So I was thinking of running this adventure path as an extension of my Sargavan game. the first two seemed interesting, but then I got to three and four. Three has been strongly criticised and does have its serious weaknesses, but four takes the failure cake for me. I will explain why.

In this book, the players have secured a bit of space for themselves, battling many of the factions of the hidden city and emerging victorious. A king of the gorillas arrives before you can venture below the city and things start to go pear-shaped if you accept his forceful hospitality. There is awful food which can sicken the party and he imposes challenges which the players must complete before he will allow them to venture forth. Yes, this outsider will come in, block the adventure proceeding, impose tests and if the players win, he will move on and accept their authority (how quaint).

To the tests, a DC 25 strength check, which many players in games I've run or been in, would fail. Even a barb may not be able to pull it off if he isn't a typical massive strength build.

Next an oratory or similar check of DC 35. You are meant to impress the court, that is nice, but 35 isn't impressive, it is magnificent. Also many parties I know couldn't get 35 at around 11th level. Even a bard would fail on a low roll.

The last is combat. One party member against the king. He is a fourteenth level fighter and dire ape. He could be taken, but it would be rather hard.

If you fail two, you lose, the king blocks the tunnels that go deeper. If you win, he threatens the party and implies he will murder them in the jungle. Well that is just swell and honourable isn't it?

So I told a friend and dnd player why I wouldn't be running this adventure path and told him of the above scene. He said, the players should say fine, leave the ridiculous tests and tell the dm well the adventure path is a failure since we now can't proceed. If you refuse the very hard quests then the gorilla king becomes angry, offers them one more time (oh how generous) and may attack with his small army. A mid level party would have very little chance against this small army of ape-variants and nasty combatants.

There are some good monsters, but the necromancer hunt was stale years ago and the gorilla king encounter begins the book. It is worse than the imposed Shoanti quests in The Crimson throne, and they seemed out of place and very demanding then.

This module has the adventurers going into Saventh-Yhi's Vaults of Madness, seeking out a way to follow up on plot hooks discovered at the climax of the last book.

This book is definitely a step up in content from the last, with each mini-dungeon containing a number of interesting encounters. The problem comes when you finally have the hindsight to realize that each dungeon has about three encounters in it, and many of them aren't really hyped up a lot with story. The ecology also feels strange. You kind of go from one encounter to the next, hitting themed streaks, but a lot of the monsters don't feel like they really live in, or have a reason to live in, the vaults they're encountered in.

It's strongly written, the roleplaying is solid, and the trademark Paizo "information the party will never learn" is fascinating. If you're coming out of City of Seven Spears, this will be a breath of fresh air.

This module is filled with several solid, short crawls. I did not like modules 3 and 5 of this AP (6 is not out yet by the time this is written), but this one is a great addition to 1 and 2. It's not one of those "Man, I want to run this NOW and see the expression on my player's faces" adventures that Paizo so often comes up with... but it's obvious from reading this that there is lots of fun to this one.

This is *only* a review on a couple points - things for which I was searching or which I just sort of noticed.

Overall, looks like a really interesting module with lots of action. Not much contact with Mwangi culture (for which I was looking) but a little bit. Huge pulp feel.