In an effort to maintain a straightforward linear adventure, I'm afraid the author makes some decisions that are not just bad adventure design but are, in a few cases, morally problematic.
Some of the bad design issues are covered in other reviews: key pieces of information happen by NPC plot dumps rather than clues for the players to figure out; the primary antagonist is teleported in and out in order to create a menacing presence, arbitrarily limiting the PC's engagement with her.
Two issues happened with my group that weren't covered in the other reviews, both with moral aspects. The first issue is that, in part 1, my players immediately decided that they weren't interested in working with the Thranish authorities, and instead sided with the Aundairian separatists. As one of my players put it, "we grew up on Star Wars, of course we're going to side with the rebels." They ditched Lukar as soon as the separatists started giving him grief, and ended up killing him when I brought him back with a couple of guards. As written, the adventure assumes that the players are going to work with the Thranish authorities, to the point that there's no way to transition the players to the second half if they act otherwise. My players never bothered to go back to the temple after getting clues pointing to the Eldeen Reaches, and I ended up using some History rolls to justify handing them the plot.
The moral aspect of this issue is that the separatists are described in highly disparaging terms: the NPCs are "thugs," and the boss fight of part 1 is with a "mob" that "is mindless with patriotic furor and will attack anyone that they meet," regardless of how the players handled the other encounters with separatists. This kind of language has been used to discredit liberation movements for centuries; most recently we saw it used (falsely) against Black Lives Matter protestors in the summer of 2020.
The second issue in my group was that, even before finding out about the Lycanthropic Purge, my players wanted to help the lycanthropes, not stop them. In response to the primary antagonist shouting "I saw you working with the agents of the Silver Flame!" my players shouted back, almost in unison, "f--- the Silver Flame!" As with the first issue, the adventure as written doesn't recognize this as a possibility. Fortunately we were playing through very slowly, and had to skip a week, so I had time to rework the plot points and boss fight in the second half.
The moral aspect of this issue is that the Lycanthropic Purge was clearly an act of genocide; not only does the adventure not acknowledge this, it actually celebrates it. Bitten lycanthropes are ordinary people suffering from a dangerous but manageable (and indeed curable) curse. Remember Oz from Buffy? In the adventure, a bitten lycanthrope is described as a "ravening monster that posed an apocalyptic threat of infection"; while the church authorities who slaughtered them "fought this civilization-ending threat" "with courage and silvered steel." The Silver Flame priest acknowledges that "not all [lycanthropes] were beset by uncontrollable savagery and bloodthirst"; but goes on to describe the forced displacement of refugees as though it were voluntary, and then describes lycanthropes as "bent on drowning civilization in blood" and "a plague." This is, quite literally, the language of any 20th century genocide you care to name: an internal, subhuman enemy who poses an existential threat to civilization unless they are completely exterminated. I can't imagine how traumatizing this would be for a player who was a survivor of genocide (or had family members killed in a genocide).
This was so objectionable that, after reading the box on the Lycanthropic Purge out loud, I stopped our session and my group spent a few minutes discussing whether or not we wanted to continue playing the adventure. I'm honestly on the fence about whether or not to flag this adventure for offensive content.
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