Down the River of Snakes is the second part of the Tier 1 Ylraphon trilogy. After starting the mystery in SRCC01-01, you now continue the search into the Flooded Forest. Some chances for role play, and some chances for combat. Various paths to ensure replayability too. Nice combat scaling to challenge the party. Another 2 hour module that plays okay as a stand-alone, but definitely sets up the 3rd module.

This adventure was a fun jungle trek. Lots of different encounters so it can be different every time!

One note is that 12 hours is pretty easily enough to travel the distance to the goal, so it's unlikely to get dark, even without a Ranger or anything else to speed you up.

I'd recommend, although perhaps give the players less time to get to the destination.

P.S. Bumped this back to 5 after remembering the dragon the players can fight! That's loads of fun, and it's well balanced as well, as it's a very young weak dragon, but still challenging!

This was an enjoyable module, though clearly the middle/transitionary one of the 3, which in attempting to also be a standalone module, created some faults. I felt this primarily in 2 locations, the beginning and end. At the beginning, the characters are given a cartographers reproduced map of a map that was found in the first adventure, clearly there so that players who didn't run the first adventure have the map. However, this map wasn't included in the map set. The map that was included was a map of the starting town (which the characters quickly left). My players spent several minutes trying to find on this map the locations that that NPC told them were shown on the map, before we finally decided it wasn't there. Additionally, it is stated that they are making this journey because teleportation doesn't work in the area (and in the 3rd module there are specific protections on the temple for just that) but at the end of the module, as a tack-on to the provided magic item, you activate a teleportation circle (so that the characters present can switch if need be). But since the temple magic doesn't protect this far out, and the town NPC knew of this safe location, why wasn't she able to teleport them there, to light the candle and progress the last distance on foot, instead of the whole hike.

An enjoyable adventure that continued to interest my players and offer other options. I'd recommend keeping the market options for bug repelant and the like mostly for cosmetic purposes, although it can and some advantage in in-game play. Though I've only played this out once, Pa and the boys made for an interseting 'tounge-in-cheek' encounter.

Interesting adventure, It requires a fair amount of preparation as the adventure tries to make the players decision matter. I found myself preparing around ~11 encounters to only 4-5 of them. It's an enjoyable adventure that doesn't feel railroaded. It has some mechanics that made the players feel very engaged. I enjoyed running the adventure but less preparation is always nice.

Down the River of Snakes ties together the beginning and end of this trilogy with an excellent choose your own adventure style expedition through the Flooded Forest and allows you to encounter some of the strange and unusual inhabitants that years of upheaval and migration into the area have wrought. The urgency of the series carries through with parties needing to think wisely about how to allocate resources since rests could lead to ill luck in the bog and the survival of the Old City in Ylraphon depends on them stopping the ritual!

This module is not well constructed.

First of all, on the pettier end, it is poorly copy edited, with a range of redundancies and sloppy mistakes, the highlight of which is this gem: "there are five halflings (the leader is secretly a wererat, the others are three bandits)."

Much more importantly, the structure is confusing and nonsensical. The module is called Down the River of Snakes. It's a story about tracking a Yuan-Ti epidemic to its source, so characters are given to expect a story about snakes, Yuan-Ti, maybe some ancient traps, and perhaps some unpleasant terrain. We are reminded again and again in the lead-up at the start of the adventure that the swamp being traversed is "full of monsters and punishing terrain as dangerous as any wilderness in Faerun." For a DM or a player, this conjures some clear expectations. I thought the module might feature giant snakes, sinkholes, giant frogs or toads, perhaps molds, fungus, plant creatures, maybe some humanoids like Bullywugs, perhaps some undead, but overall, a swampy wilderness mess. Instead, we find that the denizens of the swamp are tribes of lycanthropes that are not even remotely swamp-adapted, eg. boars and rats chilling in the swamp, so unconcerned with this monster-filled, dangerous landscape that they are using it as the grounds to stage a clan war. We have echoes of ghosts of dead rangers, a random pit trap somehow dug 20 feet in a bog, a wannabe red wizard challenging folks to a duel, orc spirit memories, a bunch of leftover water cultists from season 2... It's a veritable bad-guy convention in this swamp, with no rhyme or reason to it. All of this adds up to a structural mess for a DM and a story that doesn't go anywhere.

Structurally, the module also reads like a choose-your-own-ending story, which is really irritating for the DM, who has to keep flipping around looking for where the story goes next. Options are fine in adventures, but when it boils down to little more than left or right, splits just make more work for the game manager. This problem is frequently exacerbated in Down the River of Snakes by stats modifications to monsters that are embedded in the text rather than placed in the monster statblock, which is a huge petpeeve for me. If I am running a monster as a DM, I have to flip to the monster statblock. When the writer breaks the statblock up into multiple sections, placing the bulk of it at the end, but including a series of changes and modifications elsewhere, in the heat of running a table I am likely to err, and there is no reason for it. If you want a particular sort of enemy, just write up the statblock for it. If you want an easier or harder version for scaling, include that version at the back!

And even the vexations of the statblocks, the weird monster choices, and the crummy multi-option structure would be okay if the story went somewhere and made sense. Our heroes are here to beat back a Yuan-Ti contagion. So, what do the lycanthrope tribes have to do with that? The orc spirits? The Red Wizard? Absolutely nothing. All of the encounters in this adventure are just red herrings. This module honestly reads like someone just wanted to toss together a bunch of monsters because they thought it would be cool, with very little concept of how to write a D&D adventure that would provide an immersive experience and a compelling story. I would give this module 1 star, but I have read and been obliged to run AL content that was worse that this, which is a sickening reflection. This module is at least playable.