I was a big fan of Yawning Portal as well, but this one feels like they took the lessons they learned from that book and refined them here. It takes a lot of work to mesh singular modules into a cohesive adventure, but [Mike] Mearls and Kate Welch (who served as the lead designers on this one) did a fantastic job. There’s very little to complain about in this book as everything in it is both versatile and succinct when it comes to adventure building and storytelling. And sure, there are people who will look at this and think 'I don’t feel like going out to sea' for their campaign, and that’s okay because some of these can be adapted easily to fit what you need if you feel like taking your DM’s tools to them". Christian Hoffer, for Comicbook, wrote that "the book contains a surprising amount of references and nods to its Greyhawk roots. Saltmarsh has three competing factions that strive for influence around town, and two of them have direct ties to outside Greyhawk forces. One group is loyal to the king of Keoland and uses imperial authority to exert its influence, while another is connected to the sinister Scarlet Brotherhood, a classic group of Greyhawk antagonists. The Sea Princes, another Greyhawk faction, also play a role in the book. [...] While Ghosts of Saltmarsh contains plenty of nods to its Greyhawk roots, the book is still 'setting agnostic' as DMs and players don't need to know anything about Greyhawk before they sit down to play the adventure. The factions provide connective tissue between the adventures in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, but players can easily approach the chapters of the books as standalone adventures or pull Saltmarsh out of Greyhawk entirely without any significant issue". On ship-to-ship combat, Brandes Stoddard, for Tribality, wrote that "most of what we saw in the [Unearthed Arcana] article of the same name seems to still be in place – the same component/battle station format for ships and naval combat. Adding in grid maps for each ship type (galley, keelboat, longship, rowboat, sailing ship, and warship) and area descriptions for average vessels of those types is awesome. The system for officers and crew are likewise recognizable from the UA text. [...] It’s not hard to imagine how a series of unlucky rolls could put the PCs on the wrong end of a mutiny.