Tarondor’s Guide to Pathfinder Adventure Paths

Version 1.0

December, 2021

(PLEASE RELOAD OR REFRESH IF YOU’RE RETURNING)

The comment forum for this guide can be found HERE.

The Poll

I asked people on the Paizo boards and on Reddit which adventure path they would most recommend to others. As of the time I wrote this, 142 GM’s and players responded. This is the poll I reference below.

Let’s Get Right to the Ratings

But It’s Not All Pathfinder!

You got me. The first seven adventure paths were not written for Pathfinder, but for Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition. I still like my title, so I’m keeping it.

No Beating Around the Bush Rankings

Tarondor’s Ratings

33 - Shackled City

32 - Second Darkness

31 - Serpent’s Skull

30 - Council of Thieves

29 - Jade Regent

28 - Hell’s Vengeance

27 - Giantslayer

26 - Ruins of Azlant

25 - Age of Worms

24 - Savage Tide

23 - Mummy’s Mask

22 - Ironfang Invasion

21 - Extinction Curse

20 - Legacy of Fire

19 - Skull and Shackles

18 - Reign of Winter

17 - Carrion Crown

16 - Agents of Edgewatch

15 - Rise of the Runelords

14 - Shattered Star

13 - Tyrant’s Grasp

12 - Fists of the Ruby Phoenix

11 - Wrath of the Righteous

10 - Return of the Runelords

9 - Strange Aeons

8 - Strength of Thousands

7 - Abomination Vaults

6 - War for the Crown

5 - Iron Gods

4 - Hell’s Rebels

3 - Age of Ashes

2 - Kingmaker

1 - Curse of the Crimson Throne

Poll Ratings (142 surveyed)

33 - Second Darkness

32 - Council of Thieves

31 - Giantslayer

30 - Hell’s Vengeance

29 - Return of the Runelords

28 - Shackled City

27 - Savage Tide

26 - Shattered Star

25 - Ruins of Azlant

24 - Tyrant’s Grasp

23 - Serpent’s Skull

22 - Ironfang Invasion

21 - Legacy of Fire

20 - Jade Regent

19 - Fists of the Ruby Phoenix

18 - Age of Worms

17 - Mummy’s Mask

16 - Wrath of the Righteous

15 - War for the Crown

14 - Carrion Crown

13 - Skull and Shackles

12 - Agents of Edgewatch

11 - Strange Aeons

10 - Iron Gods

9 - Extinction Curse

8 - Reign of Winter

7 - Strength of Thousands

6 - Hell’s Rebels

5 - Kingmaker

4 - Age of Ashes

3 - Curse of the Crimson Throne

2 - Abomination Vaults

1 - Rise of the Runelords

The Eras

The Dungeon Magazine Adventure Paths

A - Shackled City

B - Savage Tide

C - Age of Worms

The Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition Era

1 - Rise of the Runelords

2 - Curse of the Crimson Throne

3 - Second Darkness

4 - Legacy of Fire

The Pathfinder First Edition Era

5 - Council of Thieves

6 - Kingmaker

7 - Serpent’s Skull

8 - Carrion Crown

9 - Jade Regent

10 - Skull and Shackles

11 - Shattered Star

12 - Reign of Winter

13 - Wrath of the Righteous

14 - Mummy’s Mask

15 - Iron Gods

16 - Giantslayer

17 - Hell’s Rebels

18 - Hell’s Vengeance

19 - Strange Aeons

20 - Ironfang Invasion

21 - Ruins of Azlant

22 - War for the Crown

23 - Return of the Runelords

24 - Tyrant’s Grasp

The Pathfinder Second Edition Era (So Far)

25 - Age of Ashes

26 - Extinction Curse

27 - Agents of Edgewatch

28 - Abomination Vaults

29 - Fists of the Ruby Phoenix

30 - Strength of Thousands

Introduction

I made this guide because I was thinking about which Adventure Path I’d like to run next and found so much contradictory information and conflicting ideas that I thought it might be interesting to learn what others thought about ranking the adventure paths. The results were enlightening and often not far different from my own experiences, with a few notable exceptions.

My Methods

My opinions are subjective of course. I’m quite well aware that no matter what I say about any of these adventure paths, many people will disagree, sometimes quite strongly. That’s okay! Diversity of thought is a good thing.

However, I did several things to make my opinions as well-informed as I could. First of all, I read each of these adventure paths in detail when they were first published. Second, I carefully re-read each adventure path when writing this series of reviews. Third, I have personally GMed several adventure paths and played several more. Fourth, I collected the opinions of hundreds of gamers through the use of a poll. Fifth, and most importantly, I scoured the internet for reviews and opinions on half a dozen forums so that I could be as informed as reasonably possible on the views of other gamers.

To Spoil or Not to Spoil

This document contains minimal spoilers, but by its nature does necessarily spoil a few things. I’ve tended to put those spoilers in “Inviso-Text”, meaning I wrote them in white letters on a white background so that you can read them if you highlight them.

The Color Code

There are no “bad” adventure paths. They all contain a lot of great and fun elements.

RED - These are going to require some work to enjoy.

ORANGE - Some solid stuff here, but not my favorites.

GREEN - Fun and rewarding. Do not hesitate to play or GM these AP’s.

BLUE  -  Best of the best. Go out of your way to experience these AP’s.

A Word on the Ratings

The meaning of the color codes is a little different between my ratings and those of the poll. The poll doesn’t give nuance or emotion, only numbers. So after ordering the adventure paths numerically, I looked at the volume or “heat” of the voting. A few adventure paths got nearly all the votes, so I colored those blue. A few got almost no votes, so I colored them red. The rest fell easily into Orange or Green.

The system for coloring my own ratings was a little more complex. I didn’t simply divide by quartiles, so you’ll see that a great many adventure paths rated green, in my opinion. I really believe that every one of these adventure paths would be a lot of fun with some GM work and the right players.

But It’s A Railroad!

Oh, stick a sock in it, already. The “railroad versus sandbox” argument has been done to death. If you don’t like railroad adventures, don’t play published adventures.

By their nature, published adventures will have to make some assumptions about the plot of the story. Some adventure paths will be more sandboxy than others, but all contain the railroad (otherwise known as the plot) at their heart. I tell my players that part of the buy-in with an adventure path is that there is a plot. They’re free to depart the plot at any time and we’ll go off in search of adventure elsewhere. But if they stay on the railroad, I promise the train will pull into Awesometown on a regular basis.

Even in a published adventure there are (or should be, in a good one) plenty of opportunities to do things the player’s way. Which NPCs do they ally with? Which do they love or hate? In which order do they follow the clues? Do they try to redeem the villains? Capture them for trial?  A good adventure path can allow for all that.

Finally, if an adventure path feels like a straitjacket, you’re doing it wrong. Adventure paths, like any other role-playing game, are just ingredients and signposts along the way. GM’s should be deviating from the published modules. Skipping some stuff, inserting other stuff and making the storyline their own.  Believe me, my game of Kingmaker is different from yours. 

Shackled City

Dungeon Magazine (March 2003 – November 2004 )

Authors:         Christopher Perkins, James Jacobs, David Noonan, Tito Leati,

Jesse Decker, Chris Thomasson

Level Range: 1-20

Original System: Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (later, 3.5e)

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 33rd out of 33

Poll Rating: 28th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Dungeon Crawl

Links to Resources: RPG Genius Shackled City Page

This is the ORIGINAL Adventure Path, published when Paizo was just getting started, having previously been the TSR Periodicals Department. The format was new and experimental. The developers were still feeling out how this Adventure Path thing should work and that lack of experience shows. Much longer than the later, more traditional Adventure Paths, Shackled City can sometimes feel bloated and too long.

There is a great deal to love in this campaign for a GM willing to put in the work to convert the system mechanics and cut out the fat. It is a tale of politics and hidden powers meddling in the safety and survival of a city nestled inside a dormant volcano. In fact it was so good that the expanded hardcover edition won three ENnie awards at the 2006 Gen Con game fair, taking home the gold award for "Best Adventure" and "Best Campaign Setting/Supplement", as well as the silver award for "Best Cartography"

The hardcover edition frequently sells on Amazon or Ebay for several hundred dollars, but you can get the PDFs from Paizo HERE.^[1]

THE GOOD: 

• Having the city of Cauldron be the central point of the story means that the player characters get a chance to be invested in the city’s personalities, factions and stories.
• The GM is given so many colorful NPCs that it is easy to bring the city to life and make the players care about the fate of the city.

THE BAD: 

• Google Shackled City and the most common phrase you’ll read is “meat grinder.”  The campaign has a reputation for being a long series of deadly combats. You will lose characters and you will probably have more than one TPK.
• The story is also very long, spanning twelve chapters.
• This campaign also comes from a time when GMs wanted adventures they could slot into their home games, so while the GM gets a lot of background and characters, it’s still going to be work to flesh it out to the point that it's ready to go.
• The campaign begins with a fair amount of role-playing as you navigate the many factions and personalities in the city of Cauldron, but the balance shifts sharply towards combat as the campaign reaches its middle.

  ---

Age of Worms

Dungeon Magazine Issues 124 to 135 (July 2005 - June 2006)

Authors:         Erik Mona, Mike Mearls, Sean K. Reynolds, Jason Buhlman, Tito

                 Leati, Richard Pett, Wolfgang Bauer, Jesse Decker, Nicolas Logue,

                 Greg A. Vaughan, James Jacobs

Level Range: 1-20

Original System: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 25th out of 33

Poll Rating: 18th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Lots of Dungeon Crawls. Save the World!

With Age of Worms, the Dungeon magazine era of Adventure Paths really hit its stride. Age of Worms is still a classic, filled with weird cults, hideous gods and ancient prophecies. What adventurer worth their salt wouldn’t want to tangle with the likes of Vecna and Kyuss? Age of Worms was awarded an Honorable Mention in the "Best Adventure" category of the 2007 ENnie Awards. You can buy the PDFs from Paizo HERE.^[2]

I particularly liked the first installment, Eric Mona’s The Whispering Cairn, which has a lovely balance of combat, puzzles, role-playing and side quests. The Whispering Cairn could easily be run all by itself as a stand-alone adventure.  

Throughout the campaign you will explore deeper levels of an age-old plot to bring on the destructive Age of Worms, which will bring you into conflict with the undead, dragons, undead dragons and evil gods. A truly epic game.

Warning - This is a very undead-heavy campaign.

The Good: 

• Diamond Lake, the home base for the setting, is well fleshed out in accompanying Dungeon magazine articles. It’s an entire mini-campaign area in itself.
• Some of the dungeons in Age of Worms are among the most creative and memorable in any Adventure Paths.
• The ratio of role-playing to combat is very good and remains excellent throughout.

The Bad: 

• The GM must do some work to get this story rolling. For a modern gamer used to having adventures serve up background, context and multiple plot hooks, this Adventure Path, like Shackled City, can feel as though it is missing these things. GMs are expected to provide context and hooks on their own and to flesh out the NPCs in a way that will be interesting to their players.
• As with Shackled City, although each chapter is interesting, the whole is so very long that you and your players risk story fatigue as it often feels as though you’re not getting any closer to the end.
• Age of Worms is deadly. If your players get attached to their characters, this may not be the Adventure Path for them. Some of the fights hit very hard and TPKs are often just waiting to jump out and get your characters.

  ---

Savage Tide

Dungeon Magazine Issues 139 to 150 (October 2006 to December 2007)

Authors:         James Jacobs, Nicolas Logue, Richard Pett, Jason Buhlman,

F. Wesley Schnider, James L. Sutter, Tito Leati, Robert J. Schwalb

Eric L. Boyd, Wolfgang Bauer, Greg A. Vaughan

Level Range: 1-20

Original System: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: Game Master

Tarondor’s Rating: 24th out of 33

Poll Rating: 27th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Water / Wilderness / Planar Travel

Set in the World of Greyhawk, Savage Tide is a water-borne adventure filled with pirates, undead, demons and undead demon pirates will take to locations like a dinosaur-filled wilderness, a city of cutthroat pirates and ultimately to the Abyss itself, where you must negotiate demonic politics, free an imprisoned goddess and face off against a demon lord!  You can find some of the PDFs from Paizo HERE.

Savage Tide can be thought of as comprising three distinct stories  linked together by the eponymous Savage Tide. Low level adventures surround the city of Sasserine. Mid-level adventures occur on the Isle of Dread and Scuttlecove. High-level adventures take you plane-hopping.

Of the three Dungeon magazine adventure paths, Savage Tide is clearly the most polished, in terms of both storyline and editing.  For those of you who weren’t around at the time, I want you to picture that the biggest RPG of them all had two print publications (Dragon and Dungeon) and for over a year both of them were focused on this adventure path. It was the final distillation of the form, likely never to be repeated.  Issue #150 was not only the final episode of Savage Tide, it was the last issue of that great magazine, as the digital age was upon us.

It is also possibly the most gonzo, high-powered, over-the-top adventure out there until you reach the mythic rules. In fact, GMs for Wrath of the Righteous who don’t like the mythic rules might want to take a gander at Savage Tide.

The Good: 

• Savage Tide takes you to some great iconic locations in Greyhawk like the Isle of Dread and Tamoachan.
• The settings are superb and evocative
• The villains are AMAZING. Savage Tide has both a great recurring villain and perhaps the best end boss of any adventure path.
• Highlight inviso-text to read a super-cool, can’t-believe-I’m-not screaming-it-from-the-rooftops spoiler:You lead a coalition of angels and demons  against the Prince of Demons, Demogorgon himself!

The Bad: 

• Like all the Dungeon magazine adventure paths, Savage Tide is just too damn -long-.
• It takes you back to the same or similar locations too often. A careful GM could probably excise a few chapters of this story without losing anything but bloat.
• The starting city of Sasserine is an excellent, interesting location, but you soon leave it and head for the Isle of Dread and never return. Some players report that the switch felt like a jarring letdown in tone.
• Savage Tide is probably the most deadly of all the adventure paths. The odds of your  1st level characters making it to 20th is quite low.

Final Thought: Despite its flaws, I enjoyed GMing Savage Tide. Its flaws are mostly a result of its length and how early this was in the history of adventure paths. But the story, the set-pieces, the characters and the role-playing opportunities are all terrific. For a GM willing to work with it, this can be an adventure path well worth running. Were I to run it again, I would boil the story down a lot and trim the fat, then use the major story beats in a leaner, faster tale. It would still be one of the meatiest adventure paths ever written.

Rise of the Runelords

Date: August 2007-January 2008 (Anniversary Edition: July 2012)

Authors:         James Jacobs, Richard Pett, Nicolas Logue, Wolfgang Bauer,

                 Stephen S. Greer, Greg A. Vaughan

Level Range: 1-18

Original System: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e

(Anniversary Edition: Pathfinder 1e)

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 15th out of 33

Poll Rating: 1st out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Dungeon Crawl / Horror / Wilderness

Links to Resources: Fan-Made Stuff on the Paizo Forum

This is the big one. The most-supported, best-loved adventure path of all time. The poll spoke very clearly - no other adventure path even came close to the love gamers have for Rise of the Runelords.

On a personal note, I’ve never been very fond of this Adventure Path. It was better than what came before it, having condensed the long Dungeon magazine Adventure Paths down into six acts, but it still feels like too much combat and not enough plot or roleplaying for me. The latter half of this adventure is a long slog against ogres and giants. However, I’m clearly in the minority there. I think a lot of the love for Rise of the Runelords stems not from innate greatness but for how ground-breaking it was and how many people have played it. I honestly don’t think it’s held up as well as some other early adventures.

There’s an anniversary edition, audiobooks, pawns, miniatures, plush dolls, maps, card games and a vast array of fan-made support materials. There is even a Deluxe Collector’s Edition covered in faux leather and fancy hardware. Rise of the Runelords is the quintessential adventure path.

Rise of the Runelords was originally written as a stand-alone campaign, but it was eventually perceived as the first part of a trilogy of adventure paths sometimes known as the Varisian Trilogy or the Varisia Arc: Rise of the Runelords, Shattered Star and Return of the Runelords.

When Dungeon Magazine was at an end, Paizo Publishing gave subscribers (like me) a choice: get back a prorated portion of your subscription fees or take a chance on the new Adventure Path publications. Like many others, I took the chance and I’m glad I did. Not only did I get the very good Rise of the Runelords and eventually many other great adventures, it led me a few years later to try out the playtest for a new game: Pathfinder.

I own the original six books (and the Deluxe Collector’s Edition), but I am going to base this review on the collected Anniversary Edition, which is the edition I recommend to anyone looking into Rise of the Runelords. The beautiful art and loving details make it rise above even its well-done original. Also, everything was converted from D&D3.5e to a Pathfinder 1st edition format. You can find it on Amazon or (as a PDF) at the Paizo webstore.

The Good:

• This is, without doubt, the most heavily-supported adventure path of them all.
• Rise of the Runelords contains a detailed home base, Sandpoint, with plenty of excellent NPCs and lore.
• It reintroduces goblins as a more interesting and fire-obsessed species.

The Bad: 

• Some of the horror elements are intense… and gross. Caution is advised, especially if any of the players are children. This is true of Book 2: The Skinsaw Murders and doubly so of Book 3: Hook Mountain Massacre.  This is the reason I’ve never played or GM’ed this adventure.
• The game starts off with plenty of role-playing and exploration, but ends up with little role-playing in the last three volumes.
• Book 4: Fortress of the Stone Giants is often cited as being too repetitive. Too many, y’know, stone giants.
• As seems to be the case for several of the best-loved Paizo adventure paths, the final villain seems to come out of nowhere. The GM knows they’re behind all the badness, but the player characters don’t and it can feel sudden and disconnected to the rest of the plot. GM’s should work to leaven the earlier books in the series with references to the final villain so that it is less of a surprise. Imagine if Frodo and Gandalf had never heard of Sauron before arriving in Mordor…
• SPOILERS! Highlight the inviso-text to read: Xanesha, the monster in Magnimar’s tower is one of the most famously deadly encounters in all of Pathfinder. Consider toning her down. The same can be said for the barghest in Thistletop.

Curse of the Crimson Throne

Date: March 2008-August 2008; Hardcover Edition October 2016

Authors:        Nicolas Logue, F. Wesley Schneider, Richard Pett, Michael Kortes,

Greg A. Vaughan, and Tito Leati

Level Range: 1-16

Original System:         Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e  

(Hardcover Edition: Pathfinder 1st Edition)

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 1st out of 33

Poll Rating: 2nd out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Urban / Wilderness / Dungeon Crawl

Links to Resources: Curse of the Crimson Throne 2e Conversion Guide

In my opinion, despite being one of the oldest adventure paths, this is the best because of its excellent plot and its mix of exciting locations and wonderful villains.  Note, my favorite adventure path is Kingmaker, but I think Curse of the Crimson Throne is the best.

I own the original six books, but I am going to base this review on the hardback edition, which updated everything to pathfinder 1st Edition. The art is new and the layout is gorgeous! You can find it on Amazon or (as a PDF) at the Paizo webstore.

Curse of the Crimson Throne is a masterpiece. The NPCs and the setting are carefully crafted, especially in the first half of the game, which all takes place in the same setting. The second half is also very good, but doesn’t dwell in one place and so the PCs are bound to feel less connected to the people and places. What sets Curse of the Crimson Throne apart from other campaigns and adventure paths that also feature excellent settings is the way the PCs are woven into the life of the city. Your PCs will almost certainly care about the city and its fate, which is critical to making the adventure feel personal.

The first half of Curse of the Crimson Throne takes place in the city of Korvosa, where the new queen has implemented draconian laws that oppress the people and are soon exacerbated by a terrible plague. Books 4 and 5 take you into the wilderness of Varisia and then in Book 6 the adventure returns to where it began, in Korvosa.  This makes Curse of the Crimson Throne an excellent adventure path to try out all those urban options you might otherwise avoid.

The Good:

• Great story
• Good balance of role-playing, exploration and combat.
• Plenty of scope for inserting your own city-based organizations or side quests.
• Plenty of scope for the players to become invested in the city and make it their own.

The Bad:

• Some people have commented that they wish the campaign had not left the city, and regard Books 4 and 5 as extraneous, especially Book 4, A History of Ashes.
• Book 2: Seven Days to the Grave, can be very free-form and requires the GM to juggle the player character’s activities with events in the city to form a coherent narrative. In other words, GM’s can’t expect to stick to a script here.
• Book 5, Skeletons of Scarwall is -slow-. It is large for the sake of being large and has far more encounters in it than the story needs or that players are going to want. For some reason the Anniversary Edition made it even longer.

Second Darkness

Date: August 2008-January 2009

Authors:        Greg A. Vaughan, Mike McArtor, Jason Buhlman, F. Wesley

                 Schneider, JD Wiker, Brian Cortijo

Level Range: 1-16

Original System: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 32nd out of 33

Poll Rating: 33rd out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Urban / Wilderness / Underdark

Widely viewed as the worst of the adventure paths, Second Darkness is rarely given a chance to shine these days, and understandably so. At first glance, this adventure path has everything going for it: ancient secrets the elves are willing to die to protect, a secret war going for thousands of years, infiltrating a noble house in a drow city, a secret drow superweapon that could devastate Golarion. What more could you want from a campaign? Handled more deftly, all the ingredients are there for a classic that would have continued the momentum of Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne. So what went wrong?

WARNING! MILD SPOILERS AHEAD!

The complaints about this adventure path fall into three categories: 1) the first volume strongly encourages player characters to be focused on making money and discourages ethical characters, then much of the rest of the campaign assumes that the player characters will make ethical and selfless choices; 2) that the tonal shift from volumes 1 and 2 to volumes 3 through 6 is so strong as to be difficult to overcome; and 3) that the people you are supposed to help and sacrifice for are just complete jerks from start to finish (“jerks” isn’t the word reviewers actually used most often…)

The Good:

• A cool plot, which with work could be made to really shine.
• A good balance of role-playing and combat. Unfortunately, you’re uniformly role-playing with asshats.
• Ancient secrets and lots of them!
• Hideously powerful drow weapon about to recreate Earthfall!
• Infiltrating a drow noble house.
• Volume 6: Descent into Midnight is a tense and moody foray into the Darklands.

The Bad:

• Poor expectation management. Players are told to make characters interested primarily in making money and surviving the mean streets of Riddleport. They invest in a business and a city and then in volume 2 they leave those behind and never return.
• Wearing drow corpses as disguises. It’s disgusting and really only there for low-brow shock value. Ordinary disguises or illusions would have done just fine.
• The PCs are betrayed by their allies several times. Once is more than enough in a single story and players are going to be really sick of it.
• The drow are portrayed as lethal and terrifying until you meet them, but then they’re mostly lower-level fodder.
• The transition into Volume 3 and later can feel as though you’ve been drafted to fight in someone else’s war, a war which appears to be just blind race hatred.

Suggestions to Improve Second Darkness

• Require all player characters to be elves or half-elves.
• Rewrite many or most NPC elves to be more likable and interesting, so as to give the PCs a reason or desire to help them.
• Rewrite at least the first half of Volume 5: A Memory of Darkness to be less rage-inducing.
• Have the Winter Council at least seem to take the PCs' evidence seriously.

Legacy of Fire

Date: March 2009 to July 2009

Authors:         Eric Mona, Tim Hitchcock, Darrin Drader, Jason Nelson,

Greg A. Vaughan, Rob McCreary

Level Range: 1-15

Original System: Dungeons & Dragons 3.5e

Tarondor’s Involvement: GAME MASTERED

Tarondor’s Rating: 20th out of 33

Poll Rating: 21st out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Wilderness / Plane Hopping / Dungeon Crawling

Links to Resources: The Ruined Undercrypt of Kelmarane

        Jason Nelson’s original notes for Kakishon

This is the first adventure path I ever GMed and I have very fond memories of it. With just a few exceptions, my team had an absolute blast with the whole “Arabian Nights” and “Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad/Jason and the Argonauts” feel of the campaign.

The story is really a trilogy, rising steadily from the dusty and mundane to the highest of fantasy. The first part takes place in and around a small village where the heroes establish themselves as protectors in the best Seven Samurai tradition. From there they go on to face the fearsome Carrion King. In the second part, they deal with Sinbad-like voyages of discovery and in the third, turn their attention to the politics of the inner planes and an unlikely plot to use genie wishes to bring about an apocalypse in the name of love.

Unfortunately, the fun comes to a screeching halt in the third volume: The Jackal’s Price. There, the usual railroading of any adventure path moves from having to follow where the story leads (okay railroading) to having to make the choices the author dictates (very not okay railroading). Knowing my players would not enjoy or stand for being dictated to, I instead threw out this volume and inserted a Sinbad-like tale of shipwrecks and improbably magical islands that my players enjoyed quite a bit and used that as the connective sinew between volumes 2 and 4.

Volume 4: The End of Eternity is sometimes mentioned online as not working well (a few reviewers really hated it), but I have to tell you that it was the single most memorable part of this entire adventure path for my group and still one of the best times I’ve had GMing in more than four decades. The mixture of role-playing and exploration was a lot of fun and my players enjoyed the politics going on between the proteans and the shaitans.  This was helped in no small part by availing myself of Jason Nelson’s extensive notes on the plane of Kakishon (see link above).  There were parts of Kakishon we only touched on that could have been whole mini-campaigns in and of themselves.  Without Jason’s notes I think this volume of the adventure would have been more cut-and-dried and not really memorable at all. If you’re going to play this adventure, get those notes! I also suggest setting up some sort of market visited by the various genies and elementals so that the PCs have some place to buy and sell before heading into volume 5.

In volume 5: The Impossible Eye, you travel to the City of Brass and encounter an enjoyable dungeon crawl (that my players still talk about a decade later). The second part, in the City of Brass, was a bit of a letdown as it wasn’t fleshed out much. This part will shine with some effort on the GM’s part and a willingness to follow the PCs lead. They’ve just spent one and a half volumes unable to buy or sell anything and now they’re in the most famous market in the multiverse! GMs would be well advised to prepare some fabulous objects for sale and even some short side quests in the city to make it feel grander.

Volume 6: The Final Wish suffers from the same problem that plagues so many adventure paths - the final villain seems to come out of nowhere from the player’s perspective. The GM knows he’s behind all the stuff going on in the adventure and that Legacy of Fire is at its heart a tale of hopeless love, but the PCs only learn this at the end, and that’s a shame. If I ran it again, I’d be sure to foreshadow the final villain and his quest for love from the start. I might even use a framing device like Scheherazade’s tale in Arabian Nights.

The Good:

• Perfectly captures the feel of The Arabian Nights and old Ray Harryhausen films like “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad” and “Jason and the Argonauts.”
• Defending a village as in The Seven Samurai or The Magnificent Seven.
• Gnolls. Lots of gnolls.
• The City of Brass, baby!
• The demiplane of Kakishon and the rivalry between creation and destruction are great fun and good role-playing fodder.
• A great mix of combat and exploration.

The Bad:

• The third volume utterly removes player agency in an important decision.
• With a few exceptions, there is much less diplomacy, role-playing and negotiation in this adventure path than in others. This is much more of a “kick in the door” type of story. Characters hoping for lots of intrigue and diplomacy might feel disappointed.
• The story is less polished than Rise of the Runelords or Curse of the Crimson Throne. Several commenters noted that it feels “rushed.”
• The driving forces behind the scenes are mostly unknown to the PCs for the first 85% of the story.
• The PCs spend all of volume 4 and most of volume 5 without any way to purchase or sell gear.
• The overwhelming number of fire creatures can get monotonous. It wasn't for my group because we bought into the title from the beginning, but it might wear on some groups.

Note: In this reviewer’s opinion, Legacy of Fire isn’t in the top tier of adventure paths because it needs some work to breathe life into it. However, it requires a lot less work than some others and the result is a lot of fun. This one really is a diamond in the rough.

Council of Thieves

Date: August 2009 - February 2010

Authors:         Sean K. Reynolds, Richard Pett, Michael Kortes, Clinton Boomer,

         James Jacobs, Greg A. Vaughan, Brian Cortijo

Level Range: 1-13

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 30th out of 33

Poll Rating: 32nd out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Urban adventure

This was the first adventure path ever written specifically for the then-new Pathfinder role-playing game (what we now call First Edition). Sadly, that is one of its few claims to greatness.  Council of Thieves is the role-playing equivalent of dropping your ice cream cone on your shoes - it’s not a disaster, but it’s not so much fun, either. I think it vies with Serpent’s Skull as the most forgettable adventure path

Council of Thieves shares its worst sin with Second Darkness: poor expectation management. The campaign is billed as being “revolution in Cheliax”, where you get to play freedom fighters against an oppressive regime, an epic tale of guerilla warfare. Instead, you fight hordes of devils, are almost never involved in any sort of freedom fighting and basically wind up in a squabble between spoiled tiefling kids. It’s a hard let-down. Note: If you’re looking for “revolution in Cheliax”, get a copy of Hell’s Rebels.

Volume 2: The Sixfold Trial seems to have a polarizing effect on players. They either hate it or love it. It involves reading lines from an actual scripted play and getting your thespian on.

The Good:

• Some people really love volume 2: The Sixfold Trial quite a bit. Y’know, not me, but some people. :-)
• There is quite a lot of role-playing in this adventure.

The Bad:

• You’re not the revolutionaries you were told you would be
• The whole adventure path is just bland.
• The pacing is slow
• The final villains are a pair of whiny kids.

Kingmaker

Date: March 2010 - July 2010

Authors:         Tim Hitchcock, Rob McCreary, Greg A. Vaughan, Neil Spicer,

                 Jason Nelson, Richard Pett.

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: GAME MASTERED

Tarondor’s Rating: 2nd of 33

Poll Rating: 5th of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Wilderness / Kingdom-building

Links to Resources:         Dudemeister’s Kingmaker ideas

                                Nevarre’s Kingmaker ideas

                                Legendary Games’s “Ultimate Rulership”

Kingmaker is a different sort of campaign. It is by far the most sandboxy of the adventure paths and this provides both its best and worst features, depending on your point of view. It has some of the best writing and story of an adventure path and should be on nearly every gamer’s “must play” list.

Kingmaker itself is six adventure path booklets published in 2010, but is made much better by the inclusion of systems from Ultimate Campaign. It was made into the Pathfinder:Kingmaker computer game by Owlcat games in 2018 and many players (like me) are impatiently awaiting the arrival of the crowdfunded Kingmaker Adventure Path hardcover which expands the story with new material from the computer game and also updates the whole to Pathfinder 2nd Edition. This was supposed to be released in April of 2022, though it has suffered many schedule setbacks so far.

In Kingmaker, you get to clear a wilderness of dangers, establish your own kingdom and decide your own relationships with the wilderness, civilization, barbarian neighbors, indigenous fey and neighboring realms. Decisions you make early on can send the story in many different directions if you have a skilful GM willing to regard the adventure path as a framework instead of a straitjacket.  Exploration is important early on, while war, treachery, diplomacy, knightly tournaments all abound.

More than any other adventure path, this one is driven largely by the choices the PCs make. It has a leisurely pace if they want it to, with months or years passing between volumes of the adventure path. Perfect for players who want to build that wizard’s tower and get to work crafting wands or whatnot.

Then too, there is a lot of space between adventures to bring in other side quests and stories. A common choice is to insert Neil Spicer’s Realm of the Fellnight Queen. Others will include fey-related adventures such as Conquest of the Bloodsworn Vale, The Harrowing or Carnival of Tears.

This very flexibility can also work against the adventure path, however, if the GM doesn’t get the players to buy into some firm background rules about runaway economies and too many magical items.  The Kingdom-building rules found in Volume 2: Rivers Run Red are very clunky and easily broken if you look at them as a game to be won rather than a set of guidelines for fun. The revised kingdom-building rules in Ultimate Campaign are better but still easy to abuse if that’s what you’re going for. I made my PCs agree not to use the kingdom’s treasure for their own and we generally ignored the magic item production rules and found the whole thing worked very well from there on.

It’s often said that Kingmaker requires a great deal of bookkeeping. This is only true if you’re interested in building a custom kingdom, which I strongly recommend. If you want to, you can use the “Kingdom in the Background” option and simply play the adventure path without focusing on the details of the kingdom’s growth.  Most Kingmaker campaigns pursue hexploration and kingdom-building for the first half of the adventure path or so, then choose the Kingdom in the Background option and concentrate on warfare and the building story after that.

One complaint some reviewers have is “there’s no roleplaying in Kingmaker!”. This is just plain untrue. Because this is a sandbox, there is no expectation that most encounters will end in a fight (many will anyway, of course). Many or most encounters can and should begin and maybe end in roleplaying. A foe or faction one group fights could become another group’s loyal allies. Or fractious troublemakers, or whatever the GM decides.

Finally, let’s talk about the final villain. Many final villains in Paizo adventure paths seem to come out of the blue, but none is more surprising and apparently unrelated to the events of the first five books than the villain of Kingmaker. So GMs are well advised to make sure the PCs have heard of this villain (even if they don’t know what she wants or why) much earlier. See Nevarre’s Kingmaker Ideas for ways this can be done.

The Good:

• Easily the most sandboxy and least railroading of any adventure path.
• One of the most interesting stories of any adventure path.
• The player characters aren’t always reacting to the story. Usually it's the story reacting to the player characters.
• The level of role-playing is entirely up to the players and GM. It could be nothing but a series of kick-in-the-door fights or you could go several sessions without swinging a sword if you decide that diplomacy and nation-building are the way you want to go.
• The huge amount of territory permits the GM to insert terrain, towns, even cities as they please.

The Bad:

• There is little overarching story until the final chapter. Before that, there are merely a series of events (very fun and interesting events) that don’t appear to be connected.
• The success of the kingdom depends on the character types, so players must be careful to create characters with this in mind.
• Because combat encounters rarely occur more than once per day, combat is sometimes trivial (honestly, I don’t see this as a problem, but some commenters do).
• As with several other adventure paths, the final villain can feel like a total surprise, disconnected from any other part of the story.
• This is not an adventure path for a beginner GM. Because the characters can make their own choices about direction and priorities, a GM can’t simply prepare the next scene and must be experienced enough to pivot when the PCs want to do something unexpected.

Serpent’s Skull

Date: August 2010 - February 2011

Authors:        James Jacobs, Tim Hitchcock, Kevin Kulp, Greg Vaughan,

                 Graeme Davis, Neil Spicer

Level Range: 1-16

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 31st out of 34

Poll Rating: 23rd out of 34

Primary Type of Adventure: Wilderness / Dungeon Crawl

The usual line about Serpent’s Skull is that it is an amazing first book followed by five forgettable books. In part, that’s true. Volume I: Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv is a textbook example of how to run a survival game in Pathfinder. The PCs are castaways who must survive the dangerous environs of a jungle island and escape. As a stand-alone adventure, I can’t recommend Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv highly enough.   But the rest of the idea, that the other five volumes are terrible, isn’t accurate. There is so much potential here for a GM ready and willing to make some changes. More about that later. Mostly, the story of Serpent’s Skull is a story of wasted potential.

Serpent’s Skull is very much a pulp setting in the vein of Indiana Jones, Doc Savage and Alan Quatermain. Exploring a lost city in the jungle, dealing with villainous foes and allies of questionable loyalty, uncovering secrets from before the dawn of man. This is good stuff! But the story simply lacks some of the connective tissue to drive this story.

One of the most common complaints is that for much of the story, the player characters lack motivation to be doing the things they’ve been requested to do by the Pathfinder Society and meanwhile more capable Pathfinders abound who sit around and don’t do these things themselves. Also, the final volume is more or less a series of battles with very little role playing or story.

Another element Pathfinder players may want to consider is the  potential for hard feelings about the postcolonial nature of outsiders fighting monkey-like natives for control of a jungle city. For those concerned about racist overtones, I think this could be deftly handled by introducing material from the recent Mwangi Expanse and making the power groups involved be Mwangi natives rather than outsiders from Avistan.

The Good: 

• Volume I: Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv is a ton of fun, even if it feels like it doesn’t belong in this story. So what? Fun rules.
• You can’t play this without hearing the Indiana Jones soundtrack in your head.
• Great idea for an adventure path: Mwangi expanse, lost Azlanti City, Serpentfolk cults!

The Bad:

• The PCs aren’t given a reason to drive the story forward other than because someone else wants them to.
• Most of Volumes 2-5 share a dreadful sameness (wade through mooks, kill bosses, “conquer” territory).
• Fewer chances for role playing than most adventure paths.
• Yet another AP where the final villains seem to come out of nowhere.

How I would rescue Serpent’s Skull

The ideas of Serpent’s Skull deserve to be played out. If I were to GM this, I’d re-write the whole thing by using the ideas and story beats and NPCs but recasting them in a more concise form with more motivation.

First and foremost, I’d make it much, much shorter. This should have been a 3-volume story, and I believe that were it made today, that’s how Paizo would address it. The success of 3-volume arcs like Fists of the Ruby Phoenix and Abomination Vaults shows that the 3-act structure still has tremendous narrative power. I’d map out the major story beats, set them to 3 acts: 1) Jungle; 2) Saventh-Yhi; 3) Ilmurea.

Second, I’d let the explorers and interested parties be from (or mostly from) Garund. I can see factions from Mzali or Magaambya or even Katapesh and Osirion taking an interest.

Third, give the PCs strong and personal motives to explore Saventh-Yhi. If they’re Pathfinders, they have a chance to make history, to become Venture Captains. If they’re from the Magaambyan Academy, they could be searching for secrets lost since the time of Old Mage Jatembe. Whatever. Let the players pick the faction, then give them a reason to want to explore.

Fourth, drop the whole “conquer parts of the city” idea and instead interact with the various factions and neighborhoods through quests, diplomacy and yes, sometimes combat. Let them choose their own path like a more contained version of Kingmaker’s sandbox.

Fifth, I’d make sure that the serpentfolk were heavily foreshadowed. The PCs could run across teams of serpentfolk in and around the city and wonder why they’re there. They could learn about Ydersius and his cult much earlier.

Carrion Crown

Date: March 2011 - July 2011

Authors:         Michael Kortes, Richard Pett, Tim Hitchcock, Greg A. Vaughan,

                Neil Spicer, Brandon Hodge

Level Range: 1-15

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 17th out of 33

Poll Rating: 14th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Urban / Wilderness

Carrion Crown revisits the themes of all the great old horror movies of the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s. This is Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, The Mummy and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Done right, it’s a glorious mixture. And for the most part, it really is done right here. For old Ravenloft players like myself, this was a stroll down memory lane. Another apt comparison might be “Tales from the Crypt.”

Carrion Crown is surprisingly strong on role-playing, with plenty of chances for social characters to shine. In fact, I’d say that at least one social character is required for survival and you may want to give kick-in-the-doors characters a strong talking-to. They're going to get you killed. Also, trapfinding. Make sure you have someone who’s good with traps. Just sayin’.

The Good:

• A really good amount of role playing.
• A fun variety of classic B-movie monster foes.
• A well-written adventure.

The Bad:

• A fairly simple (and therefore linear) plot.
• The Trust Point system is unpopular.
• Many foes have mental resistances or immunities, so players should avoid classes/builds that rely too much on mind-affecting spells and abilities. A common comment is that Witch PCs will be unhappy.
• Once again, the final villain practically comes out of nowhere. GM’s need to start referencing him much earlier to avoid dissonance and dissatisfaction.
• The final villain, as written, is going to get steamrolled by a team of competent adventurers. He NEEDS to be beefed up or given a stronger team around him.

Jade Regent

Date: August 2011 - February 2012

Authors:         James Jacobs, Greg A. Vaughan, Jason Nelson, Richard Pett,

                Tito Leati, Neil Spicer

Level Range: 1-15

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 29th out of 33

Poll Rating: 20th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Wilderness

What was marketed as the Asian-themed adventure path really wasn’t. It was more like Marco Polo’s journey, including a goblin story, a viking story and a polar journey, only arriving in Tian Xia halfway through the campaign.

You’ll have to wait another ten years for Fists of the Ruby Phoenix to really get your samurai on. Even then, Tien culture isn’t the focus. I’m still waiting for a samurai-and-daimyo, 47 Ronin style adventure!

I had to force myself to read Jade Regent both times I read it. It just felt disjointed and dull. It’s definitely not one of my favorites. This is the sort of adventure path I think about when I think of “too much railroading”.

The Good:

• A variety of themes, so there’s something for everyone.
• Lots of role playing is available with the NPCs who accompany you on this pole-spanning journey.

The Bad:

• The Caravan and Caravan Combat rules just don’t work. I suggest you ignore them.
• The NPC relationship system is pointless. Ignore it too. This is what role playing is for.
• The NPC Ameiko is the focus of the adventure, not the player characters. That’s not to say that the PCs aren’t the stars of the show, just that they need to have a really good reason to want to help Ameiko out. I’d strongly suggest having a few sessions that outline the PCs reasons for being so dedicated to this NPC.

How I’d fix Jade Regent:

It’s simple. Skip the first three books. Voilà! A much more focused adventure path emerges.

Skull and Shackles

Date: February 2012 - July 2012

Authors:        Richard Pett, Greg A. Vaughan, Matthew Goodall, Neil Spicer

                Tim Hitchcock, Jason Nelson

Level Range: 1-14

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 19th of 33

Poll Rating: 13th of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Naval / Dungeon Crawling

The pirate adventure path. In addition to all the swashbuckling you can handle, Skull and Shackles is also a kingdom-building adventure (fiefdom?) and like Kingmaker before it has less of an overriding narrative and more of a sandboxy feel.

This adventure path has everything you’d want from a pirate-themed adventure: surviving brutal shipboard discipline, raiding merchant vessels, digging up buried treasure, naval combat, racing through a hurricane, grog-soaked feasts and backstabbing pirate politics.

It’s very important that the GM set the player’s expectations from the start. You are pirates. Good characters will quite simply ruin the fun for everyone. Paladins need not apply.

The Good:

• Pirates! Yo ho ho! Walk the Plank! Pieces of Eight!
• You can be evil guilt-free.
• A great sandbox adventure
• Tons of opportunities for role-playing.
• A great setting for guns. And cannons. And hand cannons!

The Bad:

• Volume I: The Wormwood Mutiny is interminably dull. It’s almost a rite of passage to get to the good stuff.
• Volume IV: Island of Empty Eyes is also pretty slow.
• Paladins and other high-minded folk will spoil the game. Don’t let them in your club!
• The naval combat rules are awful and boring.  Ignore them utterly.
• Same thing with the fleet combat system.
• The opponents lack variety - they’re mostly humanoids.
• The climax is underwhelming. This is where the GM needs to think ahead and come up with a better ending.
• Not a great fit for an inexperienced GM.

Shattered Star

Date: August 2012 - January 2013

Authors:         Greg A. Vaughan, Mike Shel, James L. Sutter, Tito Leati,

Richard Pett, Brandon Hodges

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: GAME MASTERED

Tarondor’s Rating: 14th out of 33

Poll Rating: 26th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Dungeon Crawl

The single most underrated adventure path ever produced, in my not at all humble and highly correct opinion! I have to wonder if those who voted in the poll have actually played it.

Shattered Star has three main themes running through. First, the team must assemble an ancient Azlanti artifact to save the world from an army of ancient clockworks led by a mad undead emperor. This part of the story is very much like that staple of early D&D, The Rod of Seven Parts, where each part added to the artifact makes it stronger but brings its own dangers. The second main theme running through Shattered Star is a series of callbacks to earlier adventure paths, bringing in themes and characters from Rise of the Runelords, Curse of the Crimson Throne, Second Darkness and others. The third main theme is dungeon crawling. How do you run a vast megadungeon without making it boring? Break it up into six merely large dungeons and intersperse them with wilderness and city interludes.

There is a lot of dungeon crawling. But if you love dungeons like I love dungeons, have I got some dungeons for you. Seriously, Shattered Star has some of the most interesting dungeon crawls ever published.

Can you tell that I loved GMing Shattered Star? ‘Cause I loved GMing Shattered Star!

Along with Rise of the Runelords and Return of the Runelords, this is often considered Part 2 of the Varisia Trilogy.

There are some very tough fights very early on which nearly TPK’ed my group, and there is a fight in volume 2: Curse of the Lady’s Light that my players were wholly unprepared for and only survived by running and leaving some of their friends behind. But my players had a lot of fun with the Sihedron (the artifact) and the surprising amount of roleplaying interaction for a dungeon crawl.  And there is one trap (“That Trap”) in Curse of the Lady’s Light that everyone talks about. You’ll know it when you see it. My advice? Make sure one of your PCs falls victim to That Trap. It’s more fun that way.

I really think that the first five volumes of Shattered Star were a blast. But Volume Six: The Dead Heart of Xin was more of a slog. It had some interesting ideas but much of the adventure felt like filler. I think it would be fine to cut down the combats in this one by half and let the PCs get on with the final big villains!

So NOT a Spoiler: After so many adventure paths where the final villain of book 6 comes out of nowhere, this villain (the Azlanti Emperor Xin) is no surprise! You’ve known from very early on that you’ll be trying to stop Xin and his unstoppable army of constructs. So, kudos to Paizo for finally getting the villain out there early!

The Good:

• Fun dungeons, each with a unique twist.
• An artifact that gets stronger as you go.
• Callbacks to earlier adventure paths.
• Great locales.
• Plenty of time in urban areas
• Fair balance of role playing and combat through the first four volumes.
• The PCs know exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing.

The Bad:

• The sixth adventure needs paring down
• If you don’t like dungeons, you won’t like this one.
• “That Trap”; it just ain’t for everyone. Think carefully.

Reign of Winter

Date: February 2013 - July 2013

Authors:         Neil Spicer, Jim Groves, Tim Hitchcock, Matt Goodall,

                Brandon Hodge, Greg A. Vaughan

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: PLAYED

Tarondor’s Rating: 18th out of 33

Poll Rating: 8th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Plane Hopping / Wilderness / Historical Fiction

Reign of Winter is very much a Russian fairy tale, complete with Baba Yaga and her dancing hut and many other staples of Slavic folklore. It takes your characters across Golarion, then to other planets and eventually other planes and finally to [SPOILER]: our Earth in the midst of the Russian revolution.

You’ll be acting as the agents of an evil witch-queen, even if you are trying to prevent an apocalypse, so this is a bad one for paladins and other characters with a strong moral code.  I don’t have a strong feeling for this adventure path one way or the other. It’s undeniably well written and yet I can’t help feeling that it's missing the spark of greatness. It’s just comfortably okay in my opinion.

The Good:

• You get to visit a wide variety of locales
• Feels like an old-school adventure.
• You get to gad about in Baba Yaga’s dancing hut (no, there is no aircraft carrier).^[3]

The Bad:

• You’re working for a Very Bad Patron to stop a slightly less bad villain whom the Very Bad Patron made bad and forced to be bad and is only trying to save her own life.  Yeah. The motivation stinks.
• You won’t have much opportunity to settle down and make relationships. Or craft. Or buy and sell.
• It feels campy a lot.
• Volume 3: Maiden, Mother, Crone is a long slog without much development of the story.
• Volume 5: Rasputin Must Die! Introduces modern firearms into the game. If you don’t want tanks and repeating rifles in your Pathfinder, beware.

Wrath of the Righteous

Date: August 2013 - February 2014

Authors:         Amber E. Scott, Neil Spicer, Jim Groves, Greg A. Vaughan,

James Jacobs, Wolfgang Bauer, Richard Pett

Level Range: 1-20 (+10th mythic tier)

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 11th out of 33

Poll Rating: 16th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Demon Crusade! / Planar Travel / Worldwound

Links to Resources: Pathfinder 2nd Edition - Mythic Rules

Wrath of the Righteous is getting a lot of attention right now because of the Owlcat Games computer game: Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous based on it. Although I’ve played the computer game, this will solely be a review of the published tabletop adventure path.

First of all, the premise of the game is amazing. You are the chosen ones fighting a horde of demons to save the world and close a path to the Abyss. In Wrath of the Righteous, you must fight back against armies of demons pouring through the Worldwound from the Abyss, retake the fallen city of Drezen, fight the fiendish devotees of Baphomet, Nocticula and Deskari, venture into the Abyss itself and finally, take on the monstrous demon lords themselves. Along the way, you slowly gain divine power yourselves as you ascend towards the status of demigods.

One of the things I love about this adventure path is its dueling themes of vengeance and redemption. What does it mean to be an angel? What does it mean to be a demon? Can an angel fall? Can a demon rise? And what about you, the mortals in between? Will you help either one? Or reject both?

If you know anything at all about the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path, you’ll know that it uses the Mythic System to let the player characters begin to take on mythic traits. You probably also know those are not well regarded by those who’ve used them. The usual complaint is that mythic tiers make you so powerful that later fights in the campaign become trivially easy, leading to boredom. Look around Paizo’s adventure path forums for a variety of opinions on how to solve that. I’ve included a link above to a set of rules of Mythic adventures in 2e that I think might solve the problem because they expand the characters’ options without too much expansion of power.

The villains are colorful and have goals beyond mustache-twirling evil. The NPCs you meet aren’t the focus of the adventure, but do have goals and quests of their own. This is the right way to do companions on a quest.

The best part of the whole campaign is a trip to the Abyss. So different from what I’ve ever done before.

Another claim to fame for Wrath of the Righteous is that its first volume: The Worldwound Incursion, was the first ever adventure path volume to be written by a woman: Amber E. Scott. I don’t know why it took that long, but I’m glad it happened. Congratulations on brushing aside that particular glass ceiling, Amber!

The Good:

• Mythic levels of play!
• As epic a quest as you’re ever going to get!
• Nuanced NPCs and villains.
• Lots of fodder for role playing
• Redemption
• Corruption
• Sacrifice

The Bad: 

• The Mythic rules are not well-balanced.
• TPK’s early on, untouchable PCs later. Needs to be fixed.

Mummy’s Mask

Date: March 2014 - July 2014

Authors:         Crystal Frazier, Richard Pett, Amber Scott, Michael Kortes,

Mike Shel

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 23rd out of 33

Poll Rating: 17th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Dungeon Crawl

Mummy’s Mask is a straightforward “B Movie” of an adventure path. You explore trap-filled tombs, fight sphinxes and cultists riding out of the desert sun and vast numbers of undead and constructs. What’s not to love?

Most players seem to feel positively about it, though some said it bogged down  a bit in Book 4. Although not unanimous, the consensus seems to be that Books 1 & 2 were the best.

Several commenters noted that the weakest point of the plot was that their characters didn’t feel a strong need to follow the plot from Book 3 into Book 4. Which is funny, because when the motivation is made more explicit, everyone complains about railroading.

Mummy’s Mask is also notable for what’s not there: This is the first adventure path since Shackled City that doesn’t include an author credit for Greg Vaughan, who by this time was in medical school. That’s an author credit on 15 straight adventure paths, which is amazing.

The Good:

• Great ancient Egyptian flavor
• Lots of interesting traps
• Simple plot

The Bad:

• The many traps mean that without a trap-finder (and probably a cleric), you will be hurting.
• Simple plot
• If you’re not up for tons of undead and constructs and traps, move along!

Iron Gods

Date: August 2014 - January 2015

Authors:        Neil Spicer, Nicolas Logue, Ron Lundeen, Mike Shel,

                Tim Hitchcock, Crystal Frasier

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: Game Mastered

Tarondor’s Rating: 5th out of 33

Poll Rating: 10th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Dungeon Crawl / Conan vs. Robots

Iron Gods is a departure from previous adventure paths in that it makes significant use of the Technology Guide. A full-throated homage to 1980’s Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, this is a tale about fantasy heroes in a science fantasy setting, complete with lasers, spaceships, teleporters and robots!

Volume I: Fires of Creation looks at what happens to a small Numerian town when it loses the technology that runs its daily life and introduces the first of the Iron Gods, a computer AI exhibiting god-like powers. Volume II: Lords of Rust is a look at the bottom rung of scavenging among the ruins of a greater civilization in a town reminiscent of Bartertown from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Volume III: The Choking Tower pits the PCs against a mad scientist experimenting with technology beyond his control. Volume IV: Valley of the Brain Collectors involves the heroes in a cold war between two terrifying alien powers. It is here that they meet the second Iron God. Volume V: Palace of the Fallen Stars takes our heroes to the capital of Silver Mount and involves them in a power struggle between the drug-addled barbarian king of Numeria and the backstabbing wizards of the Technic League. Volume VI: The Divinity Drive takes the heroes inside the crashed alien ship and sees them confront the awesome power of the greatest of the Iron Gods.

If you don’t love the swords-and-lasers genre, feel free to skip this one, but for my money it has one of the best storylines and most interesting NPCs in the whole of the Pathfinder game. Then too, the freshness of fighting robots and lasers is part of the charm of the game and its high rating. If you’ve been playing a lot of Starfinder, you would probably find it less charming and fresh.

I have three complaints to make about Iron Gods: First, it lacks a strong reason for the player characters to move from Book 2 to 3. The motivation to move from 3 to 4 and from 4 to 5 is there, but depends on bonding with (or at least believing) a particular NPC.  My second complaint is rocket launchers: They’re hilariously bad at damaging, well, anything.  

Third and most serious, the final boss is wildly overpowered. Despite having fun for the previous 5 and a ½ books, the complete murderous shellacking given to my veteran players convinced them to swear off coming back to try again with new characters. The creature’s offensive and defensive abilities ensured it would kill at least one of them per round.  Admittedly, none of them were min-maxed, but neither were they poorly built. The BBEG is just an absolute beast that might need to be toned down.

And a suggestion for players: It’s fun to play barbarians in this one, but don’t be suckered into playing technology-hating barbarians, because all the coolest toys are technological. You will swiftly wish that -you- had that chainsword!

If I were to GM this again, I would get the Technic League involved earlier and establish them as hated villains early. The best thing I did was to give a PC a reason to hate the Smoke Wizard Furkas Xoud - it gave the party a reason to move between adventures 2 & 3. Also, in Volume 5: Palace of the Fallen Stars, once the party gets into the intrigue within the palace and between the palace and the Technic League, it’s time to ignore the adventure as written and let the PCs really drive the story. I’m glad I did. It -was- like holding on to the tiger’s tail, but they made the story far more interesting than if I’d made them follow a script.  Plus, after that, they were ready for the long dungeon crawl that is Book 6.

Here’s a fun bit from my Iron Gods campaign: One of my players played an android druid he called “The Technician.”  The Technician’s animal companion was “The Companion.” I ruled that when the Technician cast the reincarnate spell, the subjects always came back as androids, and represented this as the Technician downloading their mental engrams into android bodies in an android factory he’d discovered in Volume 3.

The Good:

• Swords & Sorcery & Robots
• Wonderful NPCs
• A great mix of interesting role-playing and interesting combat.
• The coolest backstory for any villain in Golarion. How the Iron Gods became gods is just fun.
• The town of Scrapwall was so much fun! Working to win over various factions and unite the underdogs really felt like watching a Mad Max movie.
• Old-style D&D with a modern sensibility.
• If you’re updating this to 2e, this is a perfect place for androids, automatons and gunslingers.

The Bad:

• If you don’t want technology (or gunslingers) in your Pathfinder, then hit the eject button right away.
• The Technology Guide is large and involves a lot of new rules. Nanites, lasers, integrated weaponry, technomancy. It’s not for the inexperienced GM
• Did I mention how overpowering the final boss is? I mean, he’s a god.

Giantslayer

Date: February 2015 - July 2015

Authors:        Patrick Renie, Larry Wilhelm, Tim Hitchcock, Jim Groves,

                Sean K. Reynolds, Tito Leati

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 27th out of 33

Poll Rating: 31st out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure:

Links to Resources: The Glass Cannon Podcast

An homage to the very first series of adventures (1978’s Against the Giants), Giantslayer is exactly what it says it is - a huge series of fights against giants. After the exotic adventures of Wrath of the Righteous and Iron Gods, Paizo was ready for a return to the classics and the result was this tale of stopping a giant army before it gets rolling.

Generally considered one of the weakest adventure paths, Giantslayer is often criticized for being boring. It can feel like a never-ending series of giant fights. Because it’s a never-ending series of giant fights.

A commonly-expressed opinion is that books 1 and 2 (and sometimes 3) are excellent, whereas Books 4 & 5 are boring.  However, many have noted that Book 1 is very dangerous and should be toned down for beginning players. Others view Book 4 as enjoyable because it requires clever guerilla tactics. Personally, I agree with the latter view - Book 4 is “sandboxy” and rewards clever play more than “kick in the door” styles of play.  Books 5 and 6 are back to back dungeons without much time between them.

Finally, it’s impossible to talk about Giantslayer without mentioning the awesome Glass Cannon podcast (link above). A very fun podcast I’ve listened to for years, that shows Giantslayer at its best. I strongly recommend giving it a listen.

The Good

• Classic Feel
• Giants are fun to fight.
• Glass Cannon Podcast!

The Bad:

• Very little downtime to shop or craft.
• Can feel monotonous after awhile
• Deadly for beginners
• Book 5: Anvil of Fire is really a very long series of fire giant fights. However many fire giants you’re picturing, it’s more than that.
• Good roleplaying at the start, but very little towards the end.

Hell’s Rebels

Date: September 2015 - January 2016

Authors:        Crystal Frazier, Mike Shel, Richard Pett, James Jacobs,

                Jim Groves, Amber Scott

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating:  4th out of 33

Poll Rating: 6th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Urban / Planar

Hell’s Rebels is the story of a guerilla / spy campaign to overthrow a despotic regime in part of devil-haunted Cheliax. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was also the premise of Council of Thieves, written five years earlier. But Hell’s Rebels gets it right. There’s no bait-and-switch. You are full-fledged rebels, spies and freedom fighters.

Hell’s Rebels is one of the best written adventure paths ever, with engaging situations, interesting role-playing and fun combats. However, some parts of the plot require a willful suspension of disbelief. The rebellion is more or less open and notorious and works from a known location, yet the authorities don’t simply show up with thirty hellknights and wipe you out. If your players can’t swallow that much, then they may have a problem with this adventure path.

Happening primarily in and around the Chelish city of Kintargo (with plenty of travel elsewhere), Hell’s Rebels is a great opportunity to use the urban options you’ve been eyeing. The adventure path manages to make Kintargo into an interesting home base that the PCs will care about and want to save.

More than almost any other adventure path, Hell’s Rebels rewards good role playing and subtlety. Pure kick-in-the-door players will be unhappy. Likewise, a successful party will have at least one player character capable of subtle actions and deception, as well as at least one player character with a heavy emphasis on skills.

One thing GM’s might want to mention to players before the game starts, especially new players, is that many of the foes they will be fighting will be devils and to keep in mind standard devil resistances and weaknesses.

The Good:

• The adventure path supplies good motivation for the player characters
• A strong narrative arc
• A good balance of role playing and combat
• Is a much better “rebels against devils” story than Council of Thieves
• Combat is challenging without being deadly (with just a few exceptions).
• Strong, well-written villain leading to a strong story climax.

The Bad:

• The rebellion is open and known rather than secret and underground. That may seem foolish to players not willing to suspend their disbelief.
• A frequent point of complaint about Hell’s Rebels is the inclusion of the bard Shensen, whom several reviewers felt was an annoying “Mary Sue” character. The good news is that she's almost always mentioned as the exception to how cool the other NPCs are.

Hell’s Vengeance

Date: February 2016 - August 2016

Authors:         F. Wesley Schneider, Thurston Hillman, Patrick Renie

                Stephen Radney-McFarland, Larry Wilhelm, Ron Lundeen

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 28th out of 33

Poll Rating: 30th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Urban/Dungeon Crawl

Hell’s Vengeance is the first and so far only adventure path where the player characters are just straight-up evil (Skull and Shackles plays just as well if you’re neutral). I’ll admit my bias against evil adventures - it feels like childish wish fulfillment to me.

That said, Hell’s Vengeance is an interesting read because you’re seeing the events of the Glorious Reclamation from the villain’s point of view. Also, I applaud Paizo for trying out a new format - it’s certainly something that certain  players had been clamoring for for years. And like always, the presentation of the adventure path carries Paizo’s signature high quality - excellent art, articles, layout and new material, all good.

The story starts off a bit slowly, with the player characters as low-level flunkies in the evil hierarchy of Cheliax whose main motivation is to rise in power. Good backgrounds tying the PC into the House of Thrune or the hellknights would go a long way towards propelling the story.

A good, experienced GM is required for this adventure path to keep the player characters in line. Cheliax may support evil, but it frowns strongly on chaos.  Player characters in Hell’s Vengeance will need to be just as subtle, just as clever as player characters in Hell’s Rebels or they’re going to get their teeth kicked in by paladins and angels. Strategic and intelligent player characters can thrive, but murderhobos will have a very difficult time as agents of this strongly-aligned lawful nation. Political Intrigue is a big element of the adventure. You’re more like SPECTRE than you are the Joker.

Finally, I STRONGLY recommend against GMing or running this adventure path if you are not experienced with the game. It’s tough!

The Good:

• Well-written
• A good balance of role playing and combat
• Lots of spy stuff
• You get to be evil. You don’t have to make your bed or brush your teeth.

The Bad:

• You get to be evil. We have enough of it in the real world.
• If you thought being evil meant more latitude for your actions, guess again. You’re agents of a very controlling lawful power.

Strange Aeons

Date: August 2016 - February 2017

Authors:        F. Wesley Schneider, Tito Leati, Mike Shel, Richard Pett,

John Compton, Jim Groves

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 9th out of 33

Poll Rating: 11th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Lovecraftian horror

The main difference between Strange Aeons and the average game of Call of Cthulhu is that you might just survive Strange Aeons. Many (if not most) of Paizo’s adventure paths involve some level of Lovecraftian horror, but in Strange Aeons, sanity-blasting revelations are aimed at your PC from the very first. That said, not everything Lovecraft wrote was about cosmic horror, and there’s a nod to the more whimsical Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath in Volume 3: Dreams of the Yellow King.

In general, Strange Aeons does an excellent job of blending Lovecraftian elements into Pathfinder, but make no mistake - this is Pathfinder with Lovecraftian elements, not Call of Cthulhu shoehorned into the Pathfinder rules. You’re a big damn hero, not an overworked researcher or spunky reporter. If you are a regular CoC player, this will feel like “Lovecraft-Lite”, which is, in my opinion, more or less exactly what I’d want out of this adventure path.

The plot does an excellent job of involving the player characters in the story and driving the story forward. Although your characters will be far more resilient than a Call of Cthulhu character, there are enough difficult situations to make you feel as though you barely survived.

The Good:

• You get to experience a who’s who of Lovecraftian baddies.
• Book 3: Dreams of the Yellow King is highly regarded by many reviewers as among the most interesting and fun volumes in any adventure path. It’s not a universal opinion, but it is common.
• A lot of excellent and atmospheric role-playing here.
• A decent balance of role-playing and combat, but beware of low-level foes like ghouls, which can tear up a low-level party.

The Bad:

• Book I: In Search of Sanity, is essentially a large dungeon and many of the encounters feel repetitive, patently there only to grant you experience points.
• “Kick-in-the-door” players may be frustrated. There is plenty of combat, but some of it requires strategy. Caution and intelligent play are rewarded.
• Lots of player characters will die, but I’m not sure that’s actually a bad thing in this sort of game.

Ironfang Invasion

Date: March 2017 - July 2017

Authors:         Amber Scott, Ron Lundeen, Benjamin Bruck, Thurston Hillman,

                 Amanda Hamon Kunz, Larry Wilhem

Level Range: 1-18

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 22nd out of 33

Poll Rating: 22nd out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Wilderness

A good adventure, with a few flaws. At its best, Ironfang Invasion feels like you’re in charge of a dynamic military machine and your choices matter. At its worst, it feels like a tightly-scripted straitjacket with optimal choices and very bad choices and little in between.

The large-scale battles in Ironfang Invasion are large, and generally better done than in Kingmaker. In fact, Kingmaker GM’s could do worse than to have a look at Volumes II and III of Ironfang Invasion for ways to better the combat in their Kingmaker campaigns.

One prominent reviewer felt it was a comment on modern American politics, which is frankly nonsense. Any real-world stuff you see in Ironfang Invasion is a bias you brought with you.

The Good:

• Old-School feel, like Robin Hood meets Lord of the Rings.
• Good villain, but many reviewers (myself included) hate what might happen to her later in the adventure path, so change it!
• Great adventure for those wanting to use mounts and animal companions.

The Bad:

• The militia system is widely regarded as useless or unnecessary.
• The survival mechanics in Book I feel more like a burdensome side game than an aid to fun. I strongly recommend removing them and streamlining that otherwise pretty-good adventure.
• Overall, Ironfang Invasion had more combat than role-playing.
• The ending has a cringe-worthy optional result for the main villain. GM’s are advised to avoid it.
• Very linear story.
• Limited opportunities early on to trade or make purchases.

Ruins of Azlant

Date: August 2017 - January 2018

Authors:         Jim Groves, Robert Brooks, Mikko Kallio, Amber Scott,

                Ron Lundeen, Thurston Hillman

Level Range: 1-17

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 26th out of 33

Poll Rating: 25th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Aquatic (not naval, get ready to get wet, kids!)

What begins as a tense mystery about a Roanoke-like lost colony ends up as a history lesson about the Azlanti empire. The first half is interesting and challenging; the second half feels aimless and unsatisfying.

GM’s, make sure your players understand that this is not a maritime adventure. This is not Skull and Shackles. You will be underwater a great deal of the time. The Underwater Combat rules are not just an interesting feature; they are a constant fact of life. Underwater combat begins at first level, so be ready for that or be ready for a TPK.

I have to share the funniest comment on any adventure path: “Sometimes you can see the ocean…” by Reddit user BendyBrains.

The Good:

• If you like Azlanti history, have I got the adventure path for you… to read.
• The lost colony mystery is interesting and can keep your players guessing.
• Volume IV: City in the Deep is a lot of fun with some good role-playing.

The Bad:

• Underwater Combat rules are a pain in the behind.
• There is a lot more combat in Ruins of Azlant than roleplaying.
• The story loses focus and becomes less interesting as it progresses.

War for the Crown

Date: February 2018 to July 2018

Authors:         Thurston Hillman, Richard Pett, Ron Lundeen, Mikko Kaillio

                John Compton, Amber Scott

Level Range: 1-18

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 6th out of 33

Poll Rating: 15th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Investigation and Spying

In War for the Crown, the player characters are agents of the Crown Princess of Taldor in her bid for the throne. They act as spies, trouble-shooters, enforcers, investigators and diplomats. It’s possible that War for the Crown is the most role-playing intensive of all the adventure paths.

Non-Player Characters have agendas and personalities and very often encounters can be (and often should be) handled through non-violent means. While War for the Crown does have a plot, it is much less linear than most. Player characters are often free to resolve individual tasks and assignments in whatever manner seems best to them, which means solid roleplaying and clever planning can avoid many fights or build the right coalition to weaken your enemies.

Right off the bat, you’re supposed to support Princess Eutropia, and she’s a great candidate for the throne, but in truth she’s not the only one and I could see supporting some of the other candidates (usurpers? Pretenders to the throne?) if the adventure path permitted that, but it doesn’t. However it’s that lack of clarity that also makes this situation ripe for roleplaying and makes it feel more realistic.

Those who liked War for the Crown -really- liked it. Here are some quotes from around the Internet:

“The benchmark by which APs should be judged. Everything about this one is superlative. A+!”

“As a GM who hates long fights and dumb, unnecessary dungeons, it is a blast.”

“It’s truly been an experience like no other.”

The Good:

• Lots of fun.
• Sandboxy, with a through-line of plot
• Tons of role-playing

The Bad:

• The Social subsystem is probably best ignored, or replaced with the system from Ultimate Intrigue.
• This ain’t Kingmaker. You can’t pick your own ruler (without a lot of re-writing and improvising by the GM). You’re stuck with the ruler War for the Crown wants you to support.
• So many NPC names to remember. Start taking notes!
• This is NOT the adventure path for kick-in-the-door style players.
• Because it’s so sandboxy and the PCs can resolve things in so many ways, this one involves a lot more GM preparation and flexibility than many AP’s.
• It’s probably not ideal for a beginner GM.

Return of the Runelords

Date: August 2018 - January 2019

Authors:        Adam Daigle, Mike Shel, Richard Pett, Jason Keeley,

                Amanda Hamon Kunz, Greg A. Vaughan

Level Range: 1-20

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 10th out of 33

Poll Rating: 29th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Wilderness / Dungeon / Planar / Intrigue

Along with Shattered Star, Return of the Runelords is one of the most underrated adventure paths. It’s epic, fun and highly worth playing.

With Rise of the Runelords and Shattered Star, this is the third and last part of the informal Varisia Arc. It is a satisfying conclusion to that arc with many callbacks to the earlier two adventure paths and several surprising reveals of earlier-discovered mysteries. It’s unnecessary to have played either of the other two adventure paths to appreciate this one, but there are some fun moments enhanced by prior knowledge.

This is an epic campaign that sees the heroes face off with threats from the forgotten mists of time. Although there will be one more 1e adventure path after this, Return of the Runelords serves as a swansong for many elements of Golarion, bringing many old threads to a satisfying conclusion and updating others for the new era to come.

One of the interesting elements of the game are the “Sihedron Heroes”, a group of high-level adventurers meant to represent your PCs from previous campaigns (such as Rise of the Runelords and Shattered Star). They’ll help or interact with your new heroes from time to time, perhaps giving your old PCs a chance for a brief cameo once again.

The villains are one of the main draws of Return of the Runelords. As you probably have guessed, they’re runelords. Lots of them. And they’re far more of a danger to each other than you are. It’s in this interplay between ancient titans that your game takes place as you make your way through the byzantine network of alliances, grudges, hatreds and, well, more hatred that the runelords have for each other. The villains are well-described individuals and are some of the most fun villains in Pathfinder.

I can’t really tell you why the poll rated this one as low as it did. Every review I’ve read is positive and it looks like a whole lot of fun. All I can tell you is that, along with Shattered Star, I think this is one of the most underrated gems among the adventure paths and well worth checking out.

The Good:

• Fantastic villains
• Great opportunities for role-playing
• Interesting and varied locales
• All the Golarion lore that you can handle.

The Bad:

• Runelords. Plural. Incautious parties will die. A lot.
• I got nothing else. I really liked this one.

Tyrant’s Grasp

Date: February 2019 - August 2019

Authors:         Ron Lundeen, Jason Keeley, Larry Wilhelm, Crystal Frazier

                Luis Loza, John Compton

Level Range: 1-18

Original System: Pathfinder 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 13th out of 33

Poll Rating: 24th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Wilderness and Planar travel

This was the big adventure to end 1st Edition and set the stage for new happenings in 2nd Edition. To say the ending was unpopular is an understatement. It was a tsunami of disappointment. I had been planning to run this adventure path for my home group until I read the ending and then I tossed it aside and moved on to Age of Ashes instead.  But with the benefit of hindsight, I think those criticisms were, if not unfair exactly, then overblown.

Let’s set the ending aside for a moment and discuss the rest of the adventure path. First of all, the first volume, The Dead Roads is fantastic. Full of interesting situations and unusual role-playing.  The middle four books (2-5) of the adventure are very solid with travel to great locations and a real sense of epic accomplishment dealing with one of the most tragic characters in Pathfinder lore and the ultimate questions of redemption and when redemption is even needed, as well as what victory looks like in a no-win situation. And that’s a question that’s about to become very important to the PCs.

If you’ve heard anything about Book 6:Midwives to Death, it’s probably that a lot of people are very upset about the ending. So let me start by saying that I was one of them until I had a chance to think it through. Now I see this as a quest of heroic proportions with echoes of The Lord of the Rings or the story of the heroic Greek resistance at Thermopylae. Or the Star Wars movie Rogue One.

Time for Spoilers in Inviso-Text!: Short version - the best you can hope for is to die while denying the Whispering Tyrant his superweapon and a shot at godhood. You have no chance of defeating him. Moreover, as written, you lose not only your lives but your souls. For many readers, this was way too much. Even Frodo got to sail into the West! 

For my money, a lot of what’s wrong with the ending of Tyrant’s Grasp is fixed with just a few words by Paizo Forums member Cole Deschain HERE.  In case you don’t have access to the Paizo Boards, here’s Cole’s suggestion in Inviso-Text:

Also... cool as the tree rebirth can be, I've already got my epilogue planned, and it's a little different. Figured it'd give more of a sense of accomplishment to the players, while also tying back to a much-loved NPC from volume one...

Umble, the Nosoi from The Dead Roads approaches Pharasma with a small bag in her claws- containing the dusty remnants (the ash, if you will) of the heroes' souls.

The Lady of Graves does her usual "listen without saying anything" routine as Umble spells out the highly unusual circumstances of the case, finally concluding with an observation that for services rendered, if for no other reason, she hopes that something can be done, even if the souls as they were have been destroyed.

Pharasma actually reaches out, takes the bag of dust. Looks at it.

Says "Yes."

Cut to four children born on the same day in Absalom. Roll credits.

So, Tyrant’s Grasp isn’t for everyone. It takes players with a mature view of storytelling and a willingness to enjoy a different kind of victory in the end. But it is a journey well worth taking with the right sort of players and GM.

The Good:

• You get to explore the afterlife. How cool is that?
• Huge, epic feel, like some of your favorite tales.
• Travel to amazing locations
• Meet some of the most famous people in Golarion
• A really good mix of role-playing and combat.
• Face off with the biggest and baddest of all of Golarion’s BBEG’s.

The Bad:

• Well, that ending is a huge bummer if you can’t wrap your head around it.
• There is a point in the game where you’re not the focus of attention. But it’s only one and it’s important.

Age of Ashes

Date: August 2019 - December 2019

Authors:        Amanda Hamon, Eleanor Ferron, Ron Lundeen, Linda

                 Zayas-Palmer, John Compton, Luis Loza

Level Range: 1-20

Original System: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: GAME MASTERED

Tarondor’s Rating: 3rd of 33

Poll Rating: 4th of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Dungeon / Urban / Wilderness

The player characters explore a mysterious network of teleportation portals from the dawn of time and battle dark forces interested in controlling that network and its central hub - the PCs home. Meanwhile in the background lurks the threat of an apocalypse somehow related to a vanished dragon god. In the end, all the PCs' hopes and expectations may hang on upon a series of broken promises. Sounds pretty good, right?

Age of Ashes is the first adventure path written for Pathfinder Second Edition. Reviewers often point to this (or blame 2e itself) to explain a few deadly encounters in Books 1 and 2, ignoring the several dozen previous adventure paths which also had lethal encounters at low levels. Turns out that being low level is just dangerous. That said, my own PCs suffered near TPK’s in both Books 1 and 2, so… yeah. Watch out.

In Book 1: Hellknight Hill, the PCs will explore an abandoned hellknight citadel, rescue innocents, fight off an invasion by a secret cult and discover the secret ring of gates below the citadel. In Book 2: Cult of Cinders, they will continue their war against the Cinderclaw cult by traveling through the portals to the Mwangi Expanse where they will also become aware of a larger threat and a new enemy. In Book 3: Tomorrow Must Burn, they root out a secret band of slavers from a city dedicated to freedom and learn more about their enemy. In Book 4: Fires of the Haunted City, they deal with the tragic history of a fallen dwarven city in the Darklands and bring the fight to the enemy. In Book 5: Against the Scarlet Triad, they finally confront the evil slavers in their headquarters and learn the true scope of the danger to Golarion. In Book 6: Broken Promises, the apocalypse begins and the heroes must race to confront a great hero of Golarion.

Each of the volumes of Age of Ashes is themed around one of the major races of Pathfinder: goblins, elves, halflings, dwarves, gnomes and finally humans. Along the way you get to customize the hellknight citadel you’ve claimed as your own. Want a library? A wizard’s tower? An infirmary? You can do it. My players added a kennel for their pet wargs.

This adventure path has it all. Before I read it, I expected it to be a simple, maybe boring story designed to ease new GM’s into Pathfinder 2e. Instead, I found that it has an amazing depth of experience. It has dungeon crawls, hexploration, infiltration, water battles, aerial battles, chances to influence important NPCs and acquire allies both public and secret. It has role-playing, debates, investigation and straight-up desperate battles for the fate of the world. What else could you possibly want?

The Good:

• A great variety of locations and enemies. Almost a “world tour” of the Inner Sea region. Not really, but it has that flavor.
• A great variety of game styles, including exploration, base-building, role-playing, dungeon crawls, urban adventure and more.
• A great balance of combat, exploration and role-playing.

The Bad: 

• New players are going to struggle with certain very tough fights in the first two volumes. My very experienced players certainly did.
• Once again the final villain isn’t revealed until quite late in the adventure path, but at least the groundwork for that villain has been laid since day one, so it makes sense later.

Extinction Curse

Date: January 2020 - June 2020

Authors:         Jason Tondro, Jenny Jarzabski, Greg Vaughan, Kate Baker,

                Mikko Kallio, Lyz Liddel

Level Range: 1-20

Original System: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 21st out of 33

Poll Rating: 9th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Wilderness / Urban

Online Resources: Roll for Combat Actual Play

A race to stop the destruction of the City at the Heart of the World caused by the mistakes of a dead god.

Dinosaur-riding, demon-worshiping troglodytes from the depths of the earth.

Clowns.

<sings> “One of these things is not like the others…” </sings>

Okay, right off the bat, I am as biased as I can be. I detest circuses and clowns so I was never going to be objective on this one.

That said, after the first two books the circus itself fades into the background, becoming a simple framing device for getting the PCs to various adventure locations. The basic idea of saving the Isle of Kortos from dinosaur-riding, demon-worshiping troglodytes from the depths of the earth isn’t so bad. And in later books you get to learn a lot about the dead god Aroden and find some of his powerful relics (no, we still don’t learn how he died).^[4]

The problem with Extinction Curse is that it’s trying to serve two different tales and not doing a great job at it. The circus story feels incomplete as it fades into the background and the troglodyte (xulgath)/Aroden story feels like it could have used more attention.

The Good:

• Cool villains
• Lots of Aroden lore and relics

The Bad:

• Like most subsystems in the adventure paths, the Circus mechanics don’t work well and feel clunky.
• Lots of roleplaying early fades away by the middle of the story.
• No part of the adventure takes place in Absalom, the City at the Center of the World!
• Once again the final villain is unexpected.
• You know...clowns.

Agents of Edgewatch

Date: July 2020 - December 2020

Authors:        James L. Sutter, Michael Sayre, Jason Keeley, Ron Lundeen,

                Cole Kronewitter, Amber Stewart

Level Range: 1-20

Original System: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: Read

Tarondor’s Rating: 16th out of 33

Poll Rating: 12th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Urban / Dungeon Crawl

Online Resources: Roll for Combat Actual Play

You play members of the city watch of Absalom, the largest city in the Inner Sea region. You deal with criminals, psychopaths, corruption and interplanar invasions.

I particularly like Book 1: Devil at the Dreaming Palace, which is based in large part on the book Devil in the White City, which is about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and [SPOILER:] one of America’s first known serial killers, H.H. Holmes. I also enjoyed Book 4: Assault on Hunting Lodge Seven, an homage to the movie Assault on Precinct 13.

The Good:

• Well written.
• A good amount of role-playing at first, but more and more fighting over time.
• The first adventure path set in Absalom!
• You get to really know a single location and its inhabitants.

The Bad:

• As the introduction to Book 6 notes, it’s a complete shift in tone and type. So much that you are encouraged to retrain your characters and sell your gear to be ready for the completely different challenge ahead. That feels like a red flag. That chapter is a long series of fights in various dungeon environments without much real opportunity for role-playing or changing the course of events.

Abomination Vaults

Date: January 2021 - March 2021

Authors:        James Jacobs, Vanessa Hoskins, Stephen Radney-McFarland

Level Range: 1-10

Original System: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: PLAYING

Tarondor’s Rating: 7th out of 33

Poll Rating: 2nd out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Dungeon Crawl

The first Pathfinder adventure path to be only three volumes long, Abomination Vaults is a great success that will likely mean many more 3-volume adventure paths in the future. I think we can all agree that while some AP’s need six volumes to wrap up, many others could have benefitted from a shorter run.

Abomination Vaults is a dungeon crawl and nothing but a dungeon crawl, but one with an excellent story. It takes the game back to its roots while remaining very much a modern game. There are a good variety of foes and hazards both mechanical and magical.  It links easily with the Beginner Box and the adventure Troubles in Otari.

Abomination Vaults’ plot gives the player characters motivation to explore, giving them a sense of purpose and urgency. The story is filled with sub-quests tied to the different factions both in the dungeon and back in town. The story isn’t just hack-and-slash. There are a number of interesting NPCs and role-playing opportunities (though you must be sure your party includes someone who speaks a variety of languages). There is a mystery to be solved as well as monsters to be vanquished.

Good:

• A well-written dungeon crawl.
• A more compact adventure.
• Good mix of role-playing and combat (though combat predominates).
• An interesting story.

Bad:

• I got nothing. If you like dungeon crawls, you’ll like Abomination Vaults.

Fists of the Ruby Phoenix

Date: July 2021 (all three volumes were released in July)

Authors:        Luis Loza, David N. Ross, James Case

Level Range: 11-20

Original System: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: PLAYED

Tarondor’s Rating: 12th of 33

Poll Rating: 19th of 33

Primary Type of Adventure:  Fighting Tournament

This is Pathfinder’s ode to Enter the Dragon, Mortal Kombat and The Karate Kid. With a dash of Godzilla thrown in. The Ruby Phoenix Tournament pits Tian Xia’s greatest martial artists against each other every ten years. Enter your team and fight!

You may be thinking that sounds like a long and boring series of fights, but you’d be wrong. There’s a story being woven here but GM’s have to put some work into bringing it out. The competition itself doesn’t begin until the second book and the first book contains a smaller story about the temple your team trains in. The overarching story begins to emerge in the second book as the competition begins.

I’m playing this right now and having a blast, but that’s more to do with the GM and players role-playing our hearts out than the gripping story, because we’ve only just begun to brush up against that.

Fists of the Ruby Phoenix has combat against a good variety of opponents, but the battlefields are surprisingly lacking in personality, being mostly wide sandy arenas of one sort or another without cover, concealment or hazards. Of course, you’re 14th level by the time the competition begins, so flight and teleportation are a regular part of the fighting.

What Fists of the Ruby Phoenix lacks in narrative complexity it more than makes up for in atmosphere and interesting Non-Player Characters. Since you’re not trying to kill most of your foes, there is a chance to gain recurring rivals and friends among the competition as well as with patrons and fans of the tournament.

If you’re looking for a deep narrative or an epic tale, this isn’t the right adventure path for you. But if you’re looking for a fun, fast-paced story with plenty of style, atmosphere and intrigue, then Fists of the Ruby Phoenix may be just the thing! I know I’m having fun with it!

The Good:

• Enter the Dragon feel. Get your Bruce Lee on!
• Flavorful atmosphere of Tian Xia.
• Travels to the city of Goka.
• You get to start at 10th level, so you don’t need to wait forever to implement those cool feat combos you’ve been thinking about.
• Fun, varied encounters with lots of different opponents.
• Chances to have fun rivalries rather than just kill all your foes
• You get to fight a [SPOILER:] kaiju (a giant Godzilla-like monster).

The Bad:

• While the opponents are interesting, the arenas mostly aren’t.
• The plot isn’t that complex.

Strength of Thousands

Date: July 2021 - December 2021

Authors:        Eleanor Ferron, Alexandria Bustion, Quinn Murphy,

Michelle Jones, Luis Loza, Michael Sayre, Saif Ansari

Level Range: 1-20

Original System: Pathfinder 2nd Edition

Tarondor’s Involvement: READ

Tarondor’s Rating: 8th out of 33

Poll Rating: 7th out of 33

Primary Type of Adventure: Urban/Wilderness/Planar

The much-anticipated “magical school” adventure path. Strength of Thousands is -really- good. As I write this, Volume 6: Shadows of the Ancients, isn’t out yet. I’ve rated it GREEN for now, but I’ve had less time to absorb it than the others and I think it's possible that I may upgrade that rating to BLUE in the future.

For those who grew up with Harry Potter and Hogwarts, the attraction is obvious, but for us older gamers there is still a lot to love here.

Strength of Thousands begins in the famous Magaambya Academy and the player characters are students performing small tasks (and later, more important ones) for the benefit of the school and later for the benefit of the city outside the school. In later volumes they act as emissaries of the school to the dangerous city of Mzali and discover a hidden city in the depths of the jungle. Finally, they encounter legends from the ancient past and travel among the planets.

What sets this adventure path apart is that, as representatives from the school, the player characters are very strongly discouraged from using violence and when they must use violence, from killing. Also, as the students progress to teachers and eventually heroes of the Academy, they continue their academic research. It’s a novel approach and an interesting variation on the traditional adventure story that will be hard to assess without having played it out, but it seems like a lot of fun.

A lot of gamers want the traditional style of high adventure seen in works like Conan, Elric or the Lord of the Rings, but others have been clamoring for something more peaceable and focused on strong relationships and Strength of Thousands delivers. While it certainly has lots of things to fight, it also has a lot of ways to avoid many of those fights and the player characters are actively urged to seek them out where possible. This adventure path rivals War for the Crown in its breadth of role-playing.

In many other adventure paths, the final villain has little foreshadowing and appears to loom out of nowhere in the 5th or 6th volume. In Strength of Thousands, the final villain is foreshadowed from the earliest pages. On the other hand the final villain has little to do with most of what happens in the first four books of the story, only becoming central in the last two books. I don’t know that I’d call it a criticism of Strength of Thousands, because unlike so many other stories, the villain isn’t the point. Being a student, teacher, researcher and hero of the Magaambyan Academy is the point of this adventure path, and the climax of that journey is simply in facing off against a powerful threat to the Academy and what it stands for.

A Note: I think the adventure path might be just slightly more interesting if at least one player character is an anadi (spider-person).

The Good:

• A very different take on high fantasy.
• Good use of the excellent Mwangi Expanse book.
• Lots of representation for African-themed cultures and mythology.
• Everyone gets to be a spellcaster, even if you’re not.
• Well-detailed characters and lots of roleplaying.
• Really well tied in to the lore of the Mwangi Expanse.

The Bad:

• The rails of this particular railroad aren’t camouflaged at all. Sometimes you get to choose the order in which you accomplish tasks, but that’s about it. Otherwise, the train goes from station to station and you have to hope the next station is somewhere good, because there’s no getting off.
• There is no strong narrative pushing the story forward or any urgent clock until near the end. Instead, the clock is the academic year and the mountain of tasks needing to be done. Some might find that boring.
• There’s a spot in Volume 5 where a major NPC tells you that you have to handle the villain without them and it feels a bit strange. It’s obviously done because the narrative needs the PCs to be heroes, not because it makes a lot of sense.

Some Numbers For No Good Reason

Author Credits:

Greg A. Vaughan - 17

Richard Pett - 16

James Jacobs - 10

Tim Hitchcock - 8

Ron Lundeen - 8

Tito Leati - 7

Neil Spicer - 7

Amber E. Scott - 6

Mike Shel - 6

Nicolas Logue - 5

F. Wesley Schneider - 5

Wolfgang Bauer - 4

John Compton - 4

Crystal Frasier - 4

Amanda Hamon Kunz / Amanda Hamon - 4

Michael Kortes - 4

Jason Nelson - 4

Thurston Hillman - 4

Luis Loza - 4

Jason Buhlman - 3

Brandon Hodge - 3

Mikko Kallio - 3

Jason Keeley - 3

Sean K. Reynolds -3

James L. Sutter - 3

Larry Wilhelm - 3

Brian Cortijo - 2

Jesse Decker - 2

Eleanor Ferron - 2

Matthew Goodall - 2

Jim Groves - 2

Rob McCreary - 2

Erik Mona - 2

Stephen Radney-McFarland - 2

Patrick Renie - 2

Michael Sayre - 2

Saif Ansari - 1

Kate Baker - 1

Clinton Boomer - 1

Eric L. Boyd - 1

Robert Brooks - 1

Benjamin Bruck - 1

Alexandria Bustion - 1

James Case - 1

Adam Daigle - 1

Graeme Davis - 1

Darrin Drader - 1

Stephen S. Greer - 1

Vanessa Hoskins - 1

Jenny Jarzabski - 1

Michelle Jones - 1

Kevin Kulp - 1

Cole Kronewitter - 1

Lyz Liddel - 1

Mike McArtor -1

Mike Mearls - 1

Quinn Murphy - 1

David Noonan -  1

Christopher Perkins - 1

David N. Ross - 1

Robert J. Schwalb - 1

Amber Stewart - 1

Chris Thomasson - 1

Jason Tondro - 1

JD Wiker - 1

Linda Zayas-Palmer - 1

Other Pathfinder Stuff I’ve Done

Pathfinder, 2nd Edition

Tarondor’s Guide to the Pathfinder Second Edition Bard

Tarondor’s Guide to the Pathfinder Second Edition (Remastered) Cleric

Tarondor’s Guide to the Pathfinder Second Edition (Remastered) Fighter

Tarondor’s Guide to the Pathfinder Second Edition (Remastered) Rogue

Tarondor’s Guide to the Pathfinder Second Edition (Remastered) Wizard

Tarondor's Pathfinder 2e Conversion of The Emerald Spire Superdungeon

Tarondor's Pathfinder 2e Conversion of Monte Cook’s The Banewarrens and Night of Dissolution

Tarondor’s Troop Compendium

Tarondor’s Guide to Pathfinder Adventure Path

Pathfinder, 1st Edition

Tarondor’s Guide to the Pathfinder First Edition Transmuter Wizard

Red Hand of Doom Conversion