I know that many of you waiting for the new book are very excited so you can see this new adventure. Having just received the book it was one of the first things I checked out (after flipping through and taking in all the great new artwork... I can't wait for a web based PDF with all the art like they do for the Dungeon mags... oh please, oh please... it works so great with my OpenRPG game). Anyway, I thought I would share my thoughts...
I felt it starts out strong with some opportunities to enteract more with some of the existing NPCs from the campaign. More RP with Jenya (pretty much she can just use the Star of Justice, but knows little else), Terseon Skellerang (who they may or may not have met previously), a little bit of investigative work (not a whole lot more though, I will have to really expand this portion if I am to run it), Jil makes another appearance, this time as the parties informant as it is in the Last Laughs interest to stop the mayhem.
After that though it quickly devolves into a standard dungeon crawl. Maybe I was hoping for more RP and tie in to the campaign before that happened. Oh well, I can add that on my own (not unlike you have to do with the AoW, there is plenty of opportunity but it isn't spelled out for you).
The point of the adventure is to respond to raids from goblins that are going on in the city. Turns out the goblins are from a group that has tunnels running under the city that are being used by the Cagewrights to smuggle half-orcs mercenaries into the city. The goblins leader is annoyed the Cagewrights aren't asking him to join and the goblin are acting out in defiance.
The PCs then go down and put a stop to things. Then of course latter in the course of the campaign the same half-orcs are brought into the city in response to the tax riots, so the PCs stopping things doesn't end up mattering.
Basically this has some small opportunities for further RP, but mostly is a filler dungeon to give the players more XP before moving on to Flood Season. Like Flood Season it seems only peripherally attached to the rest of the campaign and I wouldn't feel bad if I were a DM who were already past this in the campaign.
On the other hand, *I* will probably use it as an excuse to make Jzadirune smaller so the PCs get less XP and treasure, increase the RP time and then make up for it with this adventure... haven't decided for sure on that yet though.
Sean Mahoney