I fear that I might be a little unfair towards this adventure: It is a good one, but I'm reading it right on the heels of Shadows of the Northern Woods, which is a tough act to follow. Especially since a lot of motives and themes of Dawnfell are reminiscent of SotNW: Again, there's a small village to be saved, free folk who have become estranged from each other and must be brought back together, a magical McGuffin that the bad guys are after and a climatic battle where the outcome depends hugely on how many checkmarks the characters were able to make on their adventurous to-do list in advance. In both adventures, we have spiders in the woods and ancient burial sites hiding treasures and answers. Even some of the NPCs feel like variations on a theme when compared to SotNW (Annis/Beltine, Wulfric/Brynjar, Morcant and his She-Wolf/Urgusk and his Mountain-Lion). It's hard to say if, playing both scenarios back to back in an actual campaign, this would feel like a thematic throughline or rather like "Oh well, another troll with a vicious pet and another problematic thane."
But while SotNW uses its sleepy, rural setting as a springboard to dive deep into the (admittedly vague) mythology of vsD's implied setting, Dawnfell firmly sticks to being an adventure about saving a village from a band of trolls. Which is actually a good thing, because it makes Dawnfell truly self-contained and also thematically more suitable for a group of 1st level characters. As such, one might say that Dawnfell is better at being what it is than SotNW, but it is also a little less impressive.
Going into detail, Dawnfell is again very reminiscent of classic ICE modules in being mainly a collection of NPCs and places that are all connected to a backstory. The enchanted tower bell that has been protecting the village from the nearby troll clans has been stolen, and there's a troll chieftain out for revenge, so the characters are on a ticking clock to bring back the bell and find some allies. The latter is complicated by twenty years of distrust and bull-headedness by the local Thane.
The NPC's and their relationships to each other are well thought out, and I can see this scenario go any number of ways - if the characters fail to mend relations with the elves in the woods, they can still try to strike a deal with the bandits or even with the trolls themselves. The investigative element of the adventure is pretty basic, and the village of Dawnfell can be saved without solving it at all; the characters might very well be able to locate the bell without ever finding out who stole it in the first place, or saving Dawnfell without ever locating the bell.
The final battle of Dawnfell looks pretty good on paper - it is not quite clear how many trolls there are around Dawnfell and how many trolls Urgusk commands, but it can't be many, since he attacks the village with only two others; however, it is easily imaginable that three trolls are a major threat to some village out in the wilds, as well as to a first level party.
Some elements of the scenario don't quite ring true to me, however: For one thing, there's the aged hero Gwendoline, who slew the father of Urgusk the troll chieftain and must now be saved from him ... though if you take a look at Gwendoline's stats, it doesn't really make sense that she would need a lot of saving. My take at Gwendoline would be that, in her battle against Urgusk's father, she has suffered an injury that causes her great pain when she walks, and give her a loving husband who is not a fighter at all, but would do anything to defend her. Thus, it is clear why Gwendoline can't really join the heroes in saving Dawnfell, the heroes actually have two NPCs to save and not one (Gwendoline and her husband), and there's potentially lots of tragic and/or romantic moments to be had, from Urgusk just backhanding Gwendoline's husband out of the way when he goes for her to Gwendoline making a last stand suffering from the agonizing pain caused by her old injury.
A rather minor quibble is that I don't quite buy Urgusk's quirk - he's an art-collector, which is a nice touch, but the adventure does little with it; there's some paintings and statues in his den, but it seems a little far-fetched that he should have been able to obtain those intact, and also, it is of no real relevance to the rest of the adventure. I'd either drop this element or expand it.
All things considered, however, I'm quite happy with Dawnfell - it is a well-designed, self-contained scenario with reasonable stakes for a beginner group and gets a solid 4 out of 5 Darkmasters from me.
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