Hi, there will be NO SPOILERS in this review. And before you flame me, I LOVE Paizo and want to marry them and have a million of their babies. But I was dissapointed by this highly anticipated first chaper of Adventure Path three.
Review:
Adventure Path Part one: 2.5 stars
Fluff, Set Piece Adventure, art: 3.5 stars
I didn't feel like the first part of the adventure was written well enough to really hook the players. A key NPC is not fleshed out enough to be truly compelling. It's also a very specific 'genre' of game -- a small-time mafia story -- and your PCs might not go for it unless you prepare them to play in that genre.
Even with such prep and even with characters made for the setting, I can see the players easily ignoring the main hook and leaving the adventure plot far behind, which I don't feel should be a risk in the very first adventure of a campaign.
The first 'Set Piece' adventure I thought was a better intro to the city of Riddleport, but it is too linear. I preferred teh writing in LB1: The Last Baron or any of the Darkmoon Vale adventures.
The story arc for this path is a different matter: it's a bit Hollywood and maybe a tad cheesy, but will work well for a 'big' campaign ... if the plotwriting gets better.
Hi Paizo, you will get a higher rating for map packs when they become thicker still. It is true the newer ones are thicker than the older ones, and the art is uniformly excellent, but Dungeon Tiles put these to shame and are double-sided to boot. I want to play D&D with the children I will one day have, and I'm just not convinced map packs will survive till then. That said I will keep buying all of them because they are cool and because I am a crazy person.
Campsites is a useful-looking pack (have it but haven't played on it); it's all 2-tile sets which form one campsite per set. Some of the tilesets feature tents, etc., but some don't - those can serve dual use as forest tiles, since the forest set didn't have many generic tiles in it.
