Fifth Session (12 page pdf) – Schloss Caromarc is creepily well-kept but seemingly abandoned, except for traps and occasional golems. It is also riddled with non-OSHA compliant bridges, which conspire towards our downfall…
The castle is cool and creepy, full of abandoned rooms and taxidermy that against all our expectations doesn’t animate and attack us. Good for that.
However, let me just pause a second to ream on the castle/dungeon/adventure design here. We keep having to cross bridges that require like multiple DC15 Acrobatics checks to not fall off and die. Of course, the average fighter in his armor has like a -1 Acrobatics skill. First of all this is a game rule fail from someone who didn’t bother to read the Acrobatics skill entry – you should only be hitting DC15 if you’re trying to cross a 6 inch wide balance beam, not a three foot wide rope bridge or anything with handholds. Second of all, it’s a worldbuilding fail – this is a castle built by people, for people to live in. Anything requiring a DC5 let alone a DC 15 skill check to “not die” on a routine day doesn’t pass muster. “Well the Count could cast fly” doesn’t excuse it – he can’t fly all day every day, and if you risk death every time you have to take a crap (Sredni Vashtar’s Girl kept looking for a privy to wash up and there aren’t any, I’ll note) or want a snack the numbers will catch up with you. Does he carry his own big crates of stuff around? Do his own drywall? Oh, “his golems carry stuff for him?” His golems are clumsy as hell, has he lost 1M gold pieces worth of them to falls? (I can imagine a town downriver constantly traumatized by wounded flesh golem attacks from the water… “Why God why?!?”).
Anyway, the vast majority of this session was a fight with a summoned erinyes who totally owned us. Our crossbowman was useless against her, my spells were useless against her, and everyone else was either screwing around (Vlad) or generally clinging to things for dear life (Oswald, Icobus). Everyone nearly died several times. Only her clock eventually running out saved us. And if we didn’t get across before the bridge burned we’d be literally stuck, none of us can fly yet so it would be ‘adventure over.’ I don’t know if they assume ‘well of course they should be fifth level so they would all have fly now’ but screw them. Pett, you make creepy stuff which is good, but it feels like this adventure made certain assumptions that were not necessarily reasonable. If we didn’t have our rope of climbing we’d just have had to quit and leave the whole castle because it’d just be impossible to traverse.
The fight with the weirdo homunculus-led golem was interesting; we figured out just from looking at the thing “don’t even bother hitting it, kill the homunculi” and sure enough. Yay video game design.
This session was a mix of enjoyment and frustration mainly from us banging our head against “you know, going across this next bridge is sure death for half of you… And no, there’s no way to bypass or improve it.”
Geek Related 
Sounds like they phoned that particular scenario in. Do you think any feedback to the company might improve the v2.0 (assuming they want to fix it)? Some companies seem a bit more responsive to consumer input these days.
There’s a bunch of reviews on the Paizo site that say basically the same thing, but I’ll certainly add my 2 cents.
Yeah, the castle design made little sense. We keep on bumping into these little wonky moments in the Adventure Paths but so far they haven’t put us off; it does get close sometimes though!
My group had most trouble with the golems early on in the castle. I think we dispelled the erinyes before she had a chance to do anything.
The trolls were hard for us, but we figured out to wear the Caromarc surcoat so we bypassed the first building of golems without combat.
We had no way of dealing with golems — or the GM was reading damage reduction wrong — so this whole book was a struggle for us. Later on in the campaign my wizard started making his own golems so we got our own back.
They all have DR5/adamantine so they pop off 5 hp, so it’s a slog, but doable with enough damage bonus…
Our party was made up of a wizard, a thief, a cleric, and a paladin, so it was tough for us to affect them and made that part of the campaign a bit of a slog. We probably weren’t being clever enough!