Pathfinder Adventure Path #187: The Seventh Arch (Gatewalkers 1 of 3)

This review will contain SPOILERS

This book is in many ways the best of the 3 volumes in the Gatewalkers Adventure Path, and I struggled to decide whether to rate it 2 or 3 stars. If I could rate it 2.5 stars I would. I settled on rounding up as the adventure toolbox section for Castrovel is fantastic and pushed me to give the extra star.

This review, and my reviews of the later volumes of this adventure, will be quite critical. This is not intended to be disparaging towards the creators or anything of the sort, and I'm well aware that a large part of Gatewalkers' problems were caused by a sudden staff shortage during its production. In many ways, it's impressive they were able to even ship Gatewalkers under those circumstances. However, that doesn't change the fact that in the broader fanbase over the past 18 months Gatewalkers has become widely considered one of if not the worst 2E adventure path. (A reputation largely not reflected in the small number of review scores here) My hope is that my reviews will help people know what they're getting into if they choose to run this, and to give constructive critique to Paizo over what worked and what didn't. I will also add for context that I GMed this entire adventure path for my group, and am currently running a homebrew 11-20 sequel to it for them.

Premise - Gatewalkers has the best premise of any Adventure path period in my opinion. Absolute 11/10. However, sadly, it completely fails to live up to that premise in multiple respects throughout its 3 volumes.

Chapter 1 - This chapter is actually pretty great! You investigate a mystery, go through a fun dungeon, and have a very unique boss fight. There are a couple of minor issues (mainly a couple of overtuned encounters/hazards that are liable to kill characters if your players are unlucky) but nothing too bad. My only other criticism would be that for a character as important as Ritalson is supposed to be for this adventure, his introduction is extremely brief and not giving the players any way to stay in contact with him so he feels like an actual character and benefactor was a mistake.

Chapter 2 - This is where major issues start to arise. First, I'll address the use of the investigation subsystem. Put frankly, it's pretty awful. The players need to make a bunch of rolls to get exposition dumps, with separate ones at individual research sites and an overall tally. However, some of the overall revelations really don't make sense to learn from some of the sites. You can kind of ameliorate this via a liberal amount of GM narration but it quickly gets stretched thin as you try to justify why the party was able to learn something in one place despite the revelation only making sense if it came from a different place. There's also an even more fundamental issue: this is completely non-interactive. There is no time pressure, there is no consequence for failing. The party just needs to roll dice over and over until they get the plot coupons necessary for success. That's ungodly boring and players will notice they're just rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice.

Then we get to Kaneepo. So, in concept Kaneepo is a very interesting character. There's one big issue however: they're a fae lord well over 10,000 years old who created a curse powerful enough to stymie the best mages in Kynonin, and they're easily defeated by a group of level 2 characters. It makes no sense whatsoever. Absolutely none. By their lore, Kaneepo could have reasonably been the BBEG of a 1-10 or even 11-20 AP all by themselves, so why are they level 4??? Also, they invited the players for a purpose so why do all their servants try to kill the party? One of the more common pieces of GM advice for this adventure is coming up with a justification for why Kaneepo is so weak, but the book doesn't even recognize it's an issue.

Chapter 3 - There's some cool setpieces and a nice mini-dungeon in this chapter, and the final crossing encounter deserves praise for being among the most creative and engaging I've seen in an AP. The biggest problem in this chapter is it has a literal talking head give the party a massive exposition dump explaining half the AP's mysteries without ever giving the party a chance to solve them on their own. It's the moment the AP truly abandons its "paranormal investigators" theme and overall its just a disappointing way for these mysteries to be solved.

Adventure Toolbox - The Castrovel adventure toolbox is fantastic and has some great adventure seeds in a variety of locations. Not many notes here, this is just a top quality toolbox that is among the best I've read in the articles section of APs.

Overall: The book starts and ends strong, but has a week middle and sets up problems for the AP as a whole by abandoning its own theme and delivering answers via unsatisfying methods.

On Gatewalkers the campaign: as advertised, I was expecting Gatewalkers to focus a lot more strongly on paranormal adventures, investigating mysteries, and related horror themes, similar to Dark Archive. However, disappointingly, that feels like its really only a third of the adventure path, where most of it is spent on an adventure that feels like it hops around randomly. While the locales can be interesting and varied, the AP as a whole didn't deliver as much as I'd hoped. So as I've run it (at the time of writing, I've run the first book), I've had to make a lot of modifications, integrating new plot lines and content from other books like Dark Archive. This is the first AP I've run, and while I like how Paizo prepares really thorough material, I feel like knowing what I know now, I would have chosen to run a different AP.

On The Seventh Arch: I feel like this is the strongest of the three books, with the first two chapters being the highlights.

SPOILERS: The first chapter has the players investigate and root out a druid cult. For my players, this was a good intro to PF2e while getting their feet wet in the overall mystery of the world. The second chapter has the players delve into a shadowy fey manipulator, where you can really emphasize the horror vibes as a GM. My players really liked this part. The third book is where things kind of turn upside down as the players find themselves on a different planet. My players reacted lukewarmly to this twist. There's also a bit of "oh no crisis" railroading that feels like a side plot to the main plot. Going back, I'm not sure I would keep this in if I ran it again.

Across the chapters, it also feels like the mystery into the Missing Moment (the whole party motivation) is a bit uneven. There's scattered pieces of information in the first couple of chapters, then a massive lore dump in the third, that is fairly on rails. Feels hard to make this feel "investigative" in a way that is satisfying.

Overall, most of the book felt good to run, but the last chapter felt weaker (and the campaign as a whole has issues).

I really liked the themes and conceits presented in the players guide though right away I observed a lot of the awakened powers seemed too much of a gamble for very little benefit.

We ended up TPK'ing on the first boss after the GM misread the encounter (I won't hold that against the AP) and at that point none of us were particularly invested in the plot or in the lackluster design of the encounters.