Lass's page

In anticipation of an upcoming campaign of the Wrath of the Righteous in which I am a player I picked this book up as a bit of an aid in immersing myself into the setting.

OMG!

I can only hope my GM takes us to many of the places within! I love all of these adventure hooks and points of interest. Everything from stone forests to fallen crusades, this book hints at all.

In reading it, the area has a wink and a nod to this having once been the Golarion Celtic analog so that makes me a wee bit sad that its been overtaken by the demons. Its a shame there is no comparable places in Golarion that take on that setting to allow players to design characters with an eye towards a Celtic archetype. However there are meant to be Sarkorian survivors and refugees, I suppose that's something.

I will start by saying I approach whats written in the AP books are a framework by which I add or subtract bits here and there and shift them around to fit the backgrounds of my player characters. I ran it for a group of 6 PCs online. As such, I'll approach this review with a pros and cons framework.

Pros:
I love the hex crawl part of the adventure. I'm always fond of areas of a prepublished adventure where I have the freedom to add or subtract from whats given as I see fit. So in the first part of the game I had a lot of fun with the landscape.

I enjoyed that the NPCs were well flushed out with clear motivations and ambitions

I though the way the BBEG of the book was extremely well handled and does an excellent job of setting up things to come. It also was an area that allowed me to play around and add bits in for backstory.

Cons:

I am never a big fan of massive dungeons and that is exactly what the Sightless Sphinx is. It has several factions working against each other and to me felt a bit crowded. Perhaps if some bits of it had been moved to a desert mini dungeon I would have found that more to my liking.

The maps are just too bland. There are rooms that describe blood stains yet you wouldn't get a sense of that from looking at the map. Beds are simply boxes upon the maps. Really disappointing as I would hope that with a good number of people playing either online or printing these out there would be more attention paid to making the maps reflect how interesting the environment is.

Overall assessment: I really enjoyed this book. Some of the encounters were very tough, others easy which is a good combination. There is room for your characters to breathe and explore though the Sphinx, as fitting to the grammar of the AP setting is, was just a bit too long.

I run these adventure paths as a framework from which I cut and expand as I feel matches the needs of the game. I ran this online with a group of 5 players marginally optimized.

My goal going into this final book of the AP was to run it as written which is a change from how I ran books 3, 4, and 5. However it didn’t work out that way at all as my players ended up bypassing a great deal of it. That being said, let me address this final chapter according to some of the pros and cons as I saw them and as they synergized with my particular style of GMing:

Pros:
- The Setting is really interesting. I love the idea of a flying castle. The chance that this could fall into player’s hands at the end of the game is really quite a nice capstone to the whole adventure as well.
- The final fight with Voltus has the chance to be very cinematic and exciting with the element of a fighting in three dimensions.
- Its very true to the spirit of the AP with its commitment to Old School grinds.

Cons:
- Voltus has a boring backstory and motivation. He is easily the least interesting of all the final villains I’ve ever met in an AP.
- Its one great big grind. There are a couple of opportunities for interesting encounters based on the terrain its fought in but for the most part those challenges are negated by the level of the characters.
- Very few RP opportunities. If memory serves me correctly there is really only 2 encounters.
- No connections to the start of the AP. Trunau??? What is that?
- Like most book 6s, it’s a huge dungeon but after so many mega dungeons it would have been nice for a bit of a change. But then again, if your playing Giantslayer because of that Old School feel, you may welcome this.

I run these adventure paths as a framework from which I cut and expand as I feel matches the needs of the game. I ran this online with a group of 5 marginally optimized.

This one is second to book 3 in terms of the amount of edits I had to implement. In fact this one I cut the entire first half of the book. For me, the idea of going through a medium sized dungeon at the end of book 4, this one being a massive dungeon, and the final book also being a massive dungeon felt like too much grinding. So I instead inserted some mass combat using the Ultimate Campaign rules set which seemed to work as a fun first half. That said, let me address some of the pros and cons:

Pros:
- As usual, there are a few really interesting NPCs to build around. I especially liked Thoon and the Queen. In a massive dungeon grind, they helped to break up the monotony.
- The levels of the dungeon, and even rooms are quite modular which made it very easy to customize.
- Some good new monsters such as the Iron Rhino!

Cons
- Many of the encounters were way too similar
- Way too grindy without enough interesting things to do aside from kill everything
- The setting is interesting but felt underutilized. I’d have liked to have seen more lava dangers, ground shaking, etc.
- There is no art for this volcano. This may be particular to running this online, but its such an interesting site yet there is no art to show what this volcano looked like from the outside. Within the back matter there is a picture of a volcano but its not Ashpeak and its surrounded by tropical fauna so can’t be.
- As I said before, the back to back to back dungeon grinds was just a bit too much.

I will start by saying I approach whats written in the AP books are a framework by which I add or subtract bits here and there and shift them around to fit the backgrounds of my player characters. I ran it for a group of 6 PCs online. As such, I'll approach this review with a pros and cons framework.

PRO:
The idea of an undead outbreak throughout the city is a very fun premise. And the encounters written for this are loose enough that you can use what you like and add more with ease. I think I ended up using most of their ideas.
Many of the encounters in the outbreak could be resolved by non-combat means.
The Adventure starts with a scene that can give the PCs a chance to go to a party and interact with a variety of NPCs.
The Necropolis is an interesting setting once the adventure moves there. This adventure allows the PCs to investigate a variety of spots in and around it.
The idea of ghoul drug dealers was brilliant!

CONS:
The final fight proved deadly and almost led to a TPK.
The use of red herrings can cause a lot of confusion among the group. Also the politics within the Church of Pharasma doesn't seem to be particularly well flushed out. I felt like I was missing something important there.

So far Mummy's Mask has been a delight.

This is one of the better modules of the series. Let me start by breaking this down into a pros and cons framework:

Pros:
-Sandbox design which allows for a lot of creative solutions to resolving the challenges. My players found many clever and creative ways to deal with this part.
-Interesting environment. I like the cold and undead which owes a few nods to Game of Thrones.
-There is a scene at the front of the module which can have some RP and story implications later in the story.
-There are fun stories around the NPCs that the party can encounter, however its quite tricky to figure out ways by which these can be revealed.

Cons
-Too few NPCs for the party to speak with. This is a problem with Giantslayer in general but this module is not as bad as some of the others.
-The encounters were not particularly challenging with the exception of the final boss fight which was very creative.
- There is a serious lack of maps for some of the encounters. This proved rather frustrating.

I quite enjoyed this scenario. It has some great flavor in regards to the underworld of Magnimar and how some of the Sczarni gangs hustle for position. It also had 2 very fun RP scenes, one more serious than the other. I also enjoyed that the in one of the combats, how well or bad it went could be influenced largely upon how clever the party was. The BBEG fight was very much a challenge and we ended up losing a party member… RIP Rajlyn!

All said and done I found it clever, challenging and both light and gritty. Overall a wonderful combination.