Pathfinder: the Lowdown

[virgil]

Out of the campaign setting, the following nations might get the White Hat title;

• Andoran (NG): They do lots of guerilla warfare against the slave trade and have it as an active goal to transform the world to their culture, giving off an America vibe IMO
• Kyonin (CG): The elven nation, with all of its general 'not doing anything' philosophy you'd expect
• Lastwall (LG): The elven nation has a larger population than this nation, and their pile of crusaders are barely enough to keep Ustalav & Belkzen from wiping them off the face of the map
• Mendev (LG): A good sized nation characterized as a natural breeding ground for paladins, but all their nation can really do is counter the Worldwound (a massive chasm that constantly spews out fiends) enough for it not to expand (which it's recently done)
• Nirmathas (CG): A nation of Robins of Loxly, they're still at war with Cheliax to keep their independence (of living in the woods...), and are about the size of Lastwall; they only seem to have the 'good' moniker because they're fighting Cheliax

So, out of the five good-aligned nations, one does nothing, three are at war for survival, and one's a little on the imperialistic side.

And as an additional note, none of the nations that are Neutral (Chaotic or Lawful) could really be white hats. They're largely self-serving and just sort of there. Shackles is a literal nation of pirates, and it's only CN, so take from that what you will. Some of the mercantile nations might actually be good in a more real sense, but none really care about the reduction of suffering per se; if a group wants to make more than their immediate surroundings a better place (like a good temple that will heal sick people that walk by), then they are fighting, likely in Mendev.

[hogarth]

Actually, it sounds like you're complaining about two (or three) different (but equally valid) problems under the heading of "grimdark":

• Sigil-style power-level-wanking: "Having a city full of superpowerful NPCs that never seem to do anything interesting is totally bad-ass and makes perfect sense!" {(a) There's no accounting for taste and (b) no, it doesn't.}
• Thomas Covenant-style ick-factor-wanking: "A plain ogre is boring, but a baby-raping baby-eating ogre is awesome, and forcing the PCs to cooperate with a BRBEO is super-awesome!" {Uh, no.}

First can be (and is, for Golarion) a separate problem from the second, but second is practucally always accompanies by the first. Otherwise PCs can just stab BRBEO and call it a day.

Well, it's relative. At level 1, you might be railroaded into sucking up to a crimelord, whereas at level 12 you're railroaded into sucking up to a pit fiend (or whatever). As long as the bad guy is way better than the PCs, the absolute power level doesn't have to be high.

And possibly:

• Elric-style world-is-doomed-wanking: "Having tons of bad guys and very few good guys is cool!" {(a) Again, it's a matter of taste and (b) it's not clear to me that that's the case with Paizo's campaign setting.}

I don't know, is there at least one White Hat country in the setting to counterbalance all the devil worshippers and cenobite wannabes (who conveniently benefit from what you described as the problem #1) and various pure evil races? I'm mostly familiar with the setting through APs, and I don't remember any.

I'm sure if Paizo came out with an adventure path for evil PCs (unlikely, but for the sake of argument let's say they did), they'd suddenly pull a bunch of good-aligned enemies out of their collective ass, just like they did with drow and serpentfolk. ("Hey look! Here's a whole city of noble djinn that we totally forgot to mention. They were just hiding on a mountain/in a desert/in a forest/etc.")

[K]

The reason that Pathfinder is so grimdark is Eric Mona. If you doubt that, look up old issues of Dungeon and see his editorial on how he giggled like a little girl when the Book of Vile Darkness came out.

[magnuskn]

Eh, maybe it's because I haven't read Rise of the Runelords ( due to someone else maybe wanting to GM it ), but what else I've read is not that more grimdark than some of what Greenwood wrote for the FR.

[Roy]

Eh, maybe it's because I haven't read Rise of the Runelords ( due to someone else maybe wanting to GM it ), but what else I've read is not that more grimdark than some of what Greenwood wrote for the FR.

I'll just stand over here.

*steps aside*



You mentioned the Campaign Setting That Shall Not Be Named on the Den. Fire and Brimstone will rain for your hubris.

[Kobajagrande]

Am I missing anything?

The point of Thomas Covenant, apparently

[Windjammer]

The Den will love this.

Remember Jason Bulmahn's philosophy of running playtests? How number crunching is worthless without testing a class/feat/spell in your very own game?

Well, enter his colleague at Paizo. From a recent editorial of a "Council of Thieves" adventure:

My name is James Sutter, and I have never played in an epic-level game. In fact, I’ve never even played in a high-level game. My knowledge of prestige classes is strictly academic. As far as I can recall at the moment, the highest-level character I’ve ever played only made it to 7th level before the GM, Jason Bulmahn, took him out in a blaze of glory. Actually, since I needed to drop out of the game for scheduling reasons, Jason and I secretly arranged in advance for that session’s villain to be especially deadly and focus his attacks on me, the better to give me a worthy death scene. The unfeigned howls of despair from the other party members as I sacrificed myself to save the rest of them made it one of the most fun sessions I’ve ever played, and is one of the reasons I remain a fan of character death. As a GM, I’ve had a bit more experience with the upper end of things, with my highest-level game taking a party of seven characters (down from the original nine) up through 15th level in the Savage Tide Adventure Path, finishing up with an epic firefight featuring an aspect of Demogorgon and numerous broadside laser barrages from a squadron of lantern archons. All of which is to say that my personal experience with high- and epic-level play is nil, nada, and squat. Sure, I’ve developed and edited high-level adventures—dozens of them. I’ve built prestige classes and high-level monsters, and helped ensure they were balanced. But somehow I’ve never dived in and tried playing with the big toys myself. As I suspect is the case with many folks hiding such holes in their experience, the reasons for this are many and varied.

There you have it.

I have long suspected that Paizo authors are so terribly busy writing and developing stuff, that they don't get much room for playing their own stuff, or stuff at all. To this day, their adventures will place arcane casters on their own in dungeon rooms 3x3 squares large. It's a design error so stupid that a second-time DM aged 10 would not do it. Paizo does. Perhaps for flavour reason. But my impression, even of their more recent stuff (like Council of Thieves) really is that they don't run adventures at the table at all.

The real reason I bring this up is another, though. I always thought Bulmahn had a point as regards people who are talking about stuff at levels they've NEVER experienced at play. However, for people (like some Denners) who have had plenty of high level experience, I regard that as sufficient grounding to look at another 5th level spell, an advanced prestige class, or what have you, and say it's bollocks.

[virgil]

Ugh, Council of Thieves was a freakin' nightmare at the end there. The encounters were alright for the first half, except for the occasional extreme issue like vampires or thinking tiny CR 1 golems could even think about doing hit-and-run anything against a level 6 party.

In the second half of the AP, there were routine attacks of half a dozen level 4 rogue NPCs all the way up to level 12, though they did get a level 11 assassin to join them in the end. After the third fight, I excised them from the damn campaign because they were so useless and time consuming.

At least three NPCs has four to six levels of aristocrat (a rogue, a cleric, and a fighter) without any accommodation with CR. I assure you, a cleric 6/aristocrat 6 IS NOT a CR 11 threat where you include long-term tactics and crap like "will attempt to flee if reduced to 10hp or less."

The AP's BBEG (vs lvl 12 party)? A cambion duelist; you remember that shitty PrC, right? The one Paizo saw in their infinite wisdom to nerf. His 'cohort' was a hamatula with 7 levels of cleric. This was listed as an EL 15 encounter, so the party was given lots of warning that it's going to happen; despite the fact that with warning, they can easily prevent the signal from being given to the brain-dead population to summon reinforcements, but the AP assumes the party doesn't do this and only describes ONE way to fight the BBEG...while his entire army is within sight and so focused on playing pretend to not notice their boss getting attack for at least four or five rounds. I'm not even told what the army does when the BBEG's killed, they're never mentioned again.

That last adventure was crap, and while I could've fixed it without it looking slap-dash, Paizo doesn't deserve it. If I did, my Paizo-lovin' players would associate the fun with Paizo (ignoring that I had to excise Paizo). Besides, it was part of their original request for me to run Pathfinder and they were less than interested in an adventure that I designed.

[FatR]

Council of Thieves is just crap on every level, compared even to every other Paizo AP.

But it is true that their high-level adventures tend to make little sense. Little consideration for approaches other than kicking the door in, or even standard uses of high-level spells. Rubber band world, leading to random-ass nobodies being level 9001. Enemies without any sort of emergency plans or reaction script extending past their room. Including BBEGs, who all too often are too busy warming their trones to actually do something before PC go to stab them. Strong reluctance to let PCs shine, change stuff, become famous and important - generally this is not supposed to happen before the adventure path's end.

[TOZ]

This is something comical I found on Paizo's homebrew forum.

[Koumei]

Little consideration for approaches other than kicking the door in,

That's the way you do these things, kick logic out and do the impossible! That's just how we roll!

...come to think of it, Kamina Bro is what high-level fighters should be like.

[magnuskn]

Council of Thieves is just crap on every level, compared even to every other Paizo AP.

Second Darkness also gets a bad rep.

[Fuchs]

I use the APs to get some (at times very basic) story inspiration/background, then translate it to my campaign. I don't use 99% of the combat encounters.

[Blicero]

Has anyone played the adventurepaths they put out before Pathfinder?

I seem to recall hearing that Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide weren't all that bad.

[Juton]

Has anyone played the adventurepaths they put out before Pathfinder?

I seem to recall hearing that Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide weren't all that bad.

The Age of Worms has a reputation for being very difficult, Savage Tide has a reputation for being kind of random. I've played in Shackled City a number of times but never finished, it's a good AP, and it has enough variety to feel like quintessential D&D. It's my favourite pre-packaged adventure path and I'd really like another stab at it before finishing uni.

[TheWorid]

...come to think of it, Kamina Bro is what high-level fighters should be like.

Puppet fetishists?

[TOZ]

I've run Shackled City up to the second to last chapter and have a new group playing it a second time. The hardcover is probably one of the best purchases for the price, especially after the price dropped to $30.

That being said, it is painfully obvious that the module authors were writing individual adventures that had a few common elements using the same NPCs. There are threads that connect the overall story, but transitioning from each chapter is rough. The villians don't get enough foreshadowing, and the players never get an idea what is going on until after it is over. The campaign end boss is a Giant Space Flea From Nowhere for the most part. The good NPCs look hilariously incompetent with how they sit there and never notice anything going on, waiting for the PCs to do all the work.

The Midas touch that turns it to gold is the community material archived at the RPGenius. A lot of people posted story and character tweaks from their own games that ease the transitions from chapter to chapter as well as make the villians more consistant and believable. I'm using it the second time around and by the fourth chapter the party has pieced together the framework of the villian's plot and are much more involved and motivated.

For those who have no problem writing up a campaign, it's probably not worth the effort of reading the book and looking up everything on the RPGenius. For me, being my first campaign, it took the heaviest part of DMing off my shoulders.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Somebody mentioned Rise of the Runelords. I'd actually like to ask for advice about a heavily, heavily modified version of it I'm running. I am not going to get a Paizo forum account if I can avoid it.

The basic premise of Rise of the Runelords is that there's 7 evil archmages slowly waking up and they want to re-establish their old empire. I cut out the stupid "sin magic" and replaced the 7 evil archmages with 7 morally ambiguous dragons. Most of the party works for the gold dragon that woke up first (just finished a quest to wake up the second dragon), and the continually expanding "Dragon Empire" has access to all kinds of crazy magitek stuff. However, it already contains some rebellious characters unhappy with the status quo for one reason or another and is likely to face some major diplomatic challenges once it comes to the attention of other major powers.

So far, the party knows about the Dragon Emperor, who took over a hobgoblin khanate based around the volcano he'd been sleeping and turned it into a cross between Rokugan and 40K Tau (this started as a joke nation), and Volcaetus, the red dragon they woke up but did not save from a plot by Dragon Empire rebels to drain his power so he would be more reliant on his tiny men and hopefully thus less of a jerk. The jury is out, since Volcaetus is using the magic of his volcano to make a army of Dominions 3 style Abysians to conquer the nearby regions.

------------

So, my questions for the Den. First, what should serving as elite agents of new, fast-growing political powers backed by ~level 12-14 dragons look like when the PCs are swanning around in their home territories? Things are looking pretty easy right now for the Dragon Empire PCs, any ideas for interesting adventures? What should I roleplay people in a town like when one guy brings in an army of lava men and demands that they kneel before ZodVolcaetus?

Second (bunch of smaller questions), what political powers are near Varisia and how should they react to this sudden shift in the balance of power? Are any lame enough that I should alter them? What sorts of cool jobs can you think of for the PCs to do once things get out of easy mode and war with a real nation looms as a distinct possibility? Should I do a timeskip forward to skip past the conquest of Varisia if this looks like it will be relatively uneventful?

----

Akula is a player in this game. He may chime in.

[Lich-Loved]

Has anyone played the adventurepaths they put out before Pathfinder?

I seem to recall hearing that Shackled City, Age of Worms, and Savage Tide weren't all that bad.

I am getting ready to finish up the Age of Worms (AoW). I run weekly for 4-5 hours with a group of 6 players, 4 of which are core casters. At least a couple of them are very experienced players with 30+ years under their belts. It has taken just under 2 years to get to this point and we anticipate it taking almost exactly 2 years start to finish. The group should finish at 19th, maybe 20th level.

Yes, some of the encounters are very hard and some of the modules are very very difficult. A killer GM *could* easily wipe the party out if he tried in these tougher modules. It takes a fair amount of skill to present the material in such a way as to push the characters without splattering them. Many times it is either all or nothing - if the DM pushes it, the party will wipe, but if the DM does not push it, the party steamrolls the encounter.

Overall, the story is good and hangs together pretty well, but it has a few gaping plot holes I had to close; at least one module is wholly unnecessary and more could be cut if desired. My biggest complaint though is that the authors really do not seem to understand the power of high-level casters. To wit:

1. There is a huge or gargantuan 4 armed troll-thing in large though narrow room. The thing is a combat nightmare and most characters, even at 13 or 14th level, wouldn't last a round against it. The problem is, it cannot fly or teleport and the wizard in the group just put a wall of force up from ceiling to about 12" off the floor, walling it in while allowing line of effect for spells. They wiped it out without taking a hit point of damage. This "failed closet troll" approach happened over and over in the various high-level modules. A wall + cloudkill, or wall + small opening, or wall + wall of fire = win. Even boss fights failed in this fashion.

2. The modules (save one) do not address etherealness or wind walk. It is possible to avoid whole modules using these spells and obtain the goal.

3. Stoneskin, mirror image, and displacement destroy melee combats. There are many such "no enemies with dispel magic" fights and with most of the party buffed in this fashion (we have a sorc that casts stoneskin liberally and everyone owns a cloak of displacement) brutes are a pushover.

4. Mind blank wrecks all the subtler encounters, most of which are not accompanied by a mage to ensure such defensive spells are down. Freedom of movement ensures those nasty grapple-and-drain foes never get to use their best ability. Once again, it seems like they believe that no one or maybe only one person will have this spell up, when in practice, everyone does or has access to grapple-breakers like dimension door and teleport.

5. Armor of Death Ward voids most of the ugly negative energy attacks. Everyone in the group has this that wears armor. It seems like the authors assumed that no one would craft custom armor once they realized they faced a great danger from a particular attack type.

6. Heal and Mass Heal wreck havoc on undead and with character caster stats boosted into the mid to high 20's, the DCs are very high.

7. The melee characters (one of them is the sorc, testifying to the power of wizards over fighters) carry adamantium weapons that are both Undead Bane and Holy, adding 4d6 per strike against the evil undead, which are power attack bait after all the character buffs. Couple this with haste and it is possible for the melee types to deal 100-150 hp/round each against undead foes. Most of the foes in the modules do not have huge stores of hit points or high ACs and this tends to end them very quickly.

8. Everything would be much harder if there were time limits imposed, but many of the modules and all of the high level ones do not have time constraints. This allows resourceful characters to prep exactly what they need to deal with the next encounter, retreat and do it over again. Every possible buff is up and running and while these are in place, the characters are nearly unbeatable using any tactic. Since there is no time pressure, when the buffs drop off, the party retreats and rests.

[Kaelik]

6. Heal and Mass Heal wreck havoc on undead and with character caster stats boosted into the mid to high 20's, the DCs are very high.

If you are capable of casting Mass Heal at all and your caster stat is 2X, not 3X, you are doing it wrong (TM).

[FatR]

I am getting ready to finish up the Age of Worms (AoW). I run weekly for 4-5 hours with a group of 6 players, 4 of which are core casters. At least a couple of them are very experienced players with 30+ years under their belts. It has taken just under 2 years to get to this point and we anticipate it taking almost exactly 2 years start to finish. The group should finish at 19th, maybe 20th level.

Yes, some of the encounters are very hard and some of the modules are very very difficult. A killer GM *could* easily wipe the party out if he tried in these tougher modules. It takes a fair amount of skill to present the material in such a way as to push the characters without splattering them. Many times it is either all or nothing - if the DM pushes it, the party will wipe, but if the DM does not push it, the party steamrolls the encounter.

Overall, the story is good and hangs together pretty well, but it has a few gaping plot holes I had to close; at least one module is wholly unnecessary and more could be cut if desired. My biggest complaint though is that the authors really do not seem to understand the power of high-level casters. To wit:

I've starting running AoW recently (because I'm still don't have time or energy to write my own adventures, particularly tons of enemy statblocks). Mechanically I have little comment (because thanks to various... issues, I generally had very few PCs or very inept PCs - hopefully, not anymore - which forced me to completely change combat components of the first two adventures, to avoid a guaranteed wipe), except that the third module as written is far less difficult than the first two and likely to be steamrolled.

I can comment on the plot, though. The whole idea is good and inspired me to pick up this AP in the first place. Most of the adventure ideas and locations also are reasonably cool. However, there are many problems with execution.

- The entire first half of the AP is practically irrelevant to the main plot. It gives some clues about the real enemy, but on the whole nothing that happens during it has some bearing on whether the BBEGs achieve their win condition, or not. Actually, raising hell only reduces their chances.
- Partially due to this, at least two adventures feel extraneous (Champion's Belt and Return to Whispering Cairn). I plan to replace them.
- Some adventures have rather tenous connection to the rest. In particular, the third one.
- Big Bads suffer from a severe case of attachment to their thrones. Big Goods suffer from a severe case of being useless. There is seriously just one man who tried to do something about the coming apocalypse (and even then, because baddies accidentally pissed him off), and PCs won't learn about him until near the end. He got insta-owned too.
In short, the world around PCs doesn't feel alive.
- AP also goes of its way to minimize its impact on the world. Come on, the end BBEG's trademark are contagious undead, yet for the whole of AP PCs never encounter a localized zombie apocalypse (there are two rather feeble attempts, that are supposed to be foiled by PCs)! That's just weird and wrong. This is most likely the reason, why the world's level plank is set far too high, with, say, a level 16 character who has a personal devil army being rather minor tyrant. Which additionally underlines the lack of the world's reaction to things. You seriously have random NPCs with level 9 spells, who camp on the second-to-last BBEG doorstep because they like the landscape, yet no real attempts by anyone to wreck evil's day, until PCs arrive.

[hogarth]

I own the Shackled City hardcover, but I've only DMed the first two modules. I'm also playing in Age of Worms (2nd module so far) and Savage Tide (3rd module) play-by-post games, but I've read some comments on those paths as well.

I've starting running AoW recently (because I'm still don't have time or energy to write my own adventures, particularly tons of enemy statblocks). Mechanically I have little comment (because thanks to various... issues, I generally had very few PCs or very inept PCs - hopefully, not anymore - which forced me to completely change combat components of the first two adventures, to avoid a guaranteed wipe), except that the third module as written is far less difficult than the first two and likely to be steamrolled.

Yes, that's a frequent comment -- a bunch of lizardfolk just aren't a tough threat for a level 6-7 party, in particular.

I can comment on the plot, though. The whole idea is good and inspired me to pick up this AP in the first place. Most of the adventure ideas and locations also are reasonably cool. However, there are many problems with execution.

I like the idea of fighting a god, but Paizo has certainly gone back to the "wake up the sleeping BBEG and fight him" plot many times (Shackled City, Age of Worms, Rise of the Runelords and the upcoming Carrion Crown paths all do this).

- The entire first half of the AP is practically irrelevant to the main plot. It gives some clues about the real enemy, but on the whole nothing that happens during it has some bearing on whether the BBEGs achieve their win condition, or not. Actually, raising hell only reduces their chances.

I have mixed feelings on this issue. On the one hand, it's cool if all of the modules tie together nicely. But on the other, you want to avoid the syndrome where the high-level bad guys live just across the street from the PCs and yet somehow the PCs have to fight through the Sorting Algorithm of Evil before facing them.

- AP also goes of its way to minimize its impact on the world. Come on, the end BBEG's trademark are contagious undead, yet for the whole of AP PCs never encounter a localized zombie apocalypse (there are two rather feeble attempts, that are supposed to be foiled by PCs)! That's just weird and wrong. This is most likely the reason, why the world's level plank is set far too high, with, say, a level 16 character who has a personal devil army being rather minor tyrant. Which additionally underlines the lack of the world's reaction to things. You seriously have random NPCs with level 9 spells, who camp on the second-to-last BBEG doorstep because they like the landscape, yet no real attempts by anyone to wreck evil's day, until PCs arrive.

That's my problem with high-level adventuring in general; eventually you end up fighting a bunch of level 15+ spellcaster "mooks", which is just wrong on many levels.

---

My comments on the Dungeon adventure paths:

• Shackled City: Disjointed, but there are some interesting bits and pieces in there. I like the idea of adventuring around a single city, but it starts to feel overstuffed, with a bunch of high-level evil spellcasters in the area just hangin' around, three or four different sets of dungeons underneath the city, etc. It also suffers from Premature Climax Syndrome ("You did it! You saved everyone! Now there's only two more adventures' worth of mopping up to do!").
• Age of Worms: Pretty good; it takes a theme and sticks with it. If you're optimized to fight undead, some of the last modules will be a blowout (as noted by Lich-Loved). Not to mention that 3.5 undead are poorly balanced as far as HP vs. CR goes. The idea of fighting Kyuss is cool.
• Savage Tide: Pretty good; travelling to the Isle of Dread and fighting Demogorgon are nice touches. I don't care for shipboard combat overmuch, though. Later on there's supposed to be some pretty stiff railroading (e.g. suck this evil dude's balls or you can't continue with the adventure).

They all sort of fall apart at high levels though, but that's the nature of the beast.

[Roy]

6. Heal and Mass Heal wreck havoc on undead and with character caster stats boosted into the mid to high 20's, the DCs are very high.

If you are capable of casting Mass Heal at all and your caster stat is 2X, not 3X, you are doing it wrong (TM).

This.

As for adventures before Pathfailure: I originally thought they were alright. But once I learned how to identify Paizo's particular brand of fail, a number of things stuck out. They were incompetent at design long before they started designing whole systems of mechanics instead of just adventure paths.

All three of the adventures try to set the difficulty bar very high. And I think all three of them open with a level + 2 encounter that uses decent tactics which is a big deal at level 1 even if it wouldn't be later. But past the early parts these attempts fall flat on their face as Paizo clearly doesn't understand what mid and high level adventures really involve, nor do they have any concept of a balanced encounter. Only reason the low level parts don't also fail is because focus fire on one target at a time is actually a decent tactic at level 1. Even they can't fuck that up. They also write adventures under the assumption your players are stupid. Both in that they will not have their characters use mid and high level abilities at mid and high level, and that they actually are stupid enough to overlook very obvious things.

One of those three (I won't say which one) has a part early on in which you're basically godmoded into making everything you did in that entire section completely fucking pointless by a monster you have effectively no chance of beating at that point. Naturally, this sort of thing will tend to tick players and characters alike off and make them want revenge. The module conveniently forgets about this guy and he's supposedly disappeared and unfindable for a very long time. As in up to several levels after the point where you can track said monster down and fuck up his shit. Which parties will almost certainly do if they remember the number in their level box but that the module makes absolutely no attempt to address and plays as if you'll never see him until well after the point that defeating him is trivial. And it's not even the same then.

They give a lot of different things suggestive and very obvious names and expect players not to notice the obvious puns.

And they have encounters that anyone with a brain would know better about that basically amount to win init and blow em away without a scratch or lose init and the whole party dies. Guaranteed. If they get a surprise round, fuck you. This is also late in the adventure, so you've probably invested a good deal in it by this point.

[FatR]

I think I should add comments about some of Paizo's standalone APs to hogarth's comments about Dungeon APs. My comments are once again more concerned with the plots:

Rise of the Runelords

Good:
- Nicely tied together. Practically every group of baddies is connected to the main plot in some way, and their action feel relevant. Connections between adventures aren't too strained, mostly. Except for the one between second and third adventures, IMO.
- Feels fairly epic, although minor plot modification to showcase later enemies' threat level still won't hurt.
- Enemies are diverse, but not diverse enough to completely invalidate preparations against certain types (undead, giants and magical beasts are quite prominent).
- NPCs are fairly decent.

Bad:
- Spikes of difficulty. The Shadow Clock tower at the end of the second adventure is particularly infamous, because you get there right after fighting various weak-ass opponents (like rogue 1/cleric 1 mooks for an entire subsection - against a 5th level party), and then you are supposed to fight an intelligent flesh golem, which has a decent chance of surprising the party, a bunch of elite mook monsters (that can spring a dangerous trap), and a flying spellcaster, who has AC near 30, 142 HPs, +11 Fort, +16 Will, Charm Monster, Suggestion and +7 ability modifier to DCs. All in quick succession.
- Villains get all the way through nausea-invoking and circle back to laughably evil.
- It is not clear why anyone who is not directly mind-controlled even tries to pull BBEG from his grave. He's your usual megalomaniacal evil overlord, and being his slave forever is not an enticing job offer. During my RotR run I decided that he still has the ability to telepathically contact descendants of the races he created and make them explode with a thought, if they displease him.
- Rubber band NPC levels.
- No way to advance the plot or resolve any of the significant conflicts, save for stabbing faces.

Ugly:
- Even if you like the idea of sin magic (I do), you probably won't like its implementation. The best attitude towards it seems to be lack of care.


Curse of the Crimson Throne

Good:
- Cool urban setting.
- There is, for once, a passable explanation of why BBEG does not destroy party and, indeed, all opposition, when PCs still are level 3 (she powers up alongside with them and isn't particularly powerful at the beginning).
- Great variety of subplots.

Bad:
- You take two-adventure detour from the cool urban setting, to go on a random-ass fetch quest in the second half of the AP. There seriously are better ways to prepare for overthrowing a nascent tyrant, than to hunt for magical weapons, because authors were too scared of making the AP less dungeon-crawly.
- Strong assumption that PCs will follow the railroad even when it is not really making sense. By the time of the above-mentioned fetch quest PCs are level 10. AFAIK, there aren't any contingencies or scrips in case they just decide to try assassinating the BBEG right now.
- Rubber band NPC levels.


Second Darkness

Good:
- The first two intallments are decent standalone adventures.

Bad:
- The difficulty is set to "Easy" from the beginning. Most of your opponents are humanoid NPCs, and most of them are shafted further by racial EL.
- The first two adventures are really disconnected from the rest. Just as PCs establish themselves in their home city and prepare to enjoy the spoils of their treasure hunting, a world-saving quests falls on them with little foreshadowing and they are requred to abandon the above-mentioned city forever.
- The plot requires from you to suck a lot of NPC cocks. And most of these NPCs are really evil.
- The plot requires from you to make at least one decision that, by any reasonable assessment, is suicidal. If PCs refuse, they are punished by thinly-veiled grudge monsters.
- The plot overuses McGuffin magic.
- It is not clear, why no one cares about BBEG's attempt to blow up the whole goddamn continent.
- Rubber band NPC levels (see the theme now?).

Ugly:
- The drow. No, seriously, they are drawn ugly. As the whole point of the drow race is being evil and beautiful dominatrixes, this is a very major flaw . For that matter, normal Golarion elves tend to be butt-ugly too, but at least they have more healthy skin tone.

[hogarth]

- Spikes of difficulty. The Shadow Clock tower at the end of the second adventure is particularly infamous, because you get there right after fighting various weak-ass opponents (like rogue 1/cleric 1 mooks for an entire subsection - against a 5th level party), and then you are supposed to fight an intelligent flesh golem, which has a decent chance of surprising the party, a bunch of elite mook monsters (that can spring a dangerous trap), and a flying spellcaster, who has AC near 30, 142 HPs, +11 Fort, +16 Will, Charm Monster, Suggestion and +7 ability modifier to DCs. All in quick succession.

There's a somewhat similar enemy in Age of Worms, I believe -- an advanced mind flayer with an "oops, I goofed" high DC for its mind blast. And if I recall correctly, there's an advanced eye of the deep (or morlock or something) in Savage Tide with an "oops" DC on its save-or-suck as well.