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I wish I could give a product 0 stars.

This book hurts me; It's so bad that it burned me out of GMing the AP. It's so bad it actively hurt my mental health.

Here's a laconic version of the plot: The PCs escape from their blood pact with their sponsor and kill him. They also get revenge on the paladin that's been a thorn in their side. It's an acceptable plot overall, but the logistics of it are inexcusable.

Over the course of the AP, the writers have established a couple things about the PCs' sponsor. Namely...
* He's a cleric lich.
* He can somehow grossly violate Asmodean principles (by resurrecting a Paladin actively acting against them) without Asmodeus revoking his power.
* He can still experience positive emotions like love, as established by his reasoning for resurrecting said paladin (he saw a long-lost love in him: he's the son of his muse)
* He's an incel.

This book goes deeper into b#*#!~#@ Hell with him in two ways:
*He was resurrected by a pit fiend into a lich. Who then immediately gave him his phylactery, despite that being a MASSIVE bargaining chip.
* He hid his phylactery in an incredibly amateurish location. If he were a Bard or an Inquisitor, fine. But he's a 9th level caster with Create Greater Demiplane on his class list. He's had *decades* to prepare and augment it. He doesn't use it.

That thorn in the PCs' side, the paladin, is their first goal in the book. He's actually been incredibly successful overall, only failing in his first encounter with the party, and now. Despite this success, there's potential for him to fall here straight into being an Antipaladin. Worse, this is the *expected* outcome, only for them to pull a 'gotcha!' in the next book.

Oh, speaking of: the book forces the LE Antipaladin houserule on you, even if you don't allow him to fall.

The book demonstrates their inability to properly apply most templates:
* They butcher applying the Advanced Bestiary's Jotunblooded template, making what should be one of the toughest characters in the AP into a pushover
* There's a pair of raveners that were originally mature adults. Ravener can only be applied to Ancient or older dragons.
* They removed the Fort save from the humanoid undead (who still need to make Fort saves against, say, Disintegrate)

There's a 'masterpiece' of a trap, which *would* really hurt...if it were at all possible for the PCs to reasonably fail. A DC 20 Reflex negates, and the PCs are level 17. A better and approximately equivalent trap would be a Mage's Disjunction.

Finally, the book ends with an incredibly display of writing which fixes most of the plotholes, minor and major.../s

It's the literal definition of a Deus Ex Machina.
For example: "The Lord of Hell is older than sin and sees into the heart of mortals. He knew from the very first day of his conversion that Samuel Havelyn would never conquer Talingarde..." "He recruited every last villain truly worth of the name who yet survived on this angel-infested isle. He brought them together, trained them and gave them purpose. This scheme that he began must now be given to others to finish."
Why didn't the lich lose his cleric abilities when he revived the paladin? Because he can't lead the PCs to success if he falls at the wrong time!

As an aside, the book has an appendix with material for considering having undead PCs. Stuff like some magical items being not so useful, like belts of CON (true) and amulets of natural armour (false). They then offer up homebrew methods to help remove the drawbacks of being undead, further unbalancing the very idea. They even include a way to resurrect a creature *while still leaving the creature as undead.* This is SO ABUSEABLE and subverts what is deliberately the biggest tradeoff one makes when willingly becoming undead.

How in Hell did people trust these guys enough for a second AP when *this* is the quality of writing they achieve?

This book is filler. It's not *terrible* filler mechanically, but a good two thirds of it could be replaced by just about anything and be just as relevant to the plot.

Seriously, I don't have too much to say about it, positive or negative. There are two...

- Black dragons are notoriously anti-social, hating all intelligent life, even other black dragons. Why does saving his son allow the PCs an audience with a black wyrm?
- The king should be well aware of his daughter's power, since hit dice is a real, calculable thing in the world of Pathfinder. She's a sorcerer 19, three levels higher than he is; anything that threatens her isn't going to be meaningfully impacted by his presence.

Again, subtracted 1 star from my actual score due to the whole 'fraud' thing.

Tucker's Kobolds was a story of an AD&D campaign; it's not possible to do in 3.5 or Pathfinder!

...I'm getting ahead of myself.

Book 3 has the PCs recruit an army to assault an order of healers during the winter. This order resides in the Vale of Valtaerna, which is nearly impossible to traverse during the winter. The PCs must slay every single creature there to hide the Asmodean influence of the work.

Before the plot starts, Book 3 is a logistics nightmare:
* Book 1 established that Talingarde was an island so that you could put it anywhere. But this book needs it to be Canadian Prairies level of snowy, preventing passage to normal humans. This means if you put it anywhere below the 60th parallel, congrats! You now have to retcon it.
* Also, you'll likely have to retcon the season, since the timeline isn't written out until Book 6 and this book requires it to be the start of winter.

Book 3's actual text begins with some absolute d~!~@~&. In the last book, the ultimate encounter was a paladin and his allies. The AP hopes to have the paladin escape, but offers this justification if he doesn't. If he dies, he is resurrected by a 'miracle of Mitra'...and by that, they mean a lich cleric of Asmodeus teleports in, grabs the corpse, and resurrects it. I really hope I don't have to spell out how audaciously bad this idea is, especially given who the cleric is.

This AP begins the issue of outsiders only being banished when killed. This was a 3.5e rule that did *not* make it into Pathfinder, and it is never written that they're using a houserule. They also treat summons as their own creature rather than the mere manifestations Pathfinder's rules have them as. They also shout out the PFSRD in this book, so it's not like they didn't have the resources available to them.

It also continues the Kingmaker Problem I mentioned in my review of Book 2, because the PCs and their army have the whole season of winter to kill everyone in the Vale. The PCs don't have to worry about the common folk, but they do have to deal with the creatures too powerful for their army.

Finally, as the title establishes, this book is where they starting throwing out some absolute nonsense as 'threats' to the players. This isn't fun; this is just tedious.

I will give Fire Mountain credit: after being briefed by their leader, a contract devil informs them of some information carefully left out by said leader, and offers a contract. This is handled in an organic way, conveying that a)their leader is hiding information, b)other forces are watching them, and c)this devil (who is important later) can now scry on them freely due to the contract.

-1 star from my actual rating because of the 'Kickstarter fraud' thing others have mentioned.

I've written this review 3 times now and the site keeps crapping out, so pardon the brevity.

+ Interesting idea that's not done in Good campaigns
- Falls into the Kingmaker Problem of 1 encounter/day but worse: 1/week until the last 5 days
- Doesn't accommodate for that at all: encounters are frequently only APL+1 or APL+2, and that's before factoring in dungeon minions, traps, etc.
- Too early to be fun; bear traps (CR 1 per 12) weren't yet guaranteed to be spotted or disabled by rogues, and they couldn't be bypassed by spellcasters without them expending their high-level slots (this got worse over time, since my mesmerist slowly augmented them with nodes of blasting)
- Obvious NPC errors, like a sorceress who is missing 2 on her fire evocation DCs and sometimes includes herself/the fire-resistant barbarian in the blasts (only possible since her as-written incarnation is impotent as a blaster)
- Has the gall to ask if a APL+4 encounter is too much. If it were just a 4v4, that's a mathematically even fight. Factor in the fact it's a 1v4, they have minions, etc. and it's audacious.

-1 Star from my actual rating because of the whole 'fraud' thing.

The title says it all. Book 1 of Way of the Wicked is fantastic, with a great and memorable starting setpiece, So is the Watch Wall, with a lot of options for the PCs.

-1 Star from my overall rating, with the whole Kickstarter fraud thing others have mentioned.

To keep a long story short, I play on a virtual tabletop, as my players live across the country. These have been absolutely wonderful for use on such a tabletop, but I can easily see the qualms if you were to try to use this traditionally.

The only discredit this has to my use is that it does not allow copy and pasting of maps into image files, but that is already disclosed in the product information and is easily circumvented through use of basic functions like print screen.