The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is an adventure for level 1 characters set in the world of Eberron. It is derived from the well-known story by Washington Irving.

The adventure proceeds like this: The adventurers arrive in the village of Sleepy Hollow, where they discover the local school master, one Ichabod ir’Crane, has disappeared. As they investigate his disappearance, they uncover several odd things in the village, until finally they face the Headless Horseman and resolve the situation.

It is obvious that a great deal of love has gone into this adventure. However, this gave me a problem. It is a 141-page PDF! The first section of it is full of background for the adventure – both on the origins of the original tale and then the setting of the adventure. It takes until page 48 before we have the first encounter.

The appendices – with magic items, handouts, and monster statistics – start on page 118.

So, the main adventure text is about 70 pages, which covers 18 locations.

It is, as you might guess by now, sorely in need of trimming and a good editor.

There are plenty of things to like here: the situations are evocative and throw up a few surprises for the group. Everything feels magical, with a sense of the mythic adventure about it. The players have plenty of chances to role-play and investigate and to feel heroic. These are all good things!

However, I kept coming back to the overarching problem: there is too much text, and too much of it is repetitive. Searching for the relevant information in any encounter is an exercise in frustration. You may have a better tolerance for long descriptions; I know I do not. Some of the formatting and text choices are also poor.

How long does it take to play? I do not know, but I suspect 8-12 hours.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow adapts the original story nicely into a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, and provides a strong sense of the fantastic, but may be challenging for DMs due to its lengthy encounter descriptions. I would have preferred to see it as a 48-page adventure; it definitely needs ruthless editing.