This adventure has the same chracteristich as all the CotCT AP, GREAT encounters.
Warning!!! Lots of spoilers ahead:
Spoiler:
You finally retur to the home city and have your chance to set things right in may places, yet you don't really get to "recover" your beloved city but pave the way for the NPCs to do so. You deal with the main villains but if the DM doesn't put a great effort to make it look so, the PCs can go from one encounter to the other and finish the adventure and just realize that everything is "ok" now. If the DM puts some effort to roleplay scenes where the city is taken back this "issue" can be easyly overloked. Other than this, personally I would have loved to have the final encounter beign done in the city, since Korvosa was the anchor for most of the adventure, it was rightly so to have it finish it there. There's a perfect reason for this final encounter to be made elsewhere, but with a tiny bit of effort the DM can wave this encounter into the Ziggurat below castle Korvosa and make very little changes.
The encounters, npcs, scenes and detaits on the adventure are -5 stars-, yet the missing links to make this a more "Korvosan" closure adventure take a couple stars... Yet if you are not using CotCT as a AP or you don't care much for Korvosa Roleplaying, then this is a 5 star adventure!
This adventure breaks the line of CotCT style in an excellent way.
The adventure is a huge creepy "dungeon" that if the DM finds a way to expose the backgrupnd to the PCs, he can keep the PCs a the tip of their toes on every turn. This adventure was plenty of hack and slash yet if the DM sets the mood right, the combat feeling gets entirely different. The dungeon has such a great background that if you develop it nicely you can forget that you have beed dwelling in the same site for the past several encounters. The partition of the castle in wings makes a great way to imprint different feelings on each area and braking the phase of the castle giving the players a break on the "same place" feeling.
If you don't play CotCT I greatly recommend this module since its totally isolated, you can place it almost anywhere in most homebrew campaigns. A bit of a backgruod twist can fit it nicely into any home campaign.
This adventure is great to know the Shoanti culture, and the events are quite nicely designed, especially " bcome a snack of the legendary beast" one. Every event shows a bit of the SHoanti culture and works its way into making a bond ith them either good or bad.
The thing that took the 5th star is the fact that the "treat of war" its not very present, so if the DM doesn't emphatize the point by himself that part can be overlooked. The party works his way up to gain the Shoanti trust yet you see few other signs of brewing war.
All in all a great adventure that can be easely broken apart for insert in homebrew campaigns and a great chapter on the CotCT
This adventure has everything I like, dungeon crawling, cave lurking, city walking, arena fighting, mountaing climbing, dragon slaying, fey-sighting and more! The only thing it lacks its heavy roleplaying or social interaction with other characters (at least live-non-monster characters), but at this point that way past due.
Also after you finish the adventure you have a whole city to continue exploring! There's also plenty of material you can expand to beef up your PCs up to higher levels if you want Karzoug to be even nastier.
