This adventure is packed full of content. It's a magical amusement ride, and one of the more believable wizard tower adventures in the AL library.

A few rooms require a fair bit of imagination to 'see' and most DM's will have to fill in the descriptive blanks, but I don't consider that a mark against it--if anything, the breadth of scenes, themes, and imagery was a treat I was grateful to experience.

Don't sleep on this adventure, it's one of the greats.

It's been thoroughly discussed here, but Fire, Ash, and Ruin, as-premiered, falls flat on its face as a Tier 3 mod due to total lack of balance in the encounters.

The adventure states it is balanced for five level thirteen adventurers, yet throws a multitude of encounters at the party that do not even register on the encounter-difficulty-by-CR scale. Like, not even "Easy"--they should be nonexistent. This results in confusion on the parts of the players and the adventure rapidly devolves into a slogfest.

With heavy modification of the encounters I was able to present a reasonable number of encounters that each challenged the party to some degree, though I left the final encounter unmodified and, even having missed one of the earlier objectives, it ended up being a total cakewalk.

Were I going to run this again I'd end up combining the encounters even further into just three or four and tripling or even quintupling their CR's. I might also dramatically reduce the impact of the earlier objectives on the final fight. I feel that, as-written, a party a whole tier lower (five level 7's) would have little to no trouble completing this mod, which makes it a poor publication in my book.

Great themes and a fully fleshed-out setting redeem the mod for two stars. Typos in the descriptions are common, but you can describe the scenes in your own words--they're not tough to imagine.

While these mods function well as an introduction to Port Nyanzaru's faction representatives and the city itself, some of the adventure lines suffer from poor descriptions that I found myself needing to smooth out or even rewrite altogether.

Run as a linear series of adventures, this module tells a fascinating story full of suspense and intrigue. Run separately, most of the adventures function as short and sweet excursions, though a couple of them do leave the party wondering "ok, but why do we care?" due to lack of greater context. The conclusion is great, and with a little bit of DM modification the storyline can flow very smoothly.

They do tend to run long, but that's no fault of 7-01.

A Thousand Tiny Deaths is a very flexible mod, with potential to be a pointed welcome to dungeon delves for newer players or a monstrously oppressive needle-filled challenge for the more deserving.

I do find that, run strictly as-written, character deaths are very likely without a clever idea on how to address the titular environmental hazard. Most of my groups do come up with a creative way to avoid said hazard, however, which lets the dungeon play out as a smooth, interesting, and fun series of encounters culminating in a boss fight with great potential for roleplay, hilarity, and tension.

Definitely a big fan, though some DM intervention is required to keep it fun for new players.

There's a lot to love here, and I thoroughly enjoyed running this mod. Each segment of the adventure plays out uniquely and flavorfully, and it does a good job presenting the adventurers with choices--and rewarding them for making the "right" ones!

Admittedly, having there be such a rigid definition of "right" and "wrong" set forth by the author eliminates a lot of player/DM agency, but it's internally consistent.

My main criticism of this mod is that it doesn't play as a mod--it plays as part one of a two-part adventure. While ROZK-1 stands alone just fine, ROZK-2 ends in a cliffhanger that doesn't really allow for a satisfying experience without ROZK-3. At the convention I ran this at, we didn't have part three scheduled, and all of my players went away from the table vocally disappointed about that.

That said, if you plan to run this and its sequel together, it's a fantastic adventure--definitely one of the best put-together mods I've had the pleasure of running.

Just a note, there are few, if any, typos in the adventure material. If you find a large congregation of typos, especially in, say, a player handout, it's intentional and has meaning. It's vital that you tell your players that and not pass it off as "bad editing".

I thoroughly enjoyed running this adventure--it had a well-developed cast of characters with helpful background information that I made good use of whenever a player wanted to investigate or ask questions beyond the obvious. The opening sequence is great, the plot has its fair share of complexity, and all else is done to high level of polish--few typos, if any, and great descriptions that paint a clear picture.