A highly engaging scenario that sends a pathfinder team into a seriously creepy abandoned laboratory to recover valuable information, and have to high-tail it out of there once its demonic owner comes back.
Highlights include the tie-in to Night March of Kalkamedes, the stiched-up half-demonic ex-pathfinder who made for some great moments, a series of well-described and seriously creepy experiment rooms where you're never sure whether anything is going to leap out and attack, and several tense combat scenes.
The best part is when the party finally made it to the final vault... only to discover that
Spoiler:
their arrival triggered an alarm which would quickly have their old nemesis teleport in, so they had to rush back through a shaking lab which caused several display cases to open their hostile content, and ran straight into the arms of the guardian above. Deciding to run rather than fight, with two teammates covering their retreat, they barely made it out of the maze alive.
Overall, it's well-written; the traps, combats, and other elements tie together well; and the premise of "get the info and get out" is a nice change of pace to many scenarios of "go there and kill the bad guy". Highly recommended.
This scenario starts out poorly: after defeating the Shadow Lodge in the first part, it turns out there'a second Lodge in town that you also have to defeat. And again, nobody in town has any information whatsoever. The crime lord who sends you doesn't know; divination and gather info don't work; you meet the same colorful NPCs who didn't know anything in the first part, and they still don't know anything. After spending enough time with zero results, you get ambushed in town by the very Lodge you're unable to find. After a remarkably easy combat, you learn where their lair is, and at this point you get into a dungeon crawl to defeat the leader again.
The dungeon is decent enough, no criticism there. The problem is that these two scenarios require a fixed number of checks to trigger the next encounter, but the checks themselves (diplo talking to NPCs) give zero information and aren't related to the overall outcome. It's like those old adventure games where giving a flower to the girl in town makes a potion appear on a faraway island for no discernible reason, and it was annoying then as well. This is really not a constructive way to write an RPG scenario.
Another odd thing is that you get your mission from a local crime lord (instead of the Venture Captains) who demands bloody murder with no other option. The Silver Crusade mission is also an assassination again. Thankfully you don't get penalized for not killing the opposition, but still, for a number of people it would be in character to just say "no" to the crime lord and skip the entire scenario.
Overall this scenario is better than the first, but still not really recommendable. However, there are some good opportunities for roleplaying, and Kaer Maga is worth visiting again.
The upside of the scenario is that Kaer Maga is an interesting location with colorful NPCs, and that several of the faction missions are funny (although Silver Crusade asks you to murder a civilian for some reason). The combats are nothing special and are all very easy.
The downside of the scenario is the absence of plot. Your goal is to locate the Shadow Lodge, but nobody in town knows anything about it. The various colorful NPCs don't know, gather information reveals nothing, divinations don't help, the crime lord who ambushes you early on doesn't know either, even the Shadow Lodge goons that also ambush you don't have any info. Only after spending enough time getting no results whatsoever, you get the attention of another crime lord who knows where the Lodge is. After meeting him, you get ambushed again by Shadow Lodgers, who apparently followed you the whole time with no chance of being noticed. And then you easily defeat the leader in his lair, although the sequel reveals they have a second lair, that nobody has information on either.
I did have a pleasant time roleplaying with my teammates, but must note this is not because of the scenario, but in spite of it. So while I hope there are other missions to vibrant Kaer Maga, I really can't recommend this one.
The premise of the scenario is really cool, with fey and portals and time travel. But wow, does it ever fail to deliver.
After the intro, it starts with a boring trap encounter, then some nice role-playing in an interesting location that unfortunately doesn't answer many questions about itself. Then we get a series of easy and underwhelming combats. This is followed by a tedious immersion-breaking puzzle that took us nearly an hour to get through. And finally, two very difficult combats but in a frustrating way rather than a challenging one. You know, the kind where you get dropped before you can act, or can do nothing round after round because you can't target the enemies.
The twofold issues with the puzzle: first, in-character there is no reason to do it at all. It doesn't make sense that jumping through a series of seemingly-random portals would make a wall of force disappear, and more sensible solutions (e.g. Dimension Door) are arbitrarily disallowed. Second, there is not enough information to solve the puzzle, so you have to rely on trial an error. For an hour. Portal 4, then 2, 5, and 3, then 7? Doesn't work. 3-8-9-1-5-2-4? Nope. 2-5-3-7-4-1-4? No again, keep trying. I am seriously baffled that anyone thought this was a good idea.
Tldr, it's a railroad of encounters that range from dull-but-easy to dull-but-hard, with a horrible puzzle in the middle. Definitely a scenario to avoid.
