Module Review: Murder in Baldur's Gate

Module Review: Murder in Baldur's Gate!

This module set came with a removable outer cover, 2 booklets (Adventure Book and Campaign Guide), and a really nice DM screen customized for the adventure.

Fronts:

Backs:

Murder in Baldur's Gate came out as one of the transition modules during the shift from the D&D Next Playtest into the official release of 5E, thus the labeling that it had stats for 3E, 4E, and for D&D Next (thus the plot is meant to take place during The Sundering time period in the Forgotten Realms):

I wish they still made modules this way. The 5E hardbound books are nice, but I prefer having the nice set of smaller booklets and the custom DM screen as an inherent part of the purchase (and not something you need to buy separately). Even though I don't hide my dice rolls from my players and thus I don't need a DM screen, these are nice because they have lots of quick charts/maps with useful info. For example:

Just the fact that I wanted to spend much of my review showing the product says how much I liked this style of module. I suppose I should at least mention the adventure and the characters. Even though the product is labeled for levels 1-3, it's got a lot of political roleplay and potential combat so I would suggest that it really could work for anywhere in 1-6 and still come across as a good fit for a party. In fact, with simple combat modifications the roleplay-heaviness of this adventure really means a good DM could plop it down at any point in a campaign.

I enjoyed DMing this one and my players really enjoyed playing through the module. I will say that I noticed the correlation with the plot in this one and the real life history of Guy Fawkes in England so I purposely had us play the module on the 5th of November ("Remember, remember, the 5th of November..." became "Remember, remember the 5th of Uktar...").

Overall I give the module a rating of 7 out of 10 because it has interesting NPCs and fun encounters, but overall there really was too much going on for the amount of time my players wanted to spend dealing with Baldur's Gate at the time (though perhaps that was my fault for plopping this adventure down when my players visited the city in the middle of another campaign).