I run this as a finale to the T1 Parnast Septology of mods, and it never disappoints. It makes for a great way to end a journey with its siege points mechanic, with slightly more invested options for those who've played the previous T1 mods before it. It's a great way to showcase how big the threat is but still make it manageble for the party to hype up the final wave facing Bad Fruul.

I've also run this multi-table style (both as a DM and as a commander), and I must say it's a great experience to be able to see how T1 adventurers can come together and do the impossible!

The group like the various options and seige points. They liked not knowing how much each activity would pay off in seige points. This could have used some page numbers for cross reference.

Had the opportunity to run this during a multi-table play event and it was really epic! It gave players that heroic feel trying to defend Parnast really early on in their adventuring career.

A fantastic end to the tier 1 season 5 adventures. They players really liked seeing the threads come together from the earlier adventures.
Don't fret too much about the skill challenges and all the different kinds of points they earn. I just put them all into one big pool for the players to use. I ended up adjusting the final enocounter difficulty on the fly for the right amount of challenge.

This was an excellent end to the season 5 tier 1 storyline: it ties in (most of) the previous stories in a way where the players see the effects of their prior decisions while presenting a good mixture of combat and non-combat encounters.

For my own experience: unfortunately, my players were so excited to fortify the town and scout enemy forces that they almost forgot to talk to Chandra until I prodded them at the end, after which they belatedly hurried to the forest to acquire some fey allies; not taking any prisoners also meant that they completely skipped the den (although in season 8 rules, the lack of treasure means that there's little incentive to go there anyway). Ultimately, the "very weak" party breezed through the first few siege fights and had an excess of points left for the final fight.

While the module is generally well-written and fun, I do have two parts I'm unhappy with:

• When characters go to request aid from the fey, the module states that "if the character previously met Thornacious or Oblivillish they are remembered fondly" without considering any possibility that those encounters might have gone poorly.
• The module says that difficulty adjustments are a maximum removal that happens after players remove enemy via Siege points. While I would assume the module to be balanced around this, it can lead to strange outcomes for weak parties where the siege points they use are effectively wasted (they might feel bad being told that villagers would die if they didn't spend the siege points, but a smaller difficulty adjustment that is strictly cumulative seems more straightforward and wouldn't have the potential for bad feels.

This is really a fun module to run. Very interesting encounters. If you manage to get through this without your party having a massive surplus of all of the different points they can earn at the beginning, I salute you, because they're going to be very conservative early on and then realize they have more points than can even be spent in the final fight--which ends up being fine, because Fruul and his mammoth is a very challenging encounter for a level 4 party anyway.

I really like how basically every skill in the game has a role in the early part of the module, and that depending on how they're used, can have different effects. The tie-ins to earlier modules are great, except as I have noted in my reviews of those modules. Definitely encourage the party to interact with anyone they may have previously encountered.

My only real criticism is that it's really easy to accidentally miss the pre-siege combat encounters, just through minor happenstance. The good news is that we played this under season 8 so the players didn't miss out on any XP or gold from doing so.

I really like this module, have run it a couple times, and played it once. It is nearly impossible to fit all the content into 4-hours, so a DM must be judicious about what they will cut. The biggest beef I have with this module is that the page numbers aren't marked. Do yourself a favor and mark them up ahead of time! :)

I really liked even prepping for this. This is a great way to end the parnast series. My players really by the end of the series felt for the people and were really interested in coming up with solutions. They really worked together and actually split up alot of duties based on their strengths. I really had to limit time and gave them 2.5 hours to prep and about 2 hours for the second part. This really crunched the players to work fast. They were actually panicking a little about getting it done. This created the urgency to prep, collect their allies, prep the town and come together. The fights, as everyone said, are no joking matter. They are tough. I took what someone said and since my players were almost apathetic about letting Chandra leave and die, and they went to extra effort to get her back, I gave them some healing services from her. The last two waves are rough on the players if they are range low, but since my players convinced Thornacious to help, it made it a little easier. (7 players and 4 of them have high charisma, they were able to easily sway allies, and townsfolk).

Summary: Great Adventure, great finish but be prepared and know your players. No laughing joke for levels 3-4.

Fantastic module that can be run as a mini-epic, where different tables are responsible for different ways of preparing for the inevitable siege. That way, you can fit the module in a four hour slot. Doing everything with one table is going to run longer than that. We ran this recently as a mini epic with three tables and it was a blast. The final boss fight is lethal though, as the BBEG can one shot kill squishier characters.

There are a few minor but annoying issues with the document, most notably missing page numbers and missing creature stat blocks.

Thoroughly enjoyed running this adventure. As one of the longer Tier 1 season 4 adventures this is harder to run midweek but it worked great at a time when we could go over. The mechanics of the Siege points made good options to speed up the fight at the end and if they hadn't picked up a lot of points the fights may have gone very long. This one benefits strongly from having played through the adventures in order and can be very confusing when you have a lot of player turnover or inconsistency. 'Orc baby' scenarios bother me but fortunately me table didn't take the bait and make it an issue. As a player it did come up when I got to play it and it bothered me quite a bit.

Bad Fruul !! A great final challenge. A favorite for tier 1 players, but can be tough. I like the roleplaying aspect that brings benefits to players.

This is a pretty good graduation module, but it really does require alot of DM prep. Do the prep and reap the rewards.. the players will thank you for it

This is a fantastic ending to the T1 Giants stories; deadly and fun. As everybody else has mentioned, basically every character needs to be level 4. Also, if your group isn't into the roleplay aspect, they're not going to make it through the final fights in one piece. Honestly, I ran it for 5 level 4 characters who accumulated enough siege points to kill the first three waves outright and they still nearly got wiped in the 4th round; when I played, my group fought the goblins and took out waves 2 and 3 (thanks to finding the Orc caves), and we were very experienced players who almost got taken out.

Make sure your group has at least a couple of tanks and some healing.

Is it possible to get more than 5 stars? Read my review:

http://www.wizardslaboratory.com/review-of-ddal05-16-parnast-under-seige/

This adventure really has a lot of things going on in it with preparing for the impending army led by Bad Fruul. It takes a bit more preparation to run this well and the number of options involved in fortifying Parnast can be overwhelming to some players. If pulled off right and managed well (and there are a lot of things to manage!), especially if it is run as an epic-like multi-table adventure, this can easily feel like one of the most epic tier 1 adventures.