The beginning was kind of sudden. It's probably worth role playing out the villagers concern Benedek and Sari and having them motivate the characters to go out looking for them. Sari is an interesting NPC but the business with the gloves never seemed to make sense to me. The encounters in the Glumpen swamp were entertaining. They required creativity and cooperation from the characters to resolve. It was almost a D&D version of the leaders reaction course. Sneaking into the excavation camp and convincing the orcs to rebel worked well for my players. The Nagas were fun and the final boss fight was great with cool final role playing.

TL;DR: It was... okay. Not bad, but there wasn't anything particularly memorable either.

The major issue I have with the module is that most of the story development happened behind the scenes (AKA written in the "Adventure Background"), and many of those things were hinting towards something larger happening. Whilst the DM has full access to those information, the players had very few ways to decipher what exactly is going on.

The most interesting bit of story available for the players to find out was between the Visitor, the love triangle, and the tragedy that occured at the marriage. And it wouldn't have been hard to drop enough clues for the players to figure out the whole story, or at least have the adventure start in Orașnou, so they can at least learn about the young couple, the love-blinded brother, and the Visitor. As it stands, it felt like they were just thrown inot the dark.

I thought that this inclusion in the curse of Strahd modules lacked the spooky factor. The whole white glove thing was a little much for the players and they lost interest really quickly. However they really enjoyed fighting yuan ti since they had not encountered intellegant beings other then strahd so far in barovia! 2/5

This was my first game running a Tier 2 adventure and I found a little confusing at times. The beginning is good as it immediately puts the characters at the shrine, though I found it odd when the the monsters said "We're enemies". Since fire is more common than acid, I suggest switching their regeneration to be fine in fire, instead of acid. In my adventure, a swashbuckler had a rapier of wounding, making the encounter faster as it practically shut off the trait. From after the enounter to the end of Part 2, Sari is as useful as the ghost in the Marrionette. She is great for pushing the story along. Part 2 can be skipped if short on time, but if possible, run at least the first per the module. It can provide some comedic fun in this sad setting. In the encounter outside the temple, play the monsters as if they are smart (e.g. dropping prone to creature disadvantage on range attack rolls and spread out to reduce/eliminate the chance of fireballs). If you knock out a player and are able to charm another, have the second carry the first into the temple as a sacrifice. This creates urgency, forces them into the temple ASAP, and takes it into a rescue mission on top of surviving. The Naga Bones encounter can be skippeed if pressed for time. Though if possible, you can run it and instead of combat happening, 2 Bestow Curses and 2 Lightning Bolts can go off as if they were traps if the party fails their check. The last encounter is interesting as the Visitor's stats show that he doesn't fly dispite his identity. I defintely suggest any DM to use the Visitor's Fog Cloud ASAP to make the rescue more difficult. I also found this magic item an odd choice. Since he has a spellbook, it would make more sense for it be either be something that increases this spells potency (e.g. wand) or allow him (or his minions) to have blindsight. Overall, a good adventure, but could use improvements.

This module was okay. The thematic element of the yuan-ti felt out of place, but the storyline itself had some Barovian feel to it. As a player, I was very confused but in the end got it. It has a lot of combats, but not a lot of roleplay opportunity for a very complex plot. Overall, it was okay.

You can make this module work if you can invest time into creating believable maps or are good at describing the environment of Barovia and filling the characters in who may be playing Season 4 for the first time, that indeed Barovian mists are slowly swallowing parts of Faerun into the Demiplane of Dread. Convey this plot narrative, and you should be okay to whittle through the romantic thriller storyline which works when over simplified, and the encounters that are fairly straight forward.

I ran the module on Roll20 and added some terrain effects to the maps to give a good impression of a harrowing swamp land. I used purchased marketplace content from Gabriel Pickard "swamps assets" and generally this was ample to convey a feeling of dispair. However, creepy music on the jukebox helps.

Fun story, and good encounters.

Recommend Purchase: Yes. XP Range: 2,625-3,500

The overall story woven between all fourteen modules is called 'Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts' and is relatively strong overall, but suffers for a couple reasons. The final module probably wasn't written at the time the first was released, so they couldn't or didn't want to spill some of the meta information that DMs would have LOVED to have. In the early modules things would occur 'deus ex machina' and even the DM wouldn't have a clue as to why.

If you're planning on running these, i HIGHLY recommend buying the bundle, reading the DDAL04-14 (The Dark Lord) Adventure Overview on pages 7-8 to see where everthing is heading ... and then reading each module's Overview in turn before running everything. This will help you greatly.

If you start with the first module you'll have enough XP to level up, stay within the module tiers and make it all the way to the 14th module. Afterwards you could always play a few chapters of the Curse of Strahd Harcover and then leave Barovia behind.

Before running any Season 4 module, you should download the following content:

• dndadventurersleague.org/barexit-escaping-the-mists-of-barovia/
• dndadventurersleague.org/curse-of-strahd-backgrounds/
• DMSGUILD: DDAL04 Expanded Dark Gifts Table [OPTIONAL CONTENT]

Season 4 initially couldn't leave the Demiplane of Dread until the very end, but the Admins later introduced the 'Barexit' mechanic.

This season is one of those with so many up and downs... sadly this is definitely one of the downs for me and my play group.

The plot of the adventure is confusing and extremely hard to follow.

I will give it a slightly better rating for its ability to create a slightly horror and mystery feeling for the Season 4 ambience but... most of the mystery came from the fact that the mod was confusing.

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 was just sort of WTF? I even had the chance to playtest this, our group submitted our feedback saying it was off, and nothing was fixed. It just doesn't fit with the rest of the season, if you got rid of the Innocent and the Raven, you would have a much better flow to the overall storyline, When I ran season 4, I almost skipped this one, but I was after that season completion, so I ran it anyway. Avoid if possible.

I am not sure how I feel about this one, there are Yuan-ti here, the ghost of a troll from Season 1, a powerful NPC that is given little to no introduction other than the title "Visitor". I honestly got lost here. There were too many random parts stitched together, and the confusing typos from the earlier versions of this pdf did not help anything.

Overall this could be an interesting adventure, but you would need to put a bit of time and foreshadowing from other adventures ahead of time!

The Innocent is an adventure that is part of the Curse of Strahd storyline and is set in Ravenloft. It does give off the mystery and horror feel however I won't recommend you to play this is if you are not familiar with the story since the innocent is actually kind of like the middle part of the storyline. The combat encounters aren't that bad and the final combat with the evil boss has some mechanics that may make the players think a bit before rushing in. Newer players may find the last combat a bit hard especially if the DM running the module uses strategy very well. Overall for me this is an average adventure for me.

Despite the confusing start, once it got going the combat was at least good. Plot made no sense, the glove thing was weird and suddenly forgotten after part 1.

DDAL04-07 The Innocent is the seventh adventure for Season 4, which is also titled "Part Four of Misty Fortunes and Absent Hearts". This review does contain some spoilers, so please do not read below if you haven't played the adventure. The reviewer has played and run the adventure.

The Innocent is the first adventure of levels 5th - 10th offered for Season 4. This adventure has a plot is at times confusing ... and if FAR from fascinating. While playing this adventure I got the feeling that the DM was not happy with what she was reading, and after running it I know exactly why. While there are one or two Ravenloft-ish elements and individual good encounters, this module and it's slew of evil humanoids does not belong in the Domain of Dread. You could easily move it back to the Forgotten Realms and it would make much more sense in some respects.

The Plot I had to read the first few pages of this adventure several times to understand what was going on, mostly because I could not wrap my brain around how confusing it was. The plot focuses on the "second obsession", which is just an awful choice and for me was very NOT Ravenloft. In addition, the appearance of a mysterious "Visitor" to rationalize the bad plot was also confusing and just poor writing and editing. I also attribute this to the whole "Obsessions" plot device of Season 4, which I'm guessing few if any authors (and nearly 100% of DM) were/are aware of what the heck is actually going on. Again, a plot overview of this season with specific as to what the heck is happening might help, but is missing again. Very unfortunate.

Humanoids My other, and larger, complaint with this adventure is it does not feel like Ravenloft due to all the monstrous evil humanoids. Trolls, yuan-ti, and orcs lead the charge here, and I can't disagree more. Sure, the original Ravenloft may have had a few of these (mostly due to the fact it was larger and more flushed out), but the new CURSE OF STRAHD adventure book has no mention of ANY of these creatures. Why do this? Likely because it's a quick easy thing to do than come up with a better plot involving humans and/or undead, or the editors/Season planners are already out of ideas seven adventures into the season.

Winter? I thought the timeline in Barovia was ... winter? It even says it is the dark and weary winter on page 6 of every Season 4 module.The Innocent starts out in a mucky swamp during a thunderstorm with no explanation or plot devices. I've been through thunderstorms in winter, so why not use that as a plot device? Apparently the writer and editors don't care, forgot, or aren't good enough to mold this into the plot somehow.

Encounters Again, there were good and bad encounters, if you look at the adventure in a general sense. When applied to Ravenloft, it is a much larger failure. Examples are:

Swamp: Once again, every non-random encounter is 2-3 days apart. That is a heck of a lot of traveling across the lands of Barovia that from a terrain perspective is not really viable.

Trolls: In addition to not belonging in Ravenloft, the use of trolls is written extremely poorly. The name of the encounter is "You No Be Here!", and the only dialogue from the trolls is: “We’re enemies,” one of them growls in a gravelly voice. I just love trolls that can suddenly use contractions and the author can't write encounter titles with them ... don't you?

The Ghost: One of the better parts of this adventure is the use of the ghost Sari. One of the few Ravenloft-ish parts of the adventure, and it works well to move the party along.

Vardo: The party comes across a man in a sunken vardo. OK, not bad, until you read on. There is no mention of how the vardo got there, no mention of horses that pulled it, and the mechanics on how to rescue the Vistani terrible need to be streamlined. After failing a couple of rolls and saves, my players left him in the mud. When I played this adventure, the DM cut is out entirely.

Skull: Best encounter of the adventure ... but ... last time I checked there are no dragons in Ravenloft. However, this can be overlooked if just the skull was pulled in or maybe was an old dracolich, but that is never discussed. Still, an original encounter that was at least not as bad as the previous one. This is also listed as optional, which is a shame since the vardo one should have been.

Finale: (w/o too many spoilers) By the time I was done reading (and running) the final encounter, I was bored with this event and just wanted it to be over due to the skewing towards evil humanoids. There was no reason it could not have been humans and undead or anything more Ravenloft, which would have made more sense than orcs and yuan-ti. And the whole "mysterious Visitor" angle also had me bored by the end since it seemed like a cop-out to make a poorly written plot work.

Magic Item Finally ... a decent magic item! And, the party actually has to work for it by killing the adventure's "bad guy". I'm surprised the AL editors didn't dip it in blood first, or have permanent maggots crawling all over it to make it always disgusting - which has been the norm to date. This item and the googles from 4-4 are so far the best items to date, and actually useful going forward.

Overall I wish I could give this adventure 1 1/2 stars, but we'll bump it to 2-stars just for the decent magic item and the skull encounter. If this was a straight-up FR adventure with a few different plot twists it would have been at least 3-stars. Either the author did a bad job at writing a Ravenloft adventure, the staff has poor ideas they send to their writers, or the editors did a terrible job at hacking it into a Ravenloft scenario. Once again a confusing and poorly written plot slithers past the AL editors out to an already disappointed fan base. Not very fascinating at all.

A fascinating adventure, although not without flaw. Full review on merricb.com