Minireview: Pathfinder #8, Seven Days to the Grave

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. […]

Minireview: River Into Darkness (W2)

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. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #7, Edge of Anarchy

…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. […]

Minireview: Gallery of Evil (U1)

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. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #6, Spires of Xin-Shalast

Spires of Xin-Shalast, written by Greg A. Vaughan, is the conclusion to the Rise of the Runelords adventure path. It starts out very strong, with a great sequence involving dwarven ghosts and a Wendigo spirit. After that, the party is supposed to make their way to the ancient city of Xin-Shalast, and while it’s pretty good it has some problems. To be fair, though, most of those problems are due to the fact that it’s a huge place, and the page count limit here just doesn’t allow the writer to do it full justice. A GM running this would either have to keep the players on a very tight railroad or do quite a bit of prepwork. The final confrontation reads like it should be a titanic battle – which may or may not be your thing.

Overall, I’d give this whole adventure path something like a “four stars out of five” rating. The first half is excellent, with varied moods and encounters and fun subplots. The second half is still ok, but suffers a bit in my mind from being a combatfest most of the time. Maybe that’s the way D&D adventures tend to go as the level increases, but still…

Besides the high amount of combat, another problem crops up in that some of the plot connections between the parts of the “path”, and even within the parts themselves, are quite vague. The players are apparently expected to follow the plot with very meager leads at times, and I found myself wondering at times “why on earth would the players do what’s expected here?” With a good GM and some prepwork I’m sure that those problems would be minor (and ideally not even noticed by the players), but I think it’s fair to warn prospective GMs of this “adventure path” that it would be a good idea to read the whole thing, or at least some parts in advance, before starting a game. That way you can start dropping hints early, and provide lots of alternate plot hooks for players in case they miss the “default” ones. As they will, more often than not.

As far as main plot went: pretty standard “ancient bad guy is waking up and needs to be stopped” thing. I found the use of the seven deadly sins as a central power motif to be a bit hokey, but hey… this is D&D, hokey is part of the game. It worked well enough, though I’d love to see a main plot that wasn’t a variation of “ancient evil rises”. That’s… been done. A lot.

In case the above sounds too negative: I found this to be a high-quality set of linked adventures, with lots of really cool ideas and settings. Some GM tweaking will be needed, but that’s the case with pretty much anything.

I’m looking forward to the next adventure path, the city-based Curse of the Crimson Throne. It sounds interesting, and urban scenarios often offer lots of nice social interaction. The second half of Runelords took place mostly in the wilderness, which may also have been a factor in my feeling that it was combat-heavy.

On the other hand, the main plot of Crimson Throne seems to be… wait for it… “ancient evil rises again!”. The goggles! They do nothing!

[…]

Minireview: Crown of the Kobold King (D1)

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. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #5, Sins of the Saviors

Sins of the Saviors, by Stephen S. Greer, is the fifth and penultimate part of the “Rise of the Runelords” adventure path. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the last part in that it’s somewhat less straighforward. It’s also mostly “just” a dungeon crawl – granted that it’s a fairly interesting dungeon, but still… a bit too little social interaction there for my taste. Some parts are very cool, though; the beginning is nice, and the dungeon itself has some nifty parts and some internal politics which could be expanded in fun directions. I’m not completely sold on the “seven sins” motif that the adventure path uses a lot, but it’s used to fair effect here. Overall, quite solid.

Other than the adventure, the book contains some notes on “rune magic”, mostly 3.5DD crunch which doesn’t interest me. The (to me) more interesting part was the rest: a writeup on Lamashtu, a “Mother of Monsters” god (good stuff), some more Pathfinder travelogue (also fun), and some more strange creatures to pit the players against.

I’ll reserve comments on the whole of the adventure path until I read the last part, but so far it’s looking like a nice package with lots of varied stuff thrown into the mix. I remain sold on the overall quality of Paizo’s “Pathfinder” stuff, even though I still don’t play D&D. […]

Minireview: Entombed with the Pharaohs (J1)

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. […]

Minireview: Pathfinder #4, Fortress of the Stone Giants

Fortress of the Stone Giants, written by Wolfgang Baur, is the fourth installment in Paizo’s “Rise of the Runelords” D&D adventure path. As a concept, an “adventure path” is a set of linked adventures which can either be played stand-alone, or linked together to form a longer campaign. Sort of like the old TSR “Against the Giants” modules, or the “Slavelords” ones, or many others. I like the concept myself, it provides quite a bit of versatility in how you use the things. Of course, since there is a long-term plot involved there is a fair bit of inevitable railroading, or at the very least some behind-the-scenes GM headscratching to the tune of “how on earth do I get the PCs to do this next?”. You can’t really avoid that, unless you create a totally “sandbox” adventure setting – which has problems of its own.

Anyway, this is part four of a six-part series. After the crazed macabre goblin mayhem of part one, the horror trappings of part two, and the inbred mutant hillbilly splatter-horror of part three, this one is much more straightforward and does what it says on the tin: an assult on a stone giant fortress. It’s intentionally written as a sort of “spiritual successor” to the old “Against the Giants” adventures. Maybe because of the straightforwardness I didn’t find it quite as good as the first three parts; it’s mostly a combatfest and doesn’t offer many clever twists unlike the previous parts. To its credit, most of it is quite logical (though some parts of it feel a small bit like a zoo dungeon and are a bit incoherent), and the main bad guy has a nice backstory (though it’s likely that the PCs will never uncover it).

Other than the adventure, the book contains essays on the stone giants and dragons of Golarion, one more Pathfinder travelogue piece, and a bestiary with some nice, otherplanar antagonists. The add-ons overshadow the adventure itself this time around; I especially liked the stone giant writeup, it made them quite interesting instead of just “big hostile piles of hit points”.

As an interesting aside, this book incorporates some beasts from Cthulhu into D&D; some of the Paizo guys have a love of CoC, and this isn’t the first time Lovecraft has made side treks into their D&D creations. While some purists may yell in horror, I find it rather cool – especially since they go to great lengths to credit CoC and Lovecraft, and to say how good a game CoC is.

As a whole, a solid if not exceptional addition to the “Runelords” series. […]