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This adventure deviates a little from the normal book 2 approach, and makes significant use of the downtime system. The core conceit is about readying the village to face winter without outside help; to do so they have to stockpile villager morale, foodstuffs, and infrastructure supplies sufficient to last them until spring. They also search for clues to what keeps them trapped in the village and its surrounding environs, have a selection of eerie events, as well as a couple of detailed ceremonies/ holidays to prepare for and share with the village. There’s also a short pilgrimage journey, and the investigation of an abandoned – but certainly not empty! – monastery.

Otherwise there’s two thematic recipes to be made at home; a few feats and spells themed around Sangpotshi, a reincarnation faith; about a half dozen each of magic items, teas, spells, and rituals; and the adventure toolbox includes several new monsters and a detailed set of the new eerie fiends called nindoru. It may have some drawbacks in a vacuum, as the first volume contained most of the detail about the town and people; if you have both it’s easy to reference back, but personally I look at the APs as a package deal anyways. Overall I really enjoyed it.

Quick caveat; I've read through the adventure, but not yet run it for my players.

Willowshore is a quiet, remote village in Tian Xia with deep ties to the natural - and unnatural - world around it. The players awake after an annual festival to find the town has been seized by horrific monsters; they must defeat the invaders, rescue what citizens they are able to, and restore the protections of the village before investigating where the monsters came from and why. Many of the village locations (shops and features, etc) are quite detailed, as well as the non-violently opposed factions of the town; we get extensive summaries of the two village elders and shorter ones of other notables, plus more detail and history about the region where Willowshore is located. There's also a handful of thematic magic items, a good helping of new fulus, and quite a few neat but very creepy monsters.

Note that there are quite a few significant plot twists and secrets in the adventure path, so if you are interested in playing through it fresh, I'd recommend you avoid reading it ahead! Otherwise I'd say it's an excellent adventure, either for running it as-is or for harvesting bits for your own campaigns.

I will preface saying the product was different than expected - preview at time of subscription/ review is a round building in a park-like outdoors setting, and the actual box was all urban alleys and rooms. I'm surprised that a placeholder image that different was still on it at release, when the proper image *is* known and hopefully has been for a while. The lack of sample images of the tiles also gave me pause at first.

Overall pretty similar to the Fantasy city ones with 2-square passageways and rooms making up the sides or corners. Some open areas, nicely detailed greebling without overwhelming the ground, clearly marked doorways. Getting the rooms to fit together and look natural can take some work with rotation and rearranging, some of the corner rooms are missing back walls so you can make larger ones - but usually with doors on two tiles, guess they wanted to avoid inaccessible closets.

Would be great for a Cyberpunk type game, most of the streets are pretty gritty and many have various kinds of graffiti or stains. Less ideal for 'pretty' cities or those with curved wards or building clusters. With some work you could kludge together slightly larger buildings, or 'space dock' type open spaces.

In summary, still happy with the product even though it's not quite what I expected - definitely will be usable.

I have a slew of the old cardboard WotC tiles for fantasy and wanted to try these flip-tiles without duplicating what I already had, so I took a chance on this set. These tiles feel identical to the Map Pack tiles I've bought previously, though it's clear they put extra focus on being able to rearrange and make varied layouts. Some tiles do seem to be duplicated (for instance small rooms along a hallway) but there were only two copies of maybe ten tiles, with the rest being unique.

The station (or easily large starship corridor) that they depict is a little - I don't want to say 'bland' because of the negative connotations - but other than a few greebly techno-modules (like on the cover image) they are pretty open and sparse. Hoping that the expansion sets add some more variety and environmental decorations.

I agree with the comments on the fantasy ones that the tile name on each card is a great feature, and I like the tabbed dividers that came with it - seems to be made of the same surface material as the tiles so you can probably write or draw on them just fine. Overall I think this set was worth every penny and has convinced me to keep buying the Starfinder ones as released; I'll probably pick up the urban fantasy tiles as well, and without my existing stock of dungeon/ wilderness cardboard tiles I'd grab those in a heartbeat too.