Wait for POD to be updated. At this moment there is an issue with the publishing file and itll need to be updated by dmsguild before you can get anything but the 16-pg booklet. I'm assuming the POD option will likely temporarily be pulled shortly here. I'll update this review once I get the new "full" books.

POD version is NOT complete. Here are the full list of files that you get with POD: (Baldurs_Gate_Map_JPGS.zip) - NO (DDN_MiBG_Statistics.pdf) - NO (DDN_MiBG_Events.pdf) - NO (DDN_MiBG_AdventureGuide.pdf) - NO (DDN_MiBG_LaunchGuide.pdf) - YES (tiny pamflet) (DDN_MiBG_postermaps.pdf) - NO (DDN_MiBG_DMScreen.pdf)- NO (DDN_MiBG_CampaignGuide.pdf) - NO

This is terrible, what the hell??

A superb product - D&D at its best.

Murder in Baldur's Gate is a fantastic start to Dungeons & Dragons' 5th Edition, and remains one of the best adventures AND best campaign supplements ever published by TSR or Wizards. It contains a full-fledged fast-paced low-level campaign in the city of Baldur's Gate that combines a political sandbox with a constant stream of high-stakes events. It engages with a surprisingly political theme - class warfare - with genuine teeth. It's the sort of story where, by design, players can't interact with everything and are constantly asked to make choices about what's important to them. The finale has wide-reaching consequences for the Forgotten Realms. It's absolutely my dream format for a D&D adventure. Plus, players familiar with the Baldur's Gate videogames will appreciate regular tasteful callbacks, while those who are not won't even notice them.

Combined with that, you get an exhaustive guide to the city of Baldur's Gate and surrounds, sufficient to run a year's worth of games. There's more useful detail and compelling plot hooks here in this one adventure than there was in the entirety of the 4th Edition Forgotten Realms material. It is absolutely a worthy purchase as a setting book even if you have no intention of running the adventure. The whole thing is in full colour, and dotted with maps, character portraits, and just a really attractive presentation throughout.

The flaws are relatively few. The largest is that the adventure all but forces players to take sides with one of three factions, each of whom are equally and obviously villainous, and players are likely to resist this railroading. The second note is not really a flaw, but it's worth saying this isn't a play-by-play adventure - DMs will have to do a lot of creativity on the fly around and between the adventure content to support the player freedom that this sort of sandbox promotes, and therefore more experienced DMs will get more out of this product. Third, it's an adventure that requires the players to fail to save everyone and to be less than perfectly heroic for the plot to advance, and that may irritate some players. And fourth, this product was created before the Monster Manual and PHB were settled, and therefore the combat encounters are almost entirely limited to generic non-spellcasting humanoids - DMs will need to do a little extra work to keep combat interesting for a combat-heavy party.

The original physical edition came with one of the most gorgeous DM's screens ever produced for D&D, and while the graphics are included in this purchase sadly the production values of the original item are not. But to make up for that, the DriveThru release comes conveniently packaged with all the bonus content that Wizards released online for this adventure, including an expanded opening encounter, additional events, and monster conversions for 3rd and 4th Edition.

All told this is a must-have for 5th Edition collectors, or for anyone interested in great D&D adventure design. Highly recommended, from someone who's rarely generous towards Wizards products.

If you're looking for a resource to fully flesh out Baldur's Gate, this adventure has an abundance of goodies for you: from maps, to historical backgrounds, to important NPCs, to random encounters, it will help make the city feel like a real, living community for your players.

I bought this adventure to help fill what seemed like a pretty big hole in Horde of the Dragon Queen: the adventurers find themselves waiting around in Baldur's Gate for a tenday, and the adventure has exactly zero information about one of D&D's most iconic locations! I think the idea is to handwave the time away, but one of my players had been begging to visit a city, and I wanted to give him that opportunity. It seemed a shame to do otherwise. I can highly recommend using this product for that purpose, but I do have a couple of observations about doing so:

1. This is a level 1-3 adventure, and HOTDQ will hit this at Level 4. For most of the adventure, this doesn't matter. However, for the two big fight moments, you may find your PCs a bit overpowered. I didn't mind this, but I imagine some might find it anticlimactic. If you are industrious, I'm sure you could look at the challenge ratings of those encounters and tweak the stats to make it tougher. Keep in mind you do have to convert the D&D Next stats to 5e. There are resources online to help you do that.
2. You may have to speed some of the events along to make them happen in the tenday the PCs are supposed to be there. Or you could simply delay events of HOTDQ to have them stay longer. I did a bit of both.
3. HOTDQ has the option to use milestone XP, which I do. I decided to award them each a level for their efforts in this. They'll come into the subsequent episodes a level greater than expected, but since I have a small party, I think that's okay. If you tracked XP for this, I imagine that you'd really have to award it for non-combat stuff. Otherwise, some players might be miffed at spending so much time on this without making any progress towards the next level.

In terms of the adventure itself, my players found it engaging, but there isn't a whole lot of fighting. You might want to make sure your players understand what they're getting into. It can be a bit misleading since the adventure basically begins with a battle. Depending on how players navigate the events, they may not doing much fighting again until the very end.

There was a lot of room for creativity and great roleplay, but by the time we finished, my players were ready to move on and get back to trying to stop the dragon cult. And battles. They really want more battles.

This is a quite fascinating adventure, as it is far more of a sandbox than many although there's plenty going on to keep the characters busy - indeed they are likely to get swamped and prioritise what needs to be dealt with right now, and what can be done later if at all. You can run it with any Dungeons and Dragons ruleset from 3e to 5e, but it is designed with the aim of introducing - in character - the changes that transferring to D&D 5e would entail, being released prior to the launch of that ruleset.

You get a 32-page adventure guide, a 64-page setting book and a DM screen. The PDF version also includes additional material that was made available as free downloads to purchasers of the 'dead tree' version.

The Campaign Guide consists of a comprehensive gazetteer to the city of Baldur's Gate. Although the settlement has been mentioned in Forgotten Realms material for ages, here is the real low-down on the place, a good chance to really get to know it. With plentiful maps and illustrations and details on everything from municipal leaders to the best inns to frequent, its usefulness will last far beyond this adventure to anytime the party is in town. There are places to go, things to see and lots to do... and reading through it spawns plenty of ideas for adventure, particularly if your taste turns to urban plotliness (as mine does). Most of it is system-neutral so no matter which version of D&D you want to play, it will be a useful book to have to hand.

Turning attention to the adventure itself, Murder in Baldur's Gate, this teeming and prosperous city we have just read about is on the brink of breakdown. Part of this is due to inequality - the city is extremely stratified with the rich separated from the middle classes and them from those in real poverty - who are still expected to pay taxes although they don't get any of the services that the taxes are levied to fund! This is exacerbated by a spate of murders that herald attempts by the deity of assassins, Bhaal himself, to be resurrected with three villains competing to become his Chosen... and they do not care what happens to the city in the process. The delightful sting in the tail is that if the party chooses to solve the problem by removing those three rivals permanently, one of them will find Bhaal tapping on their shoulder instead!

Event piles upon event in dizzying complexity. The party won't see or be involved in everything, but it's likely that they will hear about the ones they don't witness - although how credible the reports are is open to question. The DM should study the material thoroughly in advance, after all it won't do for them to get swamped, that's the party's fate. Everything is laid out quite clearly, though, and there's a lot of flexibility to allow the DM to respond to the party's actions yet keep everything on track.

This adventure provides plenty of scope for interaction and intrigue, but violence is never far away so those looking for combat will not be disappointed. It's exciting and engrossing and gives low-level characters an unprecidented opportunity to be involved in momentous events. It all ends in buckets of blood, riots and possibly a big explosion: memorable in the extreme. For me it works well, I love urban intrigue and investigation - but it may be more of a struggle for those players who prefer a good dungeon crawl and conduct interactions at sword-point without the distraction of conversation!

Very good product, complete with DM Screen and map. The product has ALL of the pdfs, which includes the monsters/npcs/antagonists and the extra encounters extra pdfs that were originally available on-line from WotC for free. The adventure itself is not really a murder mystery, and so caution is advised as the players may get side-tracked right from the beginning instead of following the linear flow of the module as described.