| Kefit |
I just finished DM'ing this adventure path a few days ago. All in all my players and I had a fantastic time with most of it, though I made some heavy modifications as we went. It definitely has its weak points, particularly in books four and five. If you are going to cut material, then cut from here. You can also cut a lot of part three without missing anything, though I strongly encourage at least giving the players a chance to roleplay around the markets and locales of Katapesh.
- Book one is fantastic. There's a lot going on and the players have a lot of freedom in how to go about exploring Kelmarene. Kelmarene ends up being kind of like a free form dungeon, where the players can go wherever they want at any time and where I don't have to bother with cumbersome maps.
- Book two is also fantastic, and introduces one of the things I loved about this adventure path in general - multiple adverse factions for the PCs to mess around with. My players ended up allying with the troglodyte leader, who joined them in battle against Gartok. It created a great roleplaying experience (especially when the party backstabbed the troglodyte after the battle!) and helped ease the lethality of the battle against Gartok and his gargantuan pet.
- The first half of book three is weak. The encounters on the way to Katapesh just aren't interesting, even if they make for some cinematic fun. My players all had a blast with rummaging around the markets and with the dinner party, and I'm really surprised to hear the general negativity surrounding the party. It may have helped that one of our PCs was rightfully terrified of the Pactmasters and was unable to refuse a direct request for a dinner party from them. I also spiced things up by creating a rather insane pactmaster npc who attended the party and kept everyone on their toes. We all agree that the party was one of the single best sessions we had. The dungeon at the end of part three isn't great, so I truncated the encounters within it. I also introduced the Captain of the Sunset Ship much earlier, in the Katapesh markets, which made the dungeon flow more smoothly. The Captain even joined the dinner party for added fun :)
- I thought book four was weak. It presents an entire demiplane for the PCs to adventure in, but it really feels like there isn't a lot there. My players were only concerned with getting out, so I had to twist their arms a bit to get them to visit locales such as the antimagic spire, the volcano, and the island of the dead. We were in and out of Kashikon in three sessions, and no one was sad to leave. The most fun we had here was when my PCs were still trapped on the initial chain of islands and were having fun hunting dinosaurs and playing at diplomancy with the gnoll tribes.
- Part five is far too long as written. I heavily truncated it by having Scheherazade provide the players with a full map of the palace and then letting the PCs teleport around as they pleased. This allowed them to skip large portions of senseless grinding against the lizardfolk and whatnot. My players were somewhat fatigued from being trapped in Kashikon, but didn't mind the shift to another prison too much because Bayt Al-Bazaan was a much more interesting place to explore and play with factions than was Kashikon.
The main problem here is that the escape route from the palace is poorly written. The only way out is to get the Impossible Eye - which the PCs really have no reason to want - and then immediately give it to either the dragon or the Grand Vizier. There's really no indication that doing this will actually allow the players to leave. My PCs realized in a metagame sense that the dragon was the boss of this dungeon, and killing him would allow them to leave, but they also realized that the dragon was extremely dangerous and that other methods for leaving would be preferable. The spent a lot of time investigating for another way out, but in the end they finally got forced into fighting the dragon. I had been building up the dragon as a villain since book two (the troglodyte tribe venerated him), so they at least had some motivation to kill him.
Also, things can get messy and dragged out in book five if the PCs or Ezer retreat from the final series of encounters. My PCs went from being one encounter away from escaping the dungeon to being trapped in the bottom most levels for weeks as the dragon and giants teamed up to siege the basement, with Ezer plotting against them all the while and allying himself with the lizardfolk that I took the liberty of pumping up.
- The first half of book six is fantastic and really ties together the rest of the adventure path. The return to Kelmarene is much like the initial siege on the city with the associated freedom and ease of running encounters and exploration. As another has said, the tower felt grindy so I heavily truncated the encounters within it, in return heavily pumping up the difficulty of the boss within and of the clockwork general.
Unfortunately, I think Xotani's Grave is a poorly designed dungeon and is a poor conclusion to a mostly great campaign. The layout is excessively difficult to run in terms of mapping, the rooms are too small for the encounters that take place in them, and the wishcraft creatures are underutilized. Come on now, dominated fire giants do not make for interesting wish magic. You know what does? Two fire giants that have been merged into a creature with four arms, four legs, two heads, and a separate turn for each living head. Moreover, the dungeon is largely uninteresting and without direction, mostly asking the PCs to kind of wander until they bump into Jhavuhl. I scrapped the dungeon entirely, replacing it with a focused series of encounters to end the campaign. A complete overhaul of the dungeon would be better, but real life circumstances made ending the campaign sooner rather than later desirable for all of us, so I made Xotani's Grave into a cinematic series of events that minimized exploration.
Overall, I'd say that the one area where I had to twist my player's arms the most was with opening the Scroll of Kashikon. Their characters would have been delighted to just sell the thing, and the players knew in a metagame sense that opening it would lead to nothing but trouble. But's probably the same reason they submitted to opening it without complaint - you can't have a campaign without some trouble going on, now can you?