Pathfinder Adventure Path #188: They Watched the Stars (Gatewalkers 2 of 3)

This review will contain SPOILERS

This review, and my reviews of the other 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.

Book 2 of Gatewalkers has at this point earned an infamous reputation within the fandom, for good reason. It might honestly be the worse single AP volume published for second edition, and if I could give this book 0 stars I probably would. A lot of the following may feel like plot nitpicks in isolation, but a running theme of this book is things not making any sense if you think about them for more than half a second, and it merits mention.

Chapter 1 - The very start of the book begins with a plothole. Sakuachi is said to have contacted Alleli when she was trapped and surrounded by the looters, but given how long characters are likely to be in Castrovel for (and that Alleli was contacted by her before the characters reach Loskialua) that was likely to be at least a week ago, likely more. She has apparently been sitting there with people trying to break down the doors for what could have been weeks, with the looters finally breaking the doors down the instant the players arrive.

After that, we get to rescuing Sakuachi's friends and meeting Matz's mercenaries. This section isn't particularly riveting but its inoffensive and has a few fun moments like the trapped shop. A few of the encounters like the magic eye wolf come out of nowhere and then go absolutely nowhere, and just feel kind of baffling. Also, the miniboss leader of the Obsidian oath has the damage of a level 1 creature in one of a number of enemies with wonky stats throughout this adventure path.

The real issues with this book start as the chapter nears its end. Sakuachi firmly claims her place as the GMPC chosen one who is now the story's main character. There's even a sidebar that talks about this problem's existence and proceeds to give some halfhearted advice for ameliorating it that ultimately amounts to nothing of substance. Instead of creating a problem and then offering some vague amelioration for it, why not just not create the problem in the first place? To be clear, Sakuachi herself is a fine character and I worked very hard as a GM to get my players to like her. But the story continuously prioritzes her above the PCs in a way that many groups will and have hated.

This wouldn't be as bad, if the solutions Sakuachi offers seemed like a good idea. Her grand advice to the players is "we need a god, let's go look for one in Sarkoris." This raises several questions:

1. How does she even know about modern Sarkoris? The Erutaki are an isolated people that live hundreds of miles away across mountains and glaciers and Sarkoris was destroyed 100 years ago.
2. Ignoring the above, since she does know about modern Sarkoris, why is that where she wants to look? The gods of Sarkoris are believed to basically all be dead, and they were summoned creatures rather than actual deities to begin with.
3. The book specifies that her group trekked overland to Skywatch, and Sarkoris is between Aaminiut and Skywatch. Why did they not stop by on the way if it was their best lead?

Despite how tenuously this lead is written, it's the way forward so off we go.

I must also include at least a brief mention of disappointment at the wasting of Skywatch as a mystery. Its mysterious and seemingly impossible magical sealing has been teased in setting books for over ten years, and in this book the reason is revealed to just be that the city's ruler thought the outside world was a distraction. No elaboration. No explanation for the magic seals that prevented entrance or scrying by even the most powerful of mages. No explanation of how the city fed itself. No explanation of why there was an active merchant square if there was no trade. It's just about the most unsatisfying conclusion to a cool longstanding mystery that you could think of.

Chapter 2 - First thing's first, the map needs mentioning. Almost every location on the region map the PCs visit is mispelled. Some of them aren't small mispellings either: Skywatch somehow became Skyloatch. Continuing on, Egede is spelled Egade, Icerime is Icemine, Winterbreak becomes Winterbreath, etc. I have no idea how this happened.

The ghost ship is a cool idea, but my word the way the book expects you to go for it feels really dumb. You need to go to Mendev, so why is your first inclination to go to a ship graveyard where the only thing you know you'll find are broken ships you cannot sail??? Why not just book passage on a passenger liner, or even walk to Sarkoris? Why is relying on a probably fictitious ghost ship the first option?

So, you find a mostly intact ship and need a ritual to get it going. In order to do that, you need to go through the most nonsensical dungeon I've ever seen. The dungeon seems to be set up like it's trying to get you to choose sides in a conflict by emphasizing a choice of siding with the Naiad or not, but the ones she wants you to kill attack you on sight and they see you the moment you open the front door. Incidentally, she also sees you the moment you enter the front door because this dungeon's layout makes no sense whatsoever. Apparently before you arrived she and her enemies were just chilling there despite there being 0 walls separating them.

The rest of the chapter is mostly fine, though I have to note my befuddlement over two aspects of the Chelaxian pirates encounter. First, there's an entire sidebar dedicated to a background that doesn't exist. Second, the book strongly implies it's the same ship as the one from the ocean, which means they portaged it 1000 miles away???

Chapter 3 - The primary GM advice in the community relating to the Egede section is to either skip it entirely or make it a supernatural incident tied to one of the Dark Archive adventures because as written even if you assume it's a case of mass hysteria it makes no sense. Egede is the second largest city in Mendev and the governement is allowing some random alcholic (the book gives an elaborate explanation about his alchohol problems and that he was drunk when he found the black pudding to begin with) to publicly feed people to a Black Pudding that no one in the entire city recognizes as a black pudding. The book also expects that after you defeat the black pudding the party enjoys the praise of the murderous group that has been committing mob executions on random people and that the aforementioned perpetrator gets off scott free. This entire segment is so baffling it feels like a fever dream, and I have no idea how anyone thought this was a good idea.

The group then sees a falling star which Sakuachi insists they follow without elaborating as to why. I actually like the dungeon, but I gotta note one big issue: there's a noise trap at the begining of the dungeon that alerts the boss, and the party is severely punished not for triggering it but for Succeeding at seeing and disarming it. If the boss is made aware, he moves into the middle of the dungeon and the worst fight is a severe. If he doesn't hear a trap, he stays at the end of the dungeon with another powerful monster and the PC's earlier success is rewarded by an Extreme encounter.

Chapter 4 - The investigation section has the same problems as the Kaneepo investigation in book 1 did. 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. The fights are at least fun and interesting, with Alkoasha in particular being among the most unique encounters I've seen in an AP.

The actual dungeon is pretty bad, mainly because the book expects you to go through the same encounter 3 separate times. I created a pretty popular homebrew variant that has unique tests for the 3 gods, but they really should have had unique ones in the first place. It feels like one was written for Waiixi and then stapled onto Posololo and Enaaku. It also introduces yet another bit of plot nonsense: It took 5 "gods" to seal, not kill, seal this level 9 demon but apparently just one of those 5 gods is enough to deal with the level 27 Osoyo?????

Ending with Sakuachi's transformation is a powerful moment for groups that like her, but for groups that found her to be a show-stealer this whole dungeon kind of just reinforces that, with 4 major plot moments for her and none for the PCs.

Overall: This book feels disjoined, almost none of the events make sense if you think about it, and it firmly puts the PCs into the back seat as bodyguards for a new main character.

[On the campaign, from my review of The Seventh Arch] 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.

On They Watched the Stars: Boy, this book has issues. Personally, I'm scrapping most of the content of this book and replacing it with other content from Dark Archive and doing what I can to stitch the plot together.

SPOILERS: The biggest issue with this book (and the rest of the campaign) is Sakuachi, the "chosen one" GMPC who turns the party into functionally an escort for her mission. You KNOW this was an issue because Paizo had to write a blurb at the front to address this with the quote "...some players might feel like they’re playing second fiddle. You can assuage such concerns...". Yikes. For my campaign, I'm completely writing her out, which is tough, because she's interwoven with the narrative for the rest of the campaign.
Chapter 1 has players land in Skywatch which is a town which has some seemingly cool, but confusing geometry that mostly involves the players getting lost or making rolls to not get lost.
Chapter 2 is definitely the best part of this book, as the players get their own ghost pirate ship, which is awesome. There's a nautical encounter and visions on the sea which are pretty neat as well.
Chapters 3 and 4 feel confusing in purpose. The encounters with the townsfolk of Egede feel like the cool start to uncovering a mystery or something, but feel very quickly wrapped up as written, like the author doesn't want you to spend much time there and move on, to help Sakuachi with her quest. The rest of the chapter 3 feels like a combination of tedious random encounters and a weird diversion. Chapter 4 feels odd in that it has the investigation system applied to... looting random buildings? It feels less like the there's a mystery to uncover here and more like the players are trying to not be lost. The whole cistern dungeon feels strange in theme for what I'd expect from divinity or god-calling, and as it reads, players need to repeat the same boss encounter 3 times exactly the same way? This feels like it would be tedious to run.

I personally am not running most of the content in this book, I'd encourage a GM looking to run Gatewalkers to find ways to bridge the levels between Book 1 and Book 3, since this book doesn't exactly add much to the narrative anyway.