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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2009375" data-attributes="member: 18387">This is the 4th adventure in the WoTC Adventure Path series which is designed to bring your characters along from 7th level to an ending point of about 9th to 10th, depending on your party size.Let me get down to the meat and potatoes of the adventure and why I gave it a great rating of "4".  The adventure takes a group of players to a small starving cursed thorp called Ossington.  The village is small and filled with peasents who are hungry, distraught, and being lead or protected by a noble group of older retired adventurers.  The town seems to be plagued two fold from an undead spirit rider (kind of the headless horseman type) and a reckless blood thirsty would be cult of elves bent on death, murder, and assassination through guerilla warfare.  Evil elves and undead riders, wow, what an adventure and oh how the party will dig right into battle defending the poor helpless town and its aging retired heroes.Zing (the line goes out), Splash (hook in mouth), Yank (the fish in caught)!Thats right, the story is a set up to play evil against good and have the good guys (your party) be tricked into fighting the good fight for the wrong side.  It is done very easily and very well.  The idea, story plot itself, NPC's, and the great twists / misdirections are worth a rating of "5" alone as an adventure!  But, the adventure as you bought it has all kinds of drags, un-fleshed out storylines / NPC's, and holes that need more filler than a condemned building.  I rate the adventure beyond the storyline / plot as a "3".  Hence the overall rating I gave this adventure was a "4".The things I liked about this adventure, beyond the story, was that it had a little bit of everyting for everyone.  You want some melee well then you will have plenty of that in the encounters with the Horseman, the forect encounters with the fey, the barrow of the undead warlord, and at the climactic ending encounter with the villains (you could be battling an entire village if all went wrong)!  If you want roleplaying encounters then you have come to the right adventure for sure.  Decpetion runs rampant with the multiple encounters with the horseman, the fey, and the villains themselves.  Tully, Dyson, Henwen, and the Cukoo make for strange and very interesting NPC's and later on, dynamic and sinister villain types.  The encounter with the undead warlord in his barrow could be again, very interesting for roleplaying purposes.  If your lucky like I was, half your party will be elves and how will they feel in character trying to hunt down their own and believe that the elves are going around murdering people in broad daylight?  If you are looking for a dungeon crawl, look no further into the delves of the warlords tomb.  That place was a maze like barrow filled with undead, traps, confusing corridors, and a boss type undead knight who really can cause the party some problems in the end.  This adventure even had some interesting morality pleas in that the party must admit they screwed up at some point and then figure out what is the best thing to do in the end to make things right.  I really liked the flexability and the variety of encounters and twists to this entire adventure.The things I disliked about the adventure is the true hollowness of the meat of the premade adventure.  Maps . . . there were a couple of small ones that didnt really help or inspire at all.  Art . . . what art, you mean the cover, oh that art?  NPC's . . . when they flush out an old farmer (Tarbee) and his make believe daughter (Tanasha Lu) as much as the four main villains, you know there is some thing lacking in the developers attention to detail, enough said on that.  The encouters themselves were the most unsatisfying.  I found myself having weekly (we play once a wekk for about 8 hours a session) having to add encounters, create new areas, and spice up the battles here and there.  I added a wandering and hungry Owlbear to farmer Tarbee's barn.  I added an encounter with a small pack of orcs, fleeing from the horseman before the players even encountered the horseman.  I added a small pack of Dire Wolves that had also become unsettled from lack of food in the woods to the forest encounters.  Etc.  Overall, the adventure gives you a neat story, some interesting characters, a few cool ideas for encounters and an outlide or time frame to run them in until the players figure out what is really going on.  But 3 random forest encounter tables with encounters like a pixie harassing the party and an encounter where the party comes across a skeleton is hardly satisfying to a group of 7 people trying to figure out a mystery over a session of DnD.  The warlords tomb is very well thought out but is really just one large encounter.  If the adventure would have been prepacked with a half dozen such large encounters instead of repeated themes (forest encounter tables and several horseman encounters) then it would have been much more filling and less work for the DM.  Im not lazy mind you, but when I pay for premade stories, I am paying for more of my time running the game, not creating and filling the game with encounters.Overall this was a very fun, but very short, adventure my players enjoyed.  The mystery and roleplaying were well thought out and showcased in this adventure.  It was more work for me than I first thought when I bought the adventure (same as the SPeaker in Dreams was) and this was a little bit of a let down.  I wish some of the developers looked at Monte Cook's Return of the Temple of Elemental Evil to see what a DM wants to buy when he pays for a premade adventure (story, tons of encounters, villains, NPC's, art, magic, etC), who cares what the price is.  Time is money!  I am looking forward to the next adventure, the Heart of Night Fang Spire, and I will review this once my party finishes that product as well!  Hope this review helped, thanks as always for reading!Arreon, Lord of the Dragon SlayersSean McDaniel</blockquote>

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