This was a very fun adventure! I ran this with a table of mixed players, some who had played Season 10 Hardcover and hadn't met Frostclaw before, some who had done DDAL10-01 through DDAL10-04, and some who had done bits and pieces.
It felt very satisfying to finally put an end to Frostclaw for the party, starting the module off with that fight was a great decision after the build up of the previous modules. It felt very cathartic for the players that had been fighting her for the past few weeks and she and her Chardalyn appendages were a cool fight for the players that hadn't met her before.
I like the change in dynamic between Old Goat and Kaskur, that they were not at odds here was very cool, I made the 3 Goliaths that accompany Kaskur to fight Frostclaw be Souljoined seeking revenge for Rikurr's death to add some more flavor.
The Netherese outpost was also a cool little dungeon. The door puzzle I thought was good but I would have preferred if there were some clues to the correct stones that history/arcana/investigation checks could have provided written in the module so I didn't have to make them up myself. My party ended up brute forcing the door by juicing their Barbarian, I think we all really liked that the puzzle had two different possible solutions and loved the depth the door gave to insights on High Netheril culture. I really liked the Mud Mephit encounter as written but didn't run it as the party successfully snuck by. Although two party members had the Story Award: One Man's Junk they were intimidated by the Ooze Elementals and thought that the Mud Mephit from last time was annoying and unhelpful so bypassed the room. This bit of roleplay was fun to watch.
The other two rooms were simple enough to look around.
The final encounter with Feraltongue was interesting, I feel like even with the scaling of the encounter for the party to strong/very strong Feraltongue was not a difficult fight, the party burned through his HP too fast with a Gloomstalker Ranger and a Barbarian. The Chardalyn formations added some additional challenge but the party worked through Feraltongue's wildshapes fast enough that they saved Kaskur and knocked out Feraltongue without much problem. I would have given Feraltongue more HP, or a higher AC in Polar Bear form do to the Chardalyn on him to give him more time to use his abilities if I could.
I liked the fact that the Chwinga Blessings from DDAL10-04 were used, in fact I really liked that previous story awards came into play here in general. One PC gained the story Award for Chardalyn corruption at the end of this session and the whole party got song og vengeance so I'm curious to see what these awards will do in future modules. I do wish that the Content Catalogue was updated to help DM's forshadow the effects of these Story Awards as they play through the season.
My only knock is that the module structure makes running it ad-hoc with minimal prep hard. I wish the Story Awards and effects were presented at the beginning of the module to make sure an unprepared DM knows what information is important, I read the whole thing ahead of time so no worries there for me personally, but if AL is designed to be "show up at the local store and run this" then the layout should be designed around that sort of minimal prep execution.
Overall a very good module, and feels like a great halfway point through the season.
|