| Jim Kiley |
I have been running this darn AP for a couple of years now. We're finally in book 6. I've understood some of the complaints I've read here and there about various parts of the AP but on the whole our group is really invested & having a great time.
But a couple of times in books 5 and 6 my sense of in-game reality has gotten a bruising and I wanted to whine about it to people who might know what I'm whining about.
At the end of book 4 / start of book 5 the PCs learn that the sixth Aeon Orb is just... gone. Nobody knows where it went. Some of the Empty Stone group took it and left and literally nobody knows where it is. I am not told as a GM where it went. But there's a sixth stone! And we know where that one is! So go get it! Well... why bother having a stone that's gone missing at all? What is added there? Why not just have there be five stones, and the fifth one is in the Vault of the Black Desert and that's that? I'm sure that the missing stone is important somewhere in Golarion lore somewhere but I'll be damned if I know where and I'll be damned if I care. So I'm left breaking character to say to my players, "guys, the other stone is not available to be found, stop trying," which stinks.
At the start of book 5 the PCs travel to the Vault of the Black Desert, where teleportation magic doesn't work well. So they'll have to go overland and can't easily retreat to somewhere safe. No. Dangit. A fundamental tenet of high-level adventure design is that you don't design high-level adventures to deprive high-level characters of their coolest abilities. You design them so that they can't be done without those cool abilities. A group with a high-level wizard is excited to have access to Teleport. Why take it away? Let them teleport in and out of the Vault of the Black Desert. Make sure that enemies are aware of this as a risk and are set up to deal with it.
At the end of book 5, the PCs are told that they have free reign to go after the big bad of the book, who lives (unlives) in a dire black tower in the Forbidden Zone or whatever the hell it's called. PCs are told not to destroy or rend the tower apart, because that would be naughty, and if they do the guards will get 'em. Seriously? We're supposed to be afraid of town guards, and worried about being naughty and damaging a tower set among the ruins of a millenia-dead city? Instead, how about having the big bad be prepared for the possibility that PCs will rip the roof off the tower, and prepared to respond accordingly? Or, hell, make it such that there's literally no door into the tower. You must use teleportation magic or rend the walls to get in. That would be much more satisfying.
And now we're in book 6 and what do you know, the Kortos Mounts have a weird Aroden-created anti-teleportation field all around them, too! Once again something that might have been super-satisfying (a race against time as Sarvel Ever-Hunger is performing the Extinction Curse ritual and you have to use teleportation to get there before the isles are laid waste) is instead "oh we have to slog through these encounters that the author thought would be cool."
Anyway, I haven't read a lot of the higher-level books in other 2e APs. I hope they're more sensible about this kind of thing.