Skulljaw Hill is a weak follow-up to the quite weak module, Tharaera Lost. Whereas in that module, amusing NPC character development somewhat counterbalanced the extremely poorly balanced combat encounters, in this piece, NPCs are rendered in the text who the PCs never even get to interact with, and plot points are assumed, yielding a tightly railroaded structure that is nevertheless easy for PCs to avoid altogether simply by asking the wrong questions or making the wrong decisions in the beginning...

The consistent issue with this CCC-GHC series though is a complete lack of understanding of D&D 5e combat scaling. Enemies are extremely vanilla, often solo, and very underpowered for a Tier 2 party. There is even an encounter in this module that consists of a trio of CR 1/8 bandits, a rather poor encounter for a 1st level party, but an absolute embarassment as an obstacle for a party of Level 7-8 characters. Given D&D's emphasis on combat, scaling and challenge are very important in developing a story, and the emphasis should be on interesting encounters featuring spells, monsters with unique or creative abilities, inclement weather, odd terrain or traps, etc. Players like to be challenged, and by Tier 2, they usually know their characters' abilities quite well and have developed synergistic tendancies that make them even more resourceful and capable than their raw abilities encompass. This adventure and the one that precedes it make a mockery of player abilities. They are just very poor contributions to public play.

Linear is not necessarily a bad thing. This adventure has a reason for its linear nature, and my players loved the ingenious design of The Dark's stronghold. Setting up rooms all over Faerun and linking them with hidden portals to avoid an all-out invasion makes for an awesome and well-thought-out lair.

The encounters are very weak for a Tier 2 party (as are all encounters in this series), but overall this is the most fun of the 3 adventures. I recommend combining all 3 and skipping some encounters to fit all of it into a 4-hour slot.

This one is decent if done properly, but it does take a large amount of tweaking,.

The most linear that I have ever seen. But slightly better than part 1

This adventure offers no real choices to the players. If the party wants to make progress, they must do so the way it is written; the adventure goes so far as to use teleportation gates that are one-way only, that go to a specific room without variation, forcing the party to "explore" the rooms of an elfhold in a prescribed order that is impossible to alter. Some of the descriptions are good, but not being able to affect the order in which rooms are explored turns this adventure into a site-seeing tour on rails. Which is to say, it's boring.