Minireview: Curse of the Riven Sky (Pathfinder)

There were some expectations set up for Curse of the Riven Sky, since it’s written by well-known rpg writer and designer Monte Cook. Unfortunately, it’s simply not very good, even ignoring who the writer is. Taking that into account… it’s quite a letdown, to be honest.

The plot feels like the author just threw together some “cool” ideas, without much rhyme of reason. There are spectral entities “from beyond”, rain that transforms into gelatinous cubes, flying castles (and air barges), angry giants… any of those might be fine by itself, but here it just feels like a collection of stuff that doesn’t fit together very well and is also an ill fit for Golarion (Pathfinder’s game world). It feels very much like an old AD&D module, and not in a good way. The main backstory driver is a horde of extradimensional cats, for fuck’s sake, and it doesn’t get very much better from there. It’s also extremely linear.

It’s not all bad, of course. The beginning hook is nicely open and designed to be integrated smoothly into an ongoing campaign, and many of the minor events are ok as such. It’s just that the whole here is much less than the sum of its parts.

Meh. […]

Minireview: Blood For Blood (Pathfinder #34)

With Blood For Blood (written by Neil Spicer), the “Kingmaker” adventure path moves on to its second half. As before, the design is a “sandbox”, with the PCs assumed to have created and started to rule their own small kingdom in the (ex)wilderness. To support this, the adventure path present various rule additions and minigames to support kingdom building, simple mass combat. and such. All in all, very good stuff.

Here the PCs are faced with barbarian incursions, with strong suspicion than a nearby rival kingdom may be behind the attacks… but whatever the case may be, the PCs have to face the reality of the actual attacks first before they start to trace background leads. The module presents some very simple mass combat rules so that small-scale battles versus barbarian hordes can be resolved without everything grinding to a halt. After this, there is a vast swamp to explore (with potentially hostile natives), and a rival kingdom to subvert: this also involves a small minigame, having to do with manipulating the town loyalties. The end game involves a small dungeon crawl to face the barbarian leader.

It’s another very good installment in the Kingmaker path. This part involves lots of different types of action, and I really like the small rulesets and minigames that help out in resolving various things; it’s almost “indie” design in places. As before, this is assumed to be played at a certain point in the campaign, but could be shuffled into another “slot” if that seems more workable to the GM. […]

Minireview: From Shore To Sea (Pathfinder)

From Shore To Sea (written by Brandon Hodge) is a nifty little adventure. Set on the coast (of Cheliax, but could be placed anywhere), it has the PCs investigate strange happenings at a small fishing village. Villagers have been disappearing, and there are rumors of strange “fish-men” stalking about. Yes, Paizo’s love of Lovecraftian stuff is in full swing here.

It doesn’t directly follow an “Innsmouth” plot, though, even though that has obviously been some influence. Events lead the PCs to an extremely strange island some ways offshore, and unless they are careful they might find themselves changed in some ways… permanently. The island is quite inventively designed, and the main plot is decent enough as a driving force. Also, the backstory has some nice “local traditions” that are linked to the happenings, and should cause some headaches for the PCs if they hear about them. The main “bad guy” has a fair chance of escaping and returning in the future as a recurring villain, which is always a nice touch. There are lots of small nifty details in this module, and in general I’d rate it as one of the better Paizo standalone modules. […]

Minireview: The Varnhold Vanishing (Pathfinder #33)

With The Varnhold Vanishing, the “Kingmaker” adventure path reaches its midpoint. Even though this adventure path is by design a non-linear sandbox, by this time it’s assumed that the PCs have carved out a fledgling kingdom for themselves (with some rules crunch help via a nifty “kingdom builder” minigame/ruleset). Things have been peaceful for a while, with “downtime” perhaps even lasting a year or so after the last major events (up to the GM). Of course, peaceful times never last in these things…

The next major crisis comes in the form of an event which hits the PCs’ eastern neighbor, Varnhold. Rumor has it that the colony has just… vanished. The buildings are still there, but no sign of the inhabitants. Yes, there are deliberate shades of the old Roanoke colony mystery here, as noted in the foreword, though I’m quite confident that the cause of that old event was very different than what’s given here. Anyway, it’s assumed the PCs will want to investigate, since anything that can wipe out a nearby colony will probably me a danger to them, too. If they don’t jump to the bait, you can always have one of their remote towns meet the same fate. ..

The backstory here is a bit weird (not giving any spoilers here), but it’s workable and does give the Paizo guys an excuse to set a very iconic Big Bad versus the PCs at a level when that sort of thing would normally totally crush them. With proper prep, this adventure has possibilities for some creepy investigative stuff, before the action kicks in. Not bad at all.

Since this is part of a sandbox toolkit, the GM is of course free to use this bit at whatever point (s)he wants; some adjustment of adversary strengths may of course be needed in that case. […]

Minireview: City of Golden Death (Pathfinder)

City of Golden Death (written by Joshua J. Frost) is the finale of the three-part mini-campaign begun with Crypt of the Everflame and Masks of the Living God. I really liked those two, and this one does not disappoint either – all three are very different from each other in plot and tone, but still have links to each other and are designed to be run in sequence. It’s sort of like some the 1st edition AD&D series of modules, where the adventures were standalone but also a part of a series. In a way, this is something between a solo module and a larger “adventure path” series.

Of course, none of that matters is the adventures themselves are no good, or contain extremely weak links. No such problem here, City of Golden Death is a very nice finale to the series. Again, it’s quite different in tone to the previous two; here we have the PCs venturing into dangerous ancient ruins, trying to stop the plans of the main Bad Guy before it’s too late. It’s quite cinematic and “pulpy” in places, but in a good way. After the sneaky previous episode, the more straightforward plot here is probably a welcome change of pace. It’s assumed that the PCs will want to do their bit just because they are heroic, so the GM might need to dangle some additional carrots (or a big stick) to starts things off here. On the other hand, the previous adventure already assumed that the PCs had reason to act against the Cult of Razmir, so that motivation will probably just carry over to this one.

As for the “pulpy” bit… well, here the main locale is a place called (I kid you not) “Isle of Terror”. Subtle it’s not, and it’s also a bit cheesy… but hey, old D&D had the “Isle of Doom” (later also used in the Savage Tide adventure path), so it’s in good company.

If you’re looking for a nice mini-campaign for Pathfinder (or other D&D variant), you might want to check out this series of three adventures. […]

Minireview: Rivers Run Red (Pathfinder #32)

Rivers Run Red is part two of the Kingmaker adventure path, the first Paizo adventure path where they try for a more “sandbox” play style instead of the more linear traditional model. So far, so good; this part adds more pieces to the toolkit. Where part one saw the PCs enter the Stolen Lands with writs authorizing them to “tame the land”, and saw them pitted against local bandits and other small-scale dangers, here they are faced with the beginnings of a kingdom – and need to make lots of decisions concerning that. So that things aren’t too easy, some of the more heavyweight monster tribes in the region are getting set up to raise some trouble.

In addition to the adventure itself, the book also contains rules for kingdom building; it’s a sort of simplified medieval Sim City ruleset, where the players decide who gets put in charge of what (choosing which NPCs to give power to is very important) and what gets built where. The intention here is that there is lots of downtime between events in this adventure path. Months, maybe even years. This means that the PCs get to start building their kingdom and they also get to see the results.

While most of the stuff here (the kingdom rules, the event-based adventure main plot itself, etc) would need actual play to see how it works in practice, at least on paper it looks good. Paizo is going for something a bit different here, and some of the mechanics here have an almost “indie” feel. Oh, it’s still D&D, but it’s a bit of an unusual variant – usually the PCs don’t actually become rulers, and if they do, they don’t need to make actual long-term decisions.[…]

Minireview: Stolen Land (Pathfinder #31, "Kingmaker" part 1)

Stolen Land is the first part of a new Pathfinder adventure path, “Kingmaker”. This is an interesting one, since to date the adventure paths have been extremely linear (something I’ve harped against at times, too). Sure, it’s understandable that if you want to have a huge overreaching plot and want to cover a lot of ground in a limited number of pages, you need to railroad to some extent and need to just assume the players do certain things. The problem, of course, is that players are notorious for doing everything but the thing the adventure and/or the GM has assumed. There is no real solution to this, as such; if you want a strict plot, you need to assume limited player choice (and lots of GM “push the PCs back on track” action). That can be quite ok, as long as everyone is one the same page and the players cooperate somewhat.

Of course, the “railroad” criticism is one that Paizo has heard, too, and this adventure path seems to be an experiment of sorts in building a “sandbox” adventure path. Instead of a strict linear plot, you have a series of encounters and events, all set in one large “sandbox” world area. In theory, it sounds very cool. Also, judging by this first installment, it may also turn out to be great in practice.

This start off with the PCs all being emissaries from Brevoy, sent into the lawless and ungoverned “Stolen Lands” with writs to explore and tame them (ideally helping Brevoy expand in that direction). This is a nice setup, as it solves the “why are the PCs together” and “what is the PC motivation” things in one go. If they do good here, they may end us as rulers of a new province. Of course, they are not the only such group; four other groups have been sent to other areas. This will probably lead to plot complications in later episodes.

As noted, it’s a sandbox adventure. The PCs are expected to base at a certain wilderness tavern/inn, since it’s pretty much the last bastion of civilization in the area – but nothing forces that. The inn does serve as launching point for some follow-up events, but if the PCs insist on camping in the woods for some reason there are multiple easy ways to involve them in things.

The area given to the PCs to explore and “tame” contains a large number of encounters and events. Some are minor, some more challenging, and some are interconnected to stuff I suspect will turn up again later. The main antagonists are a gang of brigands, led my a mysterious “Stag Lord”. It’s an interesting group of NPCs, and the leader is quite unusual – not quite your normal “big bad”.

An excellent fairly freeform low-level starter adventure, with five more installments to come (which hopefully keep up the good work). […]

Minireview: Hollow's Last Hope (Pathfinder)

Hollow’s Last Hope (written by Jason Bulmahn and F. Wesley Schneider & graced with the code “D0”) is the first published Pathfinder adventure – or more exactly is the first adventure in the line that later became “Pathfinder”, at this point it was just a line of adventures for D&D3.5 under Paizo’s “GameMastery” label.

This module was originally given out for free as part of “Free RGP Day” in 2007, and thus distributed in print form to some participating rpg stores. It was also available (and still is) as a free PDF download, so getting hold of it is easy… but getting hold of the print version is anything but. It took me almost 2 years of on-and-off eBay hunting to track down my print version.

It’s an intro adventure for 1st level (D&D) characters, and is quite decent at that. The town of Falcon’s Hollow (the target of multiple calamities in later Paizo modules) is suffering from a plague, and (surprise!) it’s up to a group of intrepid young adventurers to venture into the wilds in search of components for a cure. There are some ok wilderness encounters, and then a showdown at an old temple. What makes this adventure nice is that it ties in directly with Crown of the Kobold King (D1), which in turn can be followed up with both Revenge of the Kobold King (D1.5) (also a free download) and Hungry are the Dead (D4). So this can easily kick off a mini-campaign, with a unified plot and locale. Quite nice.

As a standalone, the adventure is ok but nothing really all that spectacular; it’s a straightforward “find some medicine ingredients and save the town” thingy. […]

Minireview: Realm of the Fellnight Queen (Pathfinder)

Realm of the Fellnight Queen (written by Neil Spicer) is a mid-level standalone Pathfinder adventure – and a pretty good one, to boot.

The setup isn’t the most original of things: the PCs arrive in a small town for a wedding, and (surprise surprise) the town promptly comes under attack. To be fair, the module does suggest giving at least one of the PCs a tie to the town and a real reason to be there for the wedding, so it’s not as cliched as it could be. Anyway, naturally enough it’s up to the brave adventurers to save the day (isn’t it always), and off they go to figure out the strange mist that now surrounds the town.

The actual “meat” of the adventure is quite good stuff. There is a lot of forest to explore, and as a bonus not all of the encounters are combat ones. If the PCs play their cards right they’ll get information on who the actual Bad Guy here is, and how to get to her… which results in a raid to another dimension.

The author manages to pack quite a lot of stuff into a small page count, and I liked the varied nature of this adventure. There’s relaxed social stuff, some combat, some negotiation, and some exploration – something for all. I would have preferred for the Bag Guy to be a somewhat less “evil” character, some possible compromise in that direction would have made this even better… but of course, the GM can add that if needed. It’s also a page count issue, I guess, there’s a limit to how much you can cram into a 32-page module.

Not bad at all. […]