Review: Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv – Paizo

Overview

During our autumn coast trip, we played the entire Book 1 of the Serpent’s Skull AP, Souls for Smuggler’s Shiv
I reduced the hex crawl to a point crawl and removed 80% of the random creature encounters, focusing instead on the cannibals, dryad, and Red Mountain Devil
I skipped the lacedon cave under the cannibal village and had the dryad reveal the secret of the Tidal Stones
Good adventure, we’re going to do Book 2 and perhaps Book 3 in April ’26 at our next coast trip

Not hard to adapt to Shadowfinder, pretty much ran everything straight from the Shadowfinder Bestiary and Player Guide
I was able to use Shadowfinder’s chaotic cleric for the cannibal crone and a fire-elemental bloodrager for the cannibal chief, which were nice touches
Was able to run the vast majority of this theater of the mind, except the Temple of Blood and the island itself – just printed the island 11×17 for table reference
We played a 12-hour marathon, 4 hours on Thursday and 8 hours on Friday, and wrapped up Souls around midnight
Ieana, the cleric, escaped, making a good recurring villain. The players eventually caught on that the Varisian scholar was lurking about, but didn’t see the plot twist of her being a disguised viperian. That was a good “ah-hah” moment.

Paizo has a serious verbiage problem. Between the colored page background, frequent use of non-black font color, and paragraphs of needless backstory, I had several points where I was forced to scour the adventure mid-dramatic moment to figure out what was going on
I was running from the actual Pathfinder 1 books, which I got from various places. I’ve tried running from the PDF printout, but B&W printouts of the APs are terrible, little details get totally lost in the muddled page design
There’s a whole host of NPCs. My players interacted with two of them (Aerys and Jask). I let a player take over Jask when her PC died, but then Jask got killed too. Thankfully, I’d read ahead a bit on Book 2 and understood that these five castaway NPCs are actually faction hooks for later.
Vaguely worried that reviews say that Book 1 is the strongest out of the series, and Books 2-6 are lackluster. I’m still going to run them, just being mindful of potential design issues.