Dark Archive is easily the best Pathfinder Second Edition book to date.
Setting aside the Psychic and Thaumaturge -- two unique, flavorful, and highly-customizable classes that would be enough to hang any release's hat on -- DA is full of personality and great ideas to enrich your game with the strange and occult.
The framework, that the book is a collection of casefiles from the titular Dark Archive organization, holds the content together very well. Unique items and character options will be preceded by a page of interviews or case notes from archivists that uncovered it. The prose itself is just fun to read, on top of providing interesting mechanical content.
And bookmarking each section is a fun mini-adventure that showcases the idea. What better way to teach players and GMs about the new cryptid mechanics than to give them a cryptid to seek out? Though you might have trouble weaving one full campaign from these adventures, they're provided in a way that is easy to weave into an existing campaign.
There really isn't much more to say. This is the standard by which all future PF2e books should be judged. I can't recommend it highly enough.
A good time that could have very easily been GREAT.
Pros:
+ The setup is fun and immediately engaging.
+ The pregen party is memorable and shows off the diversity of guns/gunslingers.
+ It's written to be streamlined and fast-paced.
Cons:
- Some character abilities are of limited/no use in the adventure as-written.
- NPC dialogue is a little stiff and doesn't leave much room for rewarding RP.
- Only three enemy types; a zombie brute would have been a good addition.
- Loot isn't great; the +1 piercing wind gets a lot of space dedicated to it in the text, but an upgraded bayonet/stock or special ammo like glue bullets would have been easier to implement.
- The villains have a neat little backstory, but it's never even hinted at to the players so they come off as nonentities.
Verdict:
With a little TLC from a solid GM, this one-shot can be a great time. But I wish it had gotten a little more work/polish to knock it out of the park.
Upfront: I'm a big fan of Westerns, fantasy, and fantasy-Westerns. So I'm an easy mark for this kind of thing.
That said, I'm really impressed with this AP so far! The new monsters are flavorful and mechanically interesting, the encounters and events are all varied with multiple approaches and reactivity, and the NPCs/locations all do a good job of selling how unique the setting is.
Unfortunately this book sidesteps some aspects of the setting I would have liked to see better fleshed-out, mainly Mana Storms. The module gives minimal advice for how to run that phenomena and instead says it'll come up in certain events in later books, so anyone looking for rules and mechanics on that front will be disappointed. I'm also personally a little worried about how this AP will handle time -- the events of this book seem to take place over the course of a bout a week, which is apparently enough to get the party to level 4? I understand wanting to keep some time pressure, but I wish these APs did a little more to build in some downtime options.
But despite that, I can't deny just how much fun this book is. I'm hoping Outlaws of Alkenstar continues this level of quality and becomes one of those CLASSIC APs folks talk about. So far, it's got the potential for it.
