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I've been reading through KotS over the last few days when I have some spare time, and wanted to share my thoughts about it. We plan on playing it on Monday night, so the following doesn't benefit from an actual playtest.

Warning: here there be spoilers.

For those who haven't seen it, the offering includes some maps, a player's booklet, and a DM's booklet. The player's booklet contains stuff players need to know and the five sample characters. The DM's booklet contains stuff the DM needs to know and the adventure itself.

First off, a usability detail: if you get it, do yourself a favor and rebind it. Our local game store had a store copy for people to browse, and within the day, it was shot. While the whole offering is shod in a card stock binder, the booklets themselves are not, and are printed on lightweight paper. The print quality is nice, but this thing does not hold up well under any use. For my part, I removed the staples, used a blade to cut the folded sheets in half, three-hole-punched them, and put them in a three ring binder. I used one of those binders that allows you to slide a cover sheet into the front, and the KotS cover works just fine in there. It's much nicer, and you will probably be handing out the character sheets to your players anyway. (Why they bound them into the booklet, and yet didn't print the obligatory "permission granted to photocopy for personal use" line is beyond me.)

Anyway, on to the contents. The maps are nice, consisting of three double-sided encounter area maps, 21"x30". The maps are for a dig site, two ruined temple interiors, cave entrance, a roadside, and a graveyard. Of these, the most repurposeable are the latter three. One of the temple interiors, in particular, contains distinctive imagery and layout to make it really only appropriate for this adventure.

One down side to the maps is that one of them requires half the map to be hidden for part of the adventure, but then the other half is revealed. Of course, the easy way to hide half the map is to fold it. But then, what do you do when you need to reveal the other half if you have your miniatures all in place on the first half? The reveal is nice in concept, but there's really no good way to lay the map down during play without tipping your hand or making a headache for the reveal.

You should also be aware, although I'm not sure it's really a down side, that the provided maps cover only a fraction of the encounter areas for the adventure. You will probably want a battle mat or some dungeon tiles. If you go with the dungeon tiles, the Dire Tombs and the Lost Caverns of the Underdark sets should cover you, but you'll still need to fabricate some custom counters for things like ladders and such.

Also, the maps are heavily creased, for obvious reasons, so you might consider a sheet of plexiglass to put over the maps when you play.

The player booklet is straightforward and clear, for the most part, and does a good, concise job of describing the core D&D rules that the players need to know (mod character creation). That it all fits in five and a half pages is, I think, a testament to the streamlined and simplified nature of 4th edition. Obviously, there are more details and nuance that will be available in the core rulebooks, but it looks playable from what is provided.

The rules from the player booklet are essentially duplicated in the DM's booklet, but with more detail for adjudicating situations. There are a few confusing details here and there. As mentioned in other threads, "burst" and "blast" are distinct effects, but are close enough and nonintuitive enough for them to not be meaningful labels, I think. Some minor omissions will probably cause other troubles, too, such as how to handle someone getting up from being prone. But overall, there's enough there, I think, to allow any experienced DM to run the adventure.

However, the book is clearly written to accommodate novice players and DM's. From my reading, I'm not sure there's enough there to really help someone new to the game to effectively play the adventure, but it is certainly a valiant effort. More than just an overview of new rules and the adventure proper, the DM's booklet contains a fair amount of advice-giving aimed at the would-be DM. While much of it will be nothing new to experienced DM's, it was all good advice, and I'm encouraged to see that there is an explicit effort to address the quality of storytelling in 4e products (or perhaps it will only be in this introductory module).

Now, what about the adventure itself?

Well, I have to say that if this adventure didn't have the distinction of being a "sneak peek" of fourth edition, I probably would take a pass on it. But by the same token, I imagine the fact that it is intended to be a "sneak peek" imposed some design decisions, too, so perhaps I should cut the design some slack.

The first encounter is a stand-up fight against kobolds, nothing too fancy. If this were a 3e adventure, I couldn't' think of a duller encounter. In this context, however, it is good, since almost everyone will need something like this to get the basics of the new combat flow down. It's actually a smart move.

I think this will also help drive home the new paradigm of fourth edition. Fighting kobolds is probably the least dangerous thing you can do in 3e (or 2e or 1e) that still counts as combat, but it's clear from reading over the statistics that it would be easy to underestimate kobolds in 4e. Players who smirk upon seeing kobolds will be the most stunned, I think.

But beyond the skirmish encounters, the adventure itself feels a little weak to me. The plot is quite linear and bland, the NPC characters read as being fairly shallow, and the "read aloud" text seems to lack a sense of drama. Given all the talk about skill challenges, I expected there to be more compelling things happening between the players and the NPC's. And when there are already detractors of 4e saying that it's "all about combat," I would have expected an attempt to ensure that there's some deep plot in the first showcase adventure.

But truly, my guess is that this won't matter much in the long run, for as much as the plot is rote dungeon delving punctuated by trips to the town tavern, the combat encounters look like they'll shine. There's interesting stuff happening at a tactical level - something new and interesting in each encounter. If the plot fades into the background a bit and largely acts as a driver to move the party to the next encounter, well, that might be okay. It certainly reads like a first edition adventure, so people bemoaning the idea that "it won't feel like D&D" should be placated. I was just hoping for something a little more innovative on the story side to go along with the innovation on the game rules side.