Pathfinder Adventure Path #30: The Twice-Damned Prince (Council of Thieves 6 of 6) (PFRPG)

Council of Thieves finally becomes less linear. Players have a lot of choice regarding what to do in their climactic final battle. This feels a lot more like Book 1, which emphasized dungeon crawling less and set piece fights and encounters more. The GM has a series of NPCs and enemies for the players to interact with and can place those where they will. It's a fine way to handle a final set of encounters.

I think my issue is that it doesn't feel very climactic. Maybe the story in CoT just doesn't lend itself to a big, climactic struggle at the end. It's a low-key, and dare I say, low-stakes story compared to a lot of other APs. Some of the villains will feel like they come out of nowhere without a lot of work to foreshadow them that the AP doesn't provide. I don't know if the AP has given the players enough reason to care about the story that was happening with the ultimate AP villain. And the last boss themselves is a huge cake walk if the PCs make the right choices. It's very anticlimactic.

Honestly, Book 5 felt like a better "ending" for the AP in general. This was a persistent problem with Council of Thieves: major plot threads that were too disconnected, and with too little information provided to the players. Books can, and likely should, be done in a different order, which is not the sign of a strong plot.

Overall, the entire AP started strong, but the back half didn't move the plot along in a way that felt like a climax to a good adventure story.

This was a good finish, just not mind-blowing. The players get to run around the city and tie up all their loose-ends, and this freedom was refreshing after several books that were very dungeon-focused to the point of being too railroading. Still, there was nothing super memorable about the encounters, except the final showdown which was exciting and well done.

It felt like a bit of a grab-bag of disconnected challenges, some of which were interesting, but many of which were just fights with groups of monsters straight out of the Bestiary. Spice it up, and add appearances and encounters with any recurring villains or characters you've accumulated, and it will not feel like an unsatisfactory ending by any means.

Oh, and one other piece of advice for GMs running this: You may way to adjust the fame-point table at the end, because achieving a satisfying ending requires that the players have earned almost every single fame point available in the entire AP. My players were consistently thorough and successful and still barely avoided having a bad ending result.

Overall, worth doing. We had a good time finishing out the AP, despite some bumps along the way. It always feels like a journey to get through a campaign like this, and Council was no disappointment, though it definitely had some stretches that were much more fun than others.

This adventure had some definite strengths and weaknesses. One of its strong points was its non-linear flow: the GM is presented with a series of related events to run as he pleases and in no particular order. This allows for the adventure to develop in an organic manner, as opposed to forcing the PCs down a particular path. Also, the manner in which the party deals with these events usually has an impact later on, further adding to the realism. There are no dungeons per se in Twice-Damned Prince. This made me a bit leary at first, but the author pulls it off quite well.

Now for the bad. While all of the adventure's events are solid and well presented, few of them struck me as particularly interesting. With the exception of the two main antagonists and a tiefling monk, I found the NPCs bland and uninspiring. For example, many of the enemies in this adventure are, not surprisingly, rogues. Why, then, did the author decide to make the vampiric Thesing a rogue as well? Why not a bard or sorcerer? It would fit his character thematically, and make for a much more interesting fight than yet another backstabbing thief-type.

Another annoyance came in the form of the fame point system. Specifically, Twice-Damned Prince adds a new type of "points" called popularity points, which must be tracked separately from fame points despite being very similar to them. This seemed unneccesarily complicated.

The article on the archdevil Mammon was fantastic, easily as good as Sean K Reynold's best Deities of Golarion articles. You even get a ready-made 20th-level high priest of Mammon who would make an excellent villain should the GM wish to continue this campaign. The bestiary has some intriguing high CR entries, though like past CoT bestiaries, the illustrations are mediocre. The Catastrophe article presents a great set of rules for running disasters such as floods and fires.

All in all, Twice-Damned Prince is a solid adventure that falls a bit short in flavor and comes with some great supporting articles. I'd give it 3.5 stars if I were able.