I generally prefer to wait until I've actually DM'ed or played an adventure before posting a review of it, but the Slumbering Tsar series has been so consistently excellent and innovative that I feel that it deserves some early praise.
So far, each installment of Slumbering Tsar has been top-notch with great writing and good maps. What has been most interesting to me is that while the overarching focus of the series remains strong and consistent, each installment also feels like a mini-adventure that distinguishes itself from the whole and screams out "play me now!" Whether it's protecting a dwarven outpost from waves of undead creatures, facing the Master of the Crooked Tower in the heart of a ruined city or battling a massively giant gibbering mouther in an other-worldly citadel; Slumbering Tsar has got it all!
I'm a huge fan of Dark Sun and The Desolation (ST1-3) is simply the best wasteland wilderness exploration adventure that I've ever come across. I think this is mostly due to the consistency in the tone of this adventure. The encounters are dark and deadly and take place in sandy wastes, rocky badlands or around bubbling tar pits. There are dust storms, acid rains and other environmental threats. The dead rise from ancient battlefields and bandits hide in winding canyons. The Camp, which serves as the home-base for the heroes, achieves a perfect blend of frontier corruption and desperation. All too often, desert adventures are shoehorned into an egyptian or arabian theme and The Desolation does well in avoiding that trap. It takes the road less travelled and comes up with something new.
The second adventure, The Temple City of Orcus, sees a change in focus and locale but not in quality. The sprawling ruined city is detailed with gorgeous maps and presents many diverse and interesting factions. Most ruined city adventures that I've come across tend to focus on a few important sites in the city and leave the rest of the ruins undetailed. I have to say that I'm amazed at the level of detail that went into the development of the Temple City of Orcus. Every section of the city gets its own unique treatment. This is a place where adventurers could lose themselves. It's also a place where they could lose their lives... quite easily. Which makes sense, after all, you don't want a place with a name like "The Temple City of Orcus" to feel like it's just another place to visit.
The third adventure, The Hidden Citadel, has not yet been completely released but it features a mega-dungeon complex. And what a dungeon it will be! It will contain 419 rooms on 9 levels of a Citadel shaped like a gigantic statue of Orcus. Perhaps most exciting is the fact that as heroes progress through the citadel, actions that they take in one area will trigger events that will impact other areas of the dungeon. I can't wait to see the looks on my players faces when they return to an area that they have previously explored in order to rest only to find a Abyssal Gibbering Orb Lich waiting for them!
The reasons why this is such a good module have already been described in detail by other reviewers so I will cover only personal highlights:
First, and most importantly, my players had a blast playing this adventure and I had fun DMing it.
Second, the story of the Kobold King Merlokrep that serves as the introduction of this adventure is some of the best and most entertaining writing that I have read in all of the paizo modules.
Third, the adventure also features some of the most memorable characters and magical items in the adventure modules line -> Jeva the werewolf orphan girl, Kardoblag the drunken hill giant, the grasp of Droskar, the "ghost" of Glintaxe, etc...
Fourth, the town of Falcon's Hollow, an ideal base for low-level campaigns, is detailed within. This section also describes Falcon's Hollow most important organizations and NPCs, including Thuldrin Kreed, who is possibly the most universally hated villain in the paizo modules line.
All that to say that this is definitely one of the best modules that paizo has ever released.
My group enjoyed playing Crypt of the Everflame a great deal and I was looking forward to running Masks of the Living God next. I was especially excited by the premise of infiltrating a masked cult and all of the possibilities that it presented. However, after reading the adventure, I realized that I would not be able to run this adventure without either a high level of railroading or a great deal of time spent reworking it.
Spoiler:
As a follow up to Crypt of the Everflame, this adventure has the players infiltrate the headquarters of a cult of Razmir that has recently become more prominent in the capital city of Nirmathas.
Some of the good points about this adventure are that it presents some interesting opportunities for roleplaying and strategy (if the priests all wear masks, the players may try to impersonate some of its members) and that the temple itself can be an interesting place to explore/infiltrate.
However, for the adventure to work as written, the plot requires that the players be poisoned and captured by the cult, stripped of all their belongings and then inducted into the cult. Otherwise you end up missing aobut half of the adventure and it turns into a standard dungeon crawl.
I was also disappointed with the first part of the adventure which consists of little more than a random encounter table and features a single encounter with pirates that has no bearing on the rest of the adventure.
Finally, other minor things such as a number of typos throughout the text and uninspiring/bad artwork for the NPCs and villains make this a somewhat unsatisfying module, which is definitely not up to Pathfinder's usually high standards.
I ran this adventure in combination with Hollow's Last Hope (HLH) as the start of a new campaign and the players and I really enjoyed it.
Spoiler:
I had the people of Kassen contract Blackscour taint just as the festival of the Everflame was starting. I added the Elder Tree and Ulizmila's hut encounters from HLH to the overland travel part of the adventure and had the players find the ironbloom mushrooms in the lower level of the Crypt.
I found the adventure itself to be a good introduction for my players who had never used Pathfinder rules (CMB, CMD, changes to the new feats, etc...). The dungeon was a bit linear and I had to remove one or two encounters so that it didn't become too much of a slog, but overall the players had a good time. The story of Kassen and Asar also serves as a good start for any far reaching campaign plot as the nature of it is left fairly open.
I'm planning to follow it up with the Falcon's Hollow modules as I wasn't really impressed with the Masks of the Living God adventure.
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