I recently ran this as a "guys gaming night" for four of my friends. Only one of which had plays D&D regularly, and one of which had never played it before.
We had a great time. I really enjoyed the variety of challenges that were presented, and I think it was a tough challenge for 0-level characters, but not overwhelming. The story is a little "cutesy", but my players quickly took it to the gutter instead. :)
My only negative comment is that I felt the introduction could have been better organized, there are a lot of things that depend on information you get talking to people in town, but all the town info is in an appendix in the back. This is the first DCC that I've run, so I'm not sure if that is specific to this scenario, or general.
We ran for about 5 hours, including a 30 minute break to eat. We didn't get to the last encounter, and skipped one of the "side" encounters.
I ran it pretty close to "straight", that is, I didn't feel I had to fudge a lot of rolls to make it either challenging, or not too deadly. This is great, and it takes a lot of stress off of the DM, to be able to run the stats as written.
I do think that the "old school" layout leaves something to be desired, I'd like a little better breakdown of important plot points as you go along and such, I had to read the scenario 3-4 times through to get a feel for the whole thing, and even then, I feel like I missed stuff.
Also, the "provided" PCs are fun, but the layout (all their info is in a tabular format) meant that I had to copy all the info into PCGen in order to have character sheets to give to the players. Once I did so, PCGen trashed a lot of their stats becuase of encumberance (the gnome had like 200 lbs of equipment). No big deal, but character sheets in the back would have been a time saver.
In conclusion, I felt it was a fun scenario with a variety of challenges that was well-balanced and appropriate for the level advertised, but I felt that the formatting and layout could have been improved to make it easier to run.<br><br>
<b>LIKED</b>: Story, variety of challenges, play balance.<br><br><b>DISLIKED</b>: Layout (first stuff in an appendix, hard to dig through encounter text), PCs in tabular format.<br><br><b>QUALITY</b>: Very Good<br><br><b>VALUE</b>: Very Satisfied<br>
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