Instant on stoves. Always a good thing.

Thanks for the welcome.

The circles was an attempt to be canonical for Yuan Ti. Frankly, I've never been clear when yuan ti picked up an affinity for circles: it certainly wasn't evidenced in Dwellers of the Forbidden City, where they first appeared. But it's canon now, so I stuck with it. It also meant I could draw the map by tracing coinage, and that worked for me.

Regarding the traps, I'm happy to say that those were part of the core concept of the module: I wanted to get the party used to the idea of facing trap-happy monsters, as any PC going into a yuan-ti oriented campaign should be. Interestingly, the editors reworked a couple of the traps to make them tougher or less rewarding. The pit trap was originally not so wide; I didn't want to repeatedly drop the party mage to negative hit points in the course of his first adventure. The book at the end I had rated as CR1, which they cut down.

On the whole the editors made the module tougher and less XP-rewarading. That's OK with me, though I really question the decision to give the boss at the end one more level of rogue and a +1 sword, which puts him at average 12 or 13 damage for his hit on a party whose fighter is likely to only have 12ish hit points, minus whatever he's lost so far, and 10% more likely to land that hit. But then, the party gets a +1 sword out of it, so that's not all bad.

And happy birthday.