The 9th adventure is Copper for a Song, for level 12 characters. I found this the hardest so far to evaluate. It's certainly imo the most original, even more so than Baker's Doesn't (or at least, a lot of the ideas in it seem fresh to me) but it also has its share of flaws.
A lost magical song can restore fertility to a struggling farmland. After assembling some clues about the location of the song by interviewing the locals about a song ABOUT that song, the adventurers explore the lair of a copper dragon to recover it.
The Good
While all the other adventures so far are setting-agnostic, this one is quite specifically set in Godsbreath, a setting introduced in the Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel adventure Written in Blood. I am always happy to see any setting from that book used, and Godsbreath is an especially good one. Nonetheless, it wouldn't be hard to place this adventure in most settings.
This adventure is tonally unique from any others in the book, and many encounters can be handled non-violently. Some of these encounters work quite well (helping kobolds build a statue of the dragon, dealing with encamped hill giants by either bribing, frightening, entertaining, OR fighting them) while others are in the Complaints section.
The adventure really leans into the character of the copper dragon, and the lair reflects that dragon and her qualities. The dragon herself is generally well-characterized. She has also adopted two orphaned green dragon wyrmlings and is trying to be a good example for them.
We get the song ABOUT the song as a hand-out for the players, which is nice.
Complaints
The "find clues in the known song that point to the location of the missing song" is a good idea, but the execution isn't great and will need the DM's help to make it work. As written, it's a pretty repetitive affair: 5 NPC townsfolk are introduced, each one with a clue, each one needing to be persuaded or impressed by the adventurers in order to get them to share that clue (even though the adventurers are trying to save the town). I think analyzing the song for clues would be better handled as not strictly a social encounter - perhaps some getting hints from NPCs, some ability for the adventurers to research on their own, and even - ideally, for my tastes - some allowance for the players to just be able to figure out clues on their own by reading the song and looking at the local map. Again, and not for the first time in this book overall, an idea that is better in conception than execution.
As a I read through these adventures, in more than one case I have the suspicion that the designer was working from a pre-existing unused map from WotC's back catalogue, and trying to create an adventure that would fit that map, with somewhat mixed results. I might be wrong about that, but this is an adventure where the provided maps, like Death at Sunset, are probably gonna cause a few issues.
Example 1: A lot of time is spent on the question of dealing with a group of hill giants who have obliviously camped on top of the dungeon, but because the dungeon has four different obvious entrances, two of which are closer to where the players start than where the hill giant camp is, the reality is that most groups are going to be able to just avoid the hill giants completely. And if they can't...do six hill giants really represent a threat to a level 12 party (genuinely asking - I'm not really sure)?
Example 2: In the dragon's lair (which is an abandoned copper mine) there's a roughly 30 x 35 foot chamber, partially filled by a 10' wide natural pillar. If the party enters this area, we are told (with no elaboration) that a purple worm emerges from the floor and attacks them. A purple worm is a gargantuan, CR 15 monster than is actually more powerful than the adult copper dragon. A purple worm is not a monster you use as a side-encounter; it's a plot point. And the area in which it appears is nowhere near large enough to accommodate the encounter, and the worm probably rampages through the whole lair and kills a lot of the things in it. Just a bad design choice imo.
The purple worm is one of three no-option combat encounters that, as written, are triggered by adventurers setting foot in a particular area. All three read as kind of half-hearted, like the designer would rather not have included them. There are three groups of galeb duhr in the lair. One group wants to play with the characters by tossing boulders with them. Another wants to sing to the characters. The third group...attacks the characters on sight. There is also a djinn who attacks the characters because she is irritated that the dragon has kept her waiting for an audience. Her only characterization is that she's irritated. We're not told what she wants to talk to the dragon about.
The climax of the adventure is (hopefully) the recovery of the legendary Awakening Song, which can either be gotten from the dragon via negotiation (or, less likely, combat) or from a secret bard invisibly hidden in the lair in suspended animation by a Sequester spell (second use of this spell to hide an NPC in this book). Unlike Copper for a Song, which is the song about this magic song, we DON'T get lyrics for this. Most players are I think gonna be bummed that after all the effort to recover this song, they don't get to hear it or even hear the words. WotC should have certainly included lyrics for this and, tbh, sheet music (which is certainly something that adventures have had in the past - especially Dragonlance). That would have also been a nice extra for marketing to talk about, as well, and more substantive than the lame "solo play" adjustments which I haven't even bothered to mention.
I don't really care for the artwork in this one.
The Verdict. This review probably makes this adventure seem worse than it is. It has a strong and specific atmosphere, it's different, and there are definitely enjoyable encounters. I wanted to like it a bit more than I actually do. I'm gonna give this a B, but it's a very different B than I gave to Before the Storm. That was kind of a boring adventure where everything worked really smoothly as written. This by contrast is a quite interesting adventure, but the DM will need to do a fair amount of work to fix it imo.
