It takes a lot to qualify for the title of Worst Module ever, but since I have been playing organized play scenarios since the early days of Living City, I feel qualified in making that assessment.

1. Yet another trite module with monsters which can see in the dark and casting darkness. It was new and challenging once, but after a half dozen occurrences, the editors should be sending these encounters to be rewritten. It's so bad that my barbarian/oracle of battle/rage prophet has used a 3rd level spell slot for Daylight.

2. This is the first organized play scenario where I got absolutely no XP going back 20 over years to living city days. Why? Because we spent four hours on the second encounter (see #1). This is utterly assinine. We only saw two encounters out of the whole module. That's certainly a waste of player, author and editor time.

3. People play PFS to have fun. Beating your head against the table for hours due to a poorly designed encounter is not fun. To make matters worse, we were forced to play up due to the arbitrary PFS rules.

4. We had two PCs die (not mine) and the judge ruled that they were consumed by the rakshasa several levels above and were unrecoverable. If we'd waited a day, maybe, but not a 10 minute withdrawl to heal and buff up before returning.

I haven't read the module and I suspect that I would have enjoyed it far more with another judge, but due to the PFS rules I can not play it again even though I have only seen a fraction of the module. The Pathfinder Society needs to come up with a method of rating judges, because a poor judge makes a good module bad and a bad module worse.

This scenario provided a lot of depth and was a reasonable second parter. As a player I felt like there were options and diversity to the encounters. Combats were cleverly designed and if caught unprepared a party could be in a world of hurt.

I enjoyed GMing this scenario for a number of reasons - The types of encounters were very challenging, both for the players and for the GM to understand. I had to do MUCH more research than normal to be prepared to run certain encounters. I actually enjoyed this because I learned much more about some new topics. The bad guys were built well enough to give them plenty of fun options during combat. The story was still a little weak for roleplaying, but there are at least three times you can push the RP envelope for the group. It took us a solid 4 hours to complete the scenario. They zipped through a few of the encounters that saved time and nobody had a faction mission thanks to playing them in order and not returning. The faction missions looked to be interesting enough if you had to use them. We all enjoyed the scenario and the interesting boon that came with it. Good job!

I have mixed feelings about Pagoda. On one hand we had a great time (it was mostly because of the players). On the other hand I didn't find the scenario itself very memorable. Too much time was spent by my GM drawing maps.

The combats were balanced but not memorable overall. We actually ended up bypassing all of the encounters except for two combat encounters. I'm honestly not sure how anyone finishes either Rats 1 or 2 on time if you're not diplomatic. Luckily, most groups have a diplomacy monkey, so it isn't an issue.

Wow ... after running Rats part 1 at a convention within 4 hours it was quite a change as I ran Rats part 2 as a home game which took 8 hours at Tier 10-11. Admitedly, we took breaks for food and drinks and chit-chat but I think this might be a tricky scenario to complete within 4 hours. I think it can be completed within 4 hours but the DM has to keep the party very focused and execute the mobs' strategy quickly.

Again, this adventure was an excellent balance of story and combat which places the power back into the hands of the DM. What do I mean by that? - I had that question from a reader. I mean that the mobs are sufficiently nasty that the DM really needs to be responsible for customizing how dangerous the mobs are. If you read the encounter specific spoilers, I elaborate on how this can be achieved.

Also, I received a question why Rats part 1 only received 4 stars and not 5 stars so I imagine I'll receive another question since I gave Rats part 2 received 5 stars. I really liked Rats part 2 because of how it could be played "sandbox" style. It also provides for a unique experience for the players depending up whether they have played Rats part 1 before Rats part 2. IMO, being open ended and unique earns a module 5-stars vs. 4-stars which I would award to a module which I felt is solidly better than average.

DM complexity - very high
I'm an experienced DM in 3.0, 3.5 and PFS and spent over 8 hours preparing this module at Tier 10-11. Furthermore, there are lot of conditional modifiers to keep track - I usually keep a note sheet at hand to track everything which occurs and I ran out of space on it.

Player complexity - moderate
I ran this game at Tier 10-11 for 6 players: one at 10th level; 4 at 9th level and one at 7th. I would consider two of the characters having "optimized" builds but this did not imbalance things especially since they were the front-line fighters and this ended up saving them when they performed unwise character actions. I also made the PCs complete the entire scenario without resting so spells and resources were very limited.

My favorite element of this scenario was the complexity of the plot. There were many twists and turns which could have occurred. As such, I felt I was definately kept "on my toes" as a DM.