This pdf is 19 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page editorial, 1 page ToC, 1 page introduction to how adventure path plug-ins work, 1 page bios, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving a total of 12 pages of adventure, so let's check this out!

This being a review of an adventure module, the following contains SPOILERS, so potential players might wish to jump to the conclusion.

Still here? All right! Antrellus should have known better. When he made a pact with teh priests of teh King in Yellow, the price was not only his wife, but also his sanity, their depravity transforming his one-time love into a lobotomized incubator of a spawn of the tapestry as well as making her a slave to the cult. Driven mad and obsessively paranoid, the mad-man has long since stopped having anything resembling a grip on reality and his paranoia has sparked an act of cruelty that serves as the catalyst for this plug-in module - he murdered a pet-raven (believing it to be a familiar of a disguised cultist) and after the professor's funeral, the PCs will suddenly hear a tapping ath their window, rather than chamber door. The ghost raven leads the PCs to the fully mapped murmuring fountain, where a ghostly girl is holding a strange kind of memorial service. Turns out, though, that the ghost is in fact an innocent child mourning her pet raven - and that the girl needs their help, since a rather fatal haunt is ready to kill her.

Tracking down the murderer of the raven via a signet ring lodged in the raven's beak, the PCs can find Antrellus in his tree-house and confront the obviously mad hermit. Whether they'll be up to conversation after braving his traps and pets or not, the madman has some rather interesting, albeit delusional theories on the cult that destroyed his life. Whether there'll be combat or not, at the worst possible moment, the embryonic Neh-Thalggu inside his body starts to gestate and end his misery, alien-style, to attack the PCs. Once they have dealt with the dread horror, the only thing left to do is to grant the ghostly raven his final rest - only that as long as a certain prison has not been cleared, the raven does not rest and instead, the dread forces that be make for yet another deadly grasp for the PCs in the guise of shadowy gargoyles, before the adventure ends with an uplifting, yet slightly sinister tone. In contrast to "Fiddler's Lament", no table listing the respective trust-bonuses that can be gained is included , though several of the PC's options will have an impact on the townsfolk.

Conclusion: Editing and formatting, as I've come to expect from Legendary Games, is top-notch and I didn't notice any glitches. Layout adheres to a 2-column landscape format and ranks among the most beautiful I've ever seen, being on par and even surpassing many 1pps. The full color artworks and 2 pieces of cartography also adhere to this highest of possible standards and the pdf comes fully bookmarked and with a printer-friendly version.

"The Raven" - if you want to hear a nice musical rendition, I recommend typing "Omnia" and "The Raven" in youtube, but back to the review: I love Poe, I love Lovecraft - these two authors, perhaps more than any others, made me who I am today. For as long as I can remember, I've been in love with both authors and their vivid prose. That said, while this may seem as a positive bias, it e.g. made me abhor the terrible "Raven" movie and thus I also dreaded this homage - making a module out of the most famous of Poe's poems is a daring move. And it thankfully only takes a basic nod, bows to the tropes of the poem and then goes on to tell its own story, entwined with Lovecraftian horror.

The module per se is rather interesting, albeit not too challenging and in the end, I can only commend the good execution of the prose and crunch. However, the pdf is also rather short and honestly, I would have loved to get an homage to Poe in a rather more pronounced length. Personally, I'm also not too big a fan of mixing Poe's style and Lovecraft's and while this is a tribute to both, two modules, one devoted to each master, would have been preferably for me. That being said, I preferred this expertly-crafted, albeit not per se cheap module to "Fiddler's Lament" and while the price is steep for the amount of content, the superb production values make this still an excellent buy. My final verdict, in the end, 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 - missing 5 stars only due to the lack of a trust-gain-table and the fact that a focus on one type of horror would have been neat.

Endzeitgeist out.