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GameMastery Module E1: Carnival of Tears (OGL) Print Edition
Paizo Publishing, LLC
An event-based adventure for 5th-level characters.
Falcon's Hollow has long been watched by the vile fey of Darkmoon Vale. They've lingered in their wood, seething with anger at the townspeople for defiling their land. When the carnival arrives, the fey finally see their chance for vengeance.
Carnival of Tears is a low-level, event-based adventure written by Nicolas Logue and Tim Hitchcock that pits the players against a band of wretched fey who have infiltrated a carnival in order to unleash their anger on Falcon's Hollow. When the heroes uncover the dark secrets within, will they act in time to prevent Falcon's Hollow from becoming the carnival's final patrons?
GameMastery Modules are 32-page, high-quality, full-color, OGL-compatible adventures for use with the world's most popular fantasy RPG. All GameMastery Modules include four pre-made characters so players can jump right into the action, and full-color maps to enhance play.
Are there errors or omissions in this product information? Got corrections? Let us know at
webmaster@paizo.com.
Product Reviews
Average product rating:
 
(4.6)
based on
18
reviews
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review.
This module is remarkable. The party starts out going through a carnival, complete with grannies with pies, candy apples, beer garden, ice maze, Test-Your-Strength... and then goes through it all again when the carnival goes real horror show. The fae-altered ice carving, "Lumber Yard of Tomorrow!", candy apples and pie eating contest had my player screaming! This is one of the few adventures that get the vengeful alien humor of the fae myths. Your players will respect them after this one.
The one change I'd make, however, is that the scary clown on the cover does not appear in the module. I changed the thinly-veiled DMPC carnival owner into the cover clown and made him an antagonist. My player is still trying to find a way to sell Clown Shoes of the Elvenkind!
My longer review vanished - so here goes with a shorter version....
Dungeon - very good
Bad point - I had to change the location to a village/town full of nice innocent people as my party thought that the worthless inhabitants of Falcon's Hollow deserved everything they got and found it hard to justify saving them. (and I had to agree with them - save the trees)
Now this is how to do horror for 3.5. The encounters are dangerous and there's a good chance your characters will bite the bullet if they don't get played very carefully... but with some common sense this will be a wild ride.
Oh, and I love the heartlessly evil and alien fey villains. This adventure hearks back to the horriffic fey of folklore, and in grand fashion!
Easily worth five stars!
Like I said, I agree with Nick on the Gore-O-Meter factor: Completely maxxed, and this adventure should have a specific warning in that regard. However, this module could have very easily been titled "Fey Gone Bad: The Sourceback For Running Adventures Involving Extremely Angry Faeries". And that is why I gave it five stars. There is absolutely no way that this particular title can be considered "E (for everyone)", and I have always felt that "PG" means exactly what it says, however for years now we have all wondered about what the fey would do in exactly this situation. My personal favorite is the fate-tweaker, great use of fore-shadowing. I do not reccommend this book to new groups. It is not at all what the hobby is normally about, but like I said: "Bad faeries. Very, very BAD faeries". Thanks Paizo, nightmare inducing, toe-curdling, but for me and my experience, this is a great addition to my stockpile of things to ruin a rangers' day. Don't love it, but for me-n-mine the value is superb.
Excellently written, awesome art and maps, rules and crunchy-bits were well laid out. However, the disgusting nature of the traps and the extreme horror level made me wish I had never ordered it. If I had seen it in a store and thumbed through it I would have know it was not for me. I am not even going to run it for my table because I know they would be offended by the horrific box text descriptions. I hope I don’t order another module that is marketed as a Fantasy Adventure and receive a “Slasher Film” Horror RPG. Next time I’ll only buy books I can thumb through first.
My players LOVED this Rob Zombie-inspired dark fantasy adventure. The sandbox nature of events and the blend of social and combat encounters struck a note across the board. The level of horror is about the same as EC Comics (at their most extreme), so if you admire those, you'll enjoy Carnival of Tears.
As an extra suggestion, I recommend playing Nox Arcana's Carnival of Souls as background music.
Event-based adventures are never easy to write but this one has been
crafted well. The story evolves very smoothly and is chock full of
engaging independent encounters. This definitely isn't a mod for an
amateur DM but in the hands of a skilled storyteller this is
definitely going to be memorable.
My only significant disappointment was the chief villain and his fleet
footed side-kick. These characters seemed to lack depth (in stark
contrast to the NPC protagonist) and, as a result, I fear they would
drag the story down. That combined with the unavoidable high civilian
body count will make the finale of this story a bit of let down for
players. Players may also find the exceptinally high gore level of
this story a turn off.
This adventure turns everyone's fears of what could happen in a carnival into RPG reality.
It is "worth the ride," but beware! this module will chew up characters and spit them out ... in pieces (along with the rest of Falcon's Hollow)!
The PDF is an extra bonus making this adventure 5 Stars and then some!
This is a playtest review. We played through this adventure in two five hour session. Half of the players used the pregen characters, the other two created their own.
LIKED: The swinomancer was not very dangerous but visually very impressive. Players mentioned him again and again.
The atmosphere was interesting with sad music being played by the grigs. I started playing The Black Rider by Tom Waits in the background when we reached that point.
Not all encounters are necessary. Players can easily avoid some encounters if they they feel that they have to conserve their resources.
The pregen characters all have something useful against the predominant creature type without being obviously optimized. That makes the entire thing very organic.
DISLIKED: This adventure features no rest and no getting back of spells. That was bad news for the sorceror. The newbie player had created a sorceror without a wand of magic missile. Ouch!
The last foe has SR but I ignored it. The last foe also has Freedom of Movement and our barbarian was specialized in grappling. I ignored that, too. It really depends on well the party has been doing until now.
The nymph encounter was bad. I gave a hint about people clawing at the eyes and groaning with pleasure, asked for initiative rolls, the bard NPC won, failed his save, and turned blind. Ouch! A suggested solution in the book would have been great.
BOTH: One of my players said that if I hadn’t told them after the first session that they needed to disrupt n events to get the last foe to appear, he wouldn’t have known what to do. Another player said, however, that even though he did not know the exact number, he knew exactly what to do.
One player felt that the foes were incredibly tough with all the extra damage they were causing and their poisons, but another player felt that those made interesting encounters.
A rule to cut down a tents would have been nice.
Nick Logue and Tim Hitchock writing an adventure together?! Holy crap, the end is nigh!
These two sick MFers can come up with some straight up disturbing stuff. This is a must buy just to see where their sick minds went with this one.
Buy it! Run it! But you and your players will never be able to look at fey that same way ever again. BEWARE!
Product Discussion
54
posts.
See all discussion for this product.
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Oh my, the Quickling just might sell this module to me. I've got a campaign running and the current BBEG is a Quickling named Asyr'Ala. I'd love to have a little bit more stuff on Quicklings if I could, but then there is the time it will take the module to get to the Netherlands. So what should I do?
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Tio wrote:
... but then there is the time it will take the module to get to the Netherlands. So what should I do?
Buy the pdf instead?
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Hopefully Paizo will state that they used very similar stats to the ones I found at EN World. Cos those are the stats I'm using.
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Tio wrote:
Hopefully Paizo will state that they used very similar stats to the ones I found at EN World. Cos those are the stats I'm using.
Hey Tio,
We used the OGL stats from the revised Tome of Horror.
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Fairly disappointed with this one.
Is there a way to exclude his modules from the Gamemastery subscription service? It's gotten to the point now where I know I won't like his modules.
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PZO9506
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Tio
(Pathfinder Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber),
Tim Hitchcock
(Contributor),
