A nice 'change of pace' adventure that doesn't rely on the PCs being powerful combat-monsters to succeed. To the contrary, a party of optimized combat characters who tend to ignore puzzles and traps are going to have difficulty with this module, as the challenge it presents is one they're not the best suited to tackle.

And that's fine! Different modules should be able to challenge different types of players, and an adventure that makes your best puzzle-solving player (who perhaps has a bit more knowledge of the Forgotten Realms from earlier editions than is usually strictly useful in the current edition) feel like the session MVP is good and to be encouraged in the Organized Play campaign.

One recommended tweak: instead of 'resistance 3' and 'resistance 5', which aren't strictly meaningful Fifth Edition D&D expressions of resistance, use 'gains resistance against the next source of that damage type' and 'gains resistance against that damage type for the remainder of the adventure'. This will retain the flavor of the methods of gaining these resistances, as well as be a better expression of those resistances in 5E terms.

The Darklord tries hard to be a suitably epic finish to the Season Four storyline: the party begins surrounded by all the NPCs who have survived the previous adventures (and maybe even one or two who didn't, if the DM isn't careful), and is quickly joined by the PCs main frenemy during the season, Jeny Greenteeth. An NPC even dies in the first encounter as a way of setting the stakes suitably high. The villain's fortress contains brutal traps and tricky encounters, and the final battle with the Big Bad is suitably epic-feeling and dangerous, especially if you replace the Disintegrate spell on her spell list with Mass Suggestion.

Yet the things that came before to set up this adventure don't really set it up in a way that makes it feel epic -- instead, it feels inevitable, as if the PCs were going to get here no matter how well or poorly they handled their previous assignments. And the aftermath of the battle makes it plain that the campaign doesn't want to punish the PCs too badly if they found they weren't actually up to the challenge of beating back the Big Bad's plans for Barovia and its true dark lord.

If there ever was an Adventurers League adventure that could be used to illustrate the TVTropes entry "There Are No Global Consequences", this would be the one. Which is unfortunate, as pretty much all the dramatic heft of the adventure is based on the idea that the consequences for failure are going to be suitably dire.

Lastly, the adventure gives the impression of having been written very early in the development of the Season, and then not revisited enough when specific adventures released earlier in the Season came back with slightly different or missing bits of backstory or plot that didn't quite mesh with the events of this adventure. This could easily have been a four-star adventure with more careful attention to detail and a stronger series of adventures leading into it, and might even have made five stars if the consequences for failure lived up to the dire warnings issued both here and in prior adventures. As it stands, though the adventure has a number of flavorful, well-designed moments, those moments seem unconnected to the overall story and thus lose much of their power to affect those experiencing the story.

The Horseman very much wants to be a dark, atmospheric treatise on the nature of obsession and love, and to present a tragic tale of a talented yet homely antagonist rejected by the more potent evil he adores. Unfortunately, the adventure also serves as the info-dump for the metaplot in preparation for the final adventure in the series, The Darklord, and since this happens right up front, the sense of fatigue and irritation that this will likely install in your players will color the entire adventure.

Begin with the knowledge that the events of the previous adventures were irrelevant -- in The Raven, the party races against a 'ticking clock' to rescue the seer Sybil Rasia, yet regardless of their success, Sybil begins this adventure with the party, and even manages to bear the plot-significant object from The Artifact if, for some reason, the party either hasn't played the adventure or has somehow misplaced the MacGuffin.

The party is informed that the adventure's antagonist is on the way to deliver the final piece of the main villain's plan to her, yet has no way to impact this -- by the time the party mounts up and rides to the rescue, Omou (the antagonist) had already made his delivery and been rejected by the object of his own obsession, leading him to once again subject the poor, hapless citizens of Orasnou to dark doom. If it seems like 'endanger the citizens of Orasnou' is an overdone trope by the thirteenth adventure in the series, well, your eyes don't lie to you -- of the five Season Four adventures largely set in or involving Orasnou, four of them (including this one) feature an assault on the village that the PCs must thwart. Only the very first module, The Beast, doesn't include a direct threat to the village.

Another problem with the module is its attempt to raise the stakes by attempting to convince the DM to use 'Breathless Pacing', by which the module designer means 'don't let the PCs take even a short rest if you can help it'. In general, an adventure where short-rest focused classes like warlock and fighter are not necessarily advantaged over long-rest focused classes is a good thing every so often to serve as a change-of-pace, but this adventure doubles down on the challenge by adding arbitrary damage between encounters and basically seems to want to drain the PCs of all their useful powers before finally confronting them with the main antagonist of the piece -- who is honestly powerful enough to deal with a nearly fully-rested party if run intelligently.

A competent adventure, yet despite its attempts to provoke bigger emotions (one section is actually titled "The Last Stand of the Greenhall Elves"), it simply comes across as tired and waiting for the end.

The Raven is a workable, workmanlike adventure, featuring a search-and-rescue mission with a 'hunters become the hunted' wrinkle thrown in early to change up the pace.

Unfortunately, a number of odd decisions made in designing this adventure rob it of much of its impact. For example, the party begins with the knowledge of a 'ticking clock' that they have to outrace to get to their objective, yet only parties who completely ignore the clock will likely ever be impacted by it, as the adventure actually provides more than sufficient time for even a cautious party to reach their objective in time. (A DM can be forgiven for not realizing this sooner, as the travel time table that would point this out is referenced but not included in the adventure itself.) A treasure award given by the main quest giver is done in such a way as to be a meaningless detail. Most disappointing is the return of significant editing issues that seemed resolved in the previous modules -- one such is that the lycanthropes encounteres in this adventure can apparently transmit their curse via the weapons they wield rather than through a rabid bite as it per usual. Another is the lack of the travel time table noted above.

The adventure has the occasional interesting wrinkle that, if handled by a talented DM would make the adventure more than a simple jog across hostile terrain, but these wrinkles are too few and far between to rescue the module itself from disappointment.

There are a lot of things about this module that simply seem 'wrong'. Start with the bad guys, another round of orcs and yuan-ti in an environment where both creatures are unfortunately out of place. (It's particularly jarring here, since the McGuffin of the adventure could just as easily have been grabbed by a tribe of werewolves, which would be perfectly in keeping with a Ravenloft sensibility as well as an appropriate challenge for tier 2 characters.) Add that the adventure is highly modular, seemingly to allow for maximal replayability, in an adventuring season where the mechanics of the campaign (specifically the 'trapped in Barovia' mechanic) discourage replay. Finish with the realization that there are no site maps in this adventure, and few maps of any kind other than simple dungeon corridors for use in the final section of the adventure; if you're normally a 'maps and minis' DM, this is a good module to use to claim your 'Off the Grid' DM Quest by going with a 'theater of the mind' approach instead.

The party's goal does have a role to play in the overarching Season Four storyline, but the party won't learn what that is until the next module, so this adventure mainly succeeds or fails on its own story. And the adventure is so structurally designed that it's hard for any but a truly excellent narrative DM to really imbue the random tables and flowchart-style encounter trees with a solid sense of story. "The Donjon" is thus an unwittingly fitting title for this adventure, where the PCs must spend two hours marking time and waiting for a more interesting adventure coming later.

This adventure takes a number of risks and pulls most of them off -- it starts out looking like a traditional dungeon crawl, for instance, complete with a very controversial encounter with a creature capable of removing PCs from the campaign permanently, then quickly shifts gears into a murder mystery before concluding with the traditional big fight.

The problem with the adventure is that the reasons why the adventurers are here don't make any sense -- why would the campaign's villain order her catspaw to bring the PCs here where they can recover the only thing capable of defeating her plan? Or if, conversely, the catspaw brought the PCs here of his own accord to try to gain leverage over his mistress, why attack the PCs rather than simply claim the object and quietly return to Orasnou? These flaws provide a jarring counterpoint to an otherwise interesting adventure, and make the adventure less interesting in retrospect than it will be during play. It's still worth playing, just be ready to deal with disappointment if your players have more than a minimal interest in the overall plot of Season Four.

A solid, atmospheric module from a veteran Organized Play adventure writer. The module even avoids the now-traditional editing problems that seem to plague AL modules in general and Season Four in particular.

It's a two hour module that can run much longer if the DM and players 'get into' the setting (a house and family with a secret a la Fall of the House of Usher or similar Gothic tales), and it leaves the players making hard decisions, both in combat and out of it.

The only real flaw in the adventure is that it is so self-contained that it has minimal connections (and basically no impact) on the overarching Season Four storyline; if it were a lesser module, it could be skipped without hurting the players' understanding of the main metaplot at all. As it stands, though, this module is one of the reasons to run Season Four; don't skip it!

This adventure has its moments, particularly in the portrayal of the sympathetic NPC Luca Barbu, whom the PCs will likely befriend early and end up defending against an incensed mob of misled villagers.

There are two significant flaws, as I see them. First, the actual plot of the adventure is scattered throughout a number of different pages, so a DM trying to run this adventure without having spent significant prep time will likely lose the thread of the story more than once and may even spoil the ending before the group is even half-way through the module. A good DM who pays attention to module prep should be able to work around this, though.

Second, the choice of the permanent magic item for this adventure is so much more powerful than the other items selected for this season that it opens up the possibility of unscrupulous players simply going into Barovia, playing this one module for the item, then using the 'Barexit' options published after Season Four, escape to abuse the loot in other AL modules.

On the whole, it's a memorable module, though there are moments where it follows the general issue with most Season Four modules and puts a number of events 'on rails' so the PCs can't possibly screw them up.

An incoherent mess of a plot, with idiotic NPCs and events that contradict what's come before, including in this very module. A detailed description would require massive spoilers, but a few highlights:

• The main villain appears intended to be a call-back to a classic Ravenloft villain (the Gentleman Caller), yet his write-up in the adventure lacks the sort of abilities that would justify the things he is said to accomplish both before and during the adventure.
• The main obstacle in the adventure (though, tellingly, it's only an obstacle for the PCs, not the villain) are a group of yuan-ti and their orc slaves, which are not at all suited for the Ravenloft setting -- orcs simply don't exist in Ravenloft, while yuan-ti don't fit the Barovian 'Gothic Transylvania' style of monster. (The inclusion of yuan-ti was apparently intended to foreshadow their appearance in Season Five's AL modules, but then the modules were moved from the Moonsea to the Sword Coast, rendering the foreshadowing pointless.)
• Ultimately, your players will be disappointed, either because they think the plot they foiled was a red herring all along, or because their 'success' couldn't prevent the actual villain of the piece from achieving his own goal. The players' actions through this adventure are ultimately meaningless, as they save no one and prevent nothing significant from happening.

The weird thing is that the plot is so heavily on rails and the outcome so ironclad that, even if a player has played the adventure before or read the entire text beforehand, there's nothing they can do to change the outcome of the adventure, and almost nothing they can do to change even their own path through it. A frustrating, pointless slog.

This is a four-hour adventure that really could have been a two-hour adventure, given that many of the early encounters are not really thematically related to the key encounter (with Jeny Greenteeth in part 2) and quest (putting the titular Ghost to rest in part 3).

With that said, it's a solid adventure for those who prefer a good amount of 'fighty-fighty' in their AL experience, while still providing opportunities for those who prefer to put 'role' rather than 'roll' in front of their '-play'. There are a few flaws (the adventure suggests if the PCs don't succeed at Jeny's quest, there will be repercussions, but none ever arise, for example), but they don't detract enough to negatively impact the experience.