A wilderness/dungeon crawl module with a very strong, 18+ themes. The adventure features some major gory and gross elements. This might put some younger and sensitive players off. Be advised.
Once we are through that, it's a great module featuring several unique locales and memorable characters. Nicolas Logue is a very talented writer and I enjoyed the plot as well as many small surprises within the module.
However, there are some points where the adventure lacks polish - a major settlement is left without a map and just some rough overview, there are 4 NPCs that likely join the party for some time and require major book-keeping and care, a few statblocks more would be really useful... The Paizo forums are full of useful advice and props helpful in running this one, so make sure to check it out !
However, it's still a great module, just needs quite a bit of prep work, far more than PF 1 and PF 2. All in all, I enjoyed running it and my players liked it a lot as well.
The original Flip-Mat was a great thing, mostly due to perfect choice of laminated paper, sturdy yet light and allowing use of almost any marker without stains and smears (unlike the Chessex mats).
There were three small issues with the original, and all three are fixed in this new release:
* both sides feature 1" grid now. Honestly, the hexes side was redundant for most D&D players, and everybody wished they could just flip (duh) the mat and have a second surface to write on
* coloring is changed - one side is light grey, the other sand brown with the grid lines in soft grey, making it look less like a ... grid, while still easily outlining the squares
* the grid extends fully to the edge of the map, eliminating the unnecessary border.
The second part of RotRL is basically two adventures in one: first you get to brave the horrors of a haunted mansion, and second you get to track a sinister cult in a sprawling metropolis.
The first part is easily 5 stars - the Haunts are a great concept, the fights are memorable (Ghoul Bat, ouch !) and as usual the thing I love about Paizo's adventures - the amazing amount of detail and GM-helpful little things that help to flesh out the environs and NPCs, making them so much memorable than the "you see a room and it's a ...erm... room".
The second part keeps up the story standard, but I found it somewhat hard to picture (and describe to my players) some locales, I guess the mapwork was a bit iffy. And despite the excellent chapter on Magnimar, I still had to do a lot of GM homework to cater for players who kicked off with the usual "a big city, let's do ten thousand silly things" routine. WTB Guide to Magnimar, akin to the Korvosa one !
And of course, the TPK final boss, which required me to wrestle with re-statting to make it somewhat more manageable. Grrr... Playtest the boss fights I say !
As a hint for fellow GMs - I used "The Menagerie" from Dungeon 126 as a side-trek in Magnimar, worked like a charm !
The Desna article was really nice and the new monsters were, as usual, a nice addition.
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