SPOILERS within
I needed to run a one-shot with my regular AL group and picked this adventure because the premised seemed novel. The fact that this was not your standard dungeon crawl intrigued me, as did the fact that this is a relatively roleplay heavy module. (Look, I love combat in AL modules, but it's nice to have a break sometimes!)
In some cases, the adventure lives up to the promise.
The party is hired to by a Lliirian paladin to investigate some weird happenings in Hillsfar. Several townsfolk saw monsters near the Cormanthor forest. The paladin is convinced that the monsters aren't real, so you're told to check and see if a number of taverns are spiking drinks. The PCs are given a free pass to consume as much alcohol as they want at these watering holes. As they gather clues (and hopefully avoid some false ones), their choices lead to two possible endings.
So, what works? It's a pretty light-hearted adventure, which I appreciated. There are a ton of (dated) pop-culture references that will probably make at least one player laugh. Some of the potential "trials" the characters run into during their pub crawl are goofy fun, too.
I thought the adventure had some problems, though. If the players or characters don't buy into the initial hook, things unravel quickly. My table immediately felt something was off with Lux's (the Lliirian paladin) decision to blame the taverns and not do more thorough research. It's REALLY easy for the party to get off of the rails here, so to speak. Another problem comes from a huge chunk of the adventure's uniqueness coming from the PCs consuming a lot of alcohol. My table quickly decided that they'd find some surrogates (so to speak) to drink for them, and soon they were lugging a bunch of fratboy types from bar to bar and making them drink the alcohol. Alas. And the various intentional false leads (including one that's very, very on the nose)? Those really don't work.
The biggest difficulty are the suggested runtimes. If your table is really getting into the interactions I can see the second section actually filling up that 2+ hour estimate. But...if they're being succint in their conversations, it flies by. And the last section (which may or may not include combat)? There's no way that's an hour, even with significant DM tinkering.
Despite some of the harshness near the end, I did like this adventure overall—it's unique and has some charm. (And I did laugh a lot at the "Kurt" and "Russell" reveal.) If I ran it again I'd change a few things, I think. And maybe find some players who are already tipsy—this might work better in that context.
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