Within the Pathfinder space there are few reviewers with as much well deserved name recognition as Endzeitgeist. That’s why it’s always a thrill when he gives a good review to a product you’ve worked on. Today I am all smiles because of his review of Dungeonlands: Palace of the Lich Queen. His assessment?
My final verdict, ultimately, will clock in at 4.5 stars, rounded up to 5 for the purpose of this platform, while less experienced DMs should probably round down due to the significant skill this requires to pull off.
Personally, I loved the massive array of cool ideas spotlighted and hence, I’ll add my seal of approval for the vast imaginative potential.
The review is his usual in-depth analysis, deconstructing rules and story then graphing them against playability. As a designer I have to say that I love seeing his scalpel applied to my projects, I always end up making better products based on his feedback.
Another thing about this review that I was extremely pleased to see was in the comments where he said:
The imaginative potential of this book is vast indeed – and one can definitely see the influence, where people who know PFRPG have been brought on board – there are *a lot* of small nexus-points where one versed in design and development can see how someone VERY rules-savvy has changed a previous piece of text and added proper rules-language and concepts – these turned out to be, surprisingly, some of my favorite bits, so great job there: From haunts to technology and templates, quite an impressive job on that front indeed!
Another, interesting tidbit – on paper, this looked less awesome than it actually ran. I was sincerely concerned whether the fast-paced continuum-hopping would work out (since the sketchy nature of the sequence could have been perceived as inadequate) and somewhat surprisingly for me, it did work in playtest – so while playtest ate up about 2 months (we have to cover other books and modules as well!), I’m pretty glad we did in this case. I had an inkling actual playing would be required to properly judge whether this worked or not. Turns out, it worked better – so the seal of approval is pretty much the representation here on how well that experience went over.
So, color me thrilled! So far Palace has gotten nothing but rave reviews!
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