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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kalendraf" data-source="post: 2009330" data-attributes="member: 3433">I recently finished up running this adventure for my group. It turned out to be a very successful adventure for everyone. Of all the WotC published adventures to date (I own each put out so far), this is by far the best of those they've published.The entire module is based on some fundamental and pervasive misdirection. If you have a group that is easily mislead, then they will likely follow the assumed order of events presented in this adventure. Personally, this is something that I absolutely love to do as a DM, and Standing Stone does a very solid job of setting up the PCs. The standard plot angle of "save the poor villagers" is turned completely on its head, setting things up for a brilliant finale. If the group is wise enough to see thru the lies being told to them, they can be rewarded with a much faster jump to the conclusion of the adventure. But I'm sure that most groups will likely follow the typical expected paths here, as my group was.Standing Stone is written as an event-based module, rather than the more typical site-based adventures most DM's are familiar with. As a DM, you really need to read the entire adventure and be fluent in how to handle things that the party may decide to do. I always recommend that for any adventure a DM plans to run, but here it is absolutely mandatory. Fortunately, it's highly probable that the group you're running will follow the standard path as presented in the module, and if they do happen to do something out of the ordinary, it's not hard to adjust things for that.There aren't a lot of details given for some of the more important NPCs. So it will probably require some experienced DM skills to turn them into believeable characters. Information about their motives is scattered around in the adventure. One thing I would have appreciated is a background for each of the key NPCs explaining some of the motives and history. On the other hand, leaving this undefined allows the DM to tailor that background to fit his campaign. I consider this a minor flaw in this adventure.Besides the lack of detail on the NPCs, there is also a lack of detail for most of the key locations. One example is the main tower in the village. A brief description mentions the basic rooms on each floor, but has no real detail of what items can be found in any of those rooms. It's highly likely that the party will visit the tower either as guests or at some point later in the adventure, so it would have been helpful to have a more detailed entry for this location. Again, this is a rather minor issue in the overall flow of the adventure.The ghostly horsemen are wild elves are "enemies" very likely to be encountered throughout the course of this adventure. Their inclusion here is part of the misdirection, but they are handled fairly well. My group never engaged the horseman and was rewarded for that to gain a small insight in the fact he had a symbol of Pelor. The elves provided an elusive enemy in the woods, seemingly just out of sight, but hounding them with a trap or arrow when they moved to investigate.   Both provided a great mystery for the party to investigate.The other major location is the Tomb of the Warlord. I decided before running this part to completely redraw the map. The included Maze is a confusing circular mess which is easily corrected with a few minutes of making your own map. I included the same types of traps and inhabitants, and still had the tomb in a far off location, but it was much easier to draw on my battlemap. The traps and monsters provided a perfect mix of threats for my group, and they were quite frustrated by the time they finally reached the main tomb. And the shock that the main "monster" was honorable made it all the more interesting.The roleplaying potential in this adventure is almost off-the-scale compared to most other adventures produced. Between the inhabitants in the village, the leaders there, all the way to the possible encounters with the elves, horseman and undead warlord, it's a plethora of RP opportunity. As a big advocate of RP-style, I found that to be one of the most enduring aspects of this adventure.The final battle, should the party uncover the real villains, makes for lenghty encounter. Be prepared to get out tons of figures and use the entire battlemap to draw out the city and key buildings. This encounter took about 90 minutes for my group to resolve, and they were fortunate in being able to knock out two enemy spellcasters very quickly. One of the enemies seems out of place and is almost guaranteed to escape. As a DM, I like having recurring bad guys, so this gave me yet another to toss at the party in a future adventure. This was an exciting climax to the adventure for everone.The downside of the battle is that the party is likely left with many townsfolk and some possible loose ends (like the elves or maybe the horsemen). I wound up DM'ing the group thru the aftermath and it took about 2 hours of roleplaying with the villagers, elves and wandering druid I tossed in to get some of the loose ends tied up. The adventure doesn't really give much info on how to handle this, so it's largely up to the DM to come up with the ending here.Finally, the treasure earned from this adventure is relatively low for something of this level. There are some magic items to be found, but some of those are nearly worthless to the party (rings of mind shielding, non-detection wands and a staff of undead creation). It makes sense that there is little gold to be found. However, you may find that you want to toss a chest into the tower with some extra funds to reward the party.Given all the good aspects of this adventure I was tempted to give it a 5, but the fact that there are some flaws here, and that I did a fair amount of work to make it fly this well, I'm giving it a 4.   It's well worth running. Hope WotC makes a few more like this one.</blockquote>

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