It is teeming with interesting NPCs, locations and plot hooks. The central location of this adventure - the Seven Pillared Hall - is a wonderfully flavourful underground marketplace/settlement. I'm really grousing for the sake of grousing, here. The poster map does contain one large battlemap for the most complex encounter location (thank goodness - if I were faced with building that out of tiles I'd just go home again!), and the reverse has several smaller maps for some of the more intricate locations. Would it have done any harm to try to match them to the tiles that WotC itself actually sells? Is a 5x7 room intrinsically better than a 4x8 room? Does it make a difference, other than the fact that we wouldn't have to fiddle around building rooms and corridors out of seven million teeny tiny tiles instead of a couple of big ones? We forgave the lack of tiles (yes, we own them all) in the case of bizarre, exotic dungeon features such as the aforementioned lake of blood, but some of the odd room sizes seemed to be put there just to annoy us. One of the familiar cries from my players was 'No, there's no such thing as a 13 x 7 dungeon tile!' or 'Lake of blood? No we don't have that one'.

There's only the one poster map, though (unlike the three in KotS) which was something of a disappointment, especially given that some of the set-piece encounters involve fairly intricate locations. The same format, with the same folder and booklets. I waited to write this review until we had played it, rather than merely read it, so as to be as fair as possible. Thunderspire, however, seems like a step up. The production values were great - the folder, the colour booklets, the poster maps, and the adventure certainly did its job competently. I'm not sure I can put my finger on it - the adventure just wasn't all that exciting, and it seemed a bit rushed.

Whilst my group enjoyed Keep on the Shadowfell, there was something about it that didn't quite work for us.

Using posterazor