When the mysterious Gauntlight, an eerie landlocked lighthouse, glows with baleful light, the people of Otari know something terrible is beginning. The town's newest heroes must venture into the ruins around the lighthouse and delve the dungeon levels far beneath it to discover the evil the Gauntlight heralds. Hideous monsters, deadly traps, and mysterious ghosts all await the heroes who dare to enter the sprawling megadungeon called the Abomination Vaults!
Pathfinder Second Edition's most popular campaign yet bursts from the pages of this massive hardcover compilation, containing all three adventures in the fan-favorite Abomination Vaults Adventure Path, a dungeon-delving campaign like no other, along with support articles, rules, monsters, and more!
This is the first Pathfinder 2e Adventure Path I've read through, and to be honest, I was quite disappointed.
I had a premonition, after reading reviews and previewing materials online, that Paizo's general Lost Omens world and pre-constructed adventures were heading in a direction that I would call "entropic". I think the catalysts for this behavior are A) an attempt to break away from Wizards of the Coast and OGL, B) a creeping of postmodern quasi-moralism into the game world and C) specifically, a supplanting of the alignment system that has generally guided Dungeons and Dragons and its spinoffs for decades.
A key example of what I mean is the nature of the power groups within the Gauntlight dungeon and their anticipated interactions with the player characters. While the game seems to assume that a generally heroic and "good"-aligned party will be carrying out the dungeon delve in the interest of saving Otari and aiding its citizens, the game also clearly assumes repeated cooperation with the various cruel, malevolant, and debased inhabitants of the dungeon. Indeed, page upon page is dedicated to detailing the deals, missions, and conversations that these groups will have with a party...that is specifically intended to be an agency of their destruction.
This, combined with a very random conglomeration of monsters and factions within the dungeon itself (which seems to be an attempt to maintain a sense of variety and novelty), leads to a very intellectually dissonant and confusing play experience that I wouldn't ever be interested in running with a party. This one will go on the "rotate out" shelf.