Hey Papa J, these are great questions! Here are my answers:
How many hours of game play?
20 hours of play, in testing two groups played it over the course of a week, playing 4 hours a day, and they didn’t complete all the content in total.
Preparation: Read the world intro section and the custom dynamic introduction for your players. that should give you enough to get started.
Then you can read as you go on, as you can then shape your adventure around your players’ decisions and also the content in this adventure.
Scaling:
Every encounter in the adventure has a Easy, Medium and Hard version, which you can apply depending on the level composition of the party.
I recommend you start with a group of level 1 characters, and level up characters either with XP or as they complete significant portions of the story.
Note: While this isn’t a strictly hack and slash adventure, there’s a lot of world to explore, but it’s definitely meant to be tough, and at least one group got TPK’d in playtesting. `