Ooh, my favourite adventure...that's a tough one. My impression was that my players found almost all of them adventures to be brilliant fun. Oh, on a specific note, they really enjoyed the 'soul-tapping' mechanic in the temple in The Trial of Echoed Souls. From a GMing perspective, I found most of the adventures really great.
I suspect that from a players plus GM point of view, the best adventure would be either Shelter from the Storm or The Mad King's Banquet. Both of those had excellent setups, and really memorable final fights. I actually tweaked Lee Sidoneth a bit to use the 'aspect of nature' variant druid and make him a more ferocious melee combatant, and they had great fun beating him down in the middle of the giant rainstorm.
They also enjoyed the fact that Laurabec the paladin died in the storm. One player said it was one of those occurrences that makes your characters realise that just being heroes doesn't mean you get away without loss, and that it managed to evade the slight heavy-handedness or impression that the players are somehow being punished that such 'Oh, this friendly NPC just died.' situations sometimes can.
There were a few sour notes, which I'll mention here quickly. Luckily or unluckily depending on your perspective, these problems were mostly confined to two books in particular; Trial of Echoed Souls and Under the Eye of the Tempest.
Firstly, 'Trial of Echoed Souls'.
- One of the drow assassins has levels in 'duellist path assassin'. I've never heard of this class, and I couldn't find reference to it in any books, or even with various google and message board searches. If I'd wanted to adjust that character somehow, it would have been very difficult.
- Rhuarc as written is kind of a pushover. For most of his combat appearances, he's trying to stay at a distance from the characters, which deprives him of the opportunity to make sneak attacks. His main tactic seems to be to try and poison the hell out of them, but by 13th level, any cleric worth their salt will be casting
heroes feast every morning, making them utterly immune to poison. His shatterspell arrows are only at caster level 10th, making dispelling the player characters anti-poison wards uncertain at best. I rebuilt Rhuarc as a scout/shadowdancer because I felt it suited hit-and-run archery better than rogue, and game him a custom weapon enhancement which double the range at which he could apply precision damage, and it seemed to work pretty well. However, I feel that if I'd run Rhuarc as written, he would have kind of been owned.
- The tattoos. Oh my lord, the tattoos. If you're going to throw level 16 and 18 enemies up against the players, it seems ludicrously unfair to deny the players tens of thousands of gold pieces in loot by making all the powerful items their enemies wear tattoos. Everything the assassins possess except their weapons and armour is in the form of magical, unlootable tattoos! To be honest, I really don't see the reasoning behind this. If the players aren't supposed to have this massive cash windfall, why give the NPCs this fabulous wealth in the first place? This way, they're crazily over their gear value, and the players can't have any of it. That's the kind of situation that engenders ill-will, because it seems to be a direct snub to the players. Needless to say, I toned this down in my game, making some of the tattoos into standard items.
In counterpoint to the above, I will say that Trial of Echoed Souls has some beautifully plotted and executed pieces in it, and the rest of the adventure is excellent. It's just the assassins that have a few problems.
Secondly, 'Under the Eye of the Tempest'
- I'm afraid I don't really have a good way to say this. Every adventure path will have one entry that falls below the others in quality; it's practically unavoidable. I've certainly never seen an adventure path where I haven't been able to pick out one - or more - adventures that just don't cut the mustard when compared to the other adventures that path provides. I take it as the mark of an excellent adventure path when only one adventure falls into this category. In my opinion, for War of the Burning Sky, Under the Eye of the Tempest is that adventure.
From my first read-through, my thought was 'this doesn't feel like an adventure. It feels like a couple of scenes.' Playing this adventure proved me right. Each other adventure took us between 3 and 8 sessions, at between 3 and 4 hours play per session, to complete. Under the Eye of the Tempest took us 1. Yes, that's right. One session.
One problem is that the opposition is laughable. I was running the path in order, 1-12, and so by this point, the characters were 18th level. Nothing in the adventure could hold a candle to them. Pilus has barely over 100 hit points! Now, back in 'O, Wintry Song of Agony', the last boss was Kreven, who had less than 50 hit points. However, in that encounter, killing Kreven was never the problem; it was managing to get to Kreven in the first place. It was a fun puzzle-game like boss fight, figuring out what you needed to do to reach the big bad, and then killing him. My players enjoyed it. For Pilus, there was no such luck. It was all over in 3 rounds. The players never felt challenged or endangered by any of the encounters.
There was only one encounter in the entire book that I felt was challenging, and I didn't run that one because it seemed to be utterly unrelated to the adventure at hand. I am, of course, talking about Glurthog, the advanced huhhoad with the intelligent sword. Glurthog looks dangerous. Glurthog looks like a challenge. Glurthog has..what to do with the adventure, exactly? I really didn't feel like having the players fight the toughest encounter in the book and then discovering it was utterly unrelated to the task at hand. Players get confused when you throw a random encounter at them which eclipses the final boss of the book. They start thinking there's more to it. And Glurthog
is a random encounter. It's unnecessary, and takes focus away from the alleged bad guys.
OK, I'm going to stop ragging on Under the Eye of the Tempest now. Please don't take my remarks on it as indicative of my opinion of the adventure path as a whole. All the other adventures were excellent, and the final book handles mass combat in a way that is sheer brilliance. I absolutely love the unit rules as a way to make large numbers of standard warriors dangerous to player characters. At last, level 20 characters have a reason to suspect that they may not, actually, be able to take an army of several thousand on alone!
In short: A breathtaking work of staggering genius, with a shoddy penultimate chapter. It doesn't manage to damage the brilliant whole, though.
Reading back through this, that's quite a lot of negative in this post, which really wasn't my intention. I'll finish up with a mention of specific encounters that we really enjoyed.
..Well, I would, but there are loads of them. I'd estimate about 2 encounters per book, generally including the final boss encounter. That's the one that I think really counts. For every single book, with the one exception noted above, my players loved the final encounter. They were all evocative, interesting and compelling. Many of them had an exceptional setting. And none of them felt like a cheap shot or an unfair fight. My players came away from every boss encounter grinning, pumped to have won a hard but fair fight. And I think that's the mark of truly great game design. So thank you to all the people that worked on War of the Burning Sky. You gave me and my players a year and more of immense enjoyment.
