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Just hitting the third book now (got it read, and books 4, 5 and 6 skimmed) after being the GM, I feel I might start with my conclusion and work back.
So, I enjoy Extinction Curse a good deal.
Beyond this point, going to be digging into light spoilers but trying to keep it vague.
It has a mechanical gimmick that breaks away from the age-old tradition of "adventurers adventure to save world" which I kind of find generally shallow (even if immensely traditional). The mechanic in nature, the circus performances, does suffer the same fate a lot of the plot suffers: Juggling two ideas (i.e. being a roaming circus & adventuring against the xulgaths) and occasionally dropping the former with the rare fumble of the latter. It entails picking acts, building anticipation then meeting or exceeding anticipation. A situation that can end up taking a good hour to run through, and while I do dress it up as much as I can I'm at a point only one player does it out of a sense of obligation and potential later campaign pay-off (a pay-off I haven't found, but there's a decent chance I'm overlooking) and the others just check their phones. That said, while the moment lasted, it was wonderfully flavourful and simple enough to allow DMs like be to tweak things to make it more enjoyable (a task I managed with limited success). I suspect a large part of the problem is it's too easy to outstrip the anticipation level by a wide margin (last performance did so by 50 points) with no pay off besides the rare crit increasing anticipation and therefore money. That said, with all my moaning and groaning, I have to emphasis it is delightfully flavourful and definitely has led to my PCs recruiting wild and colourful characters including a boss at the end of Book 1. It really stuck with me more as an AP gimmick than others like Kingmaker's kingdom builder, and I think the campaign with be significantly less without it.
The rest of the AP so far has been generally positive.
On the ups, the NPCs remain just wonderfully colourful. The recruitable nature has really allowed NPCs to stay with the party, to grow with them and develop with them rather than being left in the dust. I also find when the game opens up, it really blossoms into something wonderful. Reading Book 3 left me chuckling at the weird and random adventures ahead. While perhaps early to say since I haven't read the rest and yet to run it, Book 3 is a strong component for my favourite book. In addition, while I may have found them simple curiosity reads normally, my party recruiting the boss at the end of book 1 led to the Xulgath chapters in books 2 and 3 just delightful and vital resources (especially the Book 2 chapter Among the Xulgaths). It really enabled said character to be a source of lore, well-meaning frustration and character-driven oddness that feels grounded than gimmicky. I've also found things in the adventure progress logically and with rhyme & reason, which seems minor to applaud but it's unusual to find an AP/one-shot that is tight enough to make logical sense but loose enough to give players wiggle room to do weird things (e.g. recruiting people, like a certain imp-like being in Book 2 and feeding it sausage rolls to keep it sated). Finally, the Adventurer's Toolbox has just a cornucopia of added content, 95% of which either I'd eagerly see in future games or could see the use with the right placement, either way offering both mechanical and lore boons to the game. There is a dud here and there, but the batting average is excellent.
The downsides, well, some aren't really Paizo's fault. Having NPCs introduced into the circus but not offering a paragraph-or-two bio means unprepared GMs could start off the AP and fall at the first hurdle as they don't know anyone from the Feather Fall Five's name. I also grumbled before about the lack of legacy backgrounds. Both are actually forgivable, as I notice the page numbers regularly max out in the late 90s, offering little to no room. Some are minor petty gripes like the Aroden lore, based on a few other posts, being intended as grey-scale morality history but instead coming off as "...Are we the baddies?". Maybe more time spent showing not all Xulgaths are demon-worshippers being manipulated into killing people could have eased it, but it was definitely more of a "...Huh" moment than a glaring issue.
Honestly, my biggest gripe is how the Celestial Menagerie was handled. Book 1 builds them up as this malicious antagonist you'll need to show down, does it very well actually. Then Book 2 hits, and half of it is plundering a xulgath dungeon. The rest could have been an intense circling around, taunting, manipulating, but instead Chapter 4 is a straight-forward raid and Chapter 1 builds her up as less an actual threat and more just a catty thug with a top-hat. It just feels anticlimatic after Book 1 built up the animosity. That's putting aside I had to do the boss battle in a separate session because one player was close to losing their patience via the brutal debuffs (a melee/spell-casting bard gaining Stupified 4, which was just a shutdown), only to then have a boss battle boil down to chasing a cat around the room who couldn't do enough DPS to really hurt anyone but also threw debuffs like tic-tacs so couldn't be hurt back reliably. I feel like I ran the circus courtyard right, but at least one player being vaguely annoyed and a second feeling like divine casters got the short end of the stick was just a bummer. Maybe such a boss fight could have gone down sweeter if it felt like a climatic cinematic showdown against an antagonist (maybe as she's enacting a dastardly plan), but instead it was like a raid on someone's house. A bad person's house with all the right reasons (i.e. working with xulgaths, sacrificing people and the sort), but just a raid.
That said, overall, I'm definitely enjoying it and Book 3 just has so many notes that have left me excited to run it. Book 5 also looks incredibly atmospheric in a wonderful way, so I'm sure that'll be a good time too. If we're playing with numbers, I'd give a neat 7.5/10. Most of my personal adjustments were in the form of adding more flavour and lore to the circus performers, with the rare tweak here and there of other parts.
Just let me know if I'm being a bit of a moaner, and I'll trim it to the cliff notes. I don't really mean to be too critical.
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I just finished my initial read-through of the entire adventure and am reading part 1 again in prep for starting a couple groups and I really really like books 2-4, have found book 1 to be kinda bleh and 5 has exciting roleplay opportunities.
I like the circus aspect as a way to give players who love roleplaying a lot more to do but I also like that I could just put it to the side and have no one worry about it if we wanted to. Overall I like the atmosphere and enjoy the Xulgaths as rivals throughout but Im not a huge fan of the fact that Sarvel is basically missing except in book six so I might take some time to make him more present in order to give the pcs a closer tie to him and motivation for killing him.
I do like that NPC Kirosthek a lot and her motivation of just stealing the orbs to rebuild the Xulgath empire as "We're trying to reclaim our stolen empire" is a more interesting motivation than "Beeg Leezard said sink Islands."
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Hey you are saying that Gaston isn't level 14 character? ;D
But yeah, I think the ap has bit of issue with being too meek with circus stuff. Like its pretty clear writers wanted it to be as easy as possible to remove if gm or players decided to ignore it.
I don't think there is really much of "Are we the bad guys?" thing going on because its pretty clear humanity isn't to blame for what Aroden did and that xulgaths didn't HAVE to decide to destroy the orbs to wipe out island, like there are some more reasonable xulgaths in final book too.
Like I think it actually creates pretty good gray morality thing where orbs belong to vask/orv, but if they were now brought back there it would ruin orv's current ecology and isle of kortos' as well.
I can kinda understand the logic of your circus still being small player by book 6: Because let's face it, you have been running circus for few months in small towns, it wouldn't have had fame in metropolises yet due to you running shows in backwater towns.
But yeah, this is definitely ap with pretty weak main antagonist, the urdefhan warlord in book 5 was much more charismatic and interesting in comparison to Apocalypse Prophet's "I want to destroy things" motivation
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I read multiple parts of this, and my player did as well; in the end we weren't willing to run it.
We've done "PCs as circus troupe" twice before, so the idea wasn't novel; but it's a good, flavorful idea. However, we felt that the AP sets it up and then mostly abandons it after episode 3. It's hard to avoid this in a 1-20 advancement scenario, but I felt that the AP would run a big risk of the player going "I know I have to deal with the xulgath plot but I don't want to; doing so will force me to abandon the circus plot which I'm more invested in." (Like the problem many people had with Second Darkness: running the inn is more fun than going on with the main plot.)
So, I just want to update that very much as soon as we hit Book 3 we started to just skip things by handwaving "okay, we do the circus". It's very rooted in like I said: Only one person continued to stick with it and even then there wasn't ever any stakes once you easily beat the Anticipation. People are still invested in collecting the acts, but when everyone gets back to camp they're more invested in two characters I invented (one being the head clown Pagliacci and the other a cleric called Bex who was just there because the party wanted a NPC healer) and Cavnakash from book 1. That said, my group has shown a general aversion to RPing, so results may vary?
The quality that a previous poster described as "Are we the baddies?" really bugged both of us. Just at the moment, we are not up for "These folks are irredeemable, never mind what horrors our kind have committed, you shouldn't feel the least bit bad about wiping them out." It left a bad taste in my mouth. This was made worse, I think, by the very strong Aztec flavor of the pyramid in #5. If you want to be saying "These people are much more vile than humans" you probably should not model so closely on real-life humans.
So, there's a detail in Book 5 that I picked up on when my physical copy finally arrived that just absolutely kills me. So they have a list of cults native to the area, and one is run by a xulgath ghoul who is LG. This cult, from what I can tell, doesn't turn up in the adventure proper. You have this chance to illustrate "not all xulgaths are evil", and even the book features such information (and it's great information too, well done for that whoever wrote it!), but then it doesn't put said cult into the adventure for a sorely needed illustration there are good xulgaths. Generally, I'd recommend putting it in to any GMs, not only as it does fix the awkward feeling of "...Are we the bad guys?" but it also sets up an interesting fake-out that punishes players who attack all xulgaths indiscriminately and rewards those who pick-up there's something unusual about a group of xulgaths clad in robes with bird feathers and claws on them, maybe a high religion check notices references to an Empyreal Lord. With a really determined GM, you could happily derail the campaign for a few months as you work with them to help their plans come to fruition (which in turn would lead to a surface-place where good-aligned xulgaths may live, even if it is a desert hellscape).
This isn't really a knock against book 5, as I suspect the Cults part was written by someone different to the main adventure and I haven't read the proper adventure part, but it's definitely a detail that leaped out at me.
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The quality that a previous poster described as "Are we the baddies?" really bugged both of us. Just at the moment, we are not up for "These folks are irredeemable, never mind what horrors our kind have committed, you shouldn't feel the least bit bad about wiping them out." It left a bad taste in my mouth. This was made worse, I think, by the very strong Aztec flavor of the pyramid in #5. If you want to be saying "These people are much more vile than humans" you probably should not model so closely on real-life humans.
For me, personally (I wrote book #5), the step-pyramid in the Cradle of Worms is a metaphor of ancient xulgath society. At the top there are the witch-priests. Although small in number, they held pretty much all the power in the xulgath empire. Yes, they (and their elite enforcers) were unequivocally evil; not because they were xulgaths but because their deity would not have allowed a non-evil xulgath to join his clergy. Even so, the text on page 31 suggests that the witch-priests performed sacrifices largely because they feared the world would end if they didn't. If the heroes succeed at the Religion check, they'll also learn the the sacrifices weren't made just "for the evulz".
The servants and other people who were depicted on the walls of the lower levels, though? Or the majority of xulgaths who never even got to see the pyramid from the inside? I refuse to believe they were all evil, or even that most of them were evil. I tried to describe them as an enlightened people, who -- despite the evil ways of their leadership -- just wanted to live and learn more about their new home in Vask, exploring the alluring jungle, taming dinosaurs, growing crops, making wine, trading, and building great monuments.
I see where you're coming from, though. I'm bummed I didn't do a better job at describing them as complex creatures rather than just evil.
Overall, I saw book #5 as an amazing opportunity to explore not one or two but three cultures that are evil (or at least seen as such by most): urdefhans, ancient xulgaths, and the drow of Shraen. I wanted to show not only that each of the three peoples had different reasons for doing evil, but also that they also had likable qualities and something to sympathize with rather than being just purest evil.
With urdefhans it was their curiosity and respect toward outsiders who show courage, and their leader's desire to rise above endless warfare. With xulgaths it was their ambition to become more than just a cave lizard people, and their valor and tenacity during the siege at the outpost. With Shraens it was their desire to live.. eh, exist in peace, and some of the more affable individuals who become curious or even supportive of the heroes (even if for selfish reasons). And then there's Qormintur, one of my favorite NPCs I've created for Pathfinder. I just hope some groups will spare her life and convince her to be a better person. I think she has it in her.
On the positive side, I really liked the first part of #5, before the pyramid, for its vivid visuals and weird situations. I liked the fact that the xulgath army in #4 had stuff going on inside it, factions and plots,...
Very glad to hear you liked that part!
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We've done "PCs as circus troupe" twice before, so the idea wasn't novel; but it's a good, flavorful idea. However, we felt that the AP sets it up and then mostly abandons it after episode 3. It's hard to avoid this in a 1-20 advancement scenario, but I felt that the AP would run a big risk of the player going "I know I have to deal with the xulgath plot but I don't want to; doing so will force me to abandon the circus plot which I'm more invested in." (Like the problem many people had with Second Darkness: running the inn is more fun than going on with the main plot.)
Like you, I saw Second Darkness written all over this. What you describe is the AP's central structural weakness.
In AP 1, the line editor says they want to have two strands running in parallel so that groups could focus on either circus or xulgaths and have a good time either way. Then they write the entire second half of the AP in a way that writes the circus so much out of the equation that you're not only strapped to the xulgath strand, but have zero incentive to concomitantly follow the circus strand.
Not only was this perfectly foreseeable, it's also easy to mitigate. Just intertwine the incentives for the two strands such that achievements the PCs unlock in one strand unlock achievement caps in the other--and vice versa.
That's what I tried with the hedonism/theoria write-up (see GM thread for #5). As written, however, the AP seems to fall apart for groups who're not hell bent on the xulgath track.
While I appreciate the effort to make this the "circus performer" AP, all my favorite parts of this AP were kind of circus agnostic. If I were to run this I would find a way to drop the running the circus aspect after book 2 (but probably still find a way to make the performer recruitment work). Books 3 and 4 are some of my favorite adventures I've read from Paizo, with the sandbox nature of exploring the swardlands in 3 and the somewhat open ended mission of defending the town and harrying the xulgaths in 4 what I would look forward to the most.
Even the more circus oriented parts of the first 2 volumes I found enjoyable to read and envision playing, though that probably is affected by how your players approach it. Mistress Dusklight, if acted right, could make for a great recurring villain. Evil Bards are fun for me.
Speaking frankly, I get 0 "are we the baddies" vibes from this, seeing how by the time you run into xulgaths they are teaming up with murderous demons, and the second time you find them they have murdered multiple provided kidnap victims. Like whatever xulgaths you're dealing with they are clearly evil, and the fact that there are good aligned xulgaths that exist somewhere maybe doesn't make these guys not evil.
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My weekly home group just completed EC tonight!
We all enjoyed the story lines and the xulgaths as the protagonist were great.
Thank you for a fun and interesting AP!