I highly recommend adjusting the final encounter.

Played through once and ran once. Having long rest breaks between the action made the PCs feel super empowered, everyone got to play with their absolutely best toys a couple of times and absolutely chewed up the crunchy combats. Epic scenes galore! How often do you get to see a druid wildshape into an adult red dragon and burn an airship from the sky!?!?

Was it an easier to survive adventure than some of the other tier-4s? Absolutely. Did the lore dumps and plot hole filling feel a bit forced at times? Yeah, a bit. But, did the players walk away from it feeling like they had truely epic characters who just took on a dragon flight and won? Heck yeah they did!

Played and ran this as a single table. Both times had a blast. Running it I was worried that the time travel portion would be a nightmare, but it's actually laid out farely well and didn't take nearly as much prep work as I feared. There is a lot of combat in the last section that can be easily skipped with some creative RP, disguises, and flight (which most PCs should have had 2 opportunities to pick up a flight enabling magic item by this point). The 3 side objectives in phase 1 not being highlighted as a thing that needed to happen means it's a bit of a crap shoot as to whether or not the last section is dicie, but with the layout of the time loops and locations, the party has pretty good odds on hitting 2 of them.

There are 24 encounters to potentially run. Your party will encounter ~8. That's a lot of wasted prep work. There are 26 stat blocks listed, many of which have customizations. There are 9 more NPCs that have combat actions, that aren't included in the stat blocks.

Part 1 Combat objective, the skiff is tiny, and the party has to deal with 10 large-gargantuan NPCs. Space ships are making melee attacks? Time limit means that it's unlikely that most tables will clear the fight, but there is no penalty/reward for completing or failing. Also, multiple mobs with legendary actions in the same fight is rough to keep on top of. Part 1 Exploration objective, played well, tight on time, but not impossible Part 1 Social objective, haven't played or run this one

Part 2 Objective A, no idea how that's suposed to be accomplished. Either there's a lot of handwaving, the party came with the perfect tools, or you treat the whole thing as fluf, replacing everything but the turret fights themselves with a few saves and burn some resources Part 2 Objective B, haven't played or run this one Part 2 Objective C, there is a 2-girls-1-cup reference. None of the prisoner stat blocks are included even though the adventure calls for them to use their abilities. Part 2 Objective D, haven't played or run this one

Part 3 16 different encounters here and your goal is to complete 5 of them. These are kinda hit or miss. Some give an opportunity for minimal RP (yelling at the room filled with prisoners and trying to figure out how to help them escape) Others take a bit longer. Some puzzle are fun and fit well in the time (7 and 9) others are just WTF? (6). The stress mechanic introduced at the very end is interesting, but since it's at the very end of the maze, it doesn't have much effect. That final encounter can also be trivialized by high int characters clearing the hall in 1 turn and low int characters typically being high strength and thus not being effected by the mechanic. The escape mechanic is a neat touch, other than a few issues: 1) there's no clue as to what it is and 2) characters have the option to be huge sized through this adventure, meaning that a single player can consume the entire width of the hall, preventing anyone else from getting close enough (let alone a full party of 7) to fiture out and trigger the escape mechanism. Also, there's no height listed for the room nor tenticles, so flight appears to be a means of circumventing the encounter.

Part 4 A little awkward, could have used a bit more description as to how the machine "defends itself". One of the victory conditions is unknown to the characters, a little description that might clue them into the non-combat option would have been nice. As would a descriptive blurb to warn them of what they are about to stick their hands in.

Treasure - treasure is all route dependent. The 3 items that drop are only available in 3 encounters, 1 of which the players are unaware of the opportunity before picking their objective and the 2 others are based on the assigned route, that the players don't get to choose. It's entirely possible to have a table absolutely crush the entire epic, and walk away with nothing but gold.

Maps - most of this adventure appears better suited for Theater of Mind play. There is no logical layout of the base. The provided maps are generic and don't match the room descriptions. They are too high detail to print out on the table top and too small to scale up for using in a VTT.

Splitting the adventure into Tier 3 and Tier 4 branches (more akin to DRW-EP-03) would have made for a much easier prep job, garunteed loot for the characters, and better replay-ability IMO.

All that said, the adventure does have an epic feel to it. It was also a great intro to the Astral Plane.

Played through once, ran twice.

I think Frozen Whispers does a lot to really set the tone for Xorvintroth, the story really highlights that this isn't a friendly place and even out of combat it is exhausting just being here. I love that the decisions from DRW-14 can come back to haunt the players.

It is tier 3, so the save DCs are high and there are some really challenging encounters. There are times where the party has to put their desire to kill everything on the shelf and focus on the mission. The final encounter can be a 2 hour slog fest of a fight, or 15 minutes of focus on the objective.

There is one scene with a suduku puzzle, if your table doesn't have a suduku/mathduku player, you may want to drop the suduku portion and just have them make X successful checks instead.

I've played through this one twice and ran it once. It's not a bad adventure, but it feels a little below the high bar that the rest of the DRW series has set.

The first encounter can be really hit or miss. I strongly prefer giving the party some leeway for creative solutions to the mislead option, but if they choose combat, be prepared to lose an hour plus of the session to that one scene.

The second encounter really feels shoe-horned in place. It's a fun little encounter, but it's just odd that it isn't connected to anything else in the story.

Exploring the factory exterior is solid, I love the fact that the author worked in that the Red Wizards are real people, complete with shoddy programming and lazy security, it gives them much more of a realistic feel than some group of autonomuous robots operating with perfection.

Inside, exploration is typically minimized as everyone is 100% terrified of the sheer mass of guards. Which is awesome for the party to be so terrified. But it means that the rewards and interactions on the first floor are rarely encountered.

Upstairs, love the encounter design, but each group has a different challenge with it. The first time I played it, it was rough. To be fair though, it was closing in on midnight, the DM hit us with a surprise round, and we had no plan. Second play though went much easier, folks went into it with teamwork and a heist mindset and it was cake. The run through I did I had a very strong party. They started it off as a heist, but turned it into a bloodbath, in the end, they could have easily dealt with the reinforcements for quite some time as the action economy was in their favor. Probably worth doubling up on the reinforcement rolls if you have a very strong party.

All 3 had the same issue though: time. With all of them getting the portals closed down with between 15 minutes and negative 60 minutes remaining. In the two play throughs, the DM handwaved the escape. Knowing that the escape was likely to be handwaved, for my run I had Jaanvald give the party a teleportation beacon that would be able to pull them back to the safehouse when they activated it.

Played through in Tier 2 and 3 at a con and single table, have run it twice at tier 3 single table.

Tier 2 is awesome, through and through. I love that it's an entirely different adventure than the Tier 3 play though, not just a watered down version. It also made prep waaaaaay easier than so many other epics where you have to prepare for 20 different scenarios when your table will only see 3.

Tier 3, if folks take the combat encounter to start, it's extremely hard to pull it off on the clock. Make sure you warn folks that this is going to have to be high-speed, preplan turns, and go-go-go! It is a very challenging combat as well. The final encounter is a great challenge too, and your table's previous decisions can really make it hard. There are tools at their disposal though to take the edge off.

Running as part of the DRW campaign, I slip it in between DRW-13 and DRW-14, so the table has a choice between tier 2 and 3. And since that's 5 adventures in to tier 2, most folks are excited to play it tier 3. But I highly recommend going through it again on a different character in tier 2.

A good adventure, love the saves and traps mixed in along with the paranoia it causes combined with the risk/reward of the artifacts.

Only copmlaint is that many of the descriptive paragraphs mix player/mechanic/DM information together. So either sink in some extra prep time to put together descriptions or be ready to read/skim/freeform the descriptions.

The climax scene is one of my favorite 5e fights to day. The architecture, the timing, the opportunities to leverage lesser used abilities and forcing people out of the "run to melee and spend 3 rounds attacking" mentality. Absolutely love how dynamic and interactive it is. Every time I've run it someone has done something cool and someone else has lamented not having a piece of utility that would have helped. Glorious!

It's not just that the maps are bad. They are, but it's so much more.

There are map handouts for the players, cool, those maps have 40 points of interest identified.

There are maps for the DM, cool, those maps have 29 points of interest identified and 9 more unidentified.

The section of the adventure dealing with the maps has 23 points of interest identified. So just wing it for the other 17 locations.

Also, the DMs maps and player handout maps differ. Understandable, some bad intel, some assumptions, some guesses go into what the players get. But the cartographic differences are immaterial. There's some extra squigles on the DM's map, but nothing that would meaningfully impact the game. And to make it even better, the DMs map and the Players' map have different points of interest.

Not only are they different, the numbering scheme differs as well. So when your players tell you they want to go to 18, and you start describing the library, and they're like, "no, here, the 'small entrance'" and you look at the map and you're like oh, you want number 20, the "servant entrance". Which means you actually have to find the "staff entrance" in the description.

One of the maps has two locations labeled "bunk room", which kinda lines up with the descriptions as there are two barracks described. But one of those rooms on the DM's map is a banquet hall. The second barracks in the DM's map is in what the player's map is the chapel (it looks like a chapel too), but there's no chapel described in the adventure.

Oh, and the player maps are all labeled with numbers and a key lets them know what each number means. The DM's maps though? Only 2 of the maps include the key. The third, you just get the numbers.

It's not a bad adventure, just be prepared, section 2 and 3 are likely to be highly interactive with the maps, and they are bad, really bad, you're going to want to take an hour or two to review and mark up your own copy of the maps to make it even remotely useful.