Pathfinder Adventure Path #41: The Thousand Fangs Below (Serpent's Skull 5 of 6) (PFRPG)

This book is a mirror to the scenario in Book 3. The PCs are tasked with exploring a lost city in order to find an ally who can give them the story of what's going on in the AP. The exploration mechanics of Book 3 were decidedly half-baked, and turned what should have been a compelling game of interaction with the native denizens through diplomacy and force into a hack and slash "kill them all" scenario.

This book seeks to take another crack at the scenario, and while the results are better, they're not that much better. Diplomacy is a very real part of this book, as there are multiple factions in the city and at least two of them can be recruited to the PC's side. Once this is done, the PCs have to break into a large dungeon to save their damsel in distress.

The exploration of the city is covered only very briefly. There are a few locations spelled out and a couple of scripted encounters. Most of the rest of the exploration is given over to the GM to make up. Most of the rest of the encounters are either random encounters, or wandering patrols from one of the factions. It's not very satisfying, but one could understand that they want to push the action towards the large dungeon and the rescue. Interacting with the two factions is fairly interesting and allows some opportunities for RP that were lacking from Book 3. It's not great, but it's not terrible either.

The dungeon, on the other hand, is kind of terrible. It's a large fortress where most of the encounters are with nameless serpentfolk patrols and soldiers. I cannot imagine how a GM will keep up a party's interest in this dungeon after the 4th or 5th encounter with 4-6 serpentfolk with the same stat block. It's extremely tedious. And lest you think that the PCs can stealth their way in, the book covers this. The serpentfolk are able to telepathically communicate with each other, so if you aggro one group, they're immediately able to warn the other denizens of the fortress. Aggro enough groups, and then they're all on alert and it all becomes much more difficult. This telepathy is very hard to stop and means that makes infiltration tactics, such as picking off wandering groups of serpentfolk, largely impossible. The dungeon doesn't have much diversity in encounters: it's mostly a couple of high-level serpentfolk leaders and literally dozens of low-level serpentfolk soldiers with identical stats.

These city exploration scenarios were likely just too ambitious for a single AP volume to adequately explore. After all, exploring the two cities-- or even one city-- could be the entire AP. If the GM was prepared to do a lot of work, it could be interesting. But they'd be better off scrapping the vast majority of the material presented in he AP modules and just homebrewing their own story based on the scenario of the "lost city in the jungle". After the disorganization of Book 3 and the tedium of this book, I'm not sure that there's much worth taking from the published AP material.

After cutting books 3 and 4 short because the only option is "kill em all" we really looked forward to this next chapter.
Unfortunatly we found that it just continues in the same direction. Farm monsters until you get bored. We dropped the rest of the path after two sessions.

This adventure focuses on the PCs exploring an ancient, ruined city. Which is precisely what they were doing two adventures ago in "City of Seven Spears." Thankfully, the underground city of Ilmurea feels far different than its counterpart in the world above, which means there's little chance players will be feeling much deja-vu.

The primary adversaries in "Thousand Fangs Below" are serpent people, and the PCs will be slogging through a small army of them. Fortunately there are a variety of other enemies such as morlocks, gugs, drow, intellect devourers, and daemon-spawned urdefhan to keep things feeling fresh. There are also several opportunities for diplomacy, intrigue, and shady alliances here, leaving sneaky or socially inclined characters with plenty of chances to shine.

I would also like to compliment the maps in "Thousand Fangs." The cartographer did an excellent job with Ilmurea, and the serpent people's fortress (the titular Fortress of Thousand Fangs) is well done. It's essentially an enormous, coiled, hollow stone snake - really cool in other words.

There are four new high-CR monsters in the bestiary. Three of the beasties come from African mythology, while the fourth is the mysterious herald of the magic god Nethys. All four monsters were unique and interesting.

Speaking of Nethys, he gets a full write-up in "Thousand Fangs" as well. The author, Sean K Reynolds, is known for his excellent treatment of deities, but I found this article to be among his weaker pieces. Nethys came across as a bit bland. Yes, I understand that he encourages his followers to learn/create/use magic, but to what end? I thought the previous look at nature deity Gozreh, back in "Race to Ruin", was a much more intriguing piece. Oh well.

To round out "Thousand Fangs," we have a gazeteer of Ilmurea - the city in which this adventure takes place. There are some great adventure hooks to be found here, and a creative GM could keep his players occupied for many hours exploring this nifty set piece.

All in all, this is a well done penultimate adventure.