2 out of 5 rating for Dragonlance Adventure Series
The first Adventure Path, and a good fifteen years before Paizo! The foundation of the adventure is solid, but it has not aged well in the intervening 25 years and the lifespan of three (and two half) editions. The tropes and conventions of 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons weigh heavily on the adventure. Every chapter has to have some dungeon crawl, and the plot is heavily on the rails. However, there are very few adventure hooks to keep the party on the rails and quite a few pinch points in the story where the party is expected to do one thing but there’s very little reason for that to happen. The campaign suffers in the places where the story and adventuring ends to make way for sessions of Battlesystem mass combat. The option of having mass combat is nice, but very few concessions or alternatives are made for people who don’t want to use that system. And there are some shaky subsytems introduced in the occasional adventure Because this is a series of dungeon crawls, much of the quality depends on the dungeons themselves. Some are excellent, such as the ruined city of Xak Tsaroth and a few other iconic locales such as Skullcap and even Thorabardin. Others are simply less memorable and suffer from all the problems of 1e dungeons: no ecologies, illogical design, and no sense of architecture. There's one that's meant to be a series of air filled rooms in a sunken building but is really a series of rooms connected by a wandering hallway with lots of negative space (and, ostensibly the home of a wizard despite the absence of food, a kitchen, a restroom, bed, etc). The end is good and the first nine modules are solid, but the last quarter is pretty weak, suffering from the adventure’s reliance on the novels for story. When the novels gave the adventures lots of ideas to work with, the modules are good, but when the novels started focusing entirely on the characters and personal drama the adventures had nothing to work with and really lose steam. It does not help that the last third of the story is a travel adventure of the party slowly going from point A to B at levels when they should have access to teleportation magic. It would be a lot of fun to rework and reimagine the Adventure Path. There's a lot of other places to explore, new ideas that could be incorporated, and modern ideas in adventure design to add. This might be an interesting 5th Edition project, a revised War of the Lance adventure, knowing what we know now about the game and about the world.