There needs to be a lot more adventures like this. Fun for the players, good story, a bit of combat to entertain those that like that, and it feels like it's part of a world without necessarily drowning you in details that the players will never interact with. (I mean, I enjoy the details, but sometimes authors can go a tad overboard. heh.) There's just enough to give the players the feel that "this is a place in the Forgotten Realms" but not so much that it contradicts what the players might have encountered in other adventures. And the combats were challenging enough to be interesting, but not overwhelming for a tier 1.

And for those that run on a virtual tabletop. You're in for a treat, tokens and import files make setting it up to run online extremely quick and easy, no matter the platform you use. I use Foundry and usually it takes me a few hours to prep a two-hour adventure, but I think I took about an hour or so to set up. It's rare that an adventure doesn't take more time in setup than it does to play through.

So... More of these, thank you in advance! :)

This is a great adventure for a new party or a new DM. The mission starts out with a very simple premise with "a little twist" but one that most parties will jump at. But it's not twisting or complicated, which makes it very easy to follow. And a dungeon crawl with a straightforward premise is always a welcome addition.

It's written open ended enough that parties with different preferences can be happy (the pillars of play are there, with realistic ways of actually accomplishing things.) There's a path for success for some of the encounters for sneaky parties, charismatic parties, or parties that just want to get into combat and not worry about the thinky/talky bits. :)

For those that run online, it includes tokens and importable maps that make setting it up in Foundry or Roll20 a breeze. (I imagine it would be also simple to do Fantasy Grounds, but I have yet to use that myself). This was one of the fastest prepped adventures I've run in a long while.

So, highly recommend picking this up, either for a quick and easy one shot or, if you're like me, as part of a repetoir of things that you can pull out of your bag to run on the spur of the moment.

So, first things first: Make sure to spend extra time when you prep this. It's complicated and if you're doing it on a VTT, you'll want to make sure you have a stategy for all of the various moving pieces. If you've run Waterdeep: Dragon Heist before (or even played it), you'll get some additional benefits from that. Maybe flip through that book, or ... you know, maybe wing it. :) It's your game.

But it's worth it. It totally fits the theme, you've got some definite giant statue combat going on, you've got amazing callbacks to other NPCs, you've got opportunity for your PCs to look like absolute AWESOME HEROES.

I prepped this adventure the evening before, but I ended up staying up just a little longer, and then just a little longer still to do one more thing to make it run smooth. And... well, it did.

The players enjoyed it, everyone had a blast, and weirdly enough, despite not knowing what characters people were bringing, it tied 100% perfectly to a character that had played some season 8 adventures with me and had a PERSONAL ATTACHMENT to the NPCs at the end. (I mean, all of the NPCs at the end, yes, even that one. What an amazing little fun coincidental thing.)

But I was VERY nervous before. It's tier 3, which is always tricky because tier3 is filled with all sorts of challenges. It felt like the author helped me with that, the encounters were set up in a way that made the tier3 party respond to challenges instead of ending each encounter with the perfect counter.

The social bits felt like I had enough information to run them, and given the additional details I remembered, I had a blast roleplaying them out.

But yeah, went from nervous before the game, to everyone having a great time, leaving happy, and thinking "You know, next time, I think I've got it."

I'm going to have to schedule Lonesome Grub (the author's other adventure) for our group now. :)

DM Review: I ran this for my players just a few moments ago and had a great time. The NPCs involved have lots of opportunity to roleplay, and there's a lot of details that we just didn't get the chance to hit, but it was there should I want to play up various interactions.

The encounters were interesting, and the players really enjoyed the reference in the ending combat.

The art is fun, I enjoyed having the tokens, that was a very nice touch. I run on a VTT, so it saved me effort, but it also helps with the story since it's a consistant art style. I wish there were tokens for the ships NPCs, even though they aren't being fought, I just LOVED having tokens, and I'd love having more. So, thank you for including them! (the cover is awesome, too, that cover actually being an illustration from the adventure is excellent.)

I enjoyed having the painter in the encounter, for whateve reason I leaned into the RP with that guy, and ... Just having him there painting during the final battle was fun!

The adventure ran short, which is not a criticism at all. For an adventure with so many social pieces, and for an adventure with so much of an open-ended way of running, short means that you're not going to go over your schedule if you have it work differently a different week. (We had a pretty solid 3 hours, but I tend to be a little shorter with my RP when I run online, as opposed to what I run in-person). When I run it again, because I will, I know that I don't have to worry about going long for the RP, which is nice.

Definitely enjoyed this adventure, saved it in a compendium in Foundry so that I can run it again. :)

(also a side note: I did enjoy the layout, looks like you did something a bit different than the default template, was curious what you used, since I'm always looking for how to better lay these out on my own.)

This adventure had my players laughing at many points. :) It was filled with opportunities to roleplay once you convince the party to go along with the mission in the first place.

You all know what you're getting into... So enjoy the ride, play along, get into the spirit of things.

It was an easy adventure to prep and run, fun NPCs, and its set up in such a way that you can play up the roleplay or play up the combat or adjust it how you wish. The combats were challenging.

We took a nice leisurely pace through it, had fun throughout and we finished it in about 3.5 hours, but we made sure to do every little bit of this adventure. I'm positive I could have run it in 2 hours, but I also think we could have gone past four. There was plenty for the players to actually DO.

I also love the aesthetic and it feels like a full setting, and I'm looking forward to seeing characters reappear in future adventures.

Definitely recommend this for a fun evening!

I love puzzles, but my players don't always enjoy going through with them. So, I enjoy an adventure that actually helps encourage the players to give it a try.

The first puzzle started with the players seriously overthinking it. Everyone was really seriously worried about missing gear and was trying to figure out how to deal with the lack of gear, but a gentle nudge and some reassurance helped them, just saying "this is a puzzle in a two hour adventure, don't worry too much about it, you'll be fine and enjoy yourself."

After they got that started, they solved it pretty quickly and by passing ideas around to each other. It was great to see it!

From that point on, they were in the right mindset and I think everyone enjoyed that aspect of things. As a DM I also was happy to see that in a lot of the cases, the possibility of working around the puzzle was there. Sometimes you have players that just REALLY want to be rewarded for bypassing it. (In fact, in the first puzzle one of the players floated the idea of a class ability that would have let him bypass it... and had he gone through with it, it would have worked, but at this point players were really into trying to solve it.

The end battle was a little more complicated for us, and I wish I had read it a little more carefully. Everyone had a blast, but I did mess it up a little. But, this is D&D, players are often patient when you say "hold up, I messed up, what you ACTUALLY saw was..."

Once we did that, they made short work of the end fight. My players tend to stomp pure combat, they worked on the puzzle at the end (this one gave them a little more trouble, but a lot less than I was worried about).

But it was a great evening, it ran a little over the two hours, but well within the time I had allotted for the game. (and could be because we were joking around and having a good time, which is totally a success in my book).

As a side note, we played the other adventure in the Acre Woods prior. The two of them have a very different feel. :)

So I definitely recommend this adventure, and suggest the DM read it very carefully. As is typical of puzzle adventures, it requires a little extra reading, but it was worth it.

This adventure was a hit for the players. It managed to score high marks in multiple categories!

The story was fun and engaging, the NPCs were a little silly in a good way. Not just the Dohwar, but even the pirates. We played up to stereotypes in a total fun way. The Dohwar may be one of my new favorite races, makes me wish for a PC race now. I hadn't run into them before now, but just ... they are the right amount of "silly premise, but serious goals." Little penguin men that are still 100% serious about being company men.

The set up was the sort that was unambiguous, the players felt like it was obviously a good mission to take, there was no "Maybe we're the bad guys" moment. The players all talked about how refreshing that was, and how happy they were about that. The enemies felt like good enemies that you didn't mind.

The twist at the end... I may have leaned into it a bit early, but the players were figuring it out before I did. We had fun with the expectation that there was going to be a twist, and yet when it came it was fun because it wasn't exactly how they expected. You set it up perfect for that and they enjoyed it.

This is one of the few times that the players expressed how they liked a trap! Each of the rooms that involved skill checks felt like everyone was involved, there were choices to make but there wasn't a "this is a bad choice, don't do it." Everyone got involved, everyone did something that felt like it progressed the story, and it was written well for it.

We totally played up the flashback mechanism, that was fun to use. Everyone ended up using them up by the end, and silly fun was had.

Will definitely be running the sequel in the future. (and will look forward to you making part 3.)

This is a good adventure for a new DM to get a feel for the flexibility that D&D offers. Experienced DMs will appreciate how everything fits together in a way that they can also ad lib a fair bit, as well, as there's a lot of little details that permit you to add your own touches.

The subtitle "a feywild chase" is a great description, the players need to chase their objective through various scenes. The adventure gives the DM guidance for good skills to do at various points, in a few interesting situations, along with all of the whimsy (and candy deliciousness) of the Feywild.

The end encounter does something that I've seen a lot in this season, and I hope that people keep doing it: a combat that permits different people to do different things. So folks can concentrate on the combat while someone else takes care of something else. I love that for cinematic purposes.

I love having a good 2 hour adventure that I can run on the spur of the moment, as well. This will definitely go into my bag of tricks, because I feel that I could pick this up with minimal prep and run another fun romp through candy fields chasing after honey bees. I appreciate two hour adventures in general, but ones like this are great because they're easy to run and are still filled with fun situations. (It'll join my other adventures that I pull out for those tricks, like Giant's Diplomacy and No Foolish Matter.)

Ran this recently for a group of folks, the adventure is laid out in a manner where you could take different routes to go through it, and you knew why everything was happening, so you could adjust things at the table as needed. I love that.

It's hard to do in a two-hour adventure, so it was definitely appreciated since my table seemed to be going their own direction from the start. (you always get those tables. :) It makes it fun.)

The maps were gorgeous, the timing was just about perfect. Two tight combats, with some skill challenges and some roleplaying. (with obvious ability to work around the combats, that of course my players used.)

I love how all of the CONMAR series ties together, and this tied in with the rest of them.

My group had a lot of fun and I enjoyed running it for them.

This adventure is an interesting mix (in a great way): It feels like a horror themed adventure, but a party that wants to roleplay and explore/experience all of the themes without just falling into D&D combat will feel absolutely at home here. The party that wants to hack and slash their way through it will definitely be accomodated too.

But, the content warning about "body horror" is apt. There's definitely that aspect of body horror with a bit of an eldritch horror feel to it, everything is alien and weird, and the party can interact with all of the scenery and react to it, and the group that I ran through it definitely interacted with everything. (And we had one character who was a great old ones warlock that absolutely leaned into that eldritch horror aspect, so I knew before we even started that the adventure was going to be waaaay up his alley.)

The adventure starts out with a "two paths" choice that determines which set of encounters, and even within the way that they handle the encounters can lead to an entirely different feel for the story. So there's a fair bit of repayability there.

The layout is clean and attractive, the maps are SUPER evocative of the feel and easy to use in a VTT. (If I were playing in person, I would draw some vague lines and circles, but I would definitely take out my tablet and show the picture of the full color maps because they just help so much get across the creepy atmosphere.)

I highly recommend this adventure!

A fun, light-hearted adventure with a bunch of characters that will amuse your players. I had fun roleplaying as the Bullywug Knight, who drives a large portion of the ending story. The party was really happy to be able to fight alongside a noble frog knight. :)

Another fun RP-heavy adventure from this author!

The adventure starts off with a great way to draw your players into the roleplaying, having them work together to design an NPC that factors into the rest of the adventure. This troupe style design is something common in a lot of other narrative RPGs, but it is unusual in D&D and it's done in a fashion that works well.

Throughout the adventure, the ability to play as a standard "let's kill the badguys and get loot" is possible, but the roleplaying "lets talk to the NPCs and negotiate our way." This is true throughout the adventure, if you have a party that is focused on trying to heal the relationships between characters that have been damaged, you can have a very satisfying roleplay session with a lot of the combat becoming a lot less important. The author obviously took a lot of care to try and weave together the separate paths that different groups might take.

Lastly, this adventure has a lot of guidance on how to add and subtract bits so that you can fit various timeslots. There's a lot of random encounters that you can add to make a replay different from the last run through, but if you want to get to the meat of the adventure you can skip those.

My group had a great time. We ran the adventure in a four hour slot, but we took advantage of some of the extra options, we went heavy into the roleplaying, and we had five hours of content and I could have brought even more over if I had wanted to.

Definitely recommend this adventure for a group that loves a good story.

This adventure is HEAVY on the roleplay, a great story that is easy to weave your players into. Lots of explanation for why the individuals in it are doing what they are doing, which gives the DM the opportunity to improv scenes in the in-between sections as well.

It has a unique mechanic that allows the party to keep track of their progress, good and bad, giving the party a reward for rescuing that commoner that might be caught in the crossfire. I enjoyed how the party got rewarded for acting like the heros in a story.

I had a good time, my party enjoyed it, and I look forward to reading the author's next adventure, which I've already gone and purchsed. :)

Great adventure! Looking forward to running the rest of this series.

Set up so that it can accomodate both parties that prefer combat or prefer to avoid combat, lots of roleplaying oppurtunities, along with a fair bit of silly fun for both.

Tons of art and handouts, which make setting this up for a VTT (Roll20, Foundry or Fantasy Ground) a breeze.

The players that went through it absolutely loved it, even though a lot of them tend to be on the combat-heavy side of things, they had a blast with a single combat in four hours. :) That's always a good sign, when the sillyfun aspects still manage to win over the folks that usually love the combat heavy adventures!

I had a lot of fun running this for my group! Every single little story was picked up, I was actually surprised that they knew about some of the more obscure (to me) Scandanavian forklore, but apparently there's a few children's shows in the US that the parents in my groups got excited to see references to.

I've run it three times, and played it once, each time it's run a little bit different. It's flexible enough that you can adjust it to the group you're running for, and you're never quite sure how it'll turn out as the DM, you just get a bunch of things to put out there and see how the players react to them.

You get a nice map that works just fine for virtual tabletops, some nice story elements with roleplaying that would work well with a younger table as well as your more experienced players.

Definitely recommend this one. Great job!

EDIT: It's about a year later and I have run this at least six times now, and I'm probably just going to make it an annual Christmas-time thing, and it's very sandboxy and good. I've never had a table go quite the same, but it's always been fun.