4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

http://www.critical-hits.com/2008/05/20/session-report-keep-on-the-shadowfell/

This deals with the first 2 battles of KotS, just thought that you all might be insterested. 

The overall impression is glowing, and is really killing me because I am trying to decide whether to pick up KotS or not, as I hear it is a good adventure, but that the production quality is lacking.

From what I’ve read the production quality is a bit hit or miss.  Some copies are smudging fairly easily, while others are standing up to use as one would expect.  If you can, open the product in the store and see if it smudges before you buy it.

Good idea, I might goto my FLGS and see if an acquaitence of mine is working there, she would probably let me try it out.

I should expect that most stores would let you test it out if you explained it to them first.  As I understand it, it’s fairly easy for a store to get credit for or return a damaged product to the publisher.

And even if it isn’t, if a bunch of distributers complain about a shoddy product because it’s hurting sales, it will have much more effect on the publisher than if a bunch of consumers who have already bought the product complain.

On a plus side the packaging and the way the material is contained is really good.  Reminded me a bit of the 2e boxed sets but more pro.  It comes in a folder that has the resources divided into seperate booklets for easy passing around and the battlemats/encounter maps are top notch.  If this is where they begin with adventure layout I might finally buy some of them, if only for the mats and pics.

I plan on picking up a copy as soon as I can convince my group to give it a try.  I’m not worried at all about the production values, since the product will almost certainly be used only once, and I’ll probably write all over it anyways.

I picked a copy up on Tuesday and am running it tonight with my gaming group, many of which have not looked at much of the 4th edition rules. 

for those interested, as well, WotC also created a sixth character for KotS - a Tiefling Warlord. Our party has six players, so that worked out well for us, but it also gives people that want to run the campaign another character to work with - as well as trying out the new player race and class.

I also love that adding the extra character takes NOTHING as far as scaling.  “what, another first level PC?  ok, add 100 XP to the encounter and we’re on our way...”

edit: as far as the quality, my copy has been good so far - no issues and i’ve read through it a number of times as well as had many people looking over the character sheets.