This adventure is dripping with flavor. From the start "On The Blood" all the way through to the heart of the jungle, it feels like a storied journey. Not only must the party contend with fantastic enemies, but piranah, mosquitos, and illness are omnipresent too.

The Good: As mentioned above, it's got great flavor. This is coupled with a neat fantasy approach to river travel (and all the complications that go with it), a neat and subtle underlying story, and a strong compliment of NPCs and encounters. My party was never bored playing it, and always eager to see what camce next. The writing is solid and the layout is generally good, though at times it became difficult to juggle the many small maps. The end is a great sandbox where each party can react differently to a confusing situation. I am sure players will surprise GMs with their solutions.

The Bad: While the end is diverse, most of the adventure is dedicated to a boat ride. This is the classic rail-road scenario: The encounters happen generally at preset times, and the PCs are under the command of an NPC captain. Now, this isn't too heavy handed and those encounters are interesting (it is what they signed up for!). But it did feel like the players were simply waiting for the next encounter as the boat moved along. Further, the ending is a touch anti-climactic, and likely ends with the PCs moving down the same river just came up.

Overall, I recommend the adventure and think it will please most parties.

I while not my favourite adventure released by Paizo this is a cracking wilderness adventure. There are a fair few things that could have been tweaked just a little bit to make it better. Personally I didn’t mind the whole make your own hook approach. It may not suit some DM’s but with Bloodcove being such a great city I will have no trouble getting the PC’s there.

The encounters while somewhat disparate worked for me. I can’t go into real details without spoiling anything but I felt it all hung together well, with a couple of really cool flavourful encounters. I also like the open ended nature of the final event although I think they really should have explained the options a bit more clearly.

So what are it’s issues? For one the monsters, the two new monster are both quite unimpressive. Worse neither of them is used in a particularly interesting way one is in fact just a random encounter. Also I felt Bloodcove needed more detail as it is amazing sounding city. I know it is due to the limited page count but still I think it could have done with further detailing.

All in all a real good module just unfortunately lacking in a couple of places which is the only thing that robbed it of a real classic. Still a great module that I recommend.

Let me begin by stating that the basic premises rock! The adventure takes the party by a pseudo-steamboat up a tropical river, and forces them to content with all manner of unpleasantness on the way. The "feeling" is there, and a few surprises as well.

Why only three stars, then? Because it is not a very good adventure, truth be told. The encounters are disjoined, and do not neatly flow into a single narrative. The motivation for taking the "boat trip" is not as good as i would have hoped ("do it for greed, or have the DM come up with a better reason"). Likewise, the conclusion feels disjoined, and while i like the fact that there is no overdone happy ending, the options do not quite cut it.

This module is by no means all bad - but it is not on par with some of Paizos other offerings.

"Never get off the !@#$in' boat man!"

This episode is part Heart of Darkness and part African Queen. It summons elements of Apocalypse Now and immerses players quickly in a dark world that is its own and is clearly Paizo.

This created very memorable moments in play, and had two of my players so cranked up they could not sit down for the final three scenes.

Requires a strong narrative sense to run well, but a great tool in the hands of a veteran DM.

Bravo.