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If we’re honest, for a Paizo module Seven Swords of Sin (by James Sutter & the Paizo staff) isn’t all that good. The module’s origins as an Paizo-internal “let’s write a list of deadly traps!” project shows all too well; while I like good deathtrap dungeons this isn’t a very good one – it’s just a random series of deathtraps strung together with an extremely vague plot.

It’s not strictly bad, I’m sure a fun evening of dungeon crawl could result from this. It’s just not very good either, there are better variants of this theme available. Some of the rooms/traps are inventive, though, and I suspect the best use for this module would be as a trap resource to insert into other adventures.

The plot, such as it is, deals with yet another evil sorceress trying to awaken ancient powers through yet another ancient artifact. Film at 11.

Meh.

Greg A. Vaughan’s River Into Darkness is an attempt to do a D&D version of the classic “African river journey” story, but it only succeeds partially. Some bits are very nice; I liked the opening town of Bloodcove (despite the silly name), and the almost-paddlesteamer boat is a fun idea.

However, the encounters along the way seem a bit disjointed and not all that exciting, and the finale is maybe a bit too open-ended. Sure, it’s nice to give the PCs lots of freedom to choose, but some more detail on the consequences either way would have been nice. With a good GM and some extra prep, I’m sure this would be a fun romp to run/play, especially if you feel like some “out in the wilderness” action to give your outdoors specialist characters a chance to shine.

This isn’t bad by any means, just a bit lackluster compared to other Paizo modules.

The first of Paizo’s “urban” standalone adventures, Gallery of Evil by Stephen S. Greer is a fun little romp.

It’s set in a high-class district of Absalom, a city in the Pathfinder game world of Golarion, but it could be transplanted to pretty much any D&D city with minimal effort. The plot is nicely nonstandard and involves paintings with murderous intent (yes, really). The villain of the piece is not just another stereotype “evil guy”, there are actual motivations involved… nice, for a change; all too many D&D adventures have “bad guys” doing bad stuff “just because they are evil”. Also provided are some pages of detail on the part of the city the events take place in, with a list of important people and places with some plot hooks – very nice in case the players go into freeform mode, and also useful in case you want a pre-populated section of city for some other game.

It reads like it should provide a fun evening or two of play. It’s fairly straightforward, and as written the players are almost spoon-fed clues about what’s going on. Were I to run it I would probably tweak it to make it a bit less linear and to involve a bit more actual player investigation. Matter of taste, I guess.

In any case, this is yet another classy stand-alone module from Paizo. I can’t find anything much to complain about here; the straightforward nature of the scenario can’t really be called a “fault”, since it does make this runnable with minimal prepwork and it’s easy enough to provide more complications if needed.

Crown of the Kobold King is the first “proper” module in Paizo’s “GameMastery” module line, with the very first one being an offering for “Free Rpg Day”, Hollow’s Last Hope (by the way, I’d love to get a print copy of that one, if anyone has pointers please let me know). This module is coded as “D1” (where Hollow was “D0”), with the “D” standing for “Dungeon”. So ok, we have a dungeon crawl on our hands.

Of course, since this is written by Nicolas Logue (an rpg author I’ve become to appreciate more and more), it’s anything but a boring, straightforward affair. The thing is set near Falcon’s Hollow, the setting of both D0 and the later scenario Carnival of Tears. It’s a lumber town with lots of built-in conflicts, darkness and social injustice (i.e. not quite your normal “we’re all happy farmers” D&D town) – and this time around a bunch of children have gone missing and it’s up to you, the players, to rescue them. Why? That’s largely left up to the GM, though hints on motivation and “how to get started” are given.

The adventure itself involves kobolds (surprise!), but they have been given quite decent motivation and some culture of their own, not just “we’re evil so we do evil stuff!”. There are even some quite distinct personalities among them, which is all too rare in this type of scenario. It reads like it should be a very fun affair to play or run, lots of room for total mayhem.

I’m reminded of the old TSD AD&D module N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God, which I still consider to be one of the best entry-level D&D scenarios. There, like here, we have a town with interesting social interaction material, and then a quest into a dungeon/lair to free up kidnapped people. I don’t know if this was intentionally written as some sort of “spiritual successor” to that module, but in any case: I liked this quite a bit, I think it should make for a very good beginning scenario for a D&D 3.5 game.

As an aside, I recently used the town of Falcon’s Hollow (to a very tiny extent) in my Exalted game, transformed into a snowed-in Linowan logging town near the Haltan border. The players didn’t stay other than to spend a night with the luxury of “sleepin indoors for a change”, but had they opted to do stuff I would have had some specs of the town itself to fall back on. Products like these don’t have to be limited to just the game system they’re written for, cooking up new stats and (sometimes) names for NPCs isn’t an impossible chore, given decent basic material to work with.

Entombed with the Pharaohs (written by Michael Kortes) is the first of the “J”-series modules (Journey?) from Paizo. Though the letter+number numbering scheme of these “GameMastery” modules is reminiscent of the classic TSR modules, unlike some other game lines like Goodman Games’ “Dungeon Crawl Classics” this series doesn’t much try to emulate the feel of the old stuff – these adventures are fairly modern in design.

I’ve read some others of the GameMastery line before, and overall the quality has been high. Some have been excellent (Hangman’s Noose) and some just ok (Guardians of Dragonfall), but on the whole this seems to be a very solid series of pregen adventures for D&D 3.5.

So, on to the module. It’s very consciously an Indiana Jones -styled pulpy “Tomb Raider” adventure that takes place in “Osirion”, a mythical Egypt clone with the serial numbers (very lightly) filed off. To be honest, it’s such a direct copy of mythical cliche Egypt that it bothered me a bit – but only a very small bit, since the old TSR “Desert of Desolation” modules also had a direct-from-Egypt copy thing going on and they rocked, and in any case cliche Egypt resounds pretty well with the whole “pulp adventure” feel. So I won’t complain too much on that score. It is a bit corny, though, with stuff like “The River Sphinx” etc.

The adventure itself is very good, and has a nice nontraditional element in that there’s another party of tomb raiders racing to plunder the same tomb as you are. So in addition to all the deathtraps (of course there are deathtraps, silly!), you’re dodging or fighting another “adventurer party”. Good stuff. The high lethality of the module makes me reluctant to recommend it as part of an ongoing campaign; I see many places here where a total party kill is easy to achieve. For a one-shot, this thing should work great, though it would probably take a few sessions to play through.

Overall, I liked it quite a bit. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s a very nice take on the “pulp tomb raider” genre.

Entombed with the Pharaohs has been pretty popular with players, and it recently won a “what module do you want to see a continuation for?” poll on Paizo’s forums – so we’re getting J4: The Pact Stone Pyramid in November.