Dungeons & Dragons: Shackles of Blood

Free adventures are always nice. Even if you don't like every part, there is usually something that can be taken and use. In the newest issue of Dragon+ Wizards of the Coast have given us a pdf of an adventure (second time in a row) called Shackles of Blood. I'm mainly aiming at Dungeon Masters here but since it's a free pdf and players may read this, I'll try to avoid spoilers.

Overall Structure

The adventure starts off a bit slow (you won't be slaying your way through armies of kobolds in this one) but provides many opportunities to role play. When the action does start rolling, it is centred around a set piece encounter that is actually pretty good. If you run this adventure, it will go by quick unless you pad it (though it probably isn't the easiest adventure to add to). It's not a very easy one to recycle either. It's also quite a bit more railroad-y than I would like. It ties into the issue 3 adventure.

Problems

This adventure has a few problems with it. I'll try to list them all below.

1. There is one place where it seems the counting is slightly off (page 14).
2. The race relations in the adventure as written are weird and takes some creativity to make sense if you a human in the party (I don't have a way I'm 100% happy with to fix this).
3. The difficulty stuff for this adventure is a bit wonky. You probably won't have much luck running this adventure with a full part of level 1's without giving extra experience or a level up.
4. Awarding experience at the end of part 1, regardless of how players accomplished the ending, makes the most sense to me (otherwise it makes less sense to me and one party member can cause the party to not get experience as written).

What Can Be Scavenged

The set piece encounter can quite easily be converted to new adventures or used as inspiration (it is very situational though). There is a character named Deriel that may give new Dungeon Masters ideas. The general idea and role of her character can be used to great effect but the way she is used is not very good in my opinion.

Overall Opinion

As an adventure, I'm not a fan though it's not like there is nothing here. At this point I'm convinced that a good Dungeon Master can make any adventure good, but this one will require quite a bit of work. What you can recycle from this is either situational (the set piece encounter which is pretty good) or is an idea that basically requires a rewrite for when you use it. If you are in a pinch and have to run this adventure, address those problems and carefully think about it and you may be able to save this. If you like the idea and want to save it, I'm sure you can but it won't be as easy as reading it and running it. The only case where you could just read it and run it is if your party has no human characters, is 5 level 3 characters and acts exactly as predicted in part 1 (which you can't predict ahead of time).