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How do the other players feel? Have you asked?
How would they feel if you bowed out? As someone once advised me, "no gaming is better than bad gaming."
Are you saying you want to take over as DM? How would he feel about switching places with you? Just be honest - if you're honest and he's mature, he should take it as intended. He might even be relieved.
If the current segment of the adventure is just poorly written or exceptionally challenging for this DM, you can offer to take over at least long enough to overcome your present hurdles.
If the current segment of the adventure is just poorly written
It is. I enjoy the AP as a whole but Book 3 has enormous potential to be a directionless slog, despite the best efforts of a GM.
So, to the OP...the problem's the AP, not the GM.
Like, literally the entirety of book 3 is "Wander around and find s~@+ until you have accumulated an ungodly number of 'Exploration points' and are allowed to move on to Book 4". Not much to work with there without a huge rewrite.
How it is obvious that the DM is having to make stuff up?
The discovery of the "lost city" was the springboard for book 2. The whole point is being allied with the faction that ultimately controls the city. Of course there are groups for every other faction there trying to claim it.
Feels like it's rambling? Welcome to playing APs. Most of them have spots where they try to give players some time off the railroad. If that is not fun, you probably want to tell your GM that you don't like being able to choose things for the party to do.
Honestly, if you're not having fun you should do 2 things:
1. Try to figure out if you're the only one not having fun.
2a. If 1 = yes, leave the group
2b. If 1 = no, talk with the other players and the GM to come up with something else to do (I would suggest avoiding APs)
We are nearly finishing book 5 and I have really struggled to enjoy the AP. I did drop out for small breaks here n there.
The city gets populated no matter how hard you try.
I disliked mod 4 even more than mod 3. Mod 5 is the best mod of them all thus far IMO.
I loved book 1, a really cool adventure, so much so I plan to use it again.
Book 2 was pretty bad to be honest, my players decided the quickest route was up river so I had to improv and bring another adventure until they got to the lake. The monkey man ruin was good though.
Book 3 onwards...terrible, I, like you lost faith, the players so it and the game crumbled until the party imploded.
Never been so relived to finish a campaign before. My problem was that I was I thought book 1 was so good I started the game when it came out. As the books came out though it dawned on me it was not the adventure I thought it was going to be (I was hoping for kind of an Indaiana Jones meets conquistodors feel). Put me off for a while. (tip..wait until the full ap is released until you run it),.
Its book 3 a that lets the whole AP down, its such a central piece to the whole plot but it is so under done it's like eating raw chicken! Huge map, crap encounters, next to no traps or puzzles etc the only way to rectify it is to throw the whole book away, use the map and make you're own damn city up from scratch.
Book 4 was a little bit better, book 5 a bit better but similar to book 3, book 6 at least had a good ending.
I think others have said it but the only way to have done this justice would to have been to release book 3-5 as a mega sourcebook, say 200 + pages or better yet similar to the old TSR boxed sets with maps and things.
Such a shame as the AP had so much promise.
(If you want a really well done ruined city and dungeon site, slumbering Tsar is the way to go)
we played it and I thought it was weak at best to. You have to do a lot of prep in the beginning to mold the flavour of serpents skull to fit your group to get it to work. Not a great ap by any stretch of the imagination.