I ran this adventure the other day for a group of 3 level-10 characters. All 3 were seasoned Mistbourne adventurers. The players enjoyed this adventure very much. The game took 2 hours 20 minutes.

The PDF should have been proof-read more. Spelling mistakes, typos, incomplete sentences are common thoughout.

[Spoilers]

As I was preparing this adventure, the main NPC seemed almost useless to me. Their intention is to accompany the characters, but the rest of the adventure only re-references them again once. However, during the game, they ended up being a useful tool for the players to ask questions.

The main MacGuffin of the whole adventure (the book) is never actually found and never explained why it wasn't found.

The "rainbow shards" are just there. No explanation, and many of them aren't given any direction of actually where they're found. Recombining them is explained to be done by the NPC that just died. Instead, I had them reappear in the chest at the end, in the necklace form.

The "redirect the moonbeam" puzzle almost broke my players. They just couldn't figure it out without me dropping hint after hint. Finally, someone thought to hold one of the "rainbow shards" up to the sparkles seen on the map, and from that I was able to coax them to the solution.

The pit trap in The Temple of the Forgotten should not have been visible on the player map. There's no way to hide that from the players. For timing purposes, I just skipped that trap and told the players to ignore that big black rectangle.

OK, now the good.

Despite all of the above, the players really did enjoy this game. They enjoyed the fact that it is very low-combat and mostly exploration.

This adventure worked very well with a small party.

The Call to Action is different than most other AL games. Having something happen immediately was a nice change.

One player immediately jumped at the idea of being the Heir. So that mechanic went very well. They thought they would be required to stay behind at the end of the adventure. They weren't sure whether they should return to the future, so I used Dead to convince them to return.

The players liked the Back to the Future 2 -like ending.

All-in-all, the PDF of this adventure is "rough", but it's a cute little "cozy" adventure that the players really enjoyed.

I ran this for my group yesterday. Overall, they quite enjoyed it. I was requested to run the game as Strong for my Average party (4 level 10's). It took 3 hours to play.

Some points in no particular order.

[Non spoilers]

• The Call to Action says 15 minutes. It took the group more like 30 - 45.
• The penultimate fight took 1 hour.
• The last fight took 45 minutes.

[Spoilers]

• Once they read "bowels" in the note, they were worried about the Guardian's Embrace for the remainder of the game.
• The group did not talk to NPCs at all about the "fake Helm" aspect of the village. So that entire thread was lost for them.
• The group clued in quickly that the monster was Delilah and was full on in rescue mode for her and the twins.
• The "cabin the in woods" creeped them out.
• The group did not investigate the cairns at all. They just concentrated on following the trail.
• In the cave, the players really, really tried talking the monster down. One player tried casting Sleep on the monster 3 times.
• The players Misty-Stepped and snatched the twins from the crib away from Delilah and took them to the cave entrance. So when the players finally defeated her, I had to massage the final ending.

Putting the monster to Sleep (as was attempted by a character 3 times) could have mucked up the ending. Since we're under 2024 rules, a failed Wisdom saving throw is all that's needed to put her to sleep. I rolled those saving throws with Advantage to avoid the story ending that way.

I have one complaint about the organization of the story in the PDF. Many sections of text were reversed from what I considered logical. For example, the fight with Soren is described first followed by the boxed text to read when the characters first enter the scene. To me, logically, the boxed text should have come first along with Soren's talking points, followed by the fight details. In another case, a conversation with Elyria about the monsters is similar: her talking points come after the notes about any skill checks.

All-in-all, a good story and a fun adventure.

I ran this adventure for a group of 5 players. It worked out to an "Average" party. Overall, the players enjoyed the game. It was a nice mix of RP and combat.

Some comments from running this game are below.

[Spoilers]

• The players ended up walking through the front door impersonating the "specialist". Yes, the module says that the guards won't let anyone in, but they had fun doing it. Super good Deception rolls certainly helped them.
• The players were conflicted about what to do with Victor in the end. The medicine check says he's not going to last, so they were conflicted about letting him loose, leaving him in the cell, or somehow letting him peacefully pass. In the end, we ended up contriving a "milk of the poppy" solution to allow him to sleep until he expired.
• At the altar, the players were willing to pop 1 or 10 gp into the bowl, but no one tried higher. As the DM, I tried encouraging them to try higher by saying they got a "tingle" when the coin dropped into the bowl, but no one bit.
• The doors in the laboratory are definitely a choke point. An early hypnotic pattern neutered the abomination and they took it down easily. The other creatures were stuck at the door since the characters were now blocking the door. Next time, they're going to "kool-aid man" through the walls :)

I ran this adventure for 4 players (and 2 owl familiars). Overall, they enjoyed the adventure. It took 2.5 hours (I'll explain what they encountered/skipped below).

[Spoilers]

Silvio's Glen:

• Only one character failed the effect's saving throw.
• The characters then used Calm Emotions to run in, grab villagers and pull them out of the village.
• When the raid was triggered, there was no one left inside the village to protect (aside from Cornelius).
• The players non-lethal'ed one raider and questioned them. They were very worried when they heard about the ulitharid.
• They were very suspicious of the statue and kept questioning everyone about anything that could cause the charm effect.

Forest Complications:

• Completely skipped due to time

Stronghold:

• The players used a combination of familiars, invisibility, rope, pass without trace to get to the top of tower and enter through the hatch. Thus, they avoided the courtyard combat.
• They were very suspicious of the upper floor and kept using detect magic to find clues. They found the potion, but did not attempt to identify it.
• Coming down the stairs, there's no reason why the BBEG would allow them to reach the bottom of the stairs alive, but combat just cannot practically happen unless they're allowed to reach the bottom.
• Two out of four characters were stunned by Xanzique's stun effect in round one and were out of combat for the rest of the fight.
• They broke his concentration, so Murudak was free to help the characters, which they welcomed. With Murudak free, the remaining Orogs switched sides too, but since Xanzique was so close to dying, I didn't want the NPCs to take the player's kill, so I just had the Orogs dodge.

I ran this for my group yesterday. They were a party of 5, with an APL of 3 (so Average). It took us 2h20m to complete.

Overall, they enjoyed it. This particular adventure is more skill-checks focused with some RP and finally a combat.

The adventure was easy to follow as a DM. However, when running the game, some of the details were lost among the paragraphs of text. I found myself searching for information a few times while my players waited. It would have been nice to have some of these stand out more (either bolded or separated out).

This adventure had a decent amount of lore to give the players.

(spoilers follow)

As the random choice in part 1, the players rolled the half-dragon boar (which they got a real kick about). They had no reason to attack it, so they opted to go around the boar, but questioned why that would add an entire day to the journey.

They found the gold coin in the sulpher pools and they decyphered the standing stones. They really focused their time in trying to figure out the significance of these two things until I had to move them along because "they're just there".

One player pointed out that in part 2, the kobold leader asked the players to follow them, then in part 3, told them to leave. So I had to skip the insight and just move forward with the kobolds wanting the players' help.

The players wanted to check out the dig site mentioned by the kobold leader. I had to tell them there's nothing significant there.

They did not attempt talking to the final chwinga, so I just had the chwinga bestow the gifts anyways. But they figured out the solution of the crystals themselves.

All of the players said this was the first adventure they ever played that actually asked them to use rations. So they all said they were going to buy rations going forward.

In the end, one player said this was being added to their list of their favourite adventures. So it was really well received.

Well done.

I ran this adventure for my group yesterday (6 players, Strong party) and they really enjoyed it.

It was easy to prepare and the provided maps loaded into Roll20 without any problems.

While running the game, I couldn't find some details in the PDF that I knew were there from the preparation. Finding some of the details quickly during the game was an issue. I think formatting some of the details, especially with regards to the NPCs so that some of the DCs, etc. stood out more would be beneficial.

Spoilers

The players really focused on "is this storm supernatural, or could it just be a really bad storm". So it took some extra NPC dialog to convince them that the storms won't go away naturally.

The grotto battle lasted 3 rounds. The players concentrated on the Sea Captain before dealing with the zombies. I added 3 additional zombies (above the adjustments for a Strong party).

The players were a little disappointed when Alara immediately went into rage mode. I maxed out her HP and she was still defeated right before her second turn (6 vs. 1)

All-in-all, the game took 2.5 hours and was enjoyed by everyone.

This was a fun adventure to run. My players enjoyed it. The PDF was well laid-out and the maps provided worked well. It was very straight-forward to prepare. Since it's Liar's Night, the theme and monsters provided some Liar's Night Bingo tokens. It took 2 hours, 20 minutes to run.

I ran it via Discord + Roll20. I broke the provided map up into 3 separate maps. Aside from that, they loaded nicely into Roll20.

For the fight at the end, our cleric did short work of the initial monsters with their "Turn Undead". The later waves of claws simply were fodder for those that chose not to "Investigate". But there was a "Oh, maybe not as simple as we thought" comment when the 2nd wave of claws emerged. The fight lasted 5 rounds before the party shut down the ritual.

For the tiles, I copy/pasted them from the PDF into their own graphics separated by colour, and reordered them alphabetically. Each of these were then provided to the players as handouts.

All in all, a fun adventure.

As a big fan of thriller/horror movies and the "lets put a bunch of strangers in a confined space" trope, I really enjoyed running this adventure.

For me, this was heavy to prepare for. It's RP-heavy, so I felt having NPC responses at the ready was crutial. It took me a long time to prepare for this (maybe I over-prepared a bit).

I liked the structure of this adventure: one section was area descriptions, one section was "events" (ie. things that happen). The NPC details were a little scattered around the PDF. It would have been nice if all the NPC details were collected together.

I ran this for a group of 6 characters + 2 familiars. I'd suggest limiting the table at 5 players, or maybe even 4... 6 was too many.

This adventure promoted the idea of separating the characters (ie. splitting the party). So make sure you have ways to entertain the players that aren't "on screen" at the time. There was also one "crutial" event that needed to happen, but one player was refusing to separate from the NPC to let that happen. I ended up forcing the event ignoring the "rules".

Overall, an enjoyable game. I hope to DM it again.

I really enjoyed running this adventure. I ran it in play-by-post format using Avrae. The maps were well formatted to be used for PbP (I did need to reduce the resolution because the maps were very high-res). The PDF was well laid out and easy to follow. There were a few typographical issues, but that was fixed in a recent update. I did tone down the "sexuality" of the BBEG for my audience though.

The players enjoyed the game and were getting really angry at the BBEG by the time the final fight came about. So they were very happy when they were able to defeat her.

This is a great adventure for beginner DMs and players. It was pretty easy to prepare. The provided maps loaded easily into Roll20. The different parts of the adventure were distinct and fit nicely on a single page (so very little flipping pages back and forth).

The players had fun interacting with Obsidian. The game ran just shy of 2 hours. The final battle could stand to be tougher: The players defeated the BBEG in round 1 (I ran it Very Strong) and they spent round 2 hunting down the other minions.

All-in-all, a good adventure.

I've actually played this adventure twice, but never DM'd it. It's a fun murder mystery style adventure, with a minor combat in the middle and a larger one at the end. But most of this game is social/RP.

The first time I played this was as a play-by-post (PBP) game. Unfortunately, this adventure does not work well in that style of play. This is mainly because of the number of names/people and facts to keep track of while investigating... memories fade over time.

The second time I played was online. As a "4 hour adventure", it took us 4.5 hours. Due to the questioning required, I could see it running long, and would require the DM to keep things moving. Due to time, we missed a whole sub-thread. But I'm glad I was able to play this again "normally" because it was much more fun the second time through.

I'd recommend this to players and DMs.

I was played this adventure once.

It was a nice, short adventure, easily playable in 2 hours. There was a mix of social RP, skill checks, and a combat, with a small mystery to solve.

Given the chance, I would play it again.

I recently ran this for 2 tables. Overall, the players had fun.

Frustrations grew during Part 1. Both tables were looking for something they could do to fix their predicament, when there wasn't other than just continuing.

Both tables are looking forward to the final adventure in the series.

I have ran this for two groups. Both enjoyed it and were surprised that no battles occurred. However, neither group was willing to sacrifice one of their coveted items for the trade (even after I disclosed that it wasn't permanent), so both groups did without help from the market NPC.

This adventure was fun to play. It's like a mini-epic in that your actions during the game can affect how the final fight goes. It was a nice mix of role play, exploration, and combat. My only critique would be that the primary antagonist could be stronger.

I've played this adventure once and DM'd it twice. My players asked if there was a third adventure, but alas that's not the case. We want more Ashalon!