3.5 out of 5 stars

Sorry about not getting this up yesterday, but I’m at a conference and got distracted after making my last post.

The Scales of War adventure path continues this month in Garaitha’s Anvil.

The war against the githyanki continues and the party is tasked with a strike mission against the portal network that enables the githyanki to move their strike teams, spies, and even regular troops.  During the process, they come across some intelligence that indicates the threat presented by the portal network is actually much greater than originally thought and their mission will have to be extended in order to ensure the safety of the coalition they’ve worked so hard to build.

The adventure has three parts: the original infiltration mission (1 minor quest, 4 tactical encounters, and 1 roleplaying encounter), the extension that results from the intelligence gained during the first (1 minor quest, 4 tactical encounters and 1 combined skill challenge and tactical encounter), and final strike mission to prevent the portal network from posing a threat again (1 major quest, 5 tactical encounters, 2 combined skill challenge and tactical encounter).  Altogether this gives a XP ratio of 25,400:170,000 which means there’s almost 7 times as much combat XP as their is non-combat XP, situating it most definitively on the hack’n’slash side of what I consider the ideal ratio.  Add to that the fact that 2 of the encounters (one of the pure tactical encounter and one of the combined ones) have the possibility for reinforcements which aren’t accounted for in the original XP calculation and that a fairly trigger happy party might fight the NPCs in the roleplaying encounter rather than talk to them, and the balance could be shifted even further to that extreme.

During the course of the adventure, the PCs should go from 17th to 19th level, which matches up well with the calculations I made for the last adventure.

One problem with the adventure: there’s a mention of a map on which a compass rose was purposely left off so that it could be used regardless of which entrance into a fortress the PCs take (as a side note, I really dislike this tactic as it means the PCs’ choice isn’t real).  Said map, however, has a compass rose.  Other than that, I didn’t notice any major errors.

Overall, as adventures go, this isn’t the worst thing we’ve seen from WotC, however it does lean heavily to the hack’n’slash side of things, even though it isn’t your typical dungeon crawl.  Really I wish WotC would make more of an effort to include more skill challenges and would make ones like those that have been shown to us in the Ruling Skill Challenges series.