Had a blast with this one. Some spoilers follow:

I opted to take it slow while DMing this for a group, and it paid off well. The earlier sections provide a LOT of opportunities for casual exploration and social encounters, and the flavor is wonderful. The NPCs in particular are well-drawn and interesting, and the players (and DM!) enjoyed interacting with them. So much so that we intentionally kept Part 2 going for well beyond its stated length. I think Ashley is a fantastic writer, and these sections really show why.

Once the adventure moves to the final location (an island), the descriptions are vague enough to allow for a generous interpreation by the DM. I dig this. The final battle is against a foe I've rarely seen. While some other reviews mentioned some frustration against optimized parties, I experienced the flip side of the coin: the non-optimized AL characters almost got squished, and several players grew frustrated at the foe's crowd control abilities. Still, they hung on and made it out alive (barely).

This is top-notch content.

This supplement is a thorough reworking of the domain of Darkon. The writing is great (with cheeky footnotes, my favorite), excellent art, and plenty of suggestions and teases to let the DM run wild with their own imagination.

SPOILERS within

I needed to run a one-shot with my regular AL group and picked this adventure because the premised seemed novel. The fact that this was not your standard dungeon crawl intrigued me, as did the fact that this is a relatively roleplay heavy module. (Look, I love combat in AL modules, but it's nice to have a break sometimes!)

In some cases, the adventure lives up to the promise.

The party is hired to by a Lliirian paladin to investigate some weird happenings in Hillsfar. Several townsfolk saw monsters near the Cormanthor forest. The paladin is convinced that the monsters aren't real, so you're told to check and see if a number of taverns are spiking drinks. The PCs are given a free pass to consume as much alcohol as they want at these watering holes. As they gather clues (and hopefully avoid some false ones), their choices lead to two possible endings.

So, what works? It's a pretty light-hearted adventure, which I appreciated. There are a ton of (dated) pop-culture references that will probably make at least one player laugh. Some of the potential "trials" the characters run into during their pub crawl are goofy fun, too.

I thought the adventure had some problems, though. If the players or characters don't buy into the initial hook, things unravel quickly. My table immediately felt something was off with Lux's (the Lliirian paladin) decision to blame the taverns and not do more thorough research. It's REALLY easy for the party to get off of the rails here, so to speak. Another problem comes from a huge chunk of the adventure's uniqueness coming from the PCs consuming a lot of alcohol. My table quickly decided that they'd find some surrogates (so to speak) to drink for them, and soon they were lugging a bunch of fratboy types from bar to bar and making them drink the alcohol. Alas. And the various intentional false leads (including one that's very, very on the nose)? Those really don't work.

The biggest difficulty are the suggested runtimes. If your table is really getting into the interactions I can see the second section actually filling up that 2+ hour estimate. But...if they're being succint in their conversations, it flies by. And the last section (which may or may not include combat)? There's no way that's an hour, even with significant DM tinkering.

Despite some of the harshness near the end, I did like this adventure overall—it's unique and has some charm. (And I did laugh a lot at the "Kurt" and "Russell" reveal.) If I ran it again I'd change a few things, I think. And maybe find some players who are already tipsy—this might work better in that context.

This adventure is a blast. It's very well-written, and the block text sections provide excellent detail without feeling clunky. (And dialogue in the block text actually sounds like something a real person would or could say!)

The combats are challenging and cleverly arranged, and a good chunk of the adventure rewards creative thinking and strong roleplaying--so much so that it's possible to bypass some grueling combat. I love adventures that provide different approaches to situations.

I enjoyed this enough that I'm excited to run it again!

3.75/5 stars

Wow, there is a lot here. I'd read good things about this one, so I decided to check it out.

I mostly liked it. Here's a checklist on how it played out:

Pros:

• Tons of content. This is essentially an eight-hour mod that costs as much as some four-hour adventures.
• Challenging combat. The combat encountes--and the tactics mentioned within--are definitely designed to make this a challenging module for players!
• Storyline. The adventure unfolds in a nice way, as the party gets a somewhat mundane assignment that pretty quickly turns into something much worse. Much, much worse.
• Organization. While I also had some problems with this, it's clear that Jason Denton--the author--went out of his way to make this adventure easy to prep and run. Really laudable aspects here.

Cons:

• Combat is maybe TOO challenging. I ran this with a full party of characters. The thing is, most of them were support-style characters with a few heavy (but fragile) hitters. Almost every combat was a TPK, to the point that I started adjusting the encounters so that they were something even easier than "Very Weak." Of course, this kind of thing also has a lot of variables, especially considering DMs and players.
• Some story beats don't fit together. I liked the plot overall, but there were a few points where the players really weren't connecting the dots. If you get into this situation, don't be affraid to lay some of the clues on thick.
• Easy to bypass big chunks of the adventure. I won't spoil where or how, but some clever-thinking characters can skip huge chunks of the content. (And, in one case, completely miss the adventure's magic item as a result.) In some ways this is good (as the adventure isn't on rails), but in other ways it leads to some sad players.
• Organization. Since the combat encounters are segmented in their own sections with all available information, it's easy to jump right to them...but then, some have bits and pieces that connect back to the narrative, so I often found myself flipping around from one combat section to another and then to the story again. The layout here is helpful in some regards, but it also tripped me up!

All in all, I enjoyed this one and would definitely run it again (and hopefully play as a player!). But some of the quirks won't make it for everyone!

I've run it three times now, and eact time has solidified how much I like this adventure. The combats are short and brutal, the puzzle elements are interesting, and there's some good set-up for the next two adventures. I feel like the section with Crackle could've been expanded a bit, but this is otherwise a stellar entry.

Both a loving homage to the film Predator and a genuinely challenging adventure, Hunter works quite well. Or...it CAN work well. The adventure provides the situation (stuck in an isolated part of the jungle), the NPCs (a group of Flaming Fist mercenaries, an ambassador, and a knowing Chultan), and a timeline of events. Oh, yeah--and a tough, invisible monster. I had fun DMing this, as did my players--for the most part. I ran this as an AL adventure and thought it was smartly written and designed. But much of the sandbox nature requires players totally buying into the premise, and the problem I had was a party of overly cautious PCs. The adventure is designed for Bad Things to keep ramping out before the final fight with the creature, but my party was content to simply avoid any kind of danger and take tons of safety measures. (They were staying in character!)

I had to tweak some circumstances to essentially box the party in. Otherwise, the adventure would've petered out. Again, it's a VERY well-made adventure, but also has to have some player/party buy in to eventually taking the fight to the titular creature.

I really adore this adventure. Maybe calling it an adventure is too limiting, though—there's a ton of stuff packed in here, including three adventures sketches for tiers 1, 2, and 3. Mezro is a really flavorfully designed place, and the backstory of what happened here is really fascinating. There are also tons of really cool hooks that lure your party into various parts of the city. My absolute favorite involves a music box—you'll know it when you see it (or, hear it in this case!).

I think this is a suitable cap to the end of this season. Spoilers follow.

Some things I liked:

-The adventure moves at a breathless pace, which leads to some tension. -I think the keep at the end is nicely designed, with some ghoulish bits of flavor thrown in. -Esame is, depending on your party makeup, a balanced or overwhelming "big bad." As both a player and DM, I both love and dread the fact that PCs might not be making it back to Faerun. -I really liked the "protect the ritual" portion, and I do like how it gives players a chance to participate (with a major, major cost).

Some things I didn't like. -The editing, as usual, was awful. The flavor text had an average of an error a sentence. There are so many sentence fragments that it's shocking. -See the point for Esame above. She can be a really overpowering opponent, especially if, as a DM, you don't give them ANY chance to rest. -There's a lot that's not clear in the adventure. So be prepared to either wing some things.

What a mess. The adventures for this season have been, for the most part, really strong—exciting battles, interesting roleplaying encounters, and cool thematic elements. Jarl Rising has hints at some of these, but really strikes out.

The other reviewers do a good job of stressing how poorly organized and planned the adventure is, so I won't go into detail there (seriously, though, the other reviewers are right). For me, though, the most frustrating part of the adventure is how sloppily written it is. I felt like the AL gang has really done a nice job this season of mostly fixing problems with grammatical and stylistic errors, but this adventure reminded me of the lowest of the low points of the past four seasons (which was probably somewhere in the Ravenloft adventures). Some of the sentences are nearly unreadable. I had to read some sections three or four times before I even had an inkling of what was supposed to be going on, and even then I had to make copious notes in the margin to clear things up. Some sentences are essentially word soup—bad enough when it's a description, but even worse when it's block text. Guess I'll have to re-write it all or just adlib.

In case you were worried, the usual editing problems are here. (Though this one isn't as hindered by typos as some of the other AL adventures.)

I really had a lot of fun with this one. The first half builds slowly to the really fun (and eerie) dream-reading bit in the burgomaster's home. From there, the set of encounters are a lot of fun (my players had a good time quickly trying to figure out who would tackle which problem). And the mansion at the end is really neat—several rooms, and Isabella's precense in general—made it really creepy.

Some of the earlier material seems forced, though, especially the rumors about the mansion and its background and how to connect them to Glovia. I guess it doesn't matter too much in the end, but unless the party is super curious or thorough, they might not get all of the information that helps them understand the full scope of the situation.

After the update, the module is at least slightly better. So there's that.

But it's still a mess. There's so little motivation for the characters to actually do what the adventures assumes they're going to do. The adventure overview—and how it fits into the overall story of the season—is pretty cool, but it seems like getting a full adventure out of this particular beat was difficult. I've now either run or played this a few times and NONE of the players figured out what they were supposed to.

As it stands, this one requires a lot of prep to make it easily runable, and at least one full readthrough to make note of the myriad proofing errors and typos.

Really solid adventure. I appreciated the trail the clues leading to the final encounter, and the players really got into the atmosphere and roleplaying encounters. And the story behind the scenes is really tragic and well-done. Still, the ending (as written) was somewhat of a let-down—not because of what happens, but how. I realize much of the AL content is "railroad-y," and as both a player and DM that doesn't bother me too much. But it's done is such an obvious manner here that, well, it could've been better. Alas, it's still a good mod.