Giantslayer Player's Guide

In order to get an adventure path going, the players need characters, and ideally, they’ll create characters that are suited for the particular adventure path they’ll be undertaking—characters who come from the appropriate region(s), and have relevant skills and abilities. In the case of the Giantslayer Adventure Path, they should come from the town of Trunau in Belkzen or have a reason for being in Trunau, and they should be interested in fighting giants.

The Giantslayer Player’s Guide provides players with the tools they need to create such characters. And it does a reasonably good job. One of the difficulties adventure path player’s guides can encounter is providing enough information to let players create characters appropriate to the entire campaign—not just the opening—while not giving away too much about later parts of the campaign. In the case of Giantslayer, this means making it clear that the PCs will be fighting giants (it’s in the name of the adventure path, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to the players even though it may be to the characters) and that they will be travelling through the Mindspin Mountains.

Like most adventure path player’s guides, the Giantslayer Player’s Guide opens with a brief overview of the campaign. This includes some suggestions on how the characters might already know or come to know each other. It then moves on to some basic character tips, including suggested archetypes, animal companions, bloodlines, favoured enemies, and so on. Since it’s not mandatory that PCs come from Trunau (although it is strongly recommended that at least one come from Trunau), it also includes a section on possible nearby places of origin.

Giantslayer Poster Map Folio

I can never have too many maps in my games. Particularly the big ones. I love unfolding them, laying them out on the table, and pointing to one location or another. I love the context they provide for where things are happening in the game world. And sometimes, they’re just pretty to look at. As such, I appreciate the map folios that come out for each adventure path. They help me get my fix of pointing at maps. They’re also generally useful for any games set in the same region, not just the adventure paths in their name.

The Giantslayer Poster Map Folio is no exception. Like most other adventure path map folios, it comes with three fold-out poster maps, each showing a location relevant to the Giantslayer Adventure Path. The first is a map of Trunau, the town that the adventure path starts in, and where the player characters might call home. The second is a map of the Mindspin Mountains, the region where the adventure path expands into. Trunau is located towards the northeast corner, and from there, it’s possible to trace out the route the remainder of the adventure path takes. Both these maps are useful, functional, and attractive.

The third map in an adventure path map folio tends to be a more artistic piece. Often, it’s a map of a country or region done in the style of a map the characters in the game might actually purchase and use, rather than one designed for gaming purposes. In this folio, it is a map of Skirgaard, the location of the fourth adventure. In this case, it’s more than just a map; it’s also an illustration of the entire village. Skirgaard is a small enough location that it’s possible to not just show where each individual location is, but to also sketch out every location in detail, complete with people moving about and smoke rising from chimneys. The map shows the village from the vantage point of a little bit above and to the south. When PCs arrive at the village, GMs no longer need to describe what they see. Instead, they can just show the map and say, “This is what you see.” The map is breathtakingly beautiful to look at, and I think it’s probably my favourite of all the artistic maps in all the adventure path map folios.

The Giantslayer Poster Map Folio makes a great addition to a Giantslayer campaign, and to any campaign set in Trunau and/or the Mindspin Mountains.

Giantslayer - Shadow of the Storm Tyrant

Throughout the Giantslayer Adventure Path, the player characters have taken on the servants of Volstus, the Storm Tyrant and the forces they’ve been building in the Storm Tyrant’s name. In Shadow of the Storm Tyrant by Tito Leati, the PCs finally make their way to the Storm Tyrant’s cloud castle and take the battle directly to him.

I’ve had mixed opinions of the instalments of Giantslayer so far—some have been good, others not so good—but Shadow of the Storm Tyrant works well as the culminating adventure. It’s primarily a dungeon crawl, but has a good sense of urgency and variety that its predecessor, Anvil of Fire, is missing. It also has some epic-feeling encounters and combats appropriate for a high-level party, and it makes good use of its setting, which helps to turn what could have been just a bog-standard dungeon crawl into something much more unique.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Giantslayer - Anvil of Fire

Every adventure path has a low point. It’s pretty much unavoidable. There’s always going to be something that doesn’t work quite as well as everything. Of course, the hope is that any low points are still high—still good and fun, just not quite as high as the other points in the adventure path. If this situation is met, you have a winning adventure path. Unfortunately, Giantslayer isn’t an example of this. Even more unfortunately, its low point sinks especially low.

After Ice Tomb of the Giant Queen, I worried that the adventure path was becoming repetitive. Three instalments in a row all follow a very similar style where the PCs need to infiltrate much larger and potentially overpowering forces in order to achieve their goals. I worried that this repetition could start to bore the players. Anvil of Fire by Sean K Reynolds, the fifth part of the adventure path, is only superficially similar in this regard and mostly breaks from the pattern established in the last three parts. Unfortunately, it’s repetitive in an even worse way: with itself.

Anvil of Fire is one long dungeon crawl with battle after battle after battle—with almost every encounter being virtually identical to the one immediately before it. There is very little opportunity for pause (except if and when PCs decide to retreat from the dungeon to recover) and even less opportunity for interaction with NPCs in any way other than combat. There is so much of the same in this adventure, I can’t imagine any group of players not being completely bored by the end. Even the most avid “hack’n’slash” players will likely be dismayed at the lack of variety in the combats.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Giantslayer - Ice Tomb of the Giant Queen

Every adventure path has a particular theme and style to it, which identifies it and makes it distinguishable from other adventure paths. Iron Gods has technology and aliens, while Mummy’s Mask involves exploring ancient tombs and battling undead. Giantslayer, not surprisingly, is all about giants. Adventure paths also need a certain amount of variety, though, as too much of the same thing can start to feel stale. Stray too far from the core concept, however, and the different segments of the adventure path might no longer feel like a connected whole. It can be a fine line between how much “same” and how much “different” an adventure path needs to work.

With Giantslayer, I’m starting to feel that it’s leaning towards too much of the same. The fourth instalment, Ice Tomb of the Giant Queen by Jim Groves is structurally very similar to the two adventures immediately preceding it, The Hill Giant’s Pledge and Forge of the Giant God. That’s not to say that Ice Tomb is a bad adventure. It’s actually pretty good and there’s a lot I like about it, but in it, the PCs must undertake a mission of infiltration and sabotage just like they’ve done twice already. Of course, as they’re higher level now, they have more options for how to go about their mission and they face more powerful opponents, but in the end it still feels repetitive. It’s exacerbated by the fact that this is not just the third time overall, but the third time in a row.

That aside, there’s a lot that’s very good in Ice Tomb of the Giant Queen. It has a dynamic and vibrant setting that provides a good sandbox location for the adventure to take place in, and it has lots of interesting encounters to challenge a party of 10th-level characters and entertain their players. It also has an innovative system for determining how their giant opponents respond to the PCs’ actions.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Giantslayer - Forge of the Giant God

I began reading Forge of the Giant God (the third part of the Giantslayer Adventure Path) by Tim Hitchcock about a year ago, and got through roughly half of it. I didn’t stop because I disliked it; it was just the state my life was in at the time (see this post for details). Over the next several months, I occasionally went back to it and got through a little bit more of it each time. I thought I eventually made it all the way through, though when I came back to it last week with the intention of reviewing it, I discovered a bookmark (one I thought I’d misplaced) about three quarters of the way through. Assuming I was wrong about finishing it, I picked up reading from that spot.

And was thoroughly confused.

Some things seemed familiar as though I’d read them before and others seemed completely new. More importantly though, I realised I really didn’t have a good enough recall of even the earlier parts of the adventure I knew for a fact I had previously read. This served as a pretty good example of why you should never spread out the reading of something like this over a year with months-long breaks. So I decided to do what I should have done as soon as I picked it up again last week, and that was to reread the entire thing beginning to end.

And I’m glad I did. I came away from it with a higher opinion of the adventure than I had before. I remember previously really liking the opening section of the adventure and disliking the rest. However, this time around, I liked it more. I do still think there are some issues, but they don’t bother me as much they did. The adventure is a little too similar to the previous adventure, The Hill Giant’s Pledge, in that both involve sneaking into a similar giant-controlled location (and The Hill Giant’s Pledge does it better). Following up one adventure with another that does virtually the same thing runs the risk of making things stale for the players. However, there are things to make this adventure more unique, and good GMs should be able to make it into a memorable experience.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Giantslayer - The Hill Giant's Pledge

One thing I really like is when adventures provide dynamic locations—places that aren’t always exactly the same no matter when the PCs arrive. The monsters and NPCs move around and interact with themselves, and not just with the PCs. They are places that make the PCs feel like part of a living world, even if that world is full of enemies that the PCs must fight.

Of course, good gamemasters can make any adventure site be this way, but some adventures are better than others at assisting GMs in this regard. Just from reading the text, the locations come alive, full of characters with motivations causing things to happen. The second part of the Giantslayer Adventure Path, The Hill Giant’s Pledge by Larry Wilhelm is such an adventure. It contains a wide assortment of interesting NPCs (both villains and allies), each with fairly detailed back-stories and motivations. It makes for a wonderfully dynamic adventure that can play out in a multitude of different ways depending on what the PCs do. There are a couple of inconsistencies here and there that don’t work quite so well, but on the whole, it’s a very good continuation of the adventure path.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Iron Gods Poster Map Folio

Like most other map folios, the Iron Gods Poster Map Folio comes with three full-colour poster maps suitable for use with the Iron Gods Adventure Path, but also usable with other campaigns set in Numeria.

There is a map of Numeria itself. As is standard for country maps in these folios, it is done in the style of a map the PCs might actually use in-world and can be freely shown to players. It is beautifully illustrated with pictures of monsters and very setting-appropriate robots. I am also happy to say that, unlike the map of Osirion in the Mummy’s Mask Poster Map Folio, this one has labels of cities, towns, and other major landmarks like Silver Mount. This makes it much more useful in actual play and not just something pretty to look at.

The other two maps detail Starfall, the capital city of Numeria, and Torch, the town Iron Gods begins in. The map of Starfall is rather uniform in colour, (mostly shades of brown) making it less interesting to look at, but it remains useful for gameplay. There is a lot of brown on the map of Torch as well, but the town’s smaller size means more variation and detail can be included, making it not quite so uniform as Starfall.

Overall, the maps are definitely worth it for any campaign set in, or passing through Numeria.

Giantslayer - Battle of Bloodmarch Hill

Giants are amongst the most iconic fantasy monsters. Indeed, one of the most famous Dungeons & Dragons adventures of all time is Against the Giants, published in 1981. It is a compilation of three shorter adventures originally published in 1978. All three were amongst the first adventures ever published for the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Since then, giants have gone on to feature as antagonists in many fantasy roleplaying adventures.

Pathfinder has been no exception in this regard. Giants feature as significant antagonists in several parts of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path, for example. And it’s probably no surprise that giants feature in the Giantslayer Adventure Path as well, which begins with Battle of Bloodmarch Hill by Patrick Renie. This opening adventure offers an engaging mystery for the player characters to solve, and is a strong beginning to the adventure path as a whole.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Curse of the Crimson Throne

Over the years, Paizo has published a significant number of adventure paths. The current one, Strange Aeons, is in fact the nineteenth (not including the three published in Dungeon Magazine before Pathfinder Adventure Path was born), and there will likely be many more in the years to come. Yet one of the most memorable is also one of the earliest: Curse of the Crimson Throne. Originally published in Pathfinder Adventure Path Volumes 7 through 12 in 2008, it has gone on to gain a reputation as one of the best—and with good reason.

One of the things that always stood out for me with Crimson Throne was its fully realised setting and cast of vibrant NPCs who remained relevant throughout the entire adventure path. The detail simply made it come alive. Indeed, I have always considered it one of the more dramatic adventure paths. I could imagine cinematic scenes playing out in my head as I read it—not that such things never happened with other adventure paths, but somehow this was just a little more so with Crimson Throne. The adventure path did have its faults, but the whole certainly rose above them.

However, one thing that has made Curse of the Crimson Throne a little less accessible is that the game system it was written for has changed in the years since it was released. In fact, the system changed the very next year with the release of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, where Crimson Throne was written for the 3.5 Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Conversions between the two systems are not particularly difficult, but they can take a bit of time, which can be a bit of a turn-off for someone without the necessary time and wanting an adventure they can use with minimal adjustment.

Three years ago, another of the very early and popular adventure paths, Rise of the Runelords was re-released in an updated hardcover compilation. This was to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Paizo as a company and the fifth anniversary of the Pathfinder name. The anniversary edition of Runelords updated the adventure path to the Pathfinder rules and also took the opportunity to expand it slightly and work out kinks in the original product.

It was perhaps inevitable that Curse of the Crimson Throne would one day also receive a similar treatment. There’s no special anniversary to celebrate this year, but does there really need to be? Much like its Runelords predecessor, the new hardcover compilation of Crimson Throne updates the adventure path to Pathfinder rules and also expands on the story where beneficial and streamlines in other areas. It also takes advantage of the most recent rules supplements, making use of newer monsters, classes, and feats where appropriate.

At nearly 500 pages in length, it is actually a substantially larger tome than the hardcover Runelords (a good 50 pages or so longer), and its extra length is certainly put to good use. Indeed, it manages to make one of the best adventure paths even better.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Mummy's Mask Player's Guide

Note: I recently noticed that I missed this one back when I reviewed the adventures in Mummy's Mask. I started this review around the time that I had to disappear for a while due to overwork. Since the book only exists in PDF form and doesn't have a physical copy (unless you print it out yourself), it's never been on my “to review” shelf, and so I completely forgot that I had never finished and posted it. At any rate, I have now finished it and so here it is.

One thing that has often (perhaps surprisingly) varied in adventure path Player's Guides is how much direct advice they give on character creation. Some offer only brief descriptions of how each character class might fit in. Others go into more detail, offering suggestions on specific feats, spells, skills, and other abilities that would work well for their particular adventure paths. The Mummy's Mask Player's Guide is one of these more detailed ones, spending several pages on suggested options for characters.

I like the layout chosen for this as well. Instead of going through classes in alphabetical order, it looks at categories, such as suggested archetypes, animal companions, favoured enemies, and so on. It also covers the languages that will be useful, common religions, and even suggestions for skills, feats, and traits beyond the campaign traits that are introduced later in the book. Another very useful inclusion is some suggested gear to purchase at character creation. Since much of the first adventure will involve searching through ancient tombs and buildings, this includes the types of things that are useful in dungeon crawling, such as candles, chalk, magnifying glasses, and rope. Players would be wise to take note of what's on the list and try to acquire as much of it as they can.

Iron Gods Player's Guide

The Iron Gods Adventure Path is one of the more experimental adventure paths, in that it deals with aliens and technology in a fantasy world. In this way, one might expect that its Player's Guide would have to introduce a lot of new rules material to cover this. However, the adventure path is also about the player characters encountering technology gradually. They don't start in possession of it, but learn of it through play. As such, the Player's Guide actually has a bit of an easier job than those that do need to include many add-on rules.

All things considered, the Iron Gods Player's Guide does a very good job of setting the scene for the players and preparing them for what is to come. It gives just enough information to help them create characters that will fit the adventure path, without giving away too many spoilers of what will happen during it. The first part of the book contains a quite extensive section on “Character Tips”, including archetype suggestions, appropriate animal companions, favoured enemies, languages, and so on. There is also a sidebar on where GMs and players can go for additional information pertinent to the adventure path (books like the Technology Guide, People of the River, and Numeria, Land of Fallen Stars).

Iron Gods - The Divinity Drive

The final instalment of an adventure path brings with it high expectations. Not only does it need to present an enjoyable high-level adventure (something that can be difficult on its own), but it must also bring together all the threads of the previous five adventures to a satisfying conclusion, while accounting for the myriad different things different groups of player characters might have done along the way. All things considered, it's a rather monumental task, one that may not actually be possible to do perfectly. As such, it's perhaps not surprising that the final instalments of many adventure paths often don't seem quite as good as the instalments that came before them. They can never quite reach those lofty expectations.

The Divinity Drive by Crystal Frasier does a better job than many of reaching those unreachable goals. It's a good adventure in its own right and, as the finale of Iron Gods, it provides a suitably climactic resolution, as the player characters (hopefully) save the world from a unique and rather terrifying threat. That said, it is a surprisingly linear adventure compared to how open-ended most of Iron Gods has been (with The Choking Tower being an exception). It also comes across as something of a lengthy combat-fest, with only limited opportunity for diplomacy and roleplay. There are fewer shades of grey than in the other adventures; enemies are enemies and allies are...rare. Its more linear nature also means that it makes a number of assumptions about how the PCs have progressed through the previous adventures, and gives gamemasters little to no guidance on what to do if things have progressed differently. This is particularly unfortunate in such an open-ended adventure path.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Iron Gods - Palace of Fallen Stars

One of the things that has really struck me about the Iron Gods Adventure Path is how PC-driven it is. A lot of adventures and adventure paths follow the model where an NPC or group of NPCs hires the PCs or otherwise sets them on their path. In an adventure path, these NPCs often continue to reappear from one instalment to the next, helping to guide the PCs to their next destination. Of course, this isn't universally true and the degree to which it occurs varies from one adventure or AP to another. However, it tends to be true to some extent. Alternatively, various events will occur that push or direct PCs along a certain course of action.

With Iron Gods, however, the PCs have had to be mostly self-motivating. They still encounter NPC allies, of course, but these allies don't really direct the PCs in any way. Fires of Creation has an initial set-up to draw the PCs in, but after that, they're pretty much on their own. Each instalment relies on the PCs deciding on their own to head into the next. This is particularly true of Lords of Rust and Valley of the Brain Collectors, but even The Choking Tower, the least sandboxy of this AP so far, still relies on the PCs' self-motivation to get started. The fifth instalment, Palace of Fallen Stars by Tim Hitchcock is also no exception. Of course, by this point, the PCs are probably quite invested in seeing things through to the very end. Motivating themselves shouldn't be that difficult.

Like Lords of Rust and Valley of the Brain Collectors before it, Palace of Fallen Stars is very much a sandbox adventure. How things play out is almost entirely dependent on the actions of the PCs, from the order of events, to their results, to which NPCs live and which die. It's even technically possible to bypass this adventure and jump to the sixth one before coming back and completing this one (albeit, that way would likely be considerably deadlier). The text does a good job of accounting for the many different possibilities and for how NPCs might react, while never forcing any particular path. All in all, it makes for a very good adventure, one that's going to be very different for every group that plays it.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Iron Gods - Valley of the Brain Collectors

Brain collectors have always been an iconic Dungeons & Dragons monster to me, although they're probably not amongst the first few monsters that spring to most people's minds when they think of the game. Nevertheless, they have been around a long time, first appearing way back in X2: Castle Amber, one of my favourite adventures from my childhood. I must have run that adventure fifty times back in the day. If I recall correctly, there is only one brain collector in Castle Amber and, like most monsters in that adventure, its appearance is rather random. Nevertheless, it made an impression on my young mind—an impression that has stayed with me ever since.

Castle Amber was an adventure for the Expert Rules set of the “Basic” Dungeons & Dragons game, back in the day when there were two separate games: Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (“Basic” is a misnomer as it only technically refers to the first of what would eventually become five sets of rules, yet many people persisted in calling the entire game “Basic D&D”). It wasn't until the Mystara Monstrous Compendium was published that brain collectors first appeared in AD&D (when the Mystara setting was updated from a D&D setting to an AD&D setting). After that, brain collectors eventually showed up in the more generic Monster Manuals for 3rd Edition, even appearing as an epic version in the Epic Levels Handbook. Brain collectors first showed up in Pathfinder in Bestiary 2, under their actual race name which has tagged along with them since Castle Amber: neh-thalggus.

My fascination with brain collectors is such that any adventure with them in the title is likely to grab my attention. Thus, ever since Valley of the Brain Collectors was announced, I've been eager to reach and read this instalment of the Iron Gods Adventure Path. Yet obviously, it takes more than an appearance of a neh-thalggu or two to make an adventure good and fun. Indeed, brain collectors never seem to be used well or serve much purpose in adventures I've seen them in. The fact is, while I do consider Castle Amber to be a good adventure, it's not its random selection of monsters, including the brain collector, that make it so.

In my last couple of reviews for Iron Gods, I've commented on the important role setting plays in any adventure. With its science fiction trappings, Iron Gods relies a great deal on setting to impart its flavour. Lords of Rust uses its setting to particularly great effect, while The Choking Tower does not do as good a job. Valley of the Brain Collectors has the most contained setting of all the adventures in Iron Gods so far, and that works to this particular adventure's benefit. It is also the most alien of the locations the PCs have visited so far, but it comes alive almost as well as Lords of Rust's setting does, with well-developed characters who have well-developed, if alien, motivations. And while it is an adventure that relies almost entirely on site-based encounters, the denizens encountered never come across as if they have just been sitting in one spot waiting for the player characters to arrive to fight them—a problem that many site-based and dungeon crawl adventures don't succeed in overcoming. Instead, the denizens of this valley have relationships—both allied and antagonistic—and adjust to the events around them. In short, the setting of Valley of the Brain Collectors feels actually lived in, making Valley a very good adventure indeed.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Iron Gods - The Choking Tower

There is a downside to every adventure path being the same length. While having six adventures per adventure path creates a consistency so that players and gamemasters know what to expect, it also forces every story into a predefined length whether the story really works at that length or not. This is certainly not an uncommon problem. Television programmes have to fit every episode to set number of minutes and seasons tend to run the same number of episodes. It's ultimately something of an unavoidable problem, but it can lead to individual instalments feeling rushed or like filler.

The Choking Tower by Ron Lundeen feels a lot like filler. Of course, as it's only the third part of Iron Gods and I haven't read the remaining three volumes, it's hard to judge the adventure path as a whole, but this adventure doesn't seem to add a lot to what we've had so far. While its overall goal is important to the rest of the adventure path, the events of the adventure itself are rather peripheral.

The Choking Tower is certainly not a bad adventure. It will likely provide hours of entertainment for any group. But there's also little about the adventure that really stands out. On the whole, it's run-of-the-mill, with a fairly linear plot and NPCs who are mostly forgettable (although the main villain is a notable exception). It also lacks the vibrant setting of its immediate predecessor, presenting instead a setting that is pretty standard despite its science fiction trappings.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Iron Gods - Lords of Rust

Setting is an important part of any roleplaying campaign. Different people may like different levels of detail, but there is always, at the very least, an implied setting, a place where everything is happening—even if it's just the dungeon the characters are currently adventuring in. Setting grounds the characters in a certain reality. It creates certain expectations and lays down certain limits. It helps define where the characters come from, who they are, where they're going, and what they want. Generally, a well-defined and memorable setting paves the way for memorable adventures.

Adventures can use settings in different ways. Sometimes, the setting is little more than window-dressing, with little effect on the adventure itself. It might also be a relatively generic setting, one that can be easily modified or inserted into another more detailed setting. It's important that there be adventures like this. Gamemasters often need adventures that they can grab on a moment's notice and use with little to no adjustment. These adventures need to fit in regardless of the setting any particular GM needs.

But sometimes, adventures are tied much more closely to their setting, to the point that the adventure really couldn't happen anywhere else—not without some major changes, at any rate. Obviously, adventures like this will only work if the GM is using the particular setting, and they're not the sort a GM can just grab at a moment's notice. They need to be a planned part of the campaign. Yet, these adventures are often amongst the best and most memorable of adventures. That's not to say adventures with a more generic setting can't be great and memorable—just that those with a highly detailed setting enjoy a bit of an edge in the race.

Lords of Rust by Nicolas Logue, the second part of Iron Gods is an adventure where the setting is all important. It is a sandbox adventure in pretty much the truest sense of the term (something that is difficult to do in an adventure path). The player characters can pretty much proceed however they want and the setting is almost entirely what drives the action. A poorly detailed setting could break the whole adventure. But this adventure doesn't have a poorly detailed setting. Instead, it has one of the most memorable settings I've seen in a fantasy RPG adventure, and it makes for what will likely be an extremely memorable adventure for any group of players.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Iron Gods - Fires of Creation

Despite the fact that the science fiction and fantasy genres are often grouped together and share the same fans, many people react quite negatively to mixing the two in any way. The exact lines between the two are somewhat blurred, but there do appear to be a few main points of delineation: guns and any devices that use any technology more advanced than the simplest clockwork. The moment any of these show up, it's no longer fantasy. Of course, even that line is blurred. No one bats an eye at the presence of guns in Pirates of the Caribbean, which is clearly fantasy, but put a gun in a sword-and-sorcery piece (like a Pathfinder game) and suddenly, it's ruining the fantasy.

To be fair, maybe it is. With both science fiction and fantasy, there need to be certain rules that are followed that keep things consistent. Just because there is magic in the world doesn't mean that literally anything can happen. That magic still operates (or should operate) under its own rules, even though those rules are different from the rules of the real world. Suspension of disbelief only goes so far, and will break if there isn't a minimum level of consistency to how things work. So, a gun in a fantasy world may well break its verisimilitude, depending on just what the rules of that fantasy world are (and those rules can be physical laws, magical laws, social, cultural, and so on).

In a Pathfinder game, the game rules themselves (on a meta-level) form a significant part of how the in-world rules work. Characters can manage incredible feats and take punishment well beyond what anyone in the real world can take, but this becomes an accepted and consistent part of the world. The rules of the game do include rules for guns (although not in the Core Rulebook, but added on later) that work alongside the rules for other weapons and combat. The Golarion world is something of a “kitchen sink” setting, meaning it throws in a little bit of just about everything. If you can think of something that has any kind of fantastical connotation, then you can probably find it somewhere on Golarion or the wider Pathfinder Campaign Setting that it is part of. This approach is not without potential peril. Throwing in a little bit of everything can lead to problems with consistency that can break suspension of disbelief. Yet, while there are certainly inconsistencies in the Pathfinder Campaign Setting, for the most part, there is enough consistency to maintain it. Yes, there are guns and androids and spaceships, but the setting was built from the ground up to contain those things and so they do fit pretty well.

Of course, personal preference plays a huge role in all this. Some people just don't like technology in their fantasy games regardless of any other consideration, and that's fine. I, personally, have always enjoyed mixing genres and playing against expectations, so I'm probably easier to convince that androids in a sword-and-sorcery setting work. Heck, I'm a fan of Doctor Who, which frequently throws the whole consistency thing out the window (Rules? Who needs rules?), so who am I to talk, really?

I state all this as a preamble to discussing Fires of Creation, the first part of the Iron Gods Adventure Path, which fully embraces the guns, androids, and spaceships part of the campaign setting. This is not the first appearance of such elements (The Frozen Stars from Reign of Winter takes place on another planet, for example), but it is the first to make them a significant focus. As such, it's not an adventure path that will necessarily appeal to people who don't like to mix science fiction and fantasy. However, for those who do, or for those willing to give it a try, Fires of Creation makes a great starting point. It's a somewhat “sandboxy” adventure that introduces standard fantasy player characters to a wider world of technology and science fiction.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Mummy's Mask - Pyramid of the Sky Pharaoh

Every adventure path has a theme linking its individual parts. This theme helps set the feel for the adventure path, influences its overall goal, and plays a role in the kinds of encounters the player characters have along the way. In Wrath of the Righteous, the theme is fighting demons and closing the Worldwound. Shattered Star's theme involves dungeon crawling in order to find the pieces of an important artifact, and Jade Regent's involves travelling across the world. Mummy's Mask's theme is that of Ancient Egypt (Osirian), tombs, and undead. Yet despite the common theme linking an adventure path, there is always a certain amount of variety. The adventures of Mummy's Mask have involved exploring ancient tombs and buildings, protecting a city from an undead incursion, researching in ancient libraries, and mingling with nobility. While an adventure path's theme provides unity, the variety of adventures keeps things fresh and avoids player boredom from doing the same thing over and over again. It is for this reason that I'm rather surprised to see two such similar adventures show up back-to-back as the final two instalments of Mummy's Mask.

In many ways, Pyramid of the Sky Pharaoh by Mike Shel feels like the same adventure as The Slave Trenches of Hakotep. Sure, the location is changed and the specific monsters and villains to fight are different, but the overall approaches to both adventures are identical. Both involve dungeon crawls with PCs overcoming difficult traps and dangerous monsters in order to solve a specific puzzle and reach their goal. To make matters worse, Pyramid doesn't really handle itself any better than Slave Trenches, and anyone who has read my review of that adventure (linked above) knows that I was not very impressed by it. This makes the two concluding adventures of the adventure path into one extended slog through encounter after encounter with monsters and villains that serve no other purpose than to sit in one spot until the PCs arrive to kill them—adventures in which the villains take no active roles at all other than to wait for their demise. On the plus side, I absolutely love one of the support articles, and the fiction that has been running through the entire adventure path (reviewed at the end of this review) is the best I've read in Pathfinder Adventure Path so far.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Mummy's Mask - The Slave Trenches of Hakotep

I opened my review of the fourth segment of Mummy's Mask, Secrets of the Sphinx with a comment about how I'm not a big fan of dungeon crawls. I did that in order to set up a contrast with the fact that I actually really like Secrets of the Sphinx—enough to declare it a “dungeon crawl done well.” Conversely, I'm opening this review with a reminder of it because the next segment, The Slave Trenches of Hakotep by Michael Kortes, is a pretty good example of why I'm not a fan of dungeon crawls.

While there are aspects of the adventure that I like (including one great NPC), overall The Slave Trenches of Hakotep is a long slog through a succession of dungeons, each filled with traps and monsters, and many of them forming pieces in an overall puzzle for the PCs to put together. Apart from that one NPC, there's very little opportunity for roleplaying interactions, and very little to keep the adventure spiced up and moving along. It will take many sessions to play through, and most of those session will start to feel like the same thing over and over again—and that's not good.

SPOILERS FOLLOW