Wow, it's been a long time since I worked on this project. Let's see if I can breathe some life back into it...
- The City of Strangers Part I: The Shadow Gambit. There's a lot of reasons not to like this scenario. For one, it takes place in what is probably the worst single setting element of the entire Golarion setting: the Burning Man fantasy city of Kaer Maga. Although most of these are by necessity somewhat railroady, given that they're meant to get players into the action as quickly as possible in a convention type setting, this one is one the worst, and requires players to accept several things that most players would be very unlikely to accept, like the assassins who jump them cheekily telling them that they'll just have to figure out where the person who hired them is, after they told them that they need to talk to him, or that they need to ride around town for an hour with bags over their heads before meeting with a guy who demands that the PCs owe him a favor if he tells them what they need so that they can do what is already a favor for him. You have to do this, though, because the entire plot of this (and even more especially the next one) hinge on it. Anyway, this is mostly just a module of wandering around a rather stupidly designed high concept town asking questions and fighting criminals. At the very end, they get to finally go take out a sub-boss, at least. Blegh.
- The City of Strangers Part II: The Twofold Demise. The attitude that makes Kaer Maga so intolerable a location for normal people to play in comes forward again; the guy who demanded that the PCs owed him a favor so that he could help them do him a favor (don't try to figure it out. Just remember r-strategy and accept that you'll never undestand this mentality) is even more demandy and absurd here. While the PCs are wandering around aimlessly because there are no clues at all to give them any direction on how to accomplish the scenario's goals, they're attacked by exactly the people that they need to be, of course. This leads them to... of course, a little dungeoncrawl lower in the city. Once they complete it, they conveniently find all of the evidence of Shadow Lodge skulduggery that they're looking for. One small upside; because of the scenario length restrictions, the dungeon is actually what normal people would call a dungeon, and is mercifully small and short. Enough so, in fact, that it doesn't bother me too much the way dungeoncrawls normally do.
- Echoes of Everwar IV: The Faithless Dead. Presuming that you've played the other three parts of this series, you can do this finale. It has a kind of The Mummy feel to it; trying to restore a powerful sorcerer of sorts from the past; or rather, trying to stop the restoration of such which the events of the prior scenarios put into play. In spite of the fact that like most of these scenarios, it just jumps right in without preamble, it kind of tries to make up for it by offering a bit more roleplaying opportunities than most of these; you're to riddle with a sphinx, coax the spirits of "the mummy's" concubines out of magical items that they're stored in, and then go do a pseudo-Egyptian themed small dungeon. All in all, this is far from the worst of these types of scenarios I've reviewed.
- Eyes of the Ten Part II: The Maze of the Open Road. This scenario is way too precious for its own good; it's only 23 pages long, fer cryin' out loud, and something like 8-9 pages of that at least are set-up, summary, and the faction stuff that they always throw into these things. In spite of that, you're whisked all over Golarion, from a demiplane where you talk to a medusa, to a Chelaxian manor where you fight devils and uncover a guy who's actually dead and being impersonated by a rogue Pathfinder, to the jungles of the Mwangi Expanse where you encounter a weird lich intelligent ape who runs a heretical cult—which you'll defeat almost as soon as you hear about it, assuming that you do actually hear anything about who they are and what their goals are before just fighting and killing them, which is hardly a given. This would all be relatively interesting—if esoterically D&Dish—for a long campaign, but as part two of a two-part very short module, it simply is trying to do way too much.
- The Infernal Vault. This is an interesting scenario. I mean, the scenario itself is a pretty bog-standard small little dungeoncrawl with some dumb traps, human mercenaries, a few devils and undead and a stronk wamman boss at the end. Nothing to see here that's worth seeing. But there's a backstory, which again, the PCs probably aren't really in a position to get unless the GM just flat out tells it to them. And it illuminates a major problem that I have with a lot of the Pathfinder material. In their effort to be a bid "edgy" or "mature" and "shades of gray" they simply have a nihilistic, nothing matters because everything gives way to entropy of evil anyway kind of vibe to them that is seriously off-putting. I can kinda see what they're trying to do, and I detect this vibe a lot in a lot of their other material too, but they are not at all subtle, and where a little bit goes a long way, they give us a firehose of it. I dunno; while in good circumstances the broken psychology of entertainers shouldn't really be too much an issue to their customers, in Paizo's case it's been bleeding through for some time and poisoning much of their output. This scenario in particular made it noticeable again.
- The Jester's Fraud. This is a curious scenario to end the season on, because it has none of the feel of a "season finale" and is just a pretty standard "adventure of the week" kind of feel. It involves a little bit of skulduggery, but mostly just tracking and fighting. It starts almost in media res, as most of these do, as the person that you've been sent after a super brief briefing himself stumbles into the inn that you're staying in and is being pursued by annis hags that you have to fight. He then gives you what you want, but asks for additional help. You go out into the backcountry to find a stolen evil artifact, and other than an optional encounter with some giant slugs, you just fight humans—bandits, mercenaries and bosses. There's a centaur too, depending on your level, but this is a curiously rather unfanastic adventure in many respects. Even the evil McGuffin is underwhelming, because we're never given an opportunity to understand what it's capable of or what's supposed to be so evil about it; it's just a McGuffin that might as well be a plain ole block of wood for all the scenario writers care.
So, I've now done two full seasons, Season #0 and Season #1. There are 11 (but the count is off because of Season #0) full seasons for First Edition Pathfinder. I haven't been able to get my hands on anything from Second Edition, and probably won't get around to it. But that leaves me plenty of little mini-modules to review here yet, assuming I don't lose interest like I did for a long stretch there earlier.
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