Tonight features a double post because I’m taking off tomorrow night… It’s Valentine’s Day!
(No I still haven’t received #4 if you were wondering)
The fifth Installment of Paizo’s Pathfinder series, Sins of the Savios sets out to recreate the high-level massive dungeon crawl experience of classic D&D adventures.
It features a multi-part dungeon based on the 6 major sins on which the ancient Thassilonian empire was built on. The adventure’s focus, as the title suggests, is ‘will the heroes indulge in their darker, dangerous side in order to achieve thier goals’. The adventure is for 4 level 12 PCs and should bring them to level 15.
The magazine is divided as such:
- Introduction by F. Wesley Schnieder: Where the Managing editor explains that each of the 6 issues of the 1st adventure path set out to answer a specific question about the ways of playing the d20 Fantasy game (Paizo can’t say Dungeons and Dragons anymore).
- Sins of the Savior by Stephen S. Greer. A 50 page adventure where the PC’s learn of a huge underground complex called Runeforge and investgate it. It features a fight against an old White Dragon and a Cage of lust under the whip of a Succubus! (Caveat, Mr. Greer co wrote the Seeds of Sehan campaign arc in Dungeon magazine, that I played through and as written, that was a rather ordinary and very deadly set of adventures… I fear this dungeoncrawl may be quite an ordeal for PCs)
- Magic of Thassilon (by too many to name), an 8 page treaty on Sin magic with sample spells of each ‘sin school’.
- Lamasthu by Sean K. Reyknold: A 10 page writeup of the Demon goddess of monsters, the Big Bad deity behind a lot of the evil NPC of this Adventure path.
- The monthly fluffy serving of the Pathfinder’s journal by Mike McArtor and James L. Sutter.
- The Beastiary that features a large multicolored bird (Meh), a Giant (With Spell-like abilties like Bestow Curse and Augury), a green flaming crone undead that throws gobs of range touch attack fire that deals 8d6, a Gargantuan massive Wolf/Mantis demon (Woot a gargantuan monster!!!), a Huge Outsider Moth of goodness and Dog-Snake bat-winged chimera demon.
The adventure features a pool that can, provided the player rolls adequately, fully recharge a magic Item… repeatedly.
I’ll let you mull that one over… 🙂
As usual, the magazine is topnotch.
Overall I’m pleased with the products and they are well worth the price, there’s always something useful to use in my games. However, I find that the adventures go all over the place in terms of game style and I’m not sure a huge Dungeon Crawl, so late in the Adventure Path will be well received by players who’ve invested a lot of time getting from level 1 to level 15.
How is this done? Is it successful?
I Haven’t read it in detail, but there is a dungeon for each of the Sins (We’re talking about the original biblical Sins here like Wrath, Pride, lust, etc).
Now the DM was encouraged to note down which sins each players favoured with their choices throughout the campaign.
Now in the dungeons, many traps, wards and Guardians become easier to deal (read ‘they get bonus to rolls’) with if a PC is attuned to the main sin a given part of the dungeon represents.
So, if a player character has already acted in generally sinful manner, that PC gets a bonus to rolls?
That sounds pretty weak incentive for turning to the dark side. Maybe it could work if the players knew about it from the start. Maybe.
Oh, I don’t know about that…
It sounds as though my halfling player will be getting bonuses on freaking everything in this dungeon. 😀
I was a subscriber to Dragon and Dungeon, and thoroughly enjoyed both.
While I understand how Paizo wants to push these as the successor, I couldn’t buy it. I bought the first one to give it a shot, but decided that while the quality was very very good, it didn’t fill that void that I had.
While the adventure and articles were very good, it just didn’t fit my needs. At this point in my DMing career, I am looking for shorter adventures, articles that I can utilize immediately, monsters/NPC’s I can steal, and comics to give me a chuckle. Yes, I can steal stuff from the adventure, maybe use some of the monsters, but there wasn’t enough to warrent my buying a subscription to replace the dungeon/dragon subscriptions I had. Most of the material was either too specific to the campaign world that I couldn’t use it, or not interesting enough to give me the desire to use it. In some cases I didn’t have the campaign available or the time available to utilize in my own gaming.
All that said, I really liked the quality of the pathfinder series. There are many gamers who could really utilize the content better than I. But ultimately for me it came down to a cost analysis, and the little value I could get wasn’t worth the cost.
Actually, I’m a bit sad about all of it. I wanted more. 🙁
I am finding much more pleasure from Kobold Quarterly. I can use a lot more of that immediately, and I enjoy the articles more. If they had a short adventure or two in each issue, or maybe just an encounter writeup, it would be about perfect.
But don’t get me started on the WOTC online incarnation of Dragon/Dungeon. The value of those is worth the cost at the moment, but I will have to make a hard decision when they actually start charging.
Whoops, that turned into more of a rant than I expected. Sorry ’bout that. Carry on with your regularly scheduled discussion.
All valid points Shadow 145 and I wouldn’t try to convince you otherwise…
But as you mention, if your DM-fu is pretty high, you can steal bits and pieces of each and adapt to your games. Thisletop in Pathfinder #1 is a great Goblin hideout for 3rd level PCs to invade… plus it has a creepy secret at the bottom.
But now is that worth 19$ to you? Maybe not.
I really should have a look at Kobold Quaterly… maybe I could convince my Nemesis to send me a review copy… 🙂