Review of Curse of the Crimson Throne

Curse of the Crimson Throne

Published by Paizo

Curse of the Crimson Throne made its debut back in March of 2008 starting with Edge of Anarchy and ended with Crown of Fangs in August of the same year.  This adventure path is among the earliest of Paizo’s publications.  In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, It was in March of 2008 that Paizo announced the Pathfinder RPG. The revised edition of Curse of the Crimson Throne was published back in December of 2016.  It has been updated with a few changes to expand story and reflect the rules supplements and changes made over the years .

First, this review is well as free of spoilers, I hope.  I really hate spoiling adventures and in many places it will seem like I give you hardly any information.

Curse of the Crimson Throne is set in Korvosa where the royalty never lives to old age and never manage to spawn an heir. . The King recently expired and the queen is about to take the throne. This really sets the stage for what is really a big sweeping narrative that starts by putting the players against a crime lord.  They eventually experience plagued cities and have to deal with the corruption of the queen.

In researching the Curse of the Crimson Throne, one harsh critique I discovered is that the opening of the story requires all the pc’s to have a tie ( a trait) that connects them to the crime lord.  The revised edition doesn’t do much to change this from what I can tell.  Honestly, I ‘m not sure it really matters. Since this is an adventure path and your pc’s are embedded in the story for the next 20 levels does it really matter?  Now a creative GM can easily overlook it by doing just about anything to create a connection like maybe the pc owes the crime lord a gambling debt.

The other critique I found is that the adventure is very 3.5.  The revised edition has done some things to account for this like using the supplemental rules that have been made over the years.  I even noticed one of the NPC’s is a vigilante. Now without playing I can’t attest to the way magic items are given out, but I suspect it hasn’t moved that far away from the influence of 3.5.

There are more than a few things that Paizo has done right in Curse of the Crimson Throne.  The first of which is it isn’t dungeon after dungeon like so many modules can be.  Because the story, world events, and the NPC’s  truly grant an epic feel to this story.  The best part is how early they introduce the villain and keep the villain involved through out the story.  I have also discovered that Paizo also changed the way events unfold to smooth out some of the transitions.  Chapter 4 has been reworked so players can have more interaction with the Red Mantis and the Grey Maidens.

So what is bad about Curse of the Crimson Throne?  Not much, the worse part is that a GM really has familiarize herself with the NPC’s to avoid any hiccups that might occur later in the story because of a potentially untimely death or other story influencing event. As mentioned before their is a lot of treasure.  I don’t think this is a problem if you modify things.  Give players things with limited uses.  Limiting the number of uses an item has is one of the best GM rules I can give you.  It forces the players to think about their actions instead of rampantly abusing the tool (magic item).

After reading Curse of the Crimson throne from cover to cover I really think that this is a great story as presented, but the revised edition gives a sand box feel to the region of Korvosa.  Which makes it more valuable, in my opinion, because once you have run the adventure you can still use the book to write your own adventures.  I recommend checking out the players guide and getting the Harrow deck before running this adventure path.  There is also a ton of information in the Paizo forums about the adventure, if your’e a gm looking for tips it’s the place to go.