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This is an excellent product. I am using the Faerie Tales from Unlit Shores series with 2 different groups. One group is made of more than half new gamers and the other is made of experienced gamers who are new to DCC. It works well for the latter but exceptionally well for the former. Here's why: the familairity of the faerie tale tropes helps to mitigate the learning curve re: new mechanics and becoming comfortable with roleplaying.
The module is jam-packed with awesome encounters and great setting detail. It is a lot of material for the price and it's totaly worth it.
I have two caveats I would make buyers aware of:
1.) While FT 0: Prince Charming Re-Animator was easily read, digested, and run in one go, this module was not. It takes several sessions to run (3-4) and it is as much a mini-campaign setting as it is an adventure. It is a hexcrawl with lots of random and placed encounters. One needs to be able to quickly decide when a random encounter is appropriate or not and when the group just needs to be sped along. One might also want to be able to move the placed encounters around if things are getting stale without tampering with the overall plot sequence. Moreover, because it is hexcrawl, players might want to travel to Portsmouth at some point during the adventure and if you don't have FT 2: The Portsmouth Mermaid, you might find that your on-the-fly Portsmouth description and NPCs don't match up with what comes out in the next module (this might have happened to me...). While this is easily retconned or altered later, it's something to be aware of. The Goblin Market is also pretty complicated and required more than one read through before I felt comfortable running it for Players, but it was totally worth it - they loved it and can't wait to go back! Tl;dr: while I felt FT-0 would be a great adventure to GM (Judge) for someone who is new to DCC or has never GMed an RPG, I can't say the same about FT 1 even as someone's second time.
2.) The overland map is really cool but I didn't feel a Players' version was necessary. Since my PCs were all peasants from Westlake I doubted they knew the layout of the Grimmswood and the road to Portsmouth. For hexploaration, the slow reveal of drawing the map as they moved around had a lot of payoff, especially for the new gamers who had never been in a hexcrawl before. Now, if one were running FT 1 on an online platform with fog of war, the Players' version would be very helpful. Because there is both a Players' and Judge's version of the map, I felt it would have been better if the Judge's version had both the letter and the name of the encounter site written on it. I found myself writing the names of the encounter sites onto a print out of the map. This was also the case with the map for FT 2: The Portsmouth Mermaid. If possible, I would encourage Mr. Bishop to make this change to any similar maps he may be planning for FT 4: The Twelve Dancing Princesses and/or FT 5: Within and Upon the Beanstalk.
Neither of these does too much to take away from the awesomness of this product. I plan to run FT 2 and I recommend anyone who likes DCC, Faerie Tales, Lovecraft, and RPGs in general buy this product. As stated before, the series is especially good if you have players who are new to RPGs.
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