Doom of Daggerdale

Very nice layouts; it just feels like there was no true ending.

not bad. Felt unfinished and needs improvement. Played through with a party of four. Some observations in no particular order of importance:

• NPC initiated coversations - the NPC apparently has trouble distinguishing the party leader and initiates conversation with every member of the party. this happened with virtually every NPC initiated dialogue encounter.
• Maps - nice layouts. A little large and lonely.
• Dagger Falls - for a town that has been recently occupied and oppressed by Zhentarim, the citizenry was strangely silent and largely unconcerned. What I mean is that the various NPCs ought to have something to say about it. Most NPC's had nothing to say. None ever mentioned Randal or the Constable or anything at all.
• Same thing with the "plague." For something that is afflicting so many townsfolk, an amazing number of the unafflicted have absolutely nothing to say about it!
• Zhent HQ - rather odd for an organziation of this kind to allow unknown persons to simply wander the halls unchallenged, poking their noses into everything.
• The dwarves have no dialogue or apparent reason to be where they are. Very strange. Silent dwarves are... creepy.
• Quests - except for the main quest, most others were found/initiated by "discovering" some area or circumstance. IE; no one "gave the quest," rather, we explored and then found out later (through dialogue) that things we had found could be turned in for quests rewards
• Quest Rewards - MAJOR BUG - just restart the reward giver conversation and they will keep on giving the reward. Repeatedly. Ad infinitum.
• most NPC's and important location had to be found by accident/exploring rather than being specifically noted or mentioned via conversation or other common means. Especially Loudon in the Red Rock. We did not explore in that direction early and had no clue who or where he was until after we completed the main task.
• no definitive ending. this was quite hilarious as there are several indications that the party should proceed to Shadowdale yet, as much as we searched and searched, we could find not way to actaully travel there.

As I said, Doom of Daggerdale was not a bad module. Maybe we did things "out of order." I really could not say. We had fun and the combats were mostly typical and balanced. It just felt unfinished and bit disjointed, as if the author expected and planned to add to it.

Six Stars - a few tweaks here and there, and some added polish would spice this adventure right up.
~

TL;DR -- A not bad, not good module that is a decent conversion of the PnP module whose name it bears. Most valuable to a live DM looking to base a campaign in Daggerdale.

The other two have summed up this module fairly well but I gave it a recent replay and thought I'd give it a vote.

Doom of Daggerdale (the PnP module) will always hold a special place for me among D&D modules. It was the first campaign I played in as a kid that had any semblance of a story. It led into an epic and long running campaign through the Dalelands and beyond. I subsequently ran the module the first time I ever DM'd and made all the mistakes a first time DM could make.

This adaptation is decent--nothing mind numbingly bad but certainly nothing special. I'll echo the points made before by saying that the areas were overly large which compounded the fact that the content is sparse. There were dozens of named NPCs who didn't have any dialog (one that stuck out the worst was when an innkeeper told me to speak to a female NPC in the area who did not have any dialog). 

The areas are fairly close in layout to their PnP equivalent. Noticeably absent is a certain wizard's assistant who was a star in our PnP sessions. There were some oddities with the antagonists prowling around town during the day (should've only appeared at night).

I may be wrong, but I honestly believe this module was used as the jumping off point for a DM'd campaign. It has the hallmarks: the 3 area town that could've been cut to 1, the aforementioned named NPCs who have no reason to be, the interiors that were not used at all but stocked with Zhents or placeables, and the anticlimax of an ending. This module would be a great starter for a live DM to work with. You could easily DM the handful of quests here and then add areas as needed.

The custom content for this module, while appreciated, has not aged particularly well. I haven't played an early NWN module in YEARS so I forgot how rough things were back then yet how exhilirating it was to see at the time. The Dagger Falls sign is worth the price of admission by itself. One aspect of this came from how the rural and city tilesets had been merged--which made my typical patch hak consisting of ProjectQ and Zwerkules' Facelifts look weird (the city tiles injected into the rural set or vice-versa kept the original textures which was jarring).

A very strange module with way too many transition points! Why have a transiton when you go through a gate, when you can see the area on the other side just fine? It was very hard to figure out what to do or where to go, just wandering around. Little in the way of fighting was to be found, even the Big Bad Guy you could not engage due to Good restrictions. Overall a disappointment, to me anyway.