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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 7272397" data-attributes="member: 5100">This. 1,000 times this. I tried to play with a gradual reveal and mystery about what was going on. I don't think the game ever did recover from that and the whole group (me included) opted to just drop the adventure because it was so slow. I'd gotten to a point where I'd gone back and radically reworked things to try to build momentum, but it was too late. You need to drive some urgency fairly early.Other bits:1) Shrink the scale. The towns are small and none of them have all services a PC might want. Many of the plot hooks encourage the party to move between towns, but the distance tends to make every such hook seem remote and like it's someone else's problem. The towns should be no more than a day between them. Many times, they should be a there-and-back in a day distance.2) Pay attention to hearing distance. A lot of the encounters are actually within earshot of one another. That can cause encounters to come in waves. Cultists would be aware of their reinforcements, but some of the tactics listed don't reflect that.3) Let the cults recruit. There are a lot of notes about "if these guys buy the farm, the monsters from room XX move here". A lot of times, that actually puts the new occupants in a mismatched tactical position, which isn't horrible, but the net effect is that a guerrilla approach ends up highlighting what might otherwise be a minor design flaw. Just having a handful of "replacement" cultists/mooks every few days works well. Also, there are a few monsters/NPCs that are called out as being "in training" or something similar. Let these guys advance and take on the stats of whatever they're advancing towards, if the PCs take too long.4) Read the notes about door construction, lighting, etc. very carefully. It really sucks to get halfway through a given complex only to reread that all the doors are stone and you've been allowing pretty easy checks to listen for monsters behind them. It also sucks for the PCs because they've been leaving the tank at the rear to try to stealth past said stone doors that would probably block most of the sound.5) Run the area around the Scarlet Moon Hall as theater of the mind. It's freaking huge and ideal for ranged attacks. I actually borrowed the idea of zones from Fate and blended it with melee/short/medium/long range. It was probably one of the most fun segments of the adventure, but I think it would have been a royal pain and somewhat interminable if I'd tried to draw things out on my mats.6) The Temple of Howling Hatred has a section of randomized encounters that can actually come up totally empty if things work out just right. This is actually OK. My players started to feel like, "It's quiet -- too quiet." When things finally happened, the tension release was very cool.7) Read the tactics for the different cults. There's a lot of dungeon time. This is what makes it feel like multiple dungeons, as much as anything else. Yes, that means sub-optimal tactics for some groups, but the overall feel works.8) Some of the NPCs have contacts outside the area. If the PCs head off to Waterdeep or Neverwinter to re-equip, these NPCs can call on their allies during that time to keep things feeling alive. You'll probably have to stat up some of the allies, but it's a great opportunity to adjust the adventure to the way your players are handling it, if they aren't doing this "by the book".9) Use milestone advancement. Even without adding reinforcements, the PCs could do things in an order that will let them quickly (and relatively safely) level up early on, then go through a couple lower level areas without advancing at all. If you do add reinforcements, the math could get even wonkier. I think the book has advice on when those milestones are -- basically, every chapter. Note that this has become my general philosophy on 5E, but this module was part of the push.</blockquote>

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