Ths is exactly what I'd been wanting for my Dungeon World games: a well thought-out system allowing players to create highly customized characters without destroying the game's simplicity. Even beyond the included options, it provides a framework on which to hang new material of my own.

Casual players will probably be overwhelmed by the volume of options, so it's best suited for use by GMs or players who enjoy character creation as a its own sort of mini-game, but if you're one of those, it will also assist you in building up a library of custom playbooks to hand off to players who just want to sit down at the table and start gaming.

The adventure is not without merits, but I'm going to have to do a lot of work and answer a lot of questions for myself before I'll feel like I can use it, and my goal in buying an Adventurers League module was to have something plug-and-play that I could easily run as a pick-up game outside my normal campaign.

Mystery adventures are hard to write well, plot-driven adventures that don't railroad are hard to write well, and it's been a long time since I've bought any adventure module simply because I always find them riddled with elements I find illogical or otherwise unusable. I spend more time revising than I'd have spent creating from scratch. But if I'm going to run pick-up games, I want at least the continuity allowed by Adventurers League, and Adventurers League demands the use of official adventures. Consequently, this feels like a bit of an extortion situation, and I'm not sure I can actually evaluate the adventure well relative to the other offerings currently out there.

That said, I would like any plot-driven adventure to start with an overview of the major players in the scenario, their motivations, and how they relate to each other. This one doesn't. The background material it starts with doesn't really address the elements of the mystery that's about to unfold. I had to wade through the material and a bunch of strange names and details in order to get any idea of what's happening why.

Delivery of the information aside, there's still a problem in that the adventure consists of a handful of inevitable set-pieces surrounding one section that looks like it's the meat of the adventure, where players will get to impact the story -- the investigation. On analysis, the investigation is only there to give role-playing opportunities and to fill them in on the details of the story unfolding around them. Ultimately, an event the players did nothing to trigger serves as the lure into a climactic scene meant to play out the same way regardless of what's gone before.

I've seen worse. I've seen much worse. Still, I was hoping for better.