In general, I am a fan of the now-defunct Compleat Encounters line. I might not have bought more than one had this been the first instead of penultimate set I picked up, though. The adventure here is the least captivating and the NPCs don't really inspire. I think the map is fairly useful, especially for a generic temple encounter, but the minis are the least versatile of any in the series. While several of the Compleat Encounters include a prop mini, the table of torture supplies in this set is the only one I don't think I'd ever use. Similarly, the humanoid figures are not particularly useful outside of the context of the adventure.

With much eagerness I opened the envelope that came in the mail, eager to see what one of these Compleat Encounters was all about. I dumped out a bunch of peices of paper and quite literally opened up the cardboard envelope to see if I'd missed something.

Yeah. Not an inspiring start. No wrapper even, just a pile of unattached 5x8 cards--like recipe cards. A small pile. Four of these notecards constitute the adventure (not counting the "front cover" and "back cover" bits) Another card features a magic item, sort of--it's a cursed torture rack, not really a treasure type thing. The last two are NPC writeups.

The rest of the cards are light cardstock maps--not bad really, each with a chunk of nice happy temple on one side and a bloodstained evil temple on the other. Hard to imagine a lot of other uses for them--but maybe. Trouble is I don't see how half the cards would even get used if you play the module either. But they do look nice.

The adventure itself, not suprisingly, is pretty brief, but that's not necessarily a terrible thing. It's just that the setup is a little weak and a tad trite. There's not much space, so you have to make each word ring with awesomeness--and it really didn't ring. Planes-roaming serial-killer is a great hook, but it just turns into this story about a banished, self-loathing ex-cleric who tortures people and his half-orc "Igor".

That said, the write-ups for the characters are wonderfully done. Big full art page on one side to show characters with stats and writeup on the back. It's just the characters are a little blah.

No big Golarion spoilers either for those interested. A namedrop for a yet-unheard-of god, but it's pretty clearly a core Pathfinder god with a retconned name--so really not much new there.

The needless retcons are a little disappointing and could have easily been fixed early on. It just would have been nice if this could have been an added peice to their puzzle.