A non-Paizo AP that should be mentioned here is Way of the Wicked, a 3rd party AP for evil characters who want to take over the world and exact revenge on the kingdom. The custom setting is pretty bare-bones and needs some fleshing out, but other than that I'd say out-of-the-box it is better than some official Paizo APs and can be tons of fun. The players need to agree that their characters bow to Asmodeus for the AP to really work, but other than that there is little railroading and often they have lots of options on how to tackle any given task or problem.
Yeah, about that. I was going to do a review on Way of the Wicked, and there is a lot of terrible writing in the very first part of it. For example, Gary McBride equates "Chaos" to "Giant Frog" and says that anyone who is Chaotic Evil is a random bullshit asshole who couldn't possibly work with lawful evil characters and thus is completely useless to Asmodeus despite them having just as much justification for wanting the terrible Lawful Good monotheistic burn-you-at-the-stake-for-not-worshiping-Mitra-despite-the-world-being-polytheistic-otherwise kingdom to get fucked. There's a lot of terrible MC advice, and the only "Lawful Evil" character he ever uses in his examples is Darth fucking Vader because he likes to fellate Star Wars.
It's pretty goddamned awful on the MC advice side of things, restricting you to basically one alignment and having a lot of kick-the-puppies moments.
fbmf wrote:Men in Tights? Have none of you younger generation seen Blazing Saddles?!
Game On,
fbmf
It's twu, it's twu!
Last edited by RelentlessImp on Thu May 28, 2015 2:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
A non-Paizo AP that should be mentioned here is Way of the Wicked, a 3rd party AP for evil characters who want to take over the world and exact revenge on the kingdom. The custom setting is pretty bare-bones and needs some fleshing out, but other than that I'd say out-of-the-box it is better than some official Paizo APs and can be tons of fun. The players need to agree that their characters bow to Asmodeus for the AP to really work, but other than that there is little railroading and often they have lots of options on how to tackle any given task or problem.
Yeah, about that. I was going to do a review on Way of the Wicked, and there is a lot of terrible writing in the very first part of it. For example, Gary McBride equates "Chaos" to "Giant Frog" and says that anyone who is Chaotic Evil is a random bullshit asshole who couldn't possibly work with lawful evil characters and thus is completely useless to Asmodeus despite them having just as much justification for wanting the terrible Lawful Good monotheistic burn-you-at-the-stake-for-not-worshiping-Mitra-despite-the-world-being-polytheistic-otherwise kingdom to get fucked. There's a lot of terrible MC advice, and the only "Lawful Evil" character he ever uses in his examples is Darth fucking Vader because he likes to fellate Star Wars.
It's pretty goddamned awful on the MC advice side of things, restricting you to basically one alignment and having a lot of kick-the-puppies moments.
Remember that with popular systems like PF you have to write with the lowest common denominator in mind, so saying things like "CE doesn't work for a group" helps to prevent at least some games from being wrecked by some asshole pulling random lolevil!shit. Show me where the stuff in WotW is worse that alignment rants in Paizo APs (are there any aside from WotR?). I don't think its particularly good, but it's easy to ignore and has little to do with the AP in general.
"No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style." - Steven Brust
Irish wrote:Any thoughts on Skulls and Shackles, or Jade Regent? Those have been pretty absent in the discussions thus far.
Haven't played Skulls and Shackles. What I've heard is that the beginning part has some issues - namely that in portraying forced labor as unpleasant, Paizo succeeded entirely too well, and so the first part of the AP is dull and onerous for the players, not just the PCs. But YMMV.
Jade Regent I did play - well, part of it anyway. The beginning was fine, the caravan was fine (don't think we used the caravan minigame rules though), but then when we got north the amount of red herrings was too damn high and the game sort of fizzled out. The group's disorganization may have been a factor though.
I'm running Mummy's Mask right now, and it's... meh. The amount of time they devoted to the opposing group the PCs run into (like eight pages, IIRC) in the first module made me think they were more important than they wind up being (ie, they get a passing mention once in the second adventure, then never again), which was irritating as I'd spent several hours modifying them to fit my setting, including writing up entirely new backstories.
The second adventure is definitely underwhelming, with the initial part being very location-based; for whatever reason, my group has never dealt well with that sort of thing (I think it may have something to do with my style as MC, but I'm not sure), though a major part of it being based on a random NPC who they had no reason to ever talk to or had even seen before might have caused some problems.
At this point, I'm thinking of calling the AP a wash and just start doing things by hand, because I don't think it's salvageable at this point. I've been underwhelmed by the material in later adventures, and the amount of work required to make it fit my setting makes me seriously question the return on investment.
