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I played this last night at Tier 4-5 with 6 players and quite enjoyed it.

Made me REALLY want to play an Urban Druid. If you have an urban druid, this scenario would get 5 stars.

For a dungeon crawl there is quite a bit of roleplaying potential, You can potentially deal peacefully with several of the encounters. Admittedly one of those requires some appropriate languages but that is fine. I'm tired of just about everybody speaking common and languages being all but irrelevant.

The combats were interesting, the story engaging, some of the faction missions above the norm. And it was nice to see the bad guys using some of the overpowered spells traditionally used by players. While it sucks to be on the receiving end it SHOULD happen more often.

I played this last night and this is now one of my favourite PFS scenarios. I'd really like to see more roleplay heavy scensrios like this. Interacting with and learning about all the NPCs was great fun.

This scenario is going to appeal immensely to characters with good social skills and players who like to approach problems with some lateral thinking. It might be quite frustrating to players who just want to hit things or who are playing the wrong kind of character and either can't adjust or who get a GM who doesn't reward innovative solutions.

With a good GM and a good group (both of which we had) this is a 5 or 6 star scenario. My suspicion is that a bad group could dislike it and a poorly fitting group combined with an inflexible GM could be an utter disaster. To the extent reasonable I'd advise letting the players know in advance approximately what they're signing up for (a roleplaying heavy scenario with social skills being at a premium)

We played at L6-7 and the final combat was extremely tense. Not having access to all the toys that L6 and 7 characters generally have makes a HUGE difference. I don't know what the scenario states but I'd recommend that the GM be reasonably liberal in allowing players to attempt to circumvent the rules on the island and be at least reasonably equipped. Don't make the fighter cope with just a dagger if you can possibly avoid it.

On the other hand, our group of 4 DID still win that final encounter with no losses (and we'd used up a few resources before that final fight) so the GM doesn't want to go TOO easy on the PCs.

I played with my L6 Dawnflower Dervish Bard. My biggest problem was not dominating the scenario too much :-). If I'd read the scenario ahead of time and deliberately crafted a L6 character to fit it she wouldn't have been all that different from Alinza :-). Her wide set of skills and excellent interpersonal abilities were very. very valuable and her personality helped to focus the roleplaying and make it far more than an exercise in rolling dice. When we finally came to combat she was also pretty much one of the heavy hitters for the party. Admittedly, many of the security arrangements hadn't affected her at all

I should probably start with a caveat about myself. I love prestige classes. I especially love ones that have a lot of flavour AND where the mechanics actually do a very good job of reflecting that flavour. I want a character with a Prestige Class to be less powerful in general than a member of the base classes but to be more powerful within their specialty.

Let me start with the good things about the product.

Every prestige class is very, very rich in flavour. While all fit well into Golaron most could fairly easily be moved into other, similar, worlds.

The book is very well organized. Its easy to read, easy to look up things in play. The artwork is often very evocative.

After reading the book I have lots and lots of characters that I want to play. Not quite one for each prestige class but more than 1/2 of them inspired me.

Artwork is very much a matter of taste but I thought all the artwork at least acceptable and really liked some of pictures. Cheesecake factor is reasonably low (I'll leave the reader to decide if that is a good or bad thing :-)).

Some of the characters are of the sort that, ideally, a group or campaign should be built around. For example, I can easily envisage an entire campaign being essentially centered on a RiftWarden (a class devoted to maintaining the boundaries between the planes). While freely mixing prestige classes within the group may be a bit problematic I see this as very much a good thing and a testament to how rich the flavour is.

I most certainly recommend buying the product.

However, there are flaws.

Some of the rules are mechanically unclear. This isn't a huge deal for most games as the GM can just make a ruling but it makes it a little awkward for PFS.

A reviewer pointed out the Winter Witch as an example. Another example would be the tattooed mystic. It gets Familiar Tattoo at level 1. Its not clear how that would combine with an existing familiar (tattooed or not). As a GM I'd certainly rule that it would stack (transforming the other familiar into a tattooed familiar) but that kind of thing should be explicitly specified.

My other concern is that, mechanically, the classes seem uneven in the cost that they are paying for the mechanics that they receive.

For example, the Lantern Bearer pays almost no admission charge (A few skill ranks that a character would likely have) and gets some quite potent abilities in exchange for little cost.

The Green Faith Acolyte, on the other hand, gives up a fair bit (if entered as a druid) and gets nothing at all in return until 3rd level and many of its benefits are purely flavour or GM specific. Interestingly, the mechanics all but force a Shaman or other Druid archetype that gets wild shaping to delay entering the class until they actually get wild shaping. That could have been addressed but only by writing some quite convoluted language.

The above said, those who concentrate on flavour and not so much on raw character power will love this book. And its not as if its really a major concern if a druid or cleric gets slightly less powerful. Although I'd have to do a lot more analysis to be sure my impression is that the more powerful classes may take slight nerfs in order to take a prestige class while the less powerful may get minor power ups. I'm not sure if that is deliberate or not but its certainly something that I can live with.

As an aside, I did find some of the choices as to what is legal in PFS a little questionable from a flavour perspective although a good back story could certainly justify it for lower levels of the Prestige Class. Fortunately, in most cases by the time the character is getting to a high enough level that they really should NOT be hanging around PFS they retire from most scenario play anyway.

I ran this tonight and it was great fun. Lots of roleplaying potential in a quite interesting setting.

Definitely NOT one for the hack N slash players.

At 4 hours I did find it a little tight on time.

The final encounter is very, very dangerous (I ran it at L1-2 where it is likely more dangerous than at L4-5). When I ran it the characters quickly decided it was time to cut and run and save themselves. Its almost worth the 5 stars just to see PCs running for their lives :-).

There is one definite flaw in the module in that the PCs had already accomplished almost all their goals at that point. The final encounter was almost optional.

Given the nearly sandbox nature of the adventure I suspect that different groups will approach this (especially the finale) in a great many different ways, some a lot more dangerous than others.

Strictly speaking, the way that my characters handled things at the end they should have had both the final encounter and the optional encounter together. But that would almost certainly have been a TPK so I took advantage of the fact that I didn't have time for the optional encounter :-)

As others have said, the idea is fine but the execution is flawed.

I particularly hated the faction missions. As others have stated, many are all but impossible to achieve. But my distaste goes further than that.

I was playing the Cheliax mission. The note handed to me explaining the mission made absolutely no sense at all given that my character HAD played in the previous adventure and HAD succeeded at his mission. Sure, that is just flavour text but it is nice when the flavour text ADDS to the story rather than giving one a massive WTF moment.

I certainly hope that one of the goals of the module was to convince the characters that the Pathfinder society is basically run and populated largely by a bunch of incompetent buffoons. Because that was certainly the impression left on my character :-).

If one ignores the meta fact that one cannot quit the society without quitting the campaign my character would have resigned from the society as soon as reaching home.