In recent weeks, I have been running my players through the Ruins of Gauntlight, the first of three adventures in the Abomination Vaults adventure path. Yes, I’ve been running Pathfinder 2^nd edition. (My ongoing D&D 5E World of Greyhawk campaign also continues). The Abomination Vaults is of special interest to D&D players, as Paizo intend to release a version for 5E at some point. As I write this, it’s just been announced that that product has been delayed.

Honestly, I don’t think you’re missing anything special. But that’s based on my impressions and my tastes. And, sadly, I was not impressed by Ruins of Gauntlight.

It doesn’t help that the players who are going on this journey with me are not Pathfinder fans. If anything, they’re more irritated by the system then I am. Pathfinder is rather unforgiving: it wants the players to study the rules and work out the best options for their characters, getting every last benefit from their choices. For busy players who don’t have time for that, it’s tough going. And, honestly, when I started looking at the multitude of feat options and saw how underwhelming the low-level options are, I understood their frustration.

And because they weren’t getting every bonus from the system, the already challenging monsters in the adventure just became more challenging. Though I’m not sure that any experience where you always need to roll 13+ to hit monsters is going to be fulfilling. Monsters that were weaker than the characters and could make them feel good about themselves seemed to be in short supply, especially on the third and fourth levels of the dungeon. Monsters that could inflict negative conditions on them and make the players feel worse? Lots of those!

Ruins of Gauntlight begins with the characters entering the dungeon, not starting in town. This is a ten-level dungeon crawl. You’ll spend a lot of time in the dungeon. Ruins covers the first four levels. The heroes are there because strange lights have been seen in the ruined lighthouse, and they’ve been asked to investigate. What they don’t know is that the original builder of the dungeons, the sorceress Belcorra, has returned as a ghost and is planning to enact her evil plan of destruction. This is something they’ll have to learn during their explorations.

The first level is the ground level of the swampy ruins. It is mainly inhabited by giant insects and mitflits. Mitflits are a small type of gremlin that are portrayed as rather incompetently evil in this adventure. The first few hints of the dangers that lie below appear in some of the areas, as well as clues that the adventurers are not the only ones to come here exploring.

The juxtaposition of the incompetent mitflits with the hints of a darker past exist poorly together. There are some truly unsettling things to find in this level, but the mitflits – and especially their leader – undercut all of that good work. I’m all for incompetent or whimsical encounters. Here? They feel out of place.

Before or shortly after the characters first descend into the first subterranean level, the main threat of the adventure path reveals itself. The Gauntlight, the magical lighthouse, activates. It first raises the dead in the nearby village of Otari, and then teleports a monster to attack the party as they deal with the last of the undead. It’s a nice way of making the Gauntlight more interesting and gives the players a good reason to investigate.

Unfortunately, the second level is rather dull. It’s mainly inhabited by morlocks who do little to advance the plot. It is not like they’re entirely irrelevant, but there is a major problem with their employment in the adventure: They don’t speak Common. This is also true of the mitflits of the level above.

It is hard to emphasize enough how much of a disaster this is. Without the ability to communicate with these groups, they’re purely foes. All the history that has been devised about why they’re in the positions they currently are in is invisible to the players. A few scattered hints? Yes. But without the larger context, many (probably most) groups won’t understand what they mean.

And this is pushing the revelations that explain why the characters are exploring the dungeon further away in time.

In fact, it takes until the end of the fourth level (and the end of the adventure) to properly reveal what’s going on. I can see where the designers were coming from, but – having played though it – it feels that it’s just too long to get to the point. Counting up the areas on each level, we get totals of 25, 35, 40, and 21. Yes, a lot of those areas are “empty” rooms, but it still takes significant time to learn why you’re in the dungeon.

I felt that the third level of the dungeon – an old library now inhabited by ghoul librarians – worked better. Although now we were moving into the area of “very annoying fights”. Having to make DC 20 Fort saves against paralysis was not particularly great. With luck, if you play this with PF2, your players are better than mine at fighting.

For the first time, we’re moving into an area of the dungeon where most of the monsters can speak Common! What’s that? Almost all of the ghoul encounters have them attack the heroes on sight? Never mind.

The players can find Belcorra’s diary here, so they can become informed about the person who is the Big Bad of the series. Oh, what’s that? It’s not in Common? Never mind.

I think my party found the “best” way down to the fourth level, so they quickly reached the goal of the level and completed the adventure. At last, someone to tell them what’s going on! And honestly, the overall story of the series is pretty awesome. And while I’m being quite harsh on the level designs, each of the levels has great design in it: small details, dungeon ecology, and secrets and subquests to engage with.

I expect the intention is that you pick up information as you delve deeper into the dungeon as to the background of the place, then when you reach the end of the fourth level and get the rationale, then it’s a great moment for the players. At our rate of play – and with the general dissatisfaction with how the game played – it felt far too late.

A couple of other items of note:

Pathfinder 2 has the heroes taking a LOT of damage. I mean, it was probably more for our group than more competent groups, but still, most battles ended with a lot of healing to be done. How does healing work in PF2? Mostly through use of the Medicine skill. After each battle, we’d spend 20-50 minutes of in-game time healing up.

I started playing RPGs a long time ago. I believe that any time that players spend a lot of time doing something – healing, searching, etc. – there should be risk involved. In my regular D&D play, I roll a 1d6 every 10 minutes to see if there’s a wandering monster. There’s no such procedure here – no wandering monster checks, no random encounter tables. There is a sidebar saying that you should make the dungeons living, but no procedures for it. I am very wary of interrupting rest periods by DM Fiat. If it feels unfair to you, it probably is – and the players will pick up on it.

I roll the d6 openly, and the players know what it means and the risks they take when resting. I really wish there were wandering monster tables here.

The other thing is that the dungeons are incredibly space-constrained, with lots of five-foot-wide corridors and small rooms. The effect of this is making the place extremely unfriendly to groups of five or more characters. And even a party of four, in which two are melee characters, can often end up with lots of fights where one of the fighters can’t participate. This has been an ongoing design decision of Paizo for around twenty years now. I don’t expect them to change, and I expect to keep getting incredibly frustrated whenever I play one of their dungeons.

This has been an incredibly negative view of this adventure. It didn’t resonate with either my players or me. But this is about the worst way of playing it – with a group who discovers they don’t enjoy the system. Personally, I think that my greater problems with the structure of the adventure would remain even if I were playing it with D&D 5E, but I might be able to enjoy the individual encounter areas more. There’s a lot of craft that has gone into this product. It just didn’t work for me.

EDIT: In my earlier posts, I mentioned I had only two players. For most of the campaign, we had four characters, after I found that scaling the adventure for just two a challenge. Control of the extra characters was split between the players and myself.