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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 8010795" data-attributes="member: 22424">I'll review a product according to how it is sold. So if you sell me an 'adventure' that is actually a really good setting book, that's getting a poor review.I'm also interested in how well the product executes its promise. I'm generally not interested in the concept of the thing, as some really good adventures have come from relatively vanilla concepts ("Lost Mine of Phandelver", and the original "Ravenloft"), while some adventures with excellent concepts have turned out to be poor ("Storm King's Thunder").I'm also not particularly interested in replayability, nor the ability to pull out bits of the adventure for separate use - I have enough adventure material to last me for the rest of my life without repeating, so I just don't need that.Beyond that...I like to see interesting choices in the adventure. So a map with multiple different routes through it to allow the PCs to take different approaches, or giving the party multiple competing goals, or things like that. And I'll accept that those choices necessarily mean some redundancy as some material never gets used. (But it is important to put the choices in the right places. The best bits of SKT are five dungeons, of which a successful group will only see one. That's not a good use of resources.)I also like to see good use of the lore within the adventure, so that the PCs can figure out what's going on (and benefit from doing so), and so that there's a glimpse of a much wider world out there. But it's important that the PCs actually can see that lore and figure things out. (Again, SKT is an example of mediocrity. The "Shakespearean Giants" concept is excellent, but my group spent months wandering around in Chapter Three with almost no means of accessing the actual plot of the adventure. It's only much later that it all starts to come to light - and that's way too late.)Finally, I need to be able to use the adventure as-is, without needing to fixing of issues, remixing of material, or otherwise digging to get at the good stuff. I use published adventures because I just don't have time to generate my own, so what I need from them is to actually do the work for me. (Here my go-to example of a poor adventure is "Expedition to the Demonweb Pits" for 3e - another wonderful concept, and there's a really good adventure in there somewhere. But the actual adventure as presented is sorely disappointing.)One last thing: production values. I'm generally neither particularly bothered or particularly impressed with these. Funnily enough, most professional adventures are published to a suitably professional standard. So they'd need to either be exceptionally good or exceptionally bad for me to take note - the only example that springs to mind is the woeful "Scourge of the Howling Horde", which in addition to all its other failings was clearly intended to be printed full-colour but was actually printed in greyscale. This meant that some of the sidebars should have been brown-on-yellow and were instead light-grey-on-marginally-darker-grey.I hope some of that is helpful!I read it cover-to-cover and then make my assessment. If I later run it, I'm likely to revisit that opinion - but I'll only tend to run adventures that I've already considered good. The dross gets shelved never to be used again.This, of course, means that adventure needs to read well before it gets a chance, and then it needs to play well.</blockquote>

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