#Carrion crown movie#
#Carrion crown trial#

His suggestion (based as it is in classic horror movie stylings) has Adivion Adrissant take an active role in taunting the player characters all along, leaving notes and clues for them with the various cultists that he knows they’re going to kill. There’s an interesting note in the final module of the series, where the editor, Wes, talks about integrating the main villain into the larger plot of the series. As with the statue stolen from Lepidstadt, there isn’t any closure brought to this until the end of module four. They end up at the war torn dead fields of Feldgrau? Whoops, you should have been here about 20 minutes ago. They find the ancient shrine to Desna? Oh, sorry. They get to the forest? Just missed them. About the third time it happens, it starts to seem comical. In the mean time, the characters are supposedly hot on the trail of a pair of ‘dark riders’ (sadly, not Ringwraiths) who always manage to be one step ahead of anything the characters do. From there, the modules progress forward, never giving any hint to the players about why this particular maguffin is important, until a footnote at the very end of the fourth module brings the statue back into the hands of the characters. When the Beast of Lepidstadt is apprehended, it had aided in the theft of a mysterious statue. Starting early in the second module, the characters are presented with a strange, unsolvable mystery. The way that the modules follow the metaplot, in the mean time, can be called into question. And for the sake of covering the necessary ground, that can probably be forgiven. The worst sin that can be lain at its feet is the exuberance in which the path switches between monster genres. To its credit, Carrion Crown avoids a lot of specific missteps in the way it comes together. I’m not laying blame on anyone with these, as it’s what is going to happen with this many thousand words and the strict deadlines that Paizo is working with. There are points in some of them where narratives are sort of tacked on, and other points where abrupt shifts in tone seem to take over. The reason I say this is because there are some notable rough patches in some of the Adventure Path plots. Since each of the six individual modules are written by different authors (something that remains in force for all of Paizo’s AP offerings, extending back into the days of Dungeon Magazine), the metaplot is often the only way that any of the scattered narratives can be brought together. It gives the characters a reason to follow through on their investigations, and it does what it can to string the different events into a coherent whole. Being the larger, overarching plot of the module series, the metaplot is pretty important in the long run. In the first entry, I touched briefly on the metaplot of the Adventure Path. I probably could have dealt with all six modules in the adventure path, but there are some outlying issues that I wanted to touch on as I went along.

In the interest of space, I cut the first review at that point, not wanting to spill into the 4~5,000 words range.

#Carrion crown trial#

The first entry in my review of Paizo’s Ravenloft-inspired Adventure Path, Carrion Crown, dealt mainly with the first two modules of the series, The Haunting of Harrowstone and The Trial of the Beast.