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Cult of the Glutton is an adventure for a party of characters level 5-10. It is written by JVC Parry and sold on the DMs Guild. It is 14 pages long, featuring a cover page with a short pitch, table of contents page, a full page map, 6 pages of room descriptions, and 3 separate indices over 5 pages. There is front cover with full-color art and several smaller interior art pieces that do a great job of conveying the theme of the adventure.
Pros
This adventure has a nice background, with good use of lore and some less common enemies. The setup is very interesting and Parry provides three different, equally viable hooks to get your party involved in the adventure. He also gives you ways to tie the adventure into Out of the Abyss, which is nice if you happen to be running that.
The descriptive boxed text is very atmospheric and does an excellent job of conveying the desired tone of the adventure. It's rare that I want to use flavor text as written, but I could see myself doing that here.
There is a nice mix of challenges, with excellent use of environmental elements that you rarely see in adventures. The various disease and madness effects are a nice change of pace. The physical enemies provide a good variety as well.
Cons
The map quality is not so great. It's perfectly functional and usable, but it's a graph paper scan and you can see eraser marks. It could have used a retrace.
There are a few grammatical errors (feels instead of fills, etc) and typos, though nothing too distracting.
It's interesting how some of the treasure is concealed, but Getting it might be difficult, requiring intuitive leaps that I'm not sure would occur to all groups. Be prepared to offer alternatives or make modifications.
My biggest problem with Cult of the Glutton, and the main reason I'm giving this a 4/5, is the final encounter. If presented without modification, it could be lethal, or at the least very unenjoyable for your party. The module gives the possibility of something of a deus ex machina type intervention if the final encounter goes too far south. The implication seems to be that your party should do as much as they can in the final encounter, then retreat. I know for me as a player and as a DM, this sort of situation leaves a bad taste in my mouth. When I run this, I will alter this encounter and provide at least one, if not more, alternatives to the final encounter.
Conclusion
Cult of the Glutton is a good adventure that, with a little tweaking and alteration on the part of the DM, could be a great adventure. It will provide your party with some interesting challenges and a very atmospheric, well-presented theme and tone. At $2.95, it's a good value for DMs who don't mind putting a little effort into an adventure to get the best from it.
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