Review: Racing to Ruin – Paizo (Shadowfinder)

Overview

• During our spring coast trip, we played a truncated version of Book 2 of the Serpent’s Skull AP, Racing to Ruin
• RPG system was Shadowfinder (my Shadowdark-ified Pathfinder 1 hybrid). Worked well. Monster stats were easily ported in from Shadowfinder Bestiary, and I used material from the upcoming GM Guide to fill in details.
• As written, Racing to Ruin starts with picking a patron group, slides into an urban encounter to set the stage, and then consists of 20+ encounters on the way to an lost Azlanti outpost
• I simplified the multitude of extra encounters, was fairly generous with XP (in order to get the group in line with Books 3 & 4)
• Decent, but very linear adventure, we’re going to do Book 3 & 4 in October ’26 at our next coast RPG retreat.
• Players commented that our 12-hour runtime seemed like a sweet spot for completing an entire AP book. I told them we skipped 90% of the encounters, including a good dozen extensive fights and a few mini-dungeons. They appreciated not getting slogged down for an extra 12+ hours.
• The PCs allied with the pirates, were each given a pirate ally, and proceeded to name their new-found friends monikers like “Bilge-Arms” and “Mittens”. Much fun was had. Many of these pirates died. Many of the NPCs died too! RIP Cheriot.
• The next plan is Books 3 & 4 together. I read Worlds in a Handful of Dice’s campaign summary of their actual play, and the analysis was that books 3 & 4 should be run as a package deal, book 5 can be totally skipped, and book 6 requires a lot of setup for a mediocre payoff.

Pros

• Not hard to adapt to Shadowfinder, pretty much ran everything straight from the Shadowfinder Bestiary, Player Guide, GM Guide
• Fun experience! True to Pathfinder 1 form, the gnome gunslinger rolled a mishap on his first attack roll, and his gun exploded in his hands
• Tengu continue to be fan-favorites at my Shadowfinder tables
• I cherry-picked some of the more flavorful overland encounters, handwaved rations for the most part, and just focused on building out the road trip
• Ran the overland encounters theater of the mind
• Once we got to the Azlanti outpost, we drilled down into dungeon crawling
• We played a 12-hour marathon, 4 hours on Thursday and 8 hours on Friday, and wrapped up Ruin around 6pm
• Ieana, the viperian cleric, would make a good recurring villain. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to bring her back in quite yet. The AP mentioned Yazroth/Ieana in a few spots, but I really have to find a way to slide her back in
• My players enjoyed the dream sequence/spirit animal story beat
• We skipped the Whaler’s House, and the Tempest’s quest line was truncated. We did the crab, the thunderbird feather, the local Sargavans, and the spirit journey, and then moved on to the overland adventure
• On the overland adventure, we skipped the salt mine entirely and didn’t track the days of travel to get to Tazion. We did the cockfight (that was a fun scene), Katabuto (with the ambush, but the Aspis assassins were totally incompetent because of lousy attack rolls, and it was almost comical), the beggar girl, the hanging tree, and a few other encounters
• The PCs hired a fishing boat to take them upriver, bypassing 75% of the rest of the encounters (with my blessing!), then cut overland west into the Mwangi. Cheriot, their guide, took them to the Azlanti outpost, where he was promptly eaten by a decapus

Cons

• Paizo continues to lack serious editing. Racing to Ruin was better than Kingmaker (PF2), which is the lowest point I’ve seen for Paizo content. Still, there are often paragraphs, sometimes several, of non-essential backstory, but embedded in this wall of text are crucial elements like “the family locket” or what an NPC looks like (“thin, smarmy Garundi man with a lazy eye”). Maddening as a GM.
• I was running from the actual Pathfinder 1 books, which I got from various places. Unlike Shiv, I didn’t print out any big full-color pictures.
• Again, there’s a whole lot of NPCs, very few overlapping with Book 1. There was mention of the shipwrecked NPCs from Shiv and how they play into the faction choice in Book 2, but then Ruin introduced The Tempest (druid/guide), Cheriot (Mwangi guide), and a bunch of episodic NPCs. It would be nice if the NPCs built up more of a consistent presence instead of being in and out.
• I can see how this laundry list of encounters is meant as padding to get Pathfinder characters high enough level. It wasn’t necessary in our play-through, and would have been a terrible slog (and another 20+ hours).
• On the topic of general quality, Book 1 continues to be the best of the series so far. Book 2 is very linear, literally a predetermined road trip, but not bad, just be ready to trim encounters heavily – think greatest hits album, not complete catalog.

Link

Paizo: https://store.paizo.com/pathfinder-adventure-path-38-racing-to-ruin-serpent-s-skull-2-of-6-pfrpg-pdf/

Worlds in a Handful of Dice Serpent’s Skull Blog: https://nitessine.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/serpents-skull-an-autopsy-of-a-campaign/

Shadowfinder Player Guide https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/561105/Shadowfinder-Player-Guide-for-Shadowdark-RPG?affiliate_id=14013