I ran this adventure as a one-shot for my regular gaming group over the New Year holiday and it was very well received by my group. The game took about 5 hours, which included time spent picking characters, eating liberal amounts of food, explaining the rules and a good deal of setup. I have a fair bit of familiarity with the Brass & Steel rules set and it was easy enough to run with that, but I would certainly say the content could be ported into a similar system without a great deal of fuss. Most of the wealth of the information in this adventure is in the character and setting detail, in which you can really see the love the authors put into it.

The book is divided into a scene structure which is fairly easy to follow, but it follows a pattern of discovering what the adversaries are up to and preparing for a journey to stop them, the pursuit and final confrontation. At one point I had my group divided split 4 ways scrambling around Cairo, either dodging thugs trying to beat one of them up outside their hotel, finding contacts in the black market, confronting suspicious characters in a cafe, and chasing after a local boy carting off a weapons shipment to a group of raiders set on slowing them down.

Our session was fairly light on combat, as my players elected and enjoyed diplomatic and clever dodges over straight fights, but it could easily swing the other way if your group is so inclined. Mine managed to work out a way to jump ahead and skip a scene or two in the book, but the content of those scenes still came out and came in handy so it worked out well enough. I might allow an extra hour of game time on that consideration.

The adventure is light on mechanics overall, particular for the npcs and adversaries. Generally a number is given to test against and light description on their gear and armaments and there were a few places where I could have used a few more details. It would have been nice to have had the armaments of the Austrian soldiers spelled out more in the npc sections in the final battle for instance. It's mechanics-light overall, though plenty is there for resolving the exploration and pursuit angles and the system tends to be pretty easy to work off the cuff, so if you are comfortable with that style or willing to put in a bit of time arming up the adversaries, it works well.

The pre-generated characters provided offer background, goals and how they know other npc sections as well as a one page character sheet. I found all of the characters well fleshed out and contributing well, perhaps with the possible exception of Victor Loret, who doesn't provide quite so much as a bunch of funding to the equation and knowledge skills that are destined to lead towards a dead end. Making sure that money matters would be important and something I neglected running it personally, but the player still had a good time and there's plenty of character to make role-playing him fun.

There are 6 kids and a lot of distractions at our gaming table and it's common to have a lot of people check out and split their attention elsewhere during a game, and this one nobody ever went for their cell phone or seemed to be less than engaged straight through, which is a big success in my mind.