I am going to write this review from the perspective of a player. I didn’t read the books except for the chapters we played (and I only read those after out campaign ended in chaos and frustration).
Our group lasted all of four sessions. We’re fairly experienced players and we had just finished a PF 2 campaign we played for two years.
Our expectation was to play students at a renowned magical academy. Something like the Hogwarts of Golarion. This is imo how the Magaambya and the Strength of Thousands adventure path are marketed. The book itself fails to deliver that feeling completely.
First off, most schools have teachers. The Magaambya in the book has a couple of students who arrived a few weeks before the group and who try to come up with tasks for the newbies.
There’s also Teacher Ot, but you only interact with him during the first interview for a couple of minutes and if you try to ask him any questions about the tasks the other students invented he doesn’t know anything at all.
Second, teachers at a magical school should probably know something about magic.
They don’t, which becomes apparent after the third combat encounter, a Myceloid who inflicts the group with a deadly disease. The Magaambya is either unable or unwilling to produce a „Remove Disease“ spell, potion, scroll or wand and the book doesn’t mention any options to cure said disease either.
Which brings us directly to the encounter design.
The first encounter is a piece of unwashed panties and fairly simple to beat.
The second encounter is a severe difficulty encounter against a large group of enemies.
The third encounter is a boss fight with a very hard to save death effect that cannot be reverted even by Resurrect or similar rituals since it destroys the body.
If you assume this is the first PF adventure someone plays, you can also assume it’s the last PF adventure that person will ever play.
So far we have very disappointing world building that contradicts the expectations raised by the cover text and the Mwangi setting book. We also have terrible pacing with encounter design and difficulty.
But there’s also an upside: the NPCs we met (with the exception of Ot) were funny and interesting to interact with. Especially a certain fellow student who likes to brew alcohol and skip lessons…
Storywise there‘s not much to say. Four sessions in we didn’t see a story at all. Other adventures manage to start, have a climax and a satisfying conclusion in less time, so that’s not a very promising start.
To sum things up, from a player’s perspective I am insanely disappointed by this adventure.
I might still run the campaign as a DM one day, but only if I find enough time to go through every encounter and story beat and rework it into something functional. This doesn’t seem to be an adventure you can just run as written.
