OK, I have now run this and its time to write up my thoughts having done so. I ran it a low tier with the 4 player adjustment. I have to say my initial impressions are largely confirmed having run it:
1. This is much too fiddly for a 1-5. Tracking 4 different factions is a pain especially when their influence varies over quite so many locations. The impact of the influence mechanic is also both trivial and aggravating. Imposing a tiny modifier on a small number of skill checks is barely worth doing anything for and have 4 different sets of tactics at the end is just aggravating.
2. Added to this the available influence points are very heavily skewed with one faction having a potential 23 points and another with a mere 12.
3. The NPC's the group interact with are not terribly well fleshed out and while there are lots of opportunities for players to roleplay with them there is too much for the GM to keep track of behind the scenes. I can see this is being very enjoyable to play with a well prepared GM but it is a pain to run.
4. The enemies are really not very effective at all. The guts encounter is presented as one combat but has enemies in 2 or 3 locations and the scorpions cannot reach the rest of the combat. The strix are a waste of space, spending their time trying to entangle and trip people. It might be viable if they outnumbered the party but they never will. The final encounter is pretty bad. The PC's know where the enemies will arrive from and can easily be in position for them. The casters tactics, especially at high tier, are actively terrible in half of the cases where she wastes her time buffing a pair of mooks who will go down in a single hit.
5. The surprise monster is a waste of space in both tiers. As a tiny creature it has to enter an enemies space to do anything and while it is presented as having grab it cannot grab anything larger than itself.
Overall this was a frustrating experience to prep for and run with far too much going on. My group had a couple of hairy moments but only due to some extremely lucky rolls on my part. I wouldn't recommend this one to people to be honest. If you are going to run it then DO NOT RUN THIS COLD.
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OK, I have played this once and am currently prepping it to run this weekend. This will not be a full review, it is simply some initial impressions. I will add more after I have run it and have decided on a final rating.
First off, despite this being a 1-5 it is extremely convoluted and complex. Do not under any circumstances run this cold. Do not run this having just skimmed it a couple of times. It will make little to no sense when you actually try to run it.
Part of that is due to the sheer number of moving parts to it, part of it is because it introduces elements of certain sub plots before you get to clear material about them. This is particularly an issue for the faction mission where, for example, there is information about a key NPC presented before you even know who she is.
Secondly, while I like the idea of the influence mechanic there are quite seriously far too many individual numbers for four separate factions which have to be kept track of. I shouldn't have to spend a couple of hours compiling a spreadsheet to be able to run what should be a fairly simple influence mechanic. If I am going to have to do that then the mechanic really should have a far greater impact on the scenario than this one does. Frankly it is barely worth tracking given the level of impact on anything other than the final encounter.
Thirdly, the encounter in the Gold Streets is just unnecessarily complex. I get that it is a useful way to give the PC's information but again having to track multiple different costs for multiple different pieces of information is just not necessary, especially when such costs are unlikely to be relevant to any group other than a bunch of completely fresh level 1 pc's.
I am not quite sure what is going on with the encounter in the Guts. One of the creatures is presented as being part of the rest of the encounter but it is stuck in a location where it is on its own and the rest of the encounter cant reach it even if combat does break out.
The tactics of the final encounter run directly counter to some of the enemy preparations. Announcing your presence and telling people they are under arrest for example seems rather to undercut being invisible. Likewise I am not really sure what the point of the "surprise" monster is given its size and inability to do much of anything to anyone who isn't helpless. It has some squick factor but it seems more likely to come off as comedic.
Finally I just want to stress again that this should not be run cold. When I played it our GM thought he had it down with a couple of read throughs but struggled. It cost us a lot of time as he flipped through the scenario looking for information when things made little sense and cost us our second prestige as he missed any stress on the goal for it.
At the moment, working on just a read through and some prep, it feels like an A for effort but a C for execution.
