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Crown of Fangs (by Tito Leati) provides the conclusion for Paizo’s Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path. It’s pretty good, though not quite what I was expecting; I was ready for a grand assault on the castle and a climactic fight against the main villain. Well, we get that… but not quite in the format expected. I don’t want to spoil too much here, so won’t go into details on that.

The castle is (understandably) left halfway as a sketch, since it’s huge and there’s no way to map the whole place in detail. I liked what the author had done here, in that he’s provided detail on the most critical parts and given enough info on the rest for the GM to be able to make things up as the situation demands. There are also some fun hooks to alternate adventures that could be expanded on by the GM. The castle should provide the players of lots of castle storming fun, and a nice fight – but as noted, not everything is as it appears.

The continuation (second half of this installment) has the PCs set out for the wilderness again, and I can see it possibly providing some problems unless the players pick up some vital clues. I’m not sure I buy the logic of what the main villain is trying to do here, and why that specific place… but whatever. Assuming the players stay on rails, the whole things looks like a lot of fun, once again.

In retrospect, I think Curse of the Crimson Throne is a stronger campaign than Rise of the Runelords (which was by no means bad). I liked the fact that about half of the story happens within one city, there’s a lot that can be done in the context of “urban” adventures. The PCs can no longer throw fireballs around with total abandon, there’s always the risk of serious fire and the general problem of innocent bystanders. Of course, some players may not care about those things… in which case it’s the GM’s job to make sure the PCs start having approriate reputations.

On the minus side, this adventure path also suffers from a very linear storyline (I suppose that’s a hard thing to avoid). At times while reading this, I’ve honestly had to question why the players would ever do what the writers expect them to do. Of course, all that is fixable with proper foreshadowing and generous distribution of clues, it’s just something that you have to focus on right from the beginning.

Looking forward to the next adventure path, Second Darkness. It sounds interesting.

In A History of Ashes, Paizo’s second adventure path goes over the halfway point – and it’s quite fitting that the so far city-based game takes a hike for the wild lands, as our heroes are forced to flee Korvosa (or so at least the default plot says, who know what actual PCs will want to do).

This is a nice segment. It’s mostly set in the Cinderlands, an utterly inhospitable wastelands inhabited by the Shoanti (a people heavily patterned after Native Americans). The players will need to make friends with the Shoanti, or at least stop them from attacking long enough to plead their case. This will involve a series of quests which read like they should be a lot of fun, but the author does point out that different groups have different tolerances for “go do quest A, then do quest B” stuff; some of this may need tweaking for some groups. There’s a lot of varied social interaction with native tribes, and of course a lot of action and combat, some of it against a group of assassins the PCs will probably have encountered before.

So far, I’m liking this second adventure path more than the first, and the first was already pretty good. Paizo keeps producing interesting D&D stuff, with some surprisingly adult elements included amidst the hack & slash.

In Escape From Old Korvosa, the PCs are expected to exit the city of Korvosa for the first time. As before, this points to the biggest problem with this adventure path: getting the players to follow the plot. Before this, you’ve had to give them reasons to stay in the city even though things have gone downhill fast. Now, you need to get the thinking about leaving. Fortunately you are given lots of help and player motivations, so it’s not as doomed an endeavour as you might think – but still, the GM will have to come up with Plan B (and C, and D, and…) in case the players don’t follow the breadcrumb trail.

This installment is half event-based urban encounter (like the previous two parts) and half dungeon crawl. The dungeon does seem quite interesting and has a reason to exist, so I suspect it would work pretty well in practice to break the game flow a bit. As before, the city encounters are very nice and varied – the players are given the opportunity to play Blood Pig, among other unsavory entertainments.

The whole thing seems pretty solid, with the disclaimer above about a fairly linear plot that needs to be followed in some fashion.

The rest of the contents are good, as always – we have some more new monsters (this time with an Indian style, because of module plot reasons), a new Pathfinder Journal installment, and such. The overall quality remains high.

Seven Days to the Grave, by F. Wesley Schneider, continues the “Curse of the Crimson Throne” adventure path. The city of Korvosa is slowly adjusting to the change in rulers, when a new danger appears: a deadly disease which kills in about seven days (thus the title), with an extremely high fatality rate. Where did the disease come from, and why is nobody able to do much about it? Naturally enough, it falls on the PCs to figure things out.

A good continuation to the adventure path, this chapter features a wide variety of encounters and situations (like the first part). It retains the small problem of “how do I get the PCs involved in all this”, but it’s assumed the GM has figured out a way after running part one – the default scenario has the PCs involved via the town guard, perhaps being a part of it themselves. If your game has a different setup, be prepared to do a bit of extra work in setting things up. As before, it’s assumed the PCs have some reason to stay in town (patriotism, personal ties, etc) and not just get the hell out of a plague city – otherwise this chapter will prove to be very short indeed.

Not much to fault here, the adventure part of the book(let) is very good and the other chapters are also good reading. This chapter gets extra points for being the first semi-serious look (that I’ve seen) at how large-scale plagues would work in a fantasy environment which has things like Cure Disease – and for providing lots of reasons why magic alone won’t save the day. So far, this adventure path is shaping up to be quite excellent.

One of the things I like about most of Paizo’s adventures is that they don’t all automatically assume that things will be resolved via combat – a common failing of all so many D&D adventures.

…and so begins a new Paizo adventure path, The Curse of the Crimson Throne. Judging by beginnings, it looks to be at least as good as the previous one; Edge of Anarchy (by Nicolas Logue) sets up the action quite nicely. It’s also an urban adventure set, which is a nice change of pace and provides lots of varied encounter options.

Without giving away too many spoilers, the story is set in the city of Korvosa, where the failing health of the king is about to cause civil unrest and worse. The players are people who originally just set out to get revenge on a certain crime boss, but quickly get sucked into higher-level dealings.

It’s quite nice. On the plus side, it’s a set of loosely connected mini-adventures, which gives the thing quite a bit of flexibility. On the minus side, that same flexibility can be a problem; the players are expected to do some very specific things based on sometimes very flimsy clues and prompting. Also, the beginning link from the crimelord thing to bigger issues is extremely tenuous, I can easily see players either missing it entirely or deciding to ignore it. I’m pretty sure that this thing needs quite a bit of extra GM work to make it play naturally, because you have to have a “plan B” and “plan C” ready for every time the players do something other than what’s expected. Which will be “most of the time”, most likely. So, unless you want to blatantly railroad things, read this through at least twice and do some extra prep before running it.

Is it worth that? I’d say yes, easily. The main plot is quite interesting here, and the whole urban environment thing opens up tons of opportunities. In addition, the encounters themselves tend to be pleasantly varied (no, it’s not only combat all the time). In order for this to work the PCs also need to have approriate motivations, but to Paizo’s credit that’s discussed at some length in the Player Guide to this adventure path. It’s actually nice to see a D&D adventure that takes a stance on what types of motivations the players need in order for things to work, not just “generate some characters and declare them a ‘party’”.

Other than the adventure, the book(let) contains the usual assortment: an article (this time on the local gypsy variants), a fiction “Pathfinder journal” piece, and some new monsters. I’ve always liked the fiction bits in these, and this one was especially good. I’m a tiny bit annoyed at Paizo’s near-1:1 copying of some things – the Varisians are (fantasy) gypsies down to styles of dress, then we have a people who are pretty direct Native American copies, and then there’s the fantasy Egypt copy of “Osirion”, etc etc. It probably wouldn’t have killed them to throw a bit of extra originality into those. I like Exalted’s style of mixing things up a lot more – you might get a vaguely Babylonian culture that’s mixed together with African tribalism, or a people who combine bits of Viking culture with Native American stuff. It creates cultures that are a lot more interesting and have recognizable “handles” without being copies, whereas here they just seem like generic copies with little flavor of their own. It’s not a huge problem, just a small gripe I have.

Overall, a good start to a new city-based adventure path, we’ll see where it goes.