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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 2008604" data-attributes="member: 1">I've had this adventure for some time now, but decided to hold off reviewing it until I had fully run it.  Well, my gaming group finished playing through the module a few days ago, so here's my review.Most of the other reviewers have summed up the contents of the adventure, so I'm not going to spend time writing up an overview of the adventure or a list of what's contained within.  Instead, I'm going to concentrate on how the adventure is written and presented, and how it plays out.The adventure itself is fairly small, but cleverly contains so many embedded plot hooks that, with some work on the DM's part, it can be drawn out for quite some time.  The town of Kirkwood is well detailed, each location containing a description of the area, a list of NPCs likely to be found there (and I don't just mean stats of the shopkeep - an area will also contain details of people form other parts of the town likely to be found in the area - regular customers and so on) plus a plot hook or two.  These plot hooks are small (e.g. - at the local shrine, the collection has been stolen by the gy who runs the carriage-house across the road), but the overall effect is to create a lively and interactive town which feels alive.  I found it remarkably easy to run a session where the players didn't do much more than wander around the town doing their shopping and speaking with the locals.Of course, all this is just backdrop for the adventre itself which, if you have read the other reviews here, is an attempt to rescue a loacal family from their mysterious kidnappers.  It's nicely done, with false leads and red herrings, and the process of discovering who was responsible requires the players to undergo a short exploration of the local wilderness and a indulge in a dungeon crawl  - esentially an inflitration of the lair of who they believe the kidnappers to be.    Of course, they turn out to be wrong - the local goblinoids wish to be friends with the humans of Kirkwood and are able to provide some info which helps the party find the real culprits.I had great fun during this dungeon crawl.  The goblins came across as misunderstood victims of racism and stereotyping who fear the evil murderous humans to the south who tend to kill them on sight; the party found themselves between the goblnis and thier captive half-orc prisoner, both of whom claimed that the other was responsible for the kidnapping - I was lucky in that the party botched their Sense Motive rolls, and had no idea who was telling the truth, especially since the goblins had captured and tortured the half-orc and planned on eating him for dinner!  With a lawful good party member or two, this whole situation can be twisted into quite the moral conundrum.The second half of the adventure involves chasing the culprits north and rescuing the poor family from their grasp.  There are a couple fo encounters on the way (one including the delightful new monster, the Thorn Faerie)  The culprits, a bandit group, are quite a challenge for the PCs, and the battle to rescue the missing family has quite a strategic element to it, including ambushes and lots of assassin/rogue techinques from the bad guys.  I changed this encounter a little and turned it into a sneaking, scary thriller where the PCs slowly snuk through the forest, knowing that their enemies were hiding around the area, and that they had set numerous traps, attempting to pick the PCs off one-by-one in classic thriller style.That's the adventure - as you know from reading the other reviews here, there is a substantial appendix containing various prestige classes, monsters etc.  Some of this I found a little redundant, other parts I found very well done.  One other note - Thunderhead Games are producing various web-enhancements for this adventure, the first due round about now.  I have an advance copy of it,  and it nicely expands the Thorn Faerie encounter  - dpending n how your adventure pays out, it can be sued to expland the encounter at the time or used as a 'return to' appendix at the end of the advanture.  Two or three other expansions are planned also.So - all in all a darn good adventure; it was great fun to run.  My only complaints were a slight redundancy int he appendices and perhaps some minor graphical problems with the maps in the book - when printed out, I found them very hard to read indeed, and actually had to guess some elements of it during play.  The adventure does benefit from a DM willing to put the work in to bring Kirkwood to life and to make use of all the mini plot hooks and colourful characters.</blockquote>

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