My longer review vanished - so here goes with a shorter version....

Dungeon - very good

Bad point - I had to change the location to a village/town full of nice innocent people as my party thought that the worthless inhabitants of Falcon's Hollow deserved everything they got and found it hard to justify saving them. (and I had to agree with them - save the trees)

Now this is how to do horror for 3.5. The encounters are dangerous and there's a good chance your characters will bite the bullet if they don't get played very carefully... but with some common sense this will be a wild ride.

Oh, and I love the heartlessly evil and alien fey villains. This adventure hearks back to the horriffic fey of folklore, and in grand fashion!

Easily worth five stars!

Like I said, I agree with Nick on the Gore-O-Meter factor: Completely maxxed, and this adventure should have a specific warning in that regard. However, this module could have very easily been titled "Fey Gone Bad: The Sourceback For Running Adventures Involving Extremely Angry Faeries". And that is why I gave it five stars. There is absolutely no way that this particular title can be considered "E (for everyone)", and I have always felt that "PG" means exactly what it says, however for years now we have all wondered about what the fey would do in exactly this situation. My personal favorite is the fate-tweaker, great use of fore-shadowing. I do not reccommend this book to new groups. It is not at all what the hobby is normally about, but like I said: "Bad faeries. Very, very BAD faeries". Thanks Paizo, nightmare inducing, toe-curdling, but for me and my experience, this is a great addition to my stockpile of things to ruin a rangers' day. Don't love it, but for me-n-mine the value is superb.

Excellently written, awesome art and maps, rules and crunchy-bits were well laid out. However, the disgusting nature of the traps and the extreme horror level made me wish I had never ordered it. If I had seen it in a store and thumbed through it I would have know it was not for me. I am not even going to run it for my table because I know they would be offended by the horrific box text descriptions. I hope I don’t order another module that is marketed as a Fantasy Adventure and receive a “Slasher Film” Horror RPG. Next time I’ll only buy books I can thumb through first.

My players LOVED this Rob Zombie-inspired dark fantasy adventure. The sandbox nature of events and the blend of social and combat encounters struck a note across the board. The level of horror is about the same as EC Comics (at their most extreme), so if you admire those, you'll enjoy Carnival of Tears.

As an extra suggestion, I recommend playing Nox Arcana's Carnival of Souls as background music.

Event-based adventures are never easy to write but this one has been
crafted well. The story evolves very smoothly and is chock full of
engaging independent encounters. This definitely isn't a mod for an
amateur DM but in the hands of a skilled storyteller this is
definitely going to be memorable.

My only significant disappointment was the chief villain and his fleet
footed side-kick. These characters seemed to lack depth (in stark
contrast to the NPC protagonist) and, as a result, I fear they would
drag the story down. That combined with the unavoidable high civilian
body count will make the finale of this story a bit of let down for
players. Players may also find the exceptinally high gore level of
this story a turn off.

This adventure turns everyone's fears of what could happen in a carnival into RPG reality.

It is "worth the ride," but beware! this module will chew up characters and spit them out ... in pieces (along with the rest of Falcon's Hollow)!

The PDF is an extra bonus making this adventure 5 Stars and then some!

This is a playtest review. We played through this adventure in two five hour session. Half of the players used the pregen characters, the other two created their own.

LIKED: The swinomancer was not very dangerous but visually very impressive. Players mentioned him again and again.

The atmosphere was interesting with sad music being played by the grigs. I started playing The Black Rider by Tom Waits in the background when we reached that point.

Not all encounters are necessary. Players can easily avoid some encounters if they they feel that they have to conserve their resources.

The pregen characters all have something useful against the predominant creature type without being obviously optimized. That makes the entire thing very organic.

DISLIKED: This adventure features no rest and no getting back of spells. That was bad news for the sorceror. The newbie player had created a sorceror without a wand of magic missile. Ouch!

The last foe has SR but I ignored it. The last foe also has Freedom of Movement and our barbarian was specialized in grappling. I ignored that, too. It really depends on well the party has been doing until now.

The nymph encounter was bad. I gave a hint about people clawing at the eyes and groaning with pleasure, asked for initiative rolls, the bard NPC won, failed his save, and turned blind. Ouch! A suggested solution in the book would have been great.

BOTH: One of my players said that if I hadn’t told them after the first session that they needed to disrupt n events to get the last foe to appear, he wouldn’t have known what to do. Another player said, however, that even though he did not know the exact number, he knew exactly what to do.

One player felt that the foes were incredibly tough with all the extra damage they were causing and their poisons, but another player felt that those made interesting encounters.

A rule to cut down a tents would have been nice.

Nick Logue and Tim Hitchock writing an adventure together?! Holy crap, the end is nigh!
These two sick MFers can come up with some straight up disturbing stuff. This is a must buy just to see where their sick minds went with this one.
Buy it! Run it! But you and your players will never be able to look at fey that same way ever again. BEWARE!

So I wrote this all inclusive review that got eated by the Paizo gremlins and I'm finally gettin back to doin another one, so here we go again.

Freakin great Adventure. This is defiantly one of those encounters that players will remember a long time and recant tales from for many years.

The events are non linear, so give the book a good read and get to know the NPCs as your party can encounter them in almost any order.

Your players MUST role-play a bit of this to enjoy the full experience of the carnival which I truly enjoy. I am really looking forward to throwing this at a few of my ROLL players and letting them see there is more to this game than dice.

There are some great new magical items to check out, and a menagerie of memorable NPCs. DnD hands out XP, this adventure hands out an experience.