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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retreater" data-source="post: 8292531" data-attributes="member: 42040">From the start of the adventure: "The Abomination Vaults Adventure Path focuses primarily on the sprawling dungeon complex, and this adventure assumes play begins as the heroes approach the aboveground ruins for the first time. Their mutual friend, Wrin Sivinxi, has already briefed them about her sighting of a strange glow atop the ruin’s towering lighthouse." The second paragraph provides a couple of sentences about how to set up the adventure, but tells GMs "the fun doesn’t truly begin until the heroes head up the Gaunt Trail to the foreboding ruins in Fogfen!" So it actively encourages GMs to skip the roleplaying and get into the dungeon.The investigation motivation is tenuous at best. I did put it in as a background to get them at the doorstep of the dungeon, handled in the way the adventure suggests. Figuring out why a faint light is appearing at the top of a haunted lighthouse is a very loose motivation to undertake a quest that lasts for around 10 levels of an adventuring career. There's exploration only in terms of what you would do in any dungeon, i.e. looking for traps, secret doors, hidden treasure, etc. It does not make use of the specific Pathfinder 2e exploration activities, which is what I was addressing. It's not like an expansive, open wilderness (like the hexcrawl in book 2 of Age of Ashes). It's a very compact dungeon, designed to be laid out on a series of a few Pathfinder Flip Mats. I'm not criticizing this design, but the dungeon is presented as a flowchart of encounters with a few short, narrow hallways and staircases linking them. So far as I have seen (through 2 books) they don't have long sections of caverns to link areas where characters can traverse miles of subterranean passageways (which is something I have in my OSR dungeon, Maelgrym, or that has been in previous adventures such as the first book of Age of Ashes). Those are areas where exploration activities could really shine, and it would make it difficult to walk 15 minutes back to town.</blockquote>

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