 
Sign in to create or edit a product review. Man, this guy is only an “uncommon”. By far one of the coolest guys in the set. The pose, the cape, his crossbow. Man is he cool. This mini is one of the few low points in a great set.
This mini is dwarfed by its base and just does not have any “wow” factor at all. It leaves me wondering why it was evenincluded. Maybe if that had scaled up its size by 50-100% it could have been passable. This book provides exactly what is says it does. With plenty of material to justify the price. I look forward to sprinkling many of these spells throughout adventures. I think of these spells like spice, adding little tastes of flavor to a campaign. My only disappointment was that I dislike one of the spells. But hey, that's less than 1% right? Five stars. Is 6 stars a thing?
MichaelCullen
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Wow, Paizo really hit it out of the park with this one. The book offers powerful (but not overly so) options for many different types of characters. What makes these options stand out is the flavor they provide. Two quick examples: Possessed Hand is a feat that adds a bonus to hit and damage with one handed weapons, light weapons and unarmed strikes. It also has a variety of other small effects. What makes it amazing is the flavor behind it. "You’ve made a peaceful and permanent bargain with a ghost, spirit, or outsider. It possesses your hand, guiding
Haunted Spells are a group of spells that function as haunts (what a concept). I cannot wait to use a few of these in game. The flavor is overflowing. I really hope these get made PFS legal. I don't remember the last time I was this happy with a product. A definite buy for those who like this type of flavor and options. Major Spoilers:
The plot concept is great, a famous person has been abducted and it looks like the Pathfinders are to blame, time to solve the mystery and clear our name. The flavor is not bad either, dark folk, swamp people and a kyton, all surrounding a gothic city, sounds interesting.
So let's see where this scenario goes off the rails. You quickly arrive at the scene of the crime and learn of the abduction of Olivina, a local celebrity. You quickly find out that she has been taken by someone unknown and that you must rescue her, whatever shall you do? Oh that's right, you are a party of levels 7-11. Sounds like it is time to scry and teleport, surely the bad guys must have taken precautions against this.... nope they did not. Scenario solved by two common spells out of the CRB. Ok, ok, so you decide, hey let's not bypass 90% of the adventure, because hey it's about the trip not the destination. Well that leaves you as a group paying 3000 gold or losing out on a lot of prestige, for what, wrong information that you did not need anyways. Can this loss of resources be avoided, of course, but only if you choose to skip the adventure by hitting the big red flashing easy button of scry and teleport. Otherwise you are out of luck and paying a significant amount of gold or prestige. This scenario would be a 1 star rating were it not for the great flavor thrown in, as it stands it is merely a disappointment for it really could have been good had it been designed a little better and not punished the players for playing. Plenty of options for the creative player. Every pregen has a backstory woven into the plot. End boss is amazing. Could not ask for more. I had the opportunity to run four tables of this at GenCon. minor spoilers:
The first part is like anyother scenario go do x, y and z to get item a. The difference in this scenario is that is only the prologue. Item a opens up a whole new half of the scenario. First couple of runs were 3.5 to 4 hours, by my third run of it I had the run time down to two and a half hours. This is not a scenario to do cold. There is just too much going on. If you have a well prepared GM this should easily fit into a four hour time slot. If the GM has only casually prepared be prepared for a long scenario. I definitely like the flavor of the scenario and it has fun concepts. The first half could have been shortened a task or two in order to leave more time for the "fun" part. I had the fortune of playing this scenario with my local venture captain as GM. At the onset of the scenario the players are given a long list of goals to try to accomplish while on their own in Bloodcove. How to go about completing these goals is up to them. Our table relished our deception of the Aspis and our subtle sabotage.
I have played and DM'd this adventure.
The Good:
Another adventure in to Absolom's most notorious museum. This adventure has a pretty good story. If the PCs get lucky there is a wonderful boon. It is hard to get, but in it's case it should be. The Bad:
There are two things almost absolutely required for a party to succeed. Without a way to get through hardness AND a consistent way to do fire/acid damage it is highly unlikely a party will make it through the adventure. While both of these requirements are common enough, there is a good chance that a party will not have one or the other, especially in the low tier when adamantine weapons are still hard to come by. In the end we are left with a good story that many parties unfortunately will not be able to enjoy due to some overly tough monsters. If this had a warning like Bonekeep it would have more stars. Let me start off by saying this could be a great scenario if you bring your group of favorite Liberty's Edge/Silver Crusade or similar minded PCs. Leave your Hellknight and his type of friends at home.
spoilers:
The main difficulty our group had was in our composition. Nothing to do with combat effectiveness or skills and everything to do with motivations. In our group we had a Chelaxian lawyer, a Hellknight Inquisitor, the Inquisitor's slave (a fighter), another former chelaxian dark archivist, as well as a gnome who was along for the ride. We simply had no motivation to incite insurrection against a lawful government. This of course is the point of the scenario. Some times you just find scenarios that your group is not well suited for, a bunch of Barbarians at a wedding perhaps. This was the first scenario I have encountered where the group truly struggled against the plot due to a role play issues. In order to avoid losing a ton of gold and half your prestige, you must overthrow a mildly evil monarch, who is only somewhat disliked by her subjects. The worst part is if you don't decide to do this on your own accord you loose out. There is no prod to even push you in that direction. |
