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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7977013" data-attributes="member: 18">Ohhhhh son. SON. Why gotta say things like that? You're just triggering me.Keep on the Shadowfell is absolutely that bad. It nearly killed 4E for me before it started. If I hadn't run an adventure I'd designed myself for part of the group and convinced them 4E had tons of potential, I think they'd have been like "Let's just play Cyberpunk 2020 or something..." (no-one wanted to go back to 3.XE or relatives).On the rails isn't even a major problem with it. That's the tip of the iceberg of problems with Keep on the Shadowfell. It's the smallest problem with Keep on the Shadowfell. It's total rubbish all the way down. It has every hallmark of a bad adventure.1) It's staggeringly boring. Literally everything about it is boring. The encounters are dull. The setup isn't great. The keep itself is extremely boring, both in terms of layout and constitution. The plots and characters, of which there are very few, are also extremely boring.2) Nothing at all in it makes any sense. I discussed this I think here at some length when it came out. It's just a giant pile of nonsense. It makes Terrible Trouble At Tragidore look like one of Shakespeare's most human and believable plays. And the more you look it, the more you think about it, the worse, and worse it gets. There's some stuff that like, if you don't think about it at all, and just run, it only gets you later when you "Whaaaaa wait?!?" but there's other stuff that's just "C'mon, what, no, no no no no noooooooooo that is dumb and makes no sense...". It's like if I constructed an adventure to actually make no sense, it would make more than KotSF, because it would at least be thematically consistent.3) It's full of rules errors. We went over this at the time.4) There's nothing memorable about, or cool about. The final encounter is least-awful thing about it by miles. It was still so bad, that it made literally change campaign worlds to get away from it.5) It has appalling organisation. This is a crime, a real crime against DMs. It's not unheard-of, it's not even uncommon, but to commit this crime as well as all the other crimes?6) It's far too long for the tiny amount of actual content it has. It's just ridiculously long, given that about 60%+ of it is basically "filler". This did help me in one way - it taught me that "filler" encounters, whilst fine a lot of editions, are really not fine in 4E.And yes it's terrible railroad. But I can forgive a terrible railroad, and so can my players, when the train takes you somewhere interesting or exciting. That place is not Keep on the Shadowfell.The only positive thing I can say is that, despite a lot of rules errors, and despite being really boring, the encounters were relatively well-designed and balanced.I was a big 4E booster and kind of excited about Mearls back then, and that adventure put me on the back foot. The other good thing it and the follow-up adventure did for me was convince me that there was absolutely no possibility I could use WotC adventures for 4E, so I'd have to write my own. And 4E was the right edition to make that decision in.</blockquote>

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