I ran this adventure for a small group of lvl 10 characters, through which they've level´d up to lvl 15.

This is a marvelous masterpiece, it kept us entertained for almost a full year. Putting my lvl 10 players into it was daunting at first, but it just lifted the daunting to a whole other level, where every encounter right from the start could end up deadly. At first I scaled down the monster a little bit, but as they've leveld up I realized that the later encounters at higher level actually seemed a bit to easy so actually I gave the later monster much more health to start with.

Pros: The whole module is very well written, with many good character descriptions, scenery and also handouts you can easily prepare as physical objects such as the Hawthorne Diaries. The lore is consistent and just described enough that you can easily expand upon it and flesh it out in your own kind of way, and it creates a nice feeling of dread for all characters. It also fulfills all important characteristics of a classical realm of Ravenloft, with the Dark Lord pulling all strings, while he himself is hidden and only revealed in the later stages of the game, so it creates a nice mystery for players with lots of hints until he is finally revealed. There are nice depictions of certain monsters and characters in the pdf, but it is mostly black-and white, which fits the theme however perfectly. The monster depictions themselves are just shadows, which again I think is a nice way of letting everyones imagination wander. And there are a LOT of interesting monster concepts, with personalities included as well. A schizophrenic Beholder? Hell yeah! There are enough to trigger about 8-9 creepy interesting encounters which can lead to epic boss fights. It also introduces some nice mechanics with the sight, room keys and the general unstableness of the city, so two visits to the same area will never be the same.

Some advice I would give on running this adventure: There are a lot of ways the clock can count forward, and while the adventure states you should not give the players the option to turn it back, I actually did - I felt the players would never experience a lot of the content otherwise, and they and me liked the whole setting so much, that I actually built out certain areas from the source material to give them more to explore and more horrors to find. You may then approach a similar situation where the players will be close to the end, but you can see the time will just run out one or two hours to early. I came up with the idea of a 'partial' sacrifice, which will turn back the time ticking for just one hour for a great sacrifice (e.g. 80hp from a single player), which can increase per use quite drastically (2nd time 100hp). This has given them just enough time to explore a bit more and come up with a good plan on how to handle the situation, while penalizing them and still putting a hard time limit before a player will die from this.

Flaws: In my eyes there are only 2 big flaws which make running this adventure a bit hard:

1. • The undercity/ the sewers feel a bit let-off / underdeveloped, as there are no real places the player can visit except wandering around for how often they are referenced and how many entries there are. BUT there are a lot of really nice creature encounters and random tables to use for it, but again it feels wasteful because there is no real reason why the players ever should delve there. I solved this by placing the fetching mirror in the sewers, where Amelia has hidden it back where she found it - as she was uncovering the true intentions of the spider and feared it will destroy it, before venturing into the lake.
2. The end - this is a genuine true horror adventure with no real 'good' ending, as the hopelessness of the setting is absolute. This increases the dread even more, as the players realize they can't really save anyone and stop the cycle - there is a nice full page written about the dillemma. If all of your players hang to tight to their characters though, this will become a problem really fast and can cause lots of friction. If thats the case, It can feel like running a really nice train again a brick wall if you are strictly following the adventure. It can easily be solved though by giving them a third escape route via some mist talismans though. But maybe your players also show some creativeness and really great acting, and when the luck is on their side, then maybe they truly can end it.

One thing to consider: There are no battle maps included in this version, but I think its not necessary to run the adventure, as the whole land / roads is shifting anyway.

Definitely a VERY strong recommendation for everyone who likes to haunt their players, prepare some nice tabletop audio and get out the candles...