Having picked this up, I can say that it has a lot of features that I really like for an introductory adventure. It starts off with a very solemn tone, and begins more with a focus on survival than traditional heroics which is a nice change from some others that thrust you into the thick of battle. Instead, you end up needing to battle the environment as much as any monster, leading you into a solid travel segment.

The art and detail on the trip to your destination is quite nice for setting the scene, and the adventure does a good job of playing up the shift in tone between sections, allowing the players to immerse themselves in the setting as they travel along, giving a very tense atmosphere until the end of the book.

A few things that I didn't like were a very small amount of female NPCs included, as well as what feels like an excessive amount of flavor text, although to be fair it's quite easy to cut it down to what you need for your specific game. There's also a bit of rules looseness that can aggravate the more strict of players, and the adventure does have a clear set of rails after a point, even if there are moments where those rails are expertly hidden. There's also a bit of a mechanical drag in the later part of the book, hammering weakness into the party which can get frustrating, but the book itself has steps for how to mitigate this.

The amount of effort that goes into detailing the NPCs and setting up the world offsets this though to the point where it's still a very nice journey to take a part on, and the companion book to this does such a great job of setting up the city that it's hard not to get a sense of grand adventure coming in later installments.

There's also a lot of personality from the writer that you can sense in this (sometimes a touch too much), but overall it helps make the NPCs and setting pop in a way that will help your party members remember important facts, making this a solid starting point for what I hope to be a full adventure path!