I GMed it once and will never touch this thing again. It might come down to personal taste but here are my opinions. The adventure has several major flaws I will go through, but beware spoilers:
1. It has a lot of mistakes. The writing has grammatical mistakes and missing words. The conditions in the end have an area where you just do not fall in range of any of the “epic ending cutscenes”. Hesla has an action, which is clearly meant as a free action but is declared as one action and so, you will not use it. “This will have later repercussions” – it doesn’t. The list goes on, but editing bad and so on is nothing new.
2. The adventure feels like it was designed as a special, which was forcefully squashed into a regular scenario. The whole society gathers to defend the Grand Lodge and the only team doing anything is the second best team? Are all the very high levels in Sarkoris? The structure even follows the special build up: five unrelated tasks, central event, more unrelated task (here squished into an awkward chase), a central fight and then the finale. It just feels weird.
3. But the worst part is the story. This adventure wants you to redeem the BBEG who last adventure tried to murder a whole village and swore she would burn more cities to the ground. The group is reminded several times, “there is still good in her” and “She has so much pain inside”. If they do not follow up and talk to her the most likely ending is an important NPC dying and a heavy deduction in rewards. When you fight her, the adventure even forces the GM to give her dying as any PC would get, just to make sure she does not die. This feels weirdly passive railroady. A tragic ending where you had to slay her because she just could not be redeemed would have been so much more fitting. Not everyone has to be recruited by the Society. Additionally, Eando just stands by while Ambrus hands the PCs the rune, which remains when Riftcarver is destroyed, and proposes they put it on their weapons… WHAT? Why does a rift in reality open where a resurrected Ingalor just exists? Did Zarta really plan to resurrect a Demon Lord in the middle of the biggest city in the world? Nothing feels like it makes sense.
4. Nonsensical gameplay decisions. Just examples: all NPCs (5 or 6) get to roll their support in the final ritual and have to achieve together with the player a certain amount of successes. Why not let them auto succeed? The failure in the chase is achieved, when the group gets stuck for two rounds at the same obstacle and half a page is dedicated to read aloud texts for these failures. However, it just didn’t happen in my run? Several Endings where the PCs did all the work but others get to land the final blow on a resurrected Demon Lord. “We need at least 3 artefacts but 5 would make the ritual easier” – less than three artefacts gives a -2 penalty to ritual checks and having all five does not do anything.
5. “The ending of this ritual is dependent not just on the direct successes in the ritual, but also other choices throughout the scenario. As such, GMs need to take care to ensure that the PCs get the ending that their actions have guided them toward” – Wrong. The only things mattering are whether Hesla has been turned and how much luck was included in the final rolls
I had to invest a lot of time to make this adventure borderline playable when I GMed it. I had to redo the whole map so rooms and description at least superficially fit even though some things can not be salvaged if you run it RAW. Since most negatives have already been mentioned by others, I will just sum up my points here:
- The maps and description do not match and the combination is absolutely nonsensical.
- Monsters and Encounters are Missing information and have obvious mistakes
- The story is disappointing and the involved Society officials, the supposed master-schemer which is setup as major BBEG or all people involved are just stupid.
- The final fight can be extremely dangerous/frustrating if there is a variation of PC levels involved
- The secondary success condition is just missing
The only reason I raised it to 2 stars are some small, interesting details. You can choose between a Hazard and a Fight in a nice scene. The included riddles are somewhat fun and help with variation in the scenario. And finally, there are no subsystems involved which sadly is a positive by now.
This does not save the adventure though. The abysmally bad editing ruins all the fun when running the scenario, just play something else...
I GM'ed this one in low Tier
.
Before going into detail, I'm not that able to talk about the difficulties of Combat encounters since one High Tier Character kinda stomped them (while the others got at least pummeled a bit), but I'd say they are quite standard even though much more flavorful than most.
The big pro of this adventure is the setting, story and RP. It was a lot of fun to gm and my players seemed quite happy, too. This was especially the case when they noticed, that not everything has to be killed. I really don't want to include many spoilers, but the scenario is amazing in portraying the "antagonist". I really don't want to say anything more.
The negatives in this scenario are on the mechanical parts. As a GM a bit of improvisation is necessary. Some things aren't described in detail, others are just missing and the Flip-Mats are functional at best. This gives the GM some space to interpret but on the other hand will also shift the adventure for some groups. These things aren't that bad but also sadly disqualify an otherwise great scenario for 5 Stars. A neutral point might be one encounter, which is purely narrative without map and can be inserted at different points (at least that's how I read it). This can either be an opportunity or burden depending on the GM.
To summarize: I can definitely encourage RP focused people to look into this, you will have a lot of fun. I would give 4.5 Stars if I could.
I was really hyped to see a new TV-Show based scenario including Zo!. Sadly this adventure could not keep up with mine or my players expectations when I gmd it on low Subtier. This scenario is just mediocre even if it includes great scenes. I will not go into detail that much, because I am quite on the the same line as most other reviewers. Especially since oliviasEule as one of my players wrote a comment, too.
First the positive sides:
The whole setting of a gameshow includes some great NPCs. I very much like the duo of moderators commenting on everything the players do but my personal favorite (beside Zo!) was Mia Moxie from the enemy team. My players managed to get her furious with their first comment, mentioning how small she is. And last but not least the introduction of the plot relevant NPC Datch. It was great and I would like to see more of her. The different events themselves differ in quality. Obstacle course and Combat Cooking are two great parts and even if the first one is quite deadly it was fun to run. Even though the whole execution of Combat cooking isn't that great, the idea itself brings it to the positive side.
But now the negatives:
The main counter-argument is the length of this adventure. In a standard timeslot there is just not nearly enough time to savour this adventure. This is mostly because of the number of events the PCs have to go through. The two events not mentioned before, namely Kill Count and Capture the Flag, even seem just like unfinished placeholders. Kill Count is just beating skeletons to pulps while Capture the Flag at least fulfilled the players wish to finally confront the enemy team directly. But why does this have to happen in zero-G? It just costs a lot of time and brings no real gain for fun or even plausibility. I know there are reasons for these events (collecting points and a final encounter with the other team), but this could be implemented much better in another way.
Conclusion:
This could be such a great adventure, but most of its potential is wasted. If you have an open end timeslot or plan to do it over two sessions this is fine, but it is too much for one session. The four events range from great to dull, from dangerous to laughable. In my humble opinion this could be easily converted to something great by omitting Kill Count as well as Capture the Flag, expanding the Combat Cooking part and concluding the Obstacle Course with some sort of King of the Hill to fight the enemy team. This would easily lift this scenario to a great one.
