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My group and I enjoyed this one. It kind of hand waves all the exploration parts of the book, which felt a bit strange. I suppose they couldn't have fit that into the book without cutting all the tasks in Kovlar. But providing some guidance for if a group did want to do it other than a few suggested encounters might have been a nice touch.

I also felt like having some art for a few of the guild leaders besides just the three would have been helpful. It was a bit hard to disguise who the really important players were in the political part of the adventure when there are so many guild leaders, but only a few who have official art (without just not showing the players the portraits).

But beyond those quibbles, I enjoyed this adventure and found it generally enjoyable and also quite easy to run.

Sandwiched between the much more exotic locales of book 2 and book 4, I was a little worried the standard medieval town setting of book 3 would feel like a bit of letdown, especially with the more linear plot it sports. However (possibly because I overdid the book 2 hex crawl), my players seemed to enjoy book 3 as a nice change of pace. It went by fairly quick (probably half of what book 2 took) with decent pacing and had a few memorable NPCs as well that left my group happy with it.

As others have stated, for better or worse the adventure is pretty linear. The PC's can try to do some things out of order, but this will mostly just result in them showing up too late to help which obviously doesn't feel good but does make narrative sense at least. But again for my group, coming off the hex crawl in book 2, this wasn't a big deal. I can see why some groups don't like it but my players generally seemed satisfied with the story beats and conclusion.

Having not played Hell's Rebels, my group couldn't really appreciate Kintargo as much as I think the author does. But working in the Nidalese aspect of it did make the setting more interesting. I tried to work Halleka Shadeborn in a bit more to give some exposition on the state of Ravounel, what Nidal is doing in the area, and also to make the Triad's goals a little more comprehensible. I do think setting the main story beats closer to the Nidalese border, maybe in like a smaller border town might have made for a slightly more interesting story, as well as made it easier to explain why Ravounel was struggling so badly to respond. But what is there works well enough.

The main downside of book 3 I feel is that at times it relies an awful lot on narrative convenience in a few spots. I think as the GM it's best to adjust some of the story beats so you don't rely as much on 'the PC's arrive just as the Triad are attacking and stop them.' But it wasn't hard to change these scenes a bit to not rely as much on the PCs coincidentally arriving in a very narrow time window. One other minor issue is that you do face the same enemy types repeatedly in some cases, which makes sense in context but gutting the same 2~3 types of slavers does get a little ho-hum by the end.

If I were to do this one over again, I might cut some of the dragon pillars out, I think there are more of them than are really necessary which makes knocking out the last couple a bit of a slog. A few sample random encounters might have been a nice touch as well to help with prepping the hex crawl.

Those are my only complaints, otherwise the jungle setting is fun and there are some memorable fights and NPCs. I enjoyed that the first part was entirely RP without any encounters. My group overall seemed to enjoy it and I enjoyed running it, so I don't think much else really needs to be said.

The module started off really strong, and my players enjoyed their time on the Voidcrier. But things got a bit off in the more sandboxey section in the following chapter, with my players trying things that often didn't really pan out, or just idly waiting for the other shoe to drop, which left them somewhat confused. To make things more awkward, one of them essentially guessed the twist as an idle joke.

But what I felt the least satisfied with was the ending. If combat plays out sort of 'as written', the battles the players face midway through the module are harder than the ending battle, which seemed a little anti-climactic. I had one player who walked into the ending set of fights with 0 resolve left, fully expecting to die, and walked out with only stamina damage [even after I slightly increased the enemy count].

Overall the module is fun, but upon completion of it the group voted to move to PF2e for a while which is probably somewhat telling.

I basically agree entirely with the review Nullpunkt previously left.

It's not a bad dungeon crawl if you like those, and the setting is actually a fun excuse to throw essentially any monster or encounter you would like into the mix which is cool if you've got a creature from the archive you've been dying to run.

But it does seem like a really odd follow-up to the free form investigation of book 1 to go into a fairly linear dungeon crawl. There's enough interesting stuff to interact with that it keeps things moving along but I feel like you could largely go right into book 3 and not miss a whole lot which is generally not what I would call ideal.

This was my first time running an AP, although I did wind up starting and finishing book 1 of a Starfinder AP while in the process of running this book. I had run a few PFS scenarios before this, but did not otherwise have much experience as a GM before running this.

Overall I was satisfied with it and think my players enjoyed their time and are looking forward to book 2. I did not find it difficult to run besides a minor plot hole or two. I really liked the town of Breachill as there is a fun cast of NPCs to interact with the PCs when they're in town, and there is some nice artwork to go along with it. Some of the villager artwork is tucked away at the end of subsequent books though as a heads up.

Overall the citadel felt like a bit of a grind. Even though I was using mile-stone leveling (which felt like it worked really well) I was wary of deviating from the module so I basically included every combat. If I were to do it over, I would remove a lot of the filler combats that just don't really matter.

I think my biggest criticism is that although the book has some nice story points and a fairly solid ending, the villains pretty uniformly struck me as underwhelming if you run them exactly as written. I might have overly high expectations, but I just didn't think any of the antagonists had a coherent plan or goal which makes it hard to take them seriously. Luckily(?) my players tended to cut them all down without bothering to ask them any tricky questions like 'how exactly did you think that would work?'.

My other gripe is that most of the battle maps were very cramped. My group had two fighters, so body blocking in all the narrow passages and then just using Attack of Opportunity to hack anything trying to get to the squishier backline characters made a lot of the fights feel pretty flat.

There was however one map with a lot of verticality that I would like to praise. It was essentially a map with three multi-level, fancy tree houses to fight over. The distance math on ranges of spell effects got a bit complicated, but the players really had a great time putting together a plan of attack and then (attempting) to execute it. So that fight really shined as a high note in the adventure.

Overall would recommend and the overall story seems interesting.

Other than a SFS scenario I ran to test the waters, this was my first time running Starfinder (I had some experience with PF2e and Delta Green though). I thought it was fun and generally easy to run, although a natural 20 on a perception check near the mid point did sort of disrupt the intended flow of events. But that is on the dice. Overall I think it took my slightly indecisive PCs about 20 hours to complete.

The thing I enjoyed the most about this module was actually the NPCs, which I thought were well written and (mostly) had nice artwork. There were just enough of them that it wasn't that hard to prep and introduce them, but a large enough number that the PCs could pick a couple they enjoyed having conversations with or asking for help. Also the fact that they all had at least something to discover/uncover about them (even if it turned out to be unrelated to the mystery) was a nice touch I thought.

If I had any mild criticism, it would be that information for a particular character is often spread out over multiple chapters. I get that this is to put follow-up information closer to the events likely to trigger it coming out, but due to the non-linear nature of the module I think it would have been easier to run if everything was grouped together for each character (or at least summarized) in one place.

I really enjoyed the setting, would love more Tian Xa stuff. But I never felt like the story made much sense... And I think a lot of stuff is left up to the GM to just kind of make up, like the entirety of the town the PC's visit. The ending feels a bit forced as well, since things just kind of randomly works out... So that left a bad taste in my mouth. Of the scenarios I've done so far, this one sadly was my least favorite, even though I really enjoyed the Forest of Spirits setting.

This one seemed to move quick for the group I ran for (home game) but everyone seemed to enjoy it. I think some of the lore stuff is kind of hard to figure out as a player as written, but I appreciate there was an explanation for everything that I could have expanded out on if the players seemed interested. I wasn't sure how the play part would go, but it was a pretty funny scene.

It's got lots of details if you like that in an scenario (I do), a cool/creepy little town and a fun investigation. Lots of red herrings, so that can be hit or miss with some but I enjoyed this one a lot as both a player and a GM.