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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Canada_K" data-source="post: 2009023" data-attributes="member: 3735">Bottom Line: Worth owning.  Vastly improved from the first in the series, though it still suffers from inflexible linearity.  A clever and enjoyable series of encounters.The Nitty Gritty Review: Once again, the presentation and artwork of the second book in the Witchfire trilogy are absolutely top of the line.  This is important in my mind, because it shows that Privateer Press takes their products seriously, and that they intend to be among the best of the d20 publishers.As with "The Longest Night", "Shadow of the Exile" is excruciatingly linear.  The entire book is really a series of encounters, superficially strung together.  There are three main scenarios, each shoe-horned together in fairly awkward fashion.(1) Boat journey through hostile a swamp.(2) Penetrate a mechanical dungeon.(3) Break a major NPC out of prison.Now I am happy to give credit where credit is due: each of these scenarios is very well designed.  The writing is clear and engaging, the encounters are challenging, and most important they are interesting to play.  These writers know their stuff!  What I particularly liked is that there is a bit of a twist to each one of them.  For the swamp scenario, the players have to manage most of the encounters from the boat, ever mindful that if the boat is damaged or destroyed they are stranded in hostile territory with no means of escape.  The mechanical dungeon is better than your usual dungeon crawl because it is such a foreign and sinister environment, filled with robot-constructs and unknown creatures.  The jail break is also memorable because the party has a time limit before their most enduring NPC contact is tortured to death.Each of these scenarios is a well-written adventure in its own right.  The problem is the way the party is forced to leap-frog from one to the other.  Once the players polish off one objective, they have no way to get to the next one until one of the two main NPCs (Father Dumas or Captain Helstrom) gives them some crucial bit of information.  In other words, the party just goes around doing what somebody else tells them.  This is OK once in a while, but most players would grow to resent this.  It robs them of a sense of contributing to the campaign, because ultimately all they did was follow someone else's directions.  They were just the hired muscle.I also disliked some contrived plot elements in the Mechanical Dungeon scenario.  First was the fact that some areas described the residents going about their daily routine, even while they are under invasion by THREE different power groups.  To my thinking, every last occupant would have assembled together to repel the intruders.  Second was the forced ending to the climax.  No matter what the players do, the main opponent is to fall down a deep shaft at the end of combat, and no one knows if she lives or dies. I dislike artificial plot elements.  I tend to be of the opinion that if a designer has to force an event for the sake of the plot, he needs to redesign the plot.  Besides, this is a cliche plot device.  Most seasoned players know that when a villain falls to a mysterious end, it automatically means he or she survived and will show up again in the near future.If you are going to invest in "The Shadow of the Exile" I highly recommend getting the entire trilogy. I think each book is stronger when taken in context of the whole story. The three books cost me $50 Canadian, which is a pretty good deal given how much material you get.</blockquote>

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