Great review End. Pretty mich echo my thoughts. Even stat blocks are interesting in this adventure.
Don't let that stop you from posting your own review, my man! :) (I say, after already knowing you viewed it favorably)
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I'm so glad you enjoyed the adventure and I thank you for making this your 300th review (we are honored) and for going so thoughtfully in-depth.
Glad you appreciate the work I put into this review - I really tried my best to convey the adventure's unique style and covering at least the basic elements of what to expect. Once again - great work!
Great review End. Pretty mich echo my thoughts. Even stat blocks are interesting in this adventure.
Thank you for your kind words Coltaine (btw. still one of favorite Malazan characters) - its nice comments like these that make me keep going. ^^
Nice review End.
Thanks, D_M! I'm looking forward to seeing your take on the epic, too!
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Rone AND Lou!? I've gotta get this one.
The Robot Viking blog reviews Citadel of Pain
How you like dem dire oysters?
RPG Now staff reviewer Nathan Collins had this to say (Emphasis mine):
When you hear that the writers of Citadel of Pain began their endeavor with a fairly simple map on gaming paper, you shouldn’t feel bad for cringing a little. I know I did. I fully expected a run of the mill by the number adventures adventure to sell a product, behavior that has been honed from years of putting up with this from those wizards on the Coast. I even put off reading it for 3 days because I was afraid I was going to have to give a fairly low review as I hate run of the mill adventures.
Just as it is living at home with a wife of 10 years, I was familiarly proven wrong, as Citadel of Pain is a meaty, campaign inspiring product that is one of the best adventures I have read in the Pathfinder game since Paizo’s Kingmaker path. Good adventures include out of the box mechanics and that is what makes Citadel of Pain shine. The unique story that begins with the players surfing on the back of a mechanical drill is sugary icing on the cake.
At 120 pages, City of Pain, written by Lou Agresta and Rone Barton and published by Gaming Paper, spaces out a lot of adventure. DMs can certainly center a storyline around the Fortress of Rogthandor, now nicknamed the Citadel of Pain because of its weird alchemical monstrosities and defenses. The scientific creations gone wrong scenario allows for some strangely unique adversaries for PCs. In one part of the adventures, PCs will have to negotiate with several different factions within the Citadel, and this presents a cool new mechanic where players actions are placed on a chart that will determine the future adversaries later in the adventure. Unlike traditional reputation point systems, I found the letter crosschart to be far easier to handle and way less math to keep up with.
The adventure is broken up into several acts, each act containing a very non-linear path of movement. In addition, every part has a “lose scenario” which makes for a very open ended adventure that always puts the PCs in control and provides them positive and negative consequences for their actions.
For the Dungeon Masters
Citadel of Pain is incredibly organized and contains detailed artwork and detailed handouts that will truly engage your players. The adventure does a strong job of integrating mystery, puzzles, combat and social encounters.
The Iron Word
Citidel of Pain is an impressive outing by first time adventure publisher Gaming Paper. There is so much to do in the adventure. The non-linear way the adventure was written makes you glad to be the DM so you can read about the dozens of pages of material you probably won’t use, depending on the routes your PCs take.
Disclaimer – Lou Agresta is the organizer (and orange leprechaun) of the Iron GM Tournament, of which I am a yearly competitor. Gaming Paper is a yearly sponsor of the Iron Player Tournament, of which I am lead organizer. I take great pains to make sure that my reviews are unbiased and that a crappy product will be lambasted like the others.
Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Congrats on more well-deserved 5 out of 5 stars-reviews! :)
Citadel of Pain made number eight on Paizo's Top Selling Products From Other Companies list!
Thank you so much for the support, guys. We truly hope you enjoy it.
Will Citadel of Pain ever be put out in stores? Or can we only ever get it in PDF? Me personally i will probably never get the PDF, but would purchase the print version.
Will Citadel of Pain ever be put out in stores? Or can we only ever get it in PDF? Me personally i will probably never get the PDF, but would purchase the print version.
Yes! It is available at game stores now. Paizo will have a restock in the few days as well.
Thanks for your question and your support!
Reviewed.
Thank you!
Contributor
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Will Citadel of Pain ever be put out in stores? Or can we only ever get it in PDF? Me personally i will probably never get the PDF, but would purchase the print version.Yes! It is available at game stores now. Paizo will have a restock in the few days as well.
Thanks for your question and your support!
Hey Gaming Paper Guy, when Paizo restocks is that when the Print/PDF Bundle goes from unavailable to available?
Hey Gaming Paper Guy, when Paizo restocks is that when the Print/PDF Bundle goes from unavailable to available?Will Citadel of Pain ever be put out in stores? Or can we only ever get it in PDF? Me personally i will probably never get the PDF, but would purchase the print version.Yes! It is available at game stores now. Paizo will have a restock in the few days as well.
Thanks for your question and your support!
Yes! It should change to available VERY soon.
Nice review, D_M!
I blame all the US hurricane coverage for why most major media buried the following important news item:
-Your trusty reporter, Scoop McCallahan.
What's the expected level of the PCs after completing this adventure? I may be putting it between parts 2-3 of Kingmaker and my players are now lvl 7.
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Hey Leonal,
Great question but a tricky one, right? It depends on so many factors. Take these four for example:
1. How far into 7th are your players? Just arrived? Almost at 8th?
2. What track are you on: slow, medium, or fast?
3. What play style do your players tend toward: hack-n-slash, narrative, or investigative?
4. How many players do you have?
But I want to give you an answer, so here it is:
If you have 4 players, they just reached 7th, they prefer a balanced play style (ie are neither mad kill-bots nor talk-and-never-fight types), and are on the slow or medium track, then very likely this adventure will bump them 1 level to 8th. If they are on the fast track Citadel of Pain will still likely bump them only 1 level to 8th, but 9th would not be inconceivable.
Just so you know I came to this conclusion by
1) going through the manuscript and calculating the total CR available in the adventure
2) making a SWAG as to how much of all that lives within Rogthandor a party is likely to meet and kill
3) assuming no story or bonus xp (not my favored play style)
4) dividing the resultant xp by four players
5) assuming the players start at exactly 7th level and not 1 xp more, and
6) seeing how far into what level (8th as it happens) the resultant xp takes each player on the slow, medium and fast track. On the fast track with these assumptions the number gets within striking distance of 9th, by about 2 or 3 sessions of slaughter I'd say.
Hope that helps!
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Hey Leonal,
Great question but a tricky one, right? It depends on so many factors. Take these four for example:
1. How far into 7th are your players? Just arrived? Almost at 8th?
2. What track are you on: slow, medium, or fast?
3. What play style do your players tend toward: hack-n-slash, narrative, or investigative?
4. How many players do you have?But I want to give you an answer, so here it is:
If you have 4 players, they just reached 7th, they prefer a balanced play style (ie are neither mad kill-bots nor talk-and-never-fight types), and are on the slow or medium track, then very likely this adventure will bump them 1 level to 8th. If they are on the fast track Citadel of Pain will still likely bump them only 1 level to 8th, but 9th would not be inconceivable.
Just so you know I came to this conclusion by
1) going through the manuscript and calculating the total CR available in the adventure
2) making a SWAG as to how much of all that lives within Rogthandor a party is likely to meet and kill
3) assuming no story or bonus xp (not my favored play style)
4) dividing the resultant xp by four players
5) assuming the players start at exactly 7th level and not 1 xp more, and
6) seeing how far into what level (8th as it happens) the resultant xp takes each player on the slow, medium and fast track. On the fast track with these assumptions the number gets within striking distance of 9th, by about 2 or 3 sessions of slaughter I'd say.Hope that helps!
Thanks for the incredibly detailed answer. :)
My players have 3-4 characters in total depending on whether all of us can make it. They're about 10k xp shy of lvl 8 on a medium track.They tend to hack most things when it needs hacking and drink booze and put things on fire in-between (or while hacking).
Either way I'll pick it up later today. :)
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Contributor
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Awesome, and thanks! And if you do insert a sidetrek to Rogthandor, Citadel of Pain into your Kingmaker path, I would love to hear how that plays out. Kingmaker is pretty unforgettable. What PCs can do to themselves in Rogthandor is pretty unforgettable (IMHO) -- the combo? Just would love to hear about it if you've the time one day.
Enjoy and thanks again!
Awesome, and thanks! And if you do insert a sidetrek to Rogthandor, Citadel of Pain into your Kingmaker path, I would love to hear how that plays out. Kingmaker is pretty unforgettable. What PCs can do to themselves in Rogthandor is pretty unforgettable (IMHO) -- the combo? Just would love to hear about it if you've the time one day.
Enjoy and thanks again!
You're welcome. I picked up the bundle, but have only had time to briefly look through the pdf. It looks well laid out and will probably be an interesting challenge for both the players and myself (players being players and all:)). Hopefully the physical copy will be in Paizo's warehouse when the next AP module ships this week or next.
If I get a good response from my KM group I may try to find a place for this in Carrion Crown too, if stories and such permit.
I'll let you know how they fare when they've locked themselves in. :)
Yesterday, Gaming Paper's publisher Erik Bauer put up this YouTube video that gives you a visual tour of our Citadel of Pain adventure.
If you like what you see, please spread the word (big favor). If you don't, please spread a nut butter (big flavor) across bread and slow chew while ruminating on how we stole two minutes of your life.
We will be uploading an updated version of "Citadel of Pain" tomorrow. Now with 100% more bookmarks, broken into two files (File 1: adventure and handouts File 2: maps), and a few(honestly just three)misprints cleaned up.
Thanks for the help, pointers, and recommendations.
Did this ever get updated ? Not seeing it on my downloads list.
Thanks
Stanc
Uploaded now! Apologies for the wait. We had a hiccup with uploader. The amazing Paizo staff assisted us with a fix and bam! It's up. 100% more bookmarks and separated into two smaller files.
Thanks for the patience.
Erik
Thanks for the update. I'll let it loose on my players soon, but I'm waiting for the print to ship with my next AP shipment to read it thoroughly. So far it looks very good.
Thanks for the review, DDrake!
My print copy finally shipped today/yesterday with this months AP sub, but why does it still say pre-order?
Thank you for your review, Christa!
After being handed Chris West's marvelous Mega Dungeon Map Pack 1, around which we were to compose an adventure, Lou Agresta and I had the urge to alter some of the map tiles to better jibe with where we wanted to go in our story. Erik allowed us to make changes to the map and he then included these altered map sheets in the adventure.
However, if you spotted some poorer fits owing nothing to that fact (meaning, you weren't somehow missing these altered sheets), it would be a great help if you could point them out. I took on most of the room descriptions, so if there's fault to be found there, it's all mine and I'd be grateful for a chance to reexamine the text and make any necessary fixes.
Thanks!
Shout out to Leonal: Just wondering if you ever had a chance to run this and, if so, how it went?
Hi, sorry I haven't been able to yet. Been busy with work and having a group that's spread across 4 different timezones makes it harder to schedule a session, even if it's online.
I'll let you know when something happens. :)
Reviewed. I felt there were some flaws, but overall a fun adventure.
Reviewed. I felt there were some flaws, but overall a fun adventure.
Thank you for the thoughtful review, Senjen!
bigkilla, I'm poking things to see why it's happening as well. It might be because we don't have any consignment inventory in stock.
Sending another dozen or so copies from Gaming Paper Headquarters on Monday. Thanks for the interest!
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16
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bigkilla, I'm poking things to see why it's happening as well. It might be because we don't have any consignment inventory in stock.So any idea if or when this item will be back in stock?? still gives me the same message.
Is the physical book sold out again/still? I am getting the same message when trying to order the print/pdf bundle.
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Planning to add this to kingmaker, excited to see it blend in with the stolen lands and totally using the BBE never statted as a secondary major villan
Back in stock. My sincere apologies for the wait.