Splintered Worlds continues the uneven quality of the Dead Suns adventure path set by the last two books, but brings in some truly wonderfully weird, creepy and interesting settings and characters. There's a lot of writing to love here - from the eccentric undead of Eox to the spooky abandoned Cult base, to the blasted, hostile landscapes of bone and acid in the final confrontation. And on top of that, after two books of slow burning aimlessness, the plot kicks into gear and both stakes and enemies start becoming clear.

But at the same time, the mechanical aspects of the adventure are lacking in a few glaring areas. From traps that auto-magically break the rules to frustrate PCs, to stat block errors, to multiple dramatic contradictions between maps and text. And the story - for all its evocative locales and fun characters - makes little sense, contradicting itself and hamfistedly requiring GM railroading or big plot adjustments to get players to follow the AP's content.

Thankfully, those mechanical details are all fixable, and it doesn't take huge changes to the plot to make it logically consistent. But these are all things that the GM needs to realize ahead of time and fix (or not fix and deal with confused players mid-game). It does make the adventure more of an evocative framework to create your game, than an adventure that plays well if you just pick it up.



The Good (spoilers): The descriptions, maps and art for Eox are all absolutely amazing. Knocked out of the park on cool imagery. The cult base is similarly amazing art-wise.

Eoxian characters are unexpectedly kooky and weird, with an obvious undercurrent of possibly evil creepiness to them. The encounters in the Splice with "friendly" shopkeepers are a joy. Lots of character background and details to help flesh them out.

The Eox article in the back is great!

An excellent variety of novel encounters, from snipers, to getting dunked in acid pools, to apartment block brawls, to dodging laser grids, to giant radioactive behemoths, to skeletons crawling out of walls of bone! Much much better variety and more interesting fights in this one than the previous two books.