The production quality is uneven. Nice glossy, colorful cover and back which you can see above. The maps are amateurish in look, and the text is easy to read with good use of whitespace.
There's a lot of fleshing out the adventure and the area surrounding the adventure. What I really like is that there are areas that will likely [terminate] a low level party if they go exploring, but most of those offer a way out or a way to solve the problem (even if it's just to run, a healthy thing to learn to do for players). No coddling of the players here.. I like it. Though there is one way for the DM to help out the players, but it's through a natural part of the module, not fudging a die roll because the players are in over their heads. The village and NPCs are well fleshed out, with good characters having some not so good qualities at times, and at times the PCs and the NPCs will conflict even if on the same side. Because the players can give in to the NPC wishes or do what they think is best, it gives the illusion of choice to the players in an otherwise simple adventure. The actual encounters mostly involve one monster (humanoid actually) race, unless the party explores where it shouldn't, and as such it can be fairly repetitive. There's a secret area in the module that they can find, with a surprising twist if a fight doesn't actually occur, which shows that there isn't always a happy ending. There's little in the way of puzzles, and no 'usual' dungeon. The players can greatly affect the difficulty of one of the main battle depending on what they do...
>Overall, this is a good first adventure with plenty of opportunity for roleplay, conflict and battle. Almost every possibility is spelled out for the DM, and there are numerous ways to continue on from the end of the adventure. Recommended.
One strength of this module is in its notes to the DM. The hints provided about how to run an encounter are the kind that are normally hard to express, but when expressed properly are valuable pearls of wisdom. There are also good descriptions of where xp are derived, suggestions of a bonus, additional story ideas,... I recommended the module to a friend of mine who wanted to learn to be DM and she was immensely pleased.
The module is a little bit difficult for beginning players, however. Some of the encounters could easily destroy a party if the DM wants them to. Therefore, this module is especially suited to a beginner DM in a group of experienced players. Experienced players often are not happy sitting around while the DM reads a long-winded block of text describing a room. In this module, text that is to be read to players is mercifully short. It is also clearly set out from the other text in "scrolls" so that you can access it quickly. Very nice layout.
There is a problem associated with the module that almost prevents me from giving it a 5 star rating. The authors of the module made mistakes with the 3e rules. For example, a sorcerer wears armor and has the spell mage armor. The authors erroneously believe that mage armor and armor stack. That is not the case, according to the DMG. (I decided it was unfair to dock a star since the character was downloaded rather than printed in the module.)