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I just recently finished running the main scenario of this book, and it really is a fantastic time. I heartily recommend this adventure path to any GM looking for a great story to share with their players.

I don't have many chapter by chapter notes as by and large this book is just excellent across the board, but there are a few minor issues to note:

- The combat encounters are simply too easy for most groups. Beginners will have a good time but anyone experienced in this system will breeze through it all like the enemies aren't even there. Luckily, this is a pretty easy fix thanks to how easy it is to dial encounter difficulty up or down in PF2E.
- Players are likely to be pretty light on gold during this book, and GMs might want to consider either dropping a lot more fundamental runes or upping the amount of gold they give away.
- One of the first things the book expects you to do is cross the river, but crossing bodies of water is also in the list of things you're not supposed to do so you don't anger ghosts. Very minor thing but it caused some confusion among my players near the start of the campaign.

Both the author and the Paizo developers/editors did a fantastic job with this book, and between this play experience and my reading of the upcoming volumes this may well be my favorite AP when all is said and done!

This review will contain SPOILERS

This review, and my reviews of the other volumes of this adventure, will be quite critical. This is not intended to be disparaging towards the creators or anything of the sort, and I'm well aware that a large part of Gatewalkers' problems were caused by a sudden staff shortage during its production. In many ways, it's impressive they were able to even ship Gatewalkers under those circumstances. However, that doesn't change the fact that in the broader fanbase over the past 18 months Gatewalkers has become widely considered one of if not the worst 2E adventure path. (A reputation largely not reflected in the small number of review scores here) My hope is that my reviews will help people know what they're getting into if they choose to run this, and to give constructive critique to Paizo over what worked and what didn't. I will also add for context that I GMed this entire adventure path for my group, and am currently running a homebrew 11-20 sequel to it for them.

Chapter 1 - This is, by far, the best single chapter of the Gatewalkers AP. It's fun, it's shocking, it respects and rewards player agency, and it has one of the best examples of mystery structure I've seen in a d20 RPG adventure. There is 1 caveat: If you ran the adventure up to this point as written, Ritalson's betrayal falls completely flat because you met him for 5 minutes at the start of the campaign and never saw him again. If you wrote in a way for him to keep in contact with the party and actually feel like a character, this can be an absolute gut punch.

This is the moment where unlike anything before or after, the AP truly lives up to its premise. If all 3 books were this good, not only would Gatewalkers not be a bad AP, it might have been my favorite AP. Sadly, this chapter stands alone as an example of what could have been. I nearly rated this book 3 stars for this chapter alone, but there's a couple of major issues below that meant I couldn't ultimately justify doing that.

Chapter 2 - This chapter is dominated by a long trek to the north pole that is done via a subsystem that was untested and does not function. As written, it takes so many checks to arrive that the journey is often advised to be sped up to 7x speed and still takes a while doing that. It's compounded due to a major error with the Osoyo's nightmares mechanic, which was presumably intended to have players start with a low chance of getting a nightmare, reset to a low chance after getting one, and repeating. Instead, as written they have an extremely high chance of getting a nightmare right off the bat, that chance decreases if they're lucky enough to avoid it, and resets to an extremely high chance if they get one. In other words, the entire party will accrue maximum stacks of the semi-permanent debuff almost immediately.

To say this chapter is an unfun slog is an understatement. The temple dungeon has a cool layout and boss at least.

Chapter 3 - As a final dungeon, the last temple of Aqakaru is perfectly functional and contains some fun encounters. Well, almost anyway. On the interactive maps pdf two of the rooms are left unkeyed with the numbers just sitting on the left edge of the page where they were left in photoshop, but at least the map in the main book is properly keyed. The final boss is an incredible setpiece, though it's let down a bit by as written being very easy. When you can use Osoyo's doubts to turn Ainamurren's minions against him and the Protosoul instantly gives you half your success points in bolstering Ruun, in both the fight and the post-fight awakening the party has so much stacked in their favor that if you don't make it harder it'll just feel anticlimactic for most groups.

The adventure then ends, and it does so with something major unresolved. This adventure path never gives the answer to one of the most important elements of the premise: why were the gatewalkers all sent back to begin with? It's one of the central mysteries and it's just completely forgotten, with the book talking about when the characters went back but taking them going back as a given. What purpose did it serve Osoyo to send all these people back and to give them their free will back? The most people have theorized is the gatewalkers becoming harbingers but given that an awakened Osoyo can control the Aiudara anyway why not keep your servants close until your awakening? Gatewalkers has no answer.

Toolbox - The failed ending is one of if not the most dire of any Adventure Path, constituting an unambiguous apocalypse. It feels very strange for level 10 characters to be the ones responsible for stopping something of that scale when the world has so many people much stronger who could be contributing help. Between this and Kanepo's oddly weak nature in book 1, many people have wondered if this would have made more sense as an 11-20 or even expanded into a 1-20 and I strongly agree.

To end on a note of praise, the continuing the campaign section is much more robust than average and has some great ideas for homebrewing a sequel, which I am currently in the midst of doing for my own Gatewalkers group.

Overall - Despite the moment of brilliance that is chapter 1 and some of the chapter 3 setpieces, book 3 struggles under the weight of the mysteries and plot issues introduced by its predecessors, and ultimately fails to bring the tale to a satisfying conclusion as written. Gatewalkers as a whole is sadly a tale of potential unrealized.

This review will contain SPOILERS

This review, and my reviews of the other volumes of this adventure, will be quite critical. This is not intended to be disparaging towards the creators or anything of the sort, and I'm well aware that a large part of Gatewalkers' problems were caused by a sudden staff shortage during its production. In many ways, it's impressive they were able to even ship Gatewalkers under those circumstances. However, that doesn't change the fact that in the broader fanbase over the past 18 months Gatewalkers has become widely considered one of if not the worst 2E adventure path. (A reputation largely not reflected in the small number of review scores here) My hope is that my reviews will help people know what they're getting into if they choose to run this, and to give constructive critique to Paizo over what worked and what didn't. I will also add for context that I GMed this entire adventure path for my group, and am currently running a homebrew 11-20 sequel to it for them.

Book 2 of Gatewalkers has at this point earned an infamous reputation within the fandom, for good reason. It might honestly be the worse single AP volume published for second edition, and if I could give this book 0 stars I probably would. A lot of the following may feel like plot nitpicks in isolation, but a running theme of this book is things not making any sense if you think about them for more than half a second, and it merits mention.

Chapter 1 - The very start of the book begins with a plothole. Sakuachi is said to have contacted Alleli when she was trapped and surrounded by the looters, but given how long characters are likely to be in Castrovel for (and that Alleli was contacted by her before the characters reach Loskialua) that was likely to be at least a week ago, likely more. She has apparently been sitting there with people trying to break down the doors for what could have been weeks, with the looters finally breaking the doors down the instant the players arrive.

After that, we get to rescuing Sakuachi's friends and meeting Matz's mercenaries. This section isn't particularly riveting but its inoffensive and has a few fun moments like the trapped shop. A few of the encounters like the magic eye wolf come out of nowhere and then go absolutely nowhere, and just feel kind of baffling. Also, the miniboss leader of the Obsidian oath has the damage of a level 1 creature in one of a number of enemies with wonky stats throughout this adventure path.

The real issues with this book start as the chapter nears its end. Sakuachi firmly claims her place as the GMPC chosen one who is now the story's main character. There's even a sidebar that talks about this problem's existence and proceeds to give some halfhearted advice for ameliorating it that ultimately amounts to nothing of substance. Instead of creating a problem and then offering some vague amelioration for it, why not just not create the problem in the first place? To be clear, Sakuachi herself is a fine character and I worked very hard as a GM to get my players to like her. But the story continuously prioritzes her above the PCs in a way that many groups will and have hated.

This wouldn't be as bad, if the solutions Sakuachi offers seemed like a good idea. Her grand advice to the players is "we need a god, let's go look for one in Sarkoris." This raises several questions:

1. How does she even know about modern Sarkoris? The Erutaki are an isolated people that live hundreds of miles away across mountains and glaciers and Sarkoris was destroyed 100 years ago.
2. Ignoring the above, since she does know about modern Sarkoris, why is that where she wants to look? The gods of Sarkoris are believed to basically all be dead, and they were summoned creatures rather than actual deities to begin with.
3. The book specifies that her group trekked overland to Skywatch, and Sarkoris is between Aaminiut and Skywatch. Why did they not stop by on the way if it was their best lead?

Despite how tenuously this lead is written, it's the way forward so off we go.

I must also include at least a brief mention of disappointment at the wasting of Skywatch as a mystery. Its mysterious and seemingly impossible magical sealing has been teased in setting books for over ten years, and in this book the reason is revealed to just be that the city's ruler thought the outside world was a distraction. No elaboration. No explanation for the magic seals that prevented entrance or scrying by even the most powerful of mages. No explanation of how the city fed itself. No explanation of why there was an active merchant square if there was no trade. It's just about the most unsatisfying conclusion to a cool longstanding mystery that you could think of.

Chapter 2 - First thing's first, the map needs mentioning. Almost every location on the region map the PCs visit is mispelled. Some of them aren't small mispellings either: Skywatch somehow became Skyloatch. Continuing on, Egede is spelled Egade, Icerime is Icemine, Winterbreak becomes Winterbreath, etc. I have no idea how this happened.

The ghost ship is a cool idea, but my word the way the book expects you to go for it feels really dumb. You need to go to Mendev, so why is your first inclination to go to a ship graveyard where the only thing you know you'll find are broken ships you cannot sail??? Why not just book passage on a passenger liner, or even walk to Sarkoris? Why is relying on a probably fictitious ghost ship the first option?

So, you find a mostly intact ship and need a ritual to get it going. In order to do that, you need to go through the most nonsensical dungeon I've ever seen. The dungeon seems to be set up like it's trying to get you to choose sides in a conflict by emphasizing a choice of siding with the Naiad or not, but the ones she wants you to kill attack you on sight and they see you the moment you open the front door. Incidentally, she also sees you the moment you enter the front door because this dungeon's layout makes no sense whatsoever. Apparently before you arrived she and her enemies were just chilling there despite there being 0 walls separating them.

The rest of the chapter is mostly fine, though I have to note my befuddlement over two aspects of the Chelaxian pirates encounter. First, there's an entire sidebar dedicated to a background that doesn't exist. Second, the book strongly implies it's the same ship as the one from the ocean, which means they portaged it 1000 miles away???

Chapter 3 - The primary GM advice in the community relating to the Egede section is to either skip it entirely or make it a supernatural incident tied to one of the Dark Archive adventures because as written even if you assume it's a case of mass hysteria it makes no sense. Egede is the second largest city in Mendev and the governement is allowing some random alcholic (the book gives an elaborate explanation about his alchohol problems and that he was drunk when he found the black pudding to begin with) to publicly feed people to a Black Pudding that no one in the entire city recognizes as a black pudding. The book also expects that after you defeat the black pudding the party enjoys the praise of the murderous group that has been committing mob executions on random people and that the aforementioned perpetrator gets off scott free. This entire segment is so baffling it feels like a fever dream, and I have no idea how anyone thought this was a good idea.

The group then sees a falling star which Sakuachi insists they follow without elaborating as to why. I actually like the dungeon, but I gotta note one big issue: there's a noise trap at the begining of the dungeon that alerts the boss, and the party is severely punished not for triggering it but for Succeeding at seeing and disarming it. If the boss is made aware, he moves into the middle of the dungeon and the worst fight is a severe. If he doesn't hear a trap, he stays at the end of the dungeon with another powerful monster and the PC's earlier success is rewarded by an Extreme encounter.

Chapter 4 - The investigation section has the same problems as the Kaneepo investigation in book 1 did. The players need to make a bunch of rolls to get exposition dumps, with separate ones at individual research sites and an overall tally. However, some of the overall revelations really don't make sense to learn from some of the sites. You can kind of ameliorate this via a liberal amount of GM narration but it quickly gets stretched thin as you try to justify why the party was able to learn something in one place despite the revelation only making sense if it came from a different place. There's also an even more fundamental issue: this is completely non-interactive. There is no time pressure, there is no consequence for failing. The party just needs to roll dice over and over until they get the plot coupons necessary for success. That's ungodly boring and players will notice they're just rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice. The fights are at least fun and interesting, with Alkoasha in particular being among the most unique encounters I've seen in an AP.

The actual dungeon is pretty bad, mainly because the book expects you to go through the same encounter 3 separate times. I created a pretty popular homebrew variant that has unique tests for the 3 gods, but they really should have had unique ones in the first place. It feels like one was written for Waiixi and then stapled onto Posololo and Enaaku. It also introduces yet another bit of plot nonsense: It took 5 "gods" to seal, not kill, seal this level 9 demon but apparently just one of those 5 gods is enough to deal with the level 27 Osoyo?????

Ending with Sakuachi's transformation is a powerful moment for groups that like her, but for groups that found her to be a show-stealer this whole dungeon kind of just reinforces that, with 4 major plot moments for her and none for the PCs.

Overall: This book feels disjoined, almost none of the events make sense if you think about it, and it firmly puts the PCs into the back seat as bodyguards for a new main character.

This review will contain SPOILERS

This book is in many ways the best of the 3 volumes in the Gatewalkers Adventure Path, and I struggled to decide whether to rate it 2 or 3 stars. If I could rate it 2.5 stars I would. I settled on rounding up as the adventure toolbox section for Castrovel is fantastic and pushed me to give the extra star.

This review, and my reviews of the later volumes of this adventure, will be quite critical. This is not intended to be disparaging towards the creators or anything of the sort, and I'm well aware that a large part of Gatewalkers' problems were caused by a sudden staff shortage during its production. In many ways, it's impressive they were able to even ship Gatewalkers under those circumstances. However, that doesn't change the fact that in the broader fanbase over the past 18 months Gatewalkers has become widely considered one of if not the worst 2E adventure path. (A reputation largely not reflected in the small number of review scores here) My hope is that my reviews will help people know what they're getting into if they choose to run this, and to give constructive critique to Paizo over what worked and what didn't. I will also add for context that I GMed this entire adventure path for my group, and am currently running a homebrew 11-20 sequel to it for them.

Premise - Gatewalkers has the best premise of any Adventure path period in my opinion. Absolute 11/10. However, sadly, it completely fails to live up to that premise in multiple respects throughout its 3 volumes.

Chapter 1 - This chapter is actually pretty great! You investigate a mystery, go through a fun dungeon, and have a very unique boss fight. There are a couple of minor issues (mainly a couple of overtuned encounters/hazards that are liable to kill characters if your players are unlucky) but nothing too bad. My only other criticism would be that for a character as important as Ritalson is supposed to be for this adventure, his introduction is extremely brief and not giving the players any way to stay in contact with him so he feels like an actual character and benefactor was a mistake.

Chapter 2 - This is where major issues start to arise. First, I'll address the use of the investigation subsystem. Put frankly, it's pretty awful. The players need to make a bunch of rolls to get exposition dumps, with separate ones at individual research sites and an overall tally. However, some of the overall revelations really don't make sense to learn from some of the sites. You can kind of ameliorate this via a liberal amount of GM narration but it quickly gets stretched thin as you try to justify why the party was able to learn something in one place despite the revelation only making sense if it came from a different place. There's also an even more fundamental issue: this is completely non-interactive. There is no time pressure, there is no consequence for failing. The party just needs to roll dice over and over until they get the plot coupons necessary for success. That's ungodly boring and players will notice they're just rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice.

Then we get to Kaneepo. So, in concept Kaneepo is a very interesting character. There's one big issue however: they're a fae lord well over 10,000 years old who created a curse powerful enough to stymie the best mages in Kynonin, and they're easily defeated by a group of level 2 characters. It makes no sense whatsoever. Absolutely none. By their lore, Kaneepo could have reasonably been the BBEG of a 1-10 or even 11-20 AP all by themselves, so why are they level 4??? Also, they invited the players for a purpose so why do all their servants try to kill the party? One of the more common pieces of GM advice for this adventure is coming up with a justification for why Kaneepo is so weak, but the book doesn't even recognize it's an issue.

Chapter 3 - There's some cool setpieces and a nice mini-dungeon in this chapter, and the final crossing encounter deserves praise for being among the most creative and engaging I've seen in an AP. The biggest problem in this chapter is it has a literal talking head give the party a massive exposition dump explaining half the AP's mysteries without ever giving the party a chance to solve them on their own. It's the moment the AP truly abandons its "paranormal investigators" theme and overall its just a disappointing way for these mysteries to be solved.

Adventure Toolbox - The Castrovel adventure toolbox is fantastic and has some great adventure seeds in a variety of locations. Not many notes here, this is just a top quality toolbox that is among the best I've read in the articles section of APs.

Overall: The book starts and ends strong, but has a week middle and sets up problems for the AP as a whole by abandoning its own theme and delivering answers via unsatisfying methods.