[SPOILERS] Shattered Gates of Slaughtergard

This was quite a while ago, but I'm going to put in what I remember. I picked this one up because I got a small group together, and it had a really low starting level (I really didn't want to put the group, most of which had never played at a high starting level, that would have been madness.) So I started running it, and the party looked like this:

Elven Ninja (glad the skills-heavy class went to the one with the most experience playing!)
Elven Fighter- guy had played once with me before in a dungeon crawl classics, and loved the hack-n-slash, as you'll see later on. Great guy, but he was meant to be a fighter all right.
Elven Wizard- First game. She's the type of girl who only plays because the guy she thinks is cute is DMing. I took the compliment, though I should have used an NPC.
Human Samurai- He wanted to play a claustrophobic dwarven ranger who used a sling or something trite.

It started out in a very big room that was extremely difficult to draw (I went vinyl like an IDIOT!) and it took longer for that to be set up than anything else. The ninja wanted to go in stealthy, and scout ahead, but everyone else decided they needed to be there too. They all made the checks to make it down the slope, and of course, the wizard falls, goes completely into the room, and alerts the (goblins?). So they start with initiative, the wizard expending her actions to stand up from prone, and decided to hold off on casting spells, and didn't want to waste arrows on goblins (?!). So the ninja starts shooting and the 2 hitters go up and start hitting, and it clears out pretty quickly (the map was so akward to draw, it took longer to do that than any real combat). They go on to the next room, and find the goblins playing cards due to the stealthiness involved in making it in the room. They dispatch them pretty easily, and decide to head north. What happens next isn't for the faint of heart.

The walk around and head over to the ankheg at the bottom of a pit. The fighter says it would be a good idea to shoot at it with their bows because it can't climb up (the ladder was clearly at the TOP of the pit, so the ankheg couldn't use that). Well, they're all firing away (I think the samurai was on new meds so he was in and out of sleep, so I played his character as NPC for this fight and the ones to follow.) and the thing uses its acid spit on the fighter as he was shooting for more damage (strength bow on a dex fighter is mean!) and sizzles him down to -2hp. They figure he can't do that again, so they stay to fight. Then the thing burrows into the side of the wall, and comes upward, putting the fighter behind everyone else as far as heal checks go. So now we have a bow ninja, a wizard who doesn't like using her spells, and a sleeping samurai. I made the samurai base the ankhey, and the rogue got off some pretty decent shots while the wizard went over and tended to knuckles mcgee. They ended up making it through with minimal loss and recovered a bit after sleeping. They kept going, and came upon the maug that was supposed to offer advice.

Fighter-"I'm going to jump in and start attacking"
Samurai-"Zzzzz" Translation: I'm tired of being an NPC, but I'm not up to playing anymore, let's see if I can take the maug.
Wizard-"I'll cast Magic Missile"
Ninja-"NO!"

Minus 1 Samurai- They didn't end up pressing for advice, and decided to leave the maug alone. They were really interested in the mirrors and took quite a while before they were moving again. They went back and around and found the moniter lizards. Dispatched with no problem, and the ninja decides to take the mushrooms in case they prove to be poisonous later. They made it a little farther, with not much event, but I thought I'd relate the funny parts and then get into what I thought about the module.

-NOTE: This is a terrible module if you're not good at instantly drawing randomly shaped maps that are NOT squares. Half-squares were used frequently. At least a big portion of the first floor was like this. It slowed down my game a lot, and I usually draw my maps (though after the fields tile set, I may try those out again.)
-This is NOT a hack-n-slash, so be wary if your players play like that. The encounters were pretty tough, even with an optimal set up group-wise. And there were a LOT of encounters. I couldn't imagine what would have happened if they had tried to fight that maug.
-Players lost interest quick, because it was so low-level and wasn't filled with lots of pointless goblins to squish. Not very many puzzles or tricks either (the mirrors I was referring to were interesting, they were scrying mirrors showing later parts of the dungeon. But it would have taken them a long while before they got there, and there was no way of knowing what the heck they were. One of them was set to a permanent loop of the last thing it scryed before the gates of slaughtergard shattered or whatever ended up happening. I only prepared as far as I would have been willing to play in one session.)

Hope that helped any potential buyers. I'm not even saying I would never run this module again. It was just a poor setup for the group I was playing, and I can't think of a good way to get it mapped out (I play with minis). It would be great for Role-Players, though, as it has a little grid picture of every room and where it all falls on every page reflecting every room. And I used to roleplay 2nd ed, so it's a huge step up from having to look in the back of the book for a blank set of squares to get idea of scale and where everything is.