Per Astra's page

Of the four Pathfinder Tales books that I have read, this is my favorite. I wanted to read it as soon as I learned the premise and was delighted by its execution. I liked that it actually centered on the party of them, too, not just on one character.

When I discovered that the diabolist was Valenne from Nightglass and the paladin the lover she still carries a torch for? I actually squealed. Valenne was one of several characters fron Nightglass that I wanted more of, and her presence throughout made me oh so happy, even if she never got to be a viewpoint character like Ederras, Jheraal, and Sechel.

Jheraal, the titular hellknight, anchors the story with her complex dedication to her mission, to her companions, to her order, to her daughter. Stoic and guarded to protect herself and those she cares about, Merciel treats us to her tenderness and care, too. So much of Jheraal's arc finds her negotiating the tensions between all of that as the villains threats become increasingly personal. The way in which she and the assassin Sechel's conflicted feelings about their tiefling heritage served as narrative foils to each other gave the story added emotional depth and complexity.

Paladins can be hit or miss for me, but I took a liking to Ederras almost immediately. It is fun to watch he and Jheraal come to appreciate and eventually trust each other over the course of the novel. His struggle to make sense of his feelings for Valenne, and her feelings for him, define much of his arc. The centrality of consensual pain to Valenne's and Ederras's growing relationship ends up being remarkably wholesome; what a pleasant change fo pace!

The way in which those feelings intersect with the social demands of Ederras refurbishing his family name and securing its future makes for compelling story; it also gives Merciel an opportunity to show off the complexities of Cheliax's political situation.

Throughout, Cheliax's tyranny is a pervasive presence. While the ethical quandaries of living within an evil nation are lightly treated, we see each of our heroes (even Valenne) hemmed in by it but trying to ameliorate some of its inherent cruelty and inhumanity. The compromises they must make to it often bite, but it makes the goodness they carve out from those compromises compelling.

Content-wise: Sexual content doesn't get much past PG-13, and sex is never the focus of the narrative. I guess a number of people engaged in sexual activities do feature in one scene, but the whole thing is described lightly with only the faint hint of lurid detail. The violence is (unsurprisingly) more frequent, though little is graphic about it. Sechel's murder victims are mutilated, do include children, but the mutilation is clean, magically precise and quick. No dwelling upon torture, though there are some harrowing moments. A minor chord of body horror (especially the loss of bodily autonomy) winds through the book. Mentions of slavery in Cheliax, but no slaveholding characters that I can recall.

I wasn't sure exactly what I would get when I picked this up. I wanted to see how they treated the Zon-Kuthon temple in Pangolais, and the temple to Calistria with its honeycomb ossuary intrigued me. I run and play Pathfinder 2e, so I hoped that the art (maps included) and lore would significantly outweigh the less useful 1e mechanical elements mentioned in the product description.

There are more 1e mechanical elements than I would have hoped for. That said, most of them elaborate upon the strong lore elements introduced for each temple. While I can't port it over right away into a game I might run or play in, the stories and lore to which they are attached seem like they would travel well. If you are running or playing in a 1e game, these might be perfectly fun and useful as-is; I am too rusty on Pathfinder 1e's mechanics to be sure, though.

The worst art in this book is still good. The opening spreads showing off some feature of the temple are all evocative, the maps are clear and easy to read, the NPCs well-rendered characters. With some qualifications, I can say the same thing about the lore.

The temple to Zon-Kuthon was pretty cool in that Hellraiser-cum-Catholic way Nidalese Zon-Kuthon lore tends to go. It wasn't all to my taste, but it gave me a lot of ideas for that daydream Nidalese campaign I will probably never run. It definitely does nott shirk on the torture chambers, some of it consensual and some of it entirely the opposite. It has a fair bit of presumed ableism, too, which I really do think could be peeled out of Nidal's brand of evil in a way that would make everything better for it (& I'll stop myself from ranting on there; that's some other discussion). Definitely not for every reader or gaming table, but quite good.

The temple to Calistria was great. The temple and its occupants provide a number of different perspectives on what vengeance means. No spoilers, but there is enough dramatic tension built into the temple's description that I could easily see it being the focal point for a series of adventures, or even possibly a campaign. I enjoyed seeing Calistria as patron of elven vengeance against Treerazer, too.

None of the others quite captured my imagination as the temples of Zon-Kuthon and Calistria, but I mostly liked them. Cayden's temple in Absalom is presented as a warm and inclusive and rollicking place perfect for even the most eccentric mix of good player characters. It could easily be a touchstone location for PCs operating in the city, as long as all the players involved can deal with alcohol's pride of place.

Pharasma's temple was pleasantly weird, suited to her deep mysteries. The undead-hunting Night Jars (a cool organization in itself) included two named NPCs with different ideas about what moving the undead on ideally looks like, which provides immmediate grist for the storytelling mill.

The temple of Sarenrae presented her worship in a way that helped me better understand her place in the setting. I so wish they had managed to find a better term for her ecstatic dancers than "whirling dervishes." The term is simultaneously dated, gratingly colonialist, and too tightly linked to real-life regional communities to be anything but distracting and irritating to me.

Abadar's temple...meh. He doesn't have to be the god of Inner Sea colonialism, but this temple sure makes him feel like it. And there is a chunk of 1e-era bad habits that transport nasty European colonial biases into the Mwangi expanse and Golarion and, yeah, Paizo has gotten so much better about this that this chafes all the more.

All in all, very good with a few sour notes. I am glad to have it in my collection.