Pathfinder Adventure: Claws of the Tyrant

2/5 It's a case of great ideas, really lackluster execution. It felt like the first two adventures didn't need to exist, I'm running this for two different groups and both groups basically agree with me here.

The first adventure has a great feel, a good introduction in the crypt and a solid "reason" for you having to care, stay, know and ETC with the various NPC's your expected to go on this survival horror roadtrip to vellumis with divine purpose in your hands and once you leave to Yua's Hope, it feels pretty open-ended and good. And it's on the Road to Vellumis it really shows from the get-go that this needed more time in the oven.

The Road to Vellumis is just pick a pace with no difference in the choice. They sell you on this big influence once you leave the crip to setup "morale" and gain boons from the NPC's with the idea that NPC drama / interparty conflict and possibly losing these NPC's is a part of this. You'll spend a hour doing this big influence and it feels like it has direction. Then you leave yua's hope and you realize that the road is just random encounters like somebody tossed darts at a board and they never actually wrote so much as a suggestion to spice up the road. It really is befriend brushpaws, get forager on EVERYONE to invalidate the survival aspects and once you leave Yua's Hope, you'll be on a rather meaningless railroad where Omelia the main opposition has no written reason for being there with a ending that has also no writing or reason really.

It expects you to have a valiant end of getting this object to the city but they didn't even write a satisfactory battle other than "Plunk them with arrows after questioning the party for some reason that's not elaborated on." Omelia isn't scary. Your supposed to scare the party with her, but there's no written advice on how to do so and no written events hyping her up. But that's what your supposed to be doing. A constant problem with the whole thing.

Why does a ghost and her child attack you randomly at a random cottage you don't need to stop at? Nearly everything interesting or for there to be a "reason" for something, it really feels like you have to write that all yourself and at times when you wonder "why" you need to reference a lot of exterior material. I had no problem with this but it just felt like a lot of referencing for referencing sake for how short of a distance it takes most of it's content.

The IDEA that this 3 episode anthology gives you different perspectives is COOL but in execution it doesn't accomplish that and it tries to be Pulp Fiction but without any interconnectedness beyond theme and "I guess so." The bridge at the end of A1 also seems misprinted as a simple hazard with a reaction describing it's a complex one that regains reactions like they just didn't play test it which is sort of what the road to vellumis felt like entirely once we left yua's hope in both cases we got hyped up on the NPC's, roleplay, etc just to see it go a very short distance and that this wasn't really put through a thorough testing phase. It's good until the road, and then the rest of the entire book feels like your just sort of on a road first, the reasons for doing so coming secondary. A scary ghoul opposition with no supporting material. NPC's with morale that's never referenced again.

Second Adventure, Ashes for Ozem has cool lore about Nirmrathas/that Nation and they invented a keep from before Iomedae's ascension. This was the most enjoyable of the 3 thus far. Again, little reason beyond "you are seldegs evil lackey." And your thrust into a conversation with him and doing a research subsystem to set the pace of it. This adventure is a Infiltration but, in-encounter with a emphasis on the GM making it feel seamless and it being very short and sweet. Ironically despite being the shortest and in many ways the most skippable, it's the most concise with various options with commentary such as the various ways to destroy Fort Ozem and even if your party fails there's a lot of leeway to pick it right back up as another evil party and it was enjoyable tossing some challenge at the partys in waves.

However my enjoyment of it was entirely hinged on how I handled battle with the keep commander (keeping focused on her goal to protect the dragonball/special object.) This one really feels like a super generic fort infiltration that's been given reason to exist after-the-fact sort of like how A1 feels like a Walking Dead episode with great themes just to have 0 execution but at least this was enjoyable with some writing for the commander.

The Third Adventure Of Blood & Faith is what all of this exists really for and adventure 1 and 2 very very lightly catch-up to A3 after the mid-point of A3 and really felt like you could just view adventure 1 and 2 as totally separate/as if they didn't happen. The bloodstones never even matter because all that's needed is the object from A2 for purposes of this ritual.

It doesn't seem like this was designed with the idea of the party being as high level as they are. It starts out with a meeting about undead activity and undead lt's/seldegs forces and your just expected to go on very little detail after it mentions multiple locations and your put on-to figuring out two days of travel to Corlach Keep. The writers anticipate your party to have Teleport and have a block about that being viable, but they didn't anticipate the level 18 party to have Flying and they toss two entirely skippable encounters at you and they put this keep on an island and the worlds most obviously dangerous bridge that have no answers to it after tossing a death and a wyrm at you in a otherwise skippable piece of content. Oh it exists because the death is protecting the wyrm bones... And how is that relevant? Where's the support for that? Where's the depth? Supporting ques?

We're going to go from A1, A2 where there's not really a need or opportunity for items/buying/selling and we're going to jump a group into level 18 wealth in one of the biggest level jumps with multiple opportunities to spend more gold than usual for instance?

One of the hyped-up points of this and why I bought this to play it was meeting Arazni and maybe seeing some of the inter-conflict between the Shining Sentinels and the Crimson Reclaimers. But Arazni just sort of is summoned which you find out they can just do at any time in a ridiculously badly written moment where we're brought to what's supposed to be a secret place, inquiring comedically "you don't want us to discuss Arazni and all these secrets in the hallway now do you?!" There is no inter-faction drama just like there's no interparty drama written in A1. Disappointing.

They make up as if Arazni's own choice now is somehow equal to what the shining crusade did to her. The adventure doesn't explain Beirivelle Starshine's position and relation to Aylunna in the high-command of the knights and sort of just expects you to read the lost omens books and be able to navigate all of that. The pages where you talk to Arazni, this big moment, is very bare. At many times throughout claws it feels like whereas in other adventures they'd elaborate or even write some extra blocks of "what ifs" to support or induldge the "why" they've tried to cram this anthology together and cut corners. Corlach Keep's premise at the end of it is also a cool idea. But without any setup to who the researcher is that's down there or their relevance and etc. To have a good sense motive situation, you need to have the information/context and it needs to hit.

You can't just have a block of text explaining seldeg has captured a researcher and hope on a fairy fart that the GM is doing flashback style cutscenes without directing them or supporting them. A constant thing I felt while running this was feeling the need to have out of character movie-style scenes to fill in "what the heck" was happening and that's just not a good sign.

That's how I felt by A3 was that this comprised of ideas that don't have a page count to support them and an over dependence on exterior material to overcome the cramming of this.

It's like a museum that has no information plaques and your left a little confused what some of the exhibits were trying to convey on the fieldtrip. I get that some people enjoy some openness and doing their own thing, but I do also enjoy some sense and direction with an adventure.

My best stab at this is to reference the Starfinder society scenarios where there has been a change in the future where Arazni/Iomedae is switched around and to pull a groundhog day and say all of this is different snippets of broken time because seldegs ritual is changing everything. (When something doesn't make sense, it's time or something, duh! Multiverse theory, etc etc. But it's not even in a fun Starfinder way.)

There's some interesting questions that come up with no answers which is a real shame. Why did Seldeg abandon Geb and join TB? Where and how did Seldeg gain this Flayed Files thing beyond it just being a cool idea? Oh, Fort Ozem is iomedae's home pre-ascension? Cool idea! Oh, Nirmrathas' tomb? Lore of the day of vellumis getting blasted? NEAT! And then you get there and you realize it's only as interesting as the taglines. "Meet arazni!" "Destroy a fort!" "Survive the undead!" So many possible details and so many things could of been done to make this feel and flow better rather than hinging it so much on how the GM executes these things. It felt a bit railroady but without interesting set pieces. A story of really cool taglines that feel like they were given off to other junior writers as an assignment.

It's a ritual that doesn't need the stones (a hole to allow any result of A1, A2, A3 that also just invalidates their story involvement.) It's a sort of sandbox when you get back to vellumis with sort of a gadgetzeer, it's sort of a anthology but isn't. You should play A1, A2 but you can also skip A1, A2...

You can't have your cake and eat it too like that. You don't just setup a influence to then later never reference it. You don't just skip writing a middle and an ending and you don't have a story without reasons. It's cosmopolitan ice cream that tries to be everything and ends up not really doing anything well. Arazni was pretty underwhelming and Seldeg as a villain is hilariously incompetent and his concept of redemption is sort of weak and it comes out of left field for me, but maybe I just don't get it.

You can have a lot of fun with this as a base for homebrew. As a standalone product to be run as-is it's just not what I expect or want out of adventure products. And I really wanted to enjoy the pulp-fiction like aspect but that was pretty loose I found. Playing with a second group after a first helped me to fix some of these shortcomings but still I found chalking most of it up to groundhog day was the best thing to do with how hole-y some of it is and I didn't find that very satisfying. I've played most of the adventure products and most of them usually come-through on the premise/theme, this one sold me on a really impressive idea but it did not hit, fam.

Chapter 1 has so many problematic areas and don't really want to get into them. I really enjoyed chapters 2 and 3....

However with Chapter 2 I made a lot of changes and ran it as a 4-5 hour one shot twice. Both times I had a lot of positive feedback; however, even though I had to make several changes it was mostly to speed up play for a one shot. Like a previous reviewer put this scenario was built like an infiltration, but is designed as a dungeon crawl. It would be good to include a lot of tips and tricks on how to make it a better infiltration mission. Even my players were confused at some parts because I described it as a heist. I essentially added a lot of skill checks where there would be forced combat so that it could be more heist / infiltration like. Which meant abstracting some of the components. Overall enjoyed the contents of the book even though there were many problematic parts in the specifics.

A lot of the NPCs had backstories that weren't relevant to the plot. Paizo needs to do a better job of not forcing backstory that has no relevancy to the plot, OR will come out during play. It feels forced and ungenuine taking up word count that could be used to better facilitate things like: "How to run this like a heist".

Upon initial reading and planning for play, I quite liked the first and third parts, and they seemed well-designed, with a clear understanding of the rules.
I'm sorry to say that the second part isn't the same. He proposes an infiltration that isn't really an infiltration, because he wants a dungeon crawler. He then presents the beginning as if it were a game of society, and adding drained players before beginning the exploration seems unnecessary. Given what that person created previously, I hope they don't let him write any more, because it's the least integrated and most poorly designed part of all.

I feel like they seem to have to add subsystems just to do it even though they don't understand them.

Both I and my players are HUGE fans of this book. We love the fact that we get to see the same story play out from three different perspectives. Especially the first adventure had us gripped, I recommend running the first one in a bit of a gritty way. Especially be more stingy with Hero Points as it makes the situation feel way more dire when the heroes of the story will have to just accept certain outcomes that might lead them to their demise. The storytelling is immaculate and I want to see more books like this be released.