Quote from: Voros;996753Got my copy yesterday. Probably the strongest old school or OSR influenced WoTC release so far. I've heard the ToH comparisons but Dwellers of the Forbidden City is an even stronger influence I think, not a surprise of course since it is listed as inspiration and an entire section is named after it!

It's hard to say. I feel that ToH is better as a historical and cultural milestone for D&D (for good and ill) than it is actually particularly important or groundbreaking as an actual module. So yeah, I think of this as much more a Dwellers of the Forbidden City spiritual successor. 'OSR influenced' is such a tough nut to crack. SKT too was definitely a sandbox (whether it was good at it is up for debate. It's about 50:50 hit-or-miss in my circles), so that part of old school started being met. This one has a stronger 'old-school style adventure' feel to it, but I wonder if that's just because it is a subject matter that hasn't been famously tread in a long time (to explain: although Giants-themed adventures are definitely old school, they're also 2e, 3e, and probably 4e, yet I don't remember a famous jungle-themed adventure since the early-mid 80s). I'm playing again tomorrow. It'll be interesting to see how I feel about it as we go through it.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;996804SKT too was definitely a sandbox (whether it was good at it is up for debate. It's about 50:50 hit-or-miss in my circles)

The scope was far too big.  The Forgotten Realms has ridiculous distances between everything and the module has you covering pretty much the entire breadth of the Sword Coast.  It almost feels like it'd run better as a multi-party sandbox where each group is working on its own part of the puzzle.

ToA by comparison has a much tighter geographic and plot focus without any of the railroading that can plague published adventures.

That's a good point.
As much as my instinct is "this is too big," what I mean is, "this island is too big and too dangerous to be exploring on a short time limit with a reasonable chance of success, unless my DM is wrong about how lucky we were." Overall, it is nice and contained (in a way that doesn't feel like a railroad. 'your goal is somewhere in this geographically defined area').

I'm not clear, they might have shrunk Chuult from other editions (or this is a subsection thereof). But since there aren't too many people who are personally too invested in Chult (like some are for the Sword Coast), I imagine they could change the size and people wouldn't be up in arms.

It is a sub-section of the Chult peninsula. I actually like the Terra Incognita assumptions, both on those hex map alternates, and the cut-off scale from the rest of the Faerûn map. Sometimes tighter is more, for dropping it into other settings, and also just for giving that isolated, claustrophobic feeling from the rest of that weird Sword Coast modern hegemony (Lord Neverwinter's massive domain feels weird to me still).