This version of Dead in Thay is not the same as the one in Tales from the Yawning Portal. It was the final D&D playtest adventure, as well as the final Sundering adventure and the final adventure in the Dreams of the Red Wizards adventure path that had started in Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle. Compared to the anthologized version, the original adventure has a whole opening act that links it with the previous adventure, Scourge of the Sword Coast. Designed to playtest as many monsters as possible, the statblocks at the back of the book take up a good quarter of the page count. Have fun comparing them to the Monster Manual versions!

The premium color POD version is pretty legit. It's weird there's no title on the spine, and you do miss having big versions of the maps to use. I recommend printing off big versions to use, but the book itself is very well produced and totally usable.

I am serving as the "Event Coordinator" for this season of games as well as a table DM and I can tell you this module is VERY interesting. The concept of a full season of multiple tables interacting, occasionally swapping players and a group of playable NPCs to fill in the gaps allows the DM and Event Coordinator to evolve the experience. This provides an exciting game play for experienced players, but can still be forgiving enough for the new players that drop in for the weekly encounter.

We are actively converting this to 4e as the overwhelming majority of our players do not like the mechanics of Next at this point. This makes the encounters even more challenging, however we have seen a great deal of balance in the individual encounters as we do straight conversions. I tested this in Next with a small group and it seems to be quite a bit better than the last downloadable rule set from the original play test.

Overall, whether you play this in Next of convert it, the story and scope of the encounter is outstanding and reminds me of the old dungeon crawls from my early days in D&D. It borrows heavily from those old modules and dungeon crawls and makes me want to drag out my old copy of Tomb of Horrors and play it again. The Phylactery vault fight is outstanding and will challenge your DMing skills as players move in three dimensions and move from floor to floor in a massive battle with a demi lich.

I would recommend this module, even if you don't like Next. It is a strong module with plenty of opportunity for good game play

NPC and Map artwork are in a seperate Zip file, and the module comes with the playtest version of the rules for 5e. The maps are great, with a different stylized map for players and GM for the bulk of the module.

The role of "event coordinator" is great, and should be a success for any large group, but the module also appears to be easy enough to run for just a single table without the event coordinator. The event coordinator adds to the experience, but not to the story.

The module itself is pretty much a railroad dungeon crawl, although how the dungeon is explored is very open, and it's likely that the group will not find everything on their first run through (assuming they survive to the end)

Mosters in the module are different from those in the original playtest package, however the module wars that the monsters are still in "playtest" mode, and not finalized. Combat difficulty can vary dramatically between monsters, and players, so a DM must gauge the party carefully. Though the module is designed for levels 6-8, I found it is very easy to increase or decrease the difficulty for other level ranges.