Mattastrophic's page

King of the Storval Stairs presents a very simple scenario, the most straightforward of concepts. It's a slugfest in a pure form.

The fights are pretty epic, but it suffers greatly from having four of them, and from having too many monsters who are both hard to kill and cannot effectively damage the party. Thus, the whole thing became a huge timesink, my runtime lasting a total of seven hours.

Also, I noticed that the scenario really went out of its way to make the "tough" fight easier for the players to handle,

This assistance drops the CR of the big fight by more than the numbers would suggest. Giving 7-11 PCs that much assistance and that much prep time and that much terrain advantage is overkill.

I also noticed that the scenario tries to be really tough, yet goes out of its way to pull punches, with subpar feat, terrain, and spell selections on the monsters. It even goes so far as to hand the PCs an easy surprise round at one point!

In all, Storval Stairs tries to be a pure-form slugfest, but suffers from too many pulled punches, under-capable-yet-hard-to-kill monsters, and too much generosity. This combination leads to a grindfest which takes way too long to go through.

-Matt

Waaaay too much, in fact. This scenario is reminiscent of the Josh Frost era. Except the too-many combats take longer to run.

-Matt

Asking level 3 PCs to bring 3rd-level spells with them or TPK said optional fight is also stupid.

PFS is already a hack-and-slashfest. Optional fights take up valuable time, they have from time to time been the toughest fight in the scenario, and too often the difficulty level of the module comes down to whether the GM chooses to run the optional fight. Here, the optional fight's tactics create a very lengthy, very swingy, and very TPK-possible fight.

That's just bad campaign design.

Shame, PFS. Shame.

-Matt

The Disappeared is a scenario with a sweet plot, which showcases NPCs and treats them as more than quest-givers, which contains sweet puzzles that are actually puzzling, and most importantly, is a scenario where cold-blooded murder doesn't solve everything. I wish every scenario were like this one. It's only issue is that 1-5 is too low-level for it's proper Tier.

-Matt

Skip this one. After reading through it, I found a promising urban-adventure prospect that dispensed with the urban part as quickly as it could in order to become a super-dungeon.

Video games handle this style of adventure better than this book does.

EDIT: Reviews that solely act as replies to other reviews are silly reviews. What is this, Metacritic?

-Matt