Pathfinder Adventure Path: Abomination Vaults

4.00/5 (based on 13 ratings)
Pathfinder Adventure Path: Abomination Vaults
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When the mysterious Gauntlight, an eerie landlocked lighthouse, glows with baleful light, the people of Otari know something terrible is beginning. The town's newest heroes must venture into the ruins around the lighthouse and delve the dungeon levels far beneath it to discover the evil the Gauntlight heralds. Hideous monsters, deadly traps, and mysterious ghosts all await the heroes who dare to enter the sprawling megadungeon called the Abomination Vaults!

Pathfinder Second Edition's most popular campaign yet bursts from the pages of this massive hardcover compilation, containing all three adventures in the fan-favorite Abomination Vaults Adventure Path, a dungeon-delving campaign like no other, along with support articles, rules, monsters, and more!

Content Warning: While Abomination Vaults contains typical Pathfinder action and adventure, it also presents themes of suicide, ableism, body horror, and human experimentation. Before you begin, understand that player consent (including that of the Game Master) is vital to a safe and fun play experience for everyone. You should talk with your players before beginning the adventure and modify descriptions or scenarios as appropriate.

Note: This Abomination Vaults compilation hardcover is not included in the Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscription. Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscribers who preorder Pathfinder Adventure Path: Abomination Vaults will receive a free PDF when their physical copy ships.

ISBN-13: 978-1-64078-410-9

"Abomination Vaults" is sanctioned for use in Pathfinder Society Organized Play. The rules for running this Adventure and Chronicle sheet are available as a free download (907 kb PDF).

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop
Foundry Virtual Tabletop
Pathfinder Nexus on Demiplane
Roll20 Virtual Tabletop

*While supplies last.

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4.00/5 (based on 13 ratings)

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Decent Dungeon Crawl, but not the best introduction to PF2E

3/5

Abomination Vaults is a decent enough dungeon crawl, but it is a rather poor introduction to PF2E - I would recommend against playing this as your first venture in Pathfinder 2E, or as a follow up to the beginner's box, as it is a high difficulty dungeon crawl that violates some of the guidelines about low level encounters to its detriment.

The setup for the adventure is simple enough - an abandoned necromancer's tower called the Gauntlight has lit up near the town of Otari, and your friend Wrin has called you in to try and figure out what is going on. Delving into the tower, you quickly determine that the necromancer Belcorra who created the tower is only mostly dead, and it is up to you to delve down into her abomination vaults, fighting your way down through ten floors of undead to lay her spirit to rest for good.

This is very much a dungeon crawl, not an RP-focused adventure; while the town of Otari is decent enough, it is barely involved in the actual adventure for the most part. Early on, there's several events that involve the town, and that's really nice for keeping the characters invested, but as you get deeper into the vaults, the town becomes less and less important; by the final three floors, Otari has been completely forgotten.

This is a pity, because Otari is only 15 minutes away from the Gauntlight, and you go back there to go to sleep every night; they could have easily given the players something to do there between each level to break up the dungeon crawl, which is otherwise generally pretty light on RP, with only a few floors in the middle having significant RP aspects to them. A lot of what you're doing is moving from room to room, killing monsters.

Belcorra, the big bad of the dungeon, has far too small a presence as well; you only start encountering her at the very bottom of the dungeon, which is a pity, as it means she gets little opportunity for characterization.

The biggest flaw with this dungeon, however, is that it is kind of brutal in the first few floors. A session zero to get a balanced party together is essential for this dungeon, as otherwise the many over-level encounters in the first half of it are likely to kill characters or even cause potential TPKs. There's a wood golem on the fourth floor which is really poorly signposted, is immune to almost all magic, and which also is resistant to physical attacks, and thanks to its configuration can easily put the characters in a spot where they're dying on the ground with no possibility of escape or being drug to safety or be safely healed. This is hardly the only encounter in the dungeon that can kill players, and the first half of the dungeon is kind of infamous for TPKs. It gets easier in the second half as the players are simply stronger than they are in the first half and have more resources, and the encounters tend to be more varied in the number of enemies in the encounter as you go in deeper.

My own group of TTRPG veteran players managed to get through the dungeon without too much trouble, though there was a character death on the third floor due to bad luck, and a temporary stand-in PC made by the DM died on the 9th floor when a player was absent for a session, with that character also dying to the same thing (multiple unlucky crits). We were never in any real danger of a TPK, though, so the dungeon, while challenging, is not grossly unfair; that being said, groups of newbies regularly struggle with this module and you see a weekly post on the Pathfinder 2E subreddit of a GM or player talking about how they're getting slaughtered by this module, looking for help with what they're doing wrong.

The dungeon is also full of monsters that are immune to precision damage, as well as a number of monsters that are immune to athletics maneuvers due to being incorporeal, which can screw up some kinds of builds, and some entire classes (gunslingers, rogues, precision rangers, investigators, grab fighters, grapple monks) are heavily penalized by the design of the dungeon as their build will not work on a number of major enemies, including the final boss.

This is a fine dungeon crawl if you are up for a bunch of combat encounters with some light roleplaying aspects here and there, but it's not the greatest module in the world - I liked it OK, but I felt like it could have been more than it was, and I've preferred Paizo's other modules to this one.


4/5




5/5


4/5

Abomination Vaults is great for what it is, a dungeon crawler that’s heavy on themes of undead and aberrations, that gets weirder and more interesting the further down you go. There’s a hub town to return to, and there isn’t as much pressure on the party.

The narrative is quite simple and can be sparse at time while you explore room to room. I felt such a lack of roleplay opportunities that I just converted some combat encounters into conversational NPC's. There are specific events that trigger in the town of Otari (a natural follow up to the Beginner Box adventure), but for the majority of the AP the town is relatively uninvolved which is unfortunate. I would've liked more townsfolk being tied into the narrative. Be aware that the entire AP from levels 1-10 stays in one location so the scope is very narrow to one town and a superficial slice of the Darklands.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Aaron Shanks wrote:
Decron82 wrote:
Disappointed there are no discounts that can be applied over on Demiplane for the digital version.
They do not have this product for sale yet. They are selling the three volumes separately and in a bundle, but that is not PZO2033. Make sense?

So, in the inverse of this, Roll20 isn't selling the three individual books, but is only offering a discount for people who bought the all-in-one volume, which excludes people who are subscribers.

Roll20 can't seem to understand that the three books are the same as this one book... Is there anyone who can talk to them? I know it's a _them_ thing, but I sincerely think that there's some crossed wires. I would hate it if this happened again when Fists comes out as one volume.

Grand Archive

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
kcunning wrote:
Aaron Shanks wrote:
Decron82 wrote:
Disappointed there are no discounts that can be applied over on Demiplane for the digital version.
They do not have this product for sale yet. They are selling the three volumes separately and in a bundle, but that is not PZO2033. Make sense?

So, in the inverse of this, Roll20 isn't selling the three individual books, but is only offering a discount for people who bought the all-in-one volume, which excludes people who are subscribers.

Roll20 can't seem to understand that the three books are the same as this one book... Is there anyone who can talk to them? I know it's a _them_ thing, but I sincerely think that there's some crossed wires. I would hate it if this happened again when Fists comes out as one volume.

It's actually not the same product, and the Paizo API can't check for "do they have all of these 3 other products?"

The FoundryVTT module also only support the compilation.
The compilation has a couple of different maps, and some (minor) text changes. It also has a completely different layout. So it is a different product. And Paizo treat it as different for everything. Including for cost reductions based on pre-owned PDFs.


There is no need to check for 3 owned products. Even a single PDF owned should suffice to qualify for a discount of anywhere between $13 (third of compilation price) to $18 (price of a single original PDF).

Silver Crusade

They would still need to check.

Grand Lodge

2 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

So, uh, I know I'm a little late to this party. I just had a short message for any Paizo employees still monitoring this thread.
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THIS. IS. AWESOME.
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Sorry, had to get that out. I've recently been buying the individual .pdf files for the adventure paths after most of my first edition physical copies have disintegrated over the years, but I will buy EVERY hardcover compilation y'all make, including First Edition and Starfinder APs, if it is expanded to those.

Ahem, anyway, sorry to everyone else, just wanted to make sure the powers that be knew this was something that had at least one follower behind it...


Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

Will the astoundingly awesome Foundry edition be updated for Foundry v10?

Marketing & Media Manager

NerdOver9000 wrote:

So, uh, I know I'm a little late to this party. I just had a short message for any Paizo employees still monitoring this thread.

.
.
.
.
THIS. IS. AWESOME.
.
.
.
Sorry, had to get that out. I've recently been buying the individual .pdf files for the adventure paths after most of my first edition physical copies have disintegrated over the years, but I will buy EVERY hardcover compilation y'all make, including First Edition and Starfinder APs, if it is expanded to those.

Ahem, anyway, sorry to everyone else, just wanted to make sure the powers that be knew this was something that had at least one follower behind it...

Thank you.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
dhemery wrote:
Will the astoundingly awesome Foundry edition be updated for Foundry v10?

Yes, they're hoping to get it updated around a week after V10's release, with all the modules updated by the end of September.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, PF Special Edition Subscriber

I today subbed once again to the AP line, and pre-ordered this in the same order, wanted to double check I still qualify for the PDF?


Curmudgeonly wrote:
double check I still qualify for the PDF?

This was published back in May 2022. There is no "pre-order" for previously published products.

So, no, you won't get a free PDF.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, PF Special Edition Subscriber
Dancing Wind wrote:
Curmudgeonly wrote:
double check I still qualify for the PDF?

This was published back in May 2022. There is no "pre-order" for previously published products.

So, no, you won't get a free PDF.

D'oh, not sure how I missed that. Must have seen some of the other editions and thought they were all pre-order. Thanks.

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