This adventure suffered from too much push to go straight to the end (which might be too hard for the unprepared). In our group, we didn't do very much adventuring to explore until after we'd defeated the end boss. This is because, as a good aligned party, we felt fairly obligated to try to save the missing villagers, and it was pretty easy to track them.
Still, taking back Varnhold from its new occupiers, and then eventually restoring its villagers was an epic tale. The final nemesis was appropriately evil and it felt like we were really started to have an effect on the world by eliminating him before he became a major threat, not just to us, but to the world.
As thrilled as I was to play in the first module, I was equally thrilled to turn our exploration into the background for our new nation. The interesting themes and threats continued, the fun of the explorations continued and bold new foreshadowing introduced lots of things to worry about for the future.
This book suffered from a couple of balance issues. While I mostly love the kingdom building, I agree with several other reviews that it quickly became too easy and yet was still a chore to micromanage appropriately. Nevertheless, I personally had a grand old time of it, making maps and plotting out cities multi-year development. Unfortunately, not all of our players enjoyed the system.
The second balance issue revolved around encounters. Many of the encounters were simply too easy, but then, out of nowhere, you'd encounter something mind-boggling difficult (TPK level) that just wasn't that well conceived. I'm specifically thinking of the evil fey (Dancing Lady) encounter.
Finally, this book continued the tradition of mostly silly or useless female NPCs rather than writing in any strong female characters.
Overall though, still well worth the play through.
One of the best adventures I've ever played through
Stolen land introduces an open-world sandbox exploration with plenty of adventure and perils to keep anyone interested. From the first read of the player's guide to the opening plot hook I was involved! I loved the exploration, the simple, but compelling motivations and the obvious but not overdone threats.
The only thing that keeps this book from a 5 star rating is the lack of strong female NPCs. As with many fantasy products, the game designers seem to have felt that they need to keep it "realistic" or "historically accurate." In any case, there's only one female protagonist and she's quite cliche. Fortunately, our DM made a few changes and improved things.
Overall though, I liked the concept of the sandbox exploration so much I want to add it to every game I ever play in. I'd even play through Kingmaker again just for this.
Overall I have enjoyed my time as a player in the Kingmaker AP. There have been a few issues, but the total arc has been good. This book didn't spoil my overall enjoyment of Kingmaker, but it was definitely the worst of the bunch (so far).
This book brings the mass-combat rules (started in the previous book) to the forefront. Unfortunately, mass combat is not very well designed and not very fun. First, it essentially devolves into the DM and a single player rolling. Second, in our campaign it didn't scale very well with how far we'd advanced our own kingdom. Third, there aren't any real strategy options that have meaningful effect. The entire system is too middle-of-the-road. I would have preferred a system that gave results based on individual PC combats, or, barring that, an actually cool (all players involved) wargame.
The second problem with this book is the plot. It's basically a repeat of the previous plot-line in terms of the end-goal. Whereas every book up until now has been pretty dynamic, with different NPC end-bosses and goals, this is almost a total copy. There's a bad ruler and you have to dig him out of an entrenched city. The ruler is even bad in the same way. It was a big let down.
