Pathfinder Adventure Path #185: A Taste of Ashes (Blood Lords 5 of 6) (2024)

Oh, wow - are we really getting hot war between Geb and Nex again?

That trade route backmatter sounds incredibly fun, too. Hopefully it doesn't have the same map issues as the trade routes in Guns & Gears.

Not gonna lie, the City of Yled makes me think of the City of Yhitil, and now I can't help but wonder it Hastur has some dominion here. Lol

I also wonder if the Twilight Sages or the three Nightshades (Nightwalkers?) will be brought up at all here.

keftiu wrote:

Oh, wow - are we really getting hot war between Geb and Nex again?

That trade route backmatter sounds incredibly fun, too. Hopefully it doesn't have the same map issues as the trade routes in Guns & Gears.

Could be Holomog or something different, but I guess "greatest" does imply Nex. Intriguing either way...

keftiu wrote:

I'd /love/ if this one involved orchestrating a city defense, or other large military action.

I feel it's more a race to find and defeat the bad people while in a metropolis that prepares for war.

Just wanted to note that my zip file didn’t come with interactive maps.

More notably: the backmatter has a new oracle curse: ashes! Related domains are destruction and fire, curse benefit is resistance to physical damage and +2 bonus to saves and DCs against grapple, shove, and forced movement. Moderate curse makes you both dazzled and concealed, but the rest of the curse effects are pretty minor. 6th-level focus spell Ash Form is very similar to gaseous form.

logic_poet wrote:

My subscriptions got added to my downloads, but I couldn't get the personalizer to work on them. Also, this volume did not have two entries with one for single file and one for By CHapter, so they be having technical problems.

Mine either. Looks like they are having technical difficulties on that end. As it's listed as "Single File" but it's actually one file per chapter.

I've not finished reading 'A Taste of Ashes', but I just wanted to leave a shout-out for whoever wrote the inspirational rumour table in Part 1.

The PCs may come across several random rumours in their search. Roll a d12 to determine which random rumour they hear;
1: The High Priest is up to something.
2: The High Priest is up to something.
3: The High Priest is up to something.
4: The High Priest is up to something.
5: The High Priest is up to something.
6: The High Priest is up to something.
7: The High Priest is up to something.
8: The High Priest is up to something.
9: The High Priest is up to something.
10: The High Priest is up to something.
11: The High Priest is up to something.
12: The High Priest is up to something.

You dedicated an entire page to this, when you could just as easily have the PCs overhear someone mention that THE HIGH PRIEST IS UP TO SOMETHING.

Review forthcoming. :D

I was kinda hoping I would manage to do my 3 star review ages ago, but I've been lately kinda bummed out x'D Welp finally managed to do it.

But yeah, the dungeon stuff itself seems fine and there are some fun set pieces and encounters, but I'm underwhelmed that this is essentially 2/3 dungeon crawling book when I was really hoping players got to do really cool blood lords stuff when they became blood lords. Like even if it turns out that the encounters are best in 2e in practice, its still would feel like book doesn't take advantage of players being newcomers to the political elite of the country.

I gotta say, I really enjoyed the depictions of the priests of Urgathoa throughout this AP. It would have been easy to depict them as absolute sociopaths but they're some of the more clever NPC's you find, both Zoheri and of course Brennon herself.

Quote:

So as this adventure is 2/3 combat dungeon crawling and combat, its bit hard to estimate how good the book is without playing it.

See, this is what I find frustrating about "I haven't played this but I'm going to review it". We've played through the first chapter and had a blast. Ironically the part I'm NOT looking forward to is when the group gets co-opted into being theatre kids. That to me sounds less like Blood Lording it up and more like having to do performative stuff for people like you did in BL #3.

Also I feel like the opportunity for player-oriented solutions to AVOID combat goes up with the more toys they have at higher levels. The Pallid Pinnacle? No problem, Scry + Teleport up to the top floor. Wow, that was hard!