lambence's page

After a fairly enjoyable first book I had pretty high hopes for this one, and at first I was totally on board for the idea of going into the Mana Wastes! However, so far it's been unbearable.

Chapter 1 begins with an unbearable lore dump that feels like it has nothing to do with anything before taking you on a nearly incomprehensible string of events in a library (including being ambushed by 2 people who want to kill you for reasons the book explicitly states has nothing to do with the story) that it devotes, I kid you not, ZERO words to describing the look and feel of. It makes you go to the Temple of Brigh to find some contrived clues through nonsense means and loads of bloated encounters but doesn't even spend a single inch of ink telling you what the *only temple in the city looks like*.

Chapter 2 is another severely disappointing encounter gauntlet that has had me with my head in my hands out of boredom and frustration every week. I don't understand how a story about trying to find an ancient forbidden temple in such a cool and vibrant desert can be THIS railroaded. It's an utter slog.

I make no exaggeration when I say that Cradle of Quartz not only has made me want to quit this campaign I've now been running for 10 months, but also has made me want to look elsewhere for my TTRPG thrills despite falling head over heels in love with PF2e when I started prepping for this a year ago.

A huge disappointment and shame.

This module comes with some fantastic visual presentation of the text that's pretty easy to navigate rather than flipping through the PDF. But of course, the main feature are the maps. They're fantastically recreated and it's great having tokens for all the NPCs! IMO this is a must if you're running the AP through Foundry.

I'm also happy about the module being supported through update patches. At release, the Alkenstar city map was upside down and missing labels, but has since been improved greatly. I was also missing a map from chapter 3 which has been added. Very glad to be able to receive fresh updates to my campaign's maps without having to do anything!

My only complaint at the moment is that many of the NPCs' stat blocks list them with the wrong ancestry trait, which looks weird when you mystify them (e.g. kinda annoying to mystify a goblin and have their name rendered as 'Human') but it's not a big deal.

Full disclosure: I've yet to run this, so I might change my rating/review once I've gotten into it a bit. This is based on a thorough read of chapter 1, a session 0, plus a healthy skim of chapters 2 and 3.

There's a lot to love about OoA so far and I'm incredibly excited to run it; I think it's got a very fun set-up and takes you through a variety of exciting and wild scenarios. However, if I were to sum up my gripes in a word, I'd say: sloppy.

There's almost no elaboration on the city itself (as in, some entire districts have maybe a sentence worth of description across the text, and you're completely stranded the moment a player asks to go off the trail of the encounters), and for an AP placing the characters in the roles of lawbreakers, it sure would be nice if there was even a paragraph dedicated to suggesting what might happen if they get caught. Mana storms are entirely handwaved as a concept.

Some encounters fall into tired tropes that I thought Paizo was over (I'm looking at you, tribe of murder gnolls whose entire existence is dedicated to murdering for fun) while others are oddly cartoony. There's a whole chunk of a scenario in chapter 2 involving a bridge that makes no physical or logical sense whatsoever. There's a part in chapter 1 where it asks you to give characters a condition that only exists in 1e if they do something stupid.

At the end of the day, none of this is unfixable, but in my opinion a pre-written adventure should do more than this does to minimise the homework the GM has to do to run it. Again, though, I still love it conceptually and I'll make sure to amend my review if anything changes in how I feel about it.