I had high hopes for this one. I have been very curious how we were going to deal with extraplanar entities in such a cosmopolitan city where a trip to hell really isnt much more than a simple set of directions in a starship.
What's more it finally played on what I see as a major interesting plot opportunity in The Drift's nature of sucking up a bit of reality each time it gets used in such a way that it presents a potential conflict but this scenario didn't really do anything with any of this promise.
I think the central mistake made is that the scenario tries to play too coy with the fact that this bit of swampland and the manor that goes with it are from hell. It's in the title. But in the name of preserving this bit of discovery it feels like the whole of what's going on has been obfuscated too much for this scenario to have felt satisfying in any way.
You are playing around on a bit of land suspended in the Drift so you might be thinking there would be cool environmental effects relating to that? Well you would be wrong. The trip through the swamp is just...a trip through what may as well be a regular swamp. The Manor itself is cut in half and is hanging off the edge into the drift maybe that could lead to something interesting? It lends itself towards being a minor hazard in one fight but in one time running and one time playing this adventure that hazard didnt even trigger.
Well okay this place belongs to a Devil Prince and he hired some sort of mercenary crew to sit on it seemingly so maybe theres at least some interesting dangling plot threads? Maybe an opportunity for our Knight of Golarion friends to vanquish some evil while we gather information on the provenance of the mysterious painting that was our purpose here? There's only two such opportunities to do good guy things but were you to do so you'd be going against the secondary success condition of the scenario.
The starship combat was really the only compelling fight in this one as the others were thematic but ultimately not that compelling and the encounter with the bird was pretty confusing in light of how little information the party has to play with.
Ultimately, I don't know why this scenario existed. I don't know what we discovered or what is going to come of the fact that we have this art or what it even means that this art was you know, infernal. The location wasn't exotic or interesting enough on its own and there is no cool reveal to make any of this stick.
You just sort of finish the scenario when you finish which is inevitably a bit of a let down because you leave feeling like you didn't really discover anything or do anything all that great.
