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As context for these reviews, I should confess that I'm writing many of them well after I first played or ran them. I played Citadel of Flame nearly a year and a half ago (so far behind am I in my reviews!), and when I first saw it come up on my list, I had absolutely no recollection of it whatsoever! After doing some research, I was able to reconstruct what PC I ran and who I played it with, and then bits of it came back. But still, it's fair to say that this review is more based on my reading the scenario than it is recounting my actual experience of it. As to that last bit, I played my bizarre android oozeshifter Genesix in a live tabletop game. I can say that there's agreement from what little I do remember of playing it and my evaluation of the scenario as written: it's pretty forgettable. There's nothing outright bad or broken about it, and indeed it has a somewhat interesting main location. But the storyline and encounters are fairly vanilla, and there's probably only one short opportunity for role-playing in the whole session. In short, Citadel of Flame is nothing to write home about.
SPOILERS!
The background section of the scenario presents a solid, interesting tale. Three hundred years ago, the cult of Moloch (an archdevil and the so-called "God of Fires") began to spread through Qadira's Meraz Desert. It was a time of the fiercest heat waves ever recorded, and some Qadirans were persuaded it was a sign of Moloch's power. Preachers invited the converted to trek through the desert to reach paradise; most died in the attempt (which the cultists claimed as a sacrifice to their god) but a lucky few reached the Citadel of Flame, the hidden home of the cult deep in the southern Meraz. But as the cult's strength grew, so did opposition from the Dawnflower, Sarenrae's dervishes. They launched a crusade into the Meraz, seeking to destroy the Citadel of Flame. The greatest sandstorm in a century rose up and swallowed both the army and the Citadel, with neither ever having been seen since! Until now, that is--a Pathfinder Society wizard was flying (as one does) over the desert and saw the minarets of the Citadel from above.
This is where the PCs come in, with a briefing by the unfortunately named Venture-Captain Hamshanks. Good ole' VC Baconthighs wants the PCs to trek to the Citadel of Flame and explore it; and more to the point, Swinehaunches wants the group to retrieve a bull-headed idol of Moloch said to symbolise the judgment of Moloch. Smash and loot: that's how the PFS does archaeology! Fortunately for the PCs (and unfortunately for this Kuthite reviewer who loves inflicting grueling environmental effects), the actual travel through the desert is handwaved.
Act 1 ("Heat of the Hoodoos") has the PCs following a path through a maze of cliffs when they're attacked by a pair of fire elementals. It's about as generic as encounters get. After the battle, the PCs can investigate some bull-headed statues, flame-carved hoodoos, and stone glyphs that line the cliffs.
In Act 2 ("The Ember Halls"), the PCs learn that the Citadel of Flame actually consists of two minareted (?) fortresses connected by a stone bridge. The descriptive text is well-written, and the place sounds pretty cool (or--hot--as it were). The first of these fortresses is the Ember Halls. The gist of what happens here is that there's a secret central room with spyholes in the surrounding rooms. A sorcerer named Gali Sinquil hides in the central room and uses illusions each time the PCs enter an adjoining room to try to get them to waste their resources and be frightened away. It's a fairly clever concept, actually. Neither The Ember Halls or the other fortress have anything approaching realistic architecture as a residence where people would actually live, but I'm not too fussed about that. The Halls also contain "The Sacred Sauna" (a ritual prayer room for priests of Moloch, trapped with fire magic for unbelievers) and "The Bridge of Flame"--a covered bridge connected to the other fortress, here guarded by a small flying devil called a gaav.
Act 3 ("The Inferno Heart") has the PCs force their way into the second of the two fortresses. There's a mention that the fortress is hot enough that the PCs need to make hourly saves against heat--at normal exploration pace, that probably means just one, but I appreciate the scenario throwing me a bone. There's a massive forge here called the Volcanic Anvil, currently tended to by a single dwarf. This fellow, Vulcus, is a weaponsmith hired by the newly re-started cult's leader to begin making weapons to outfit the cult. Vulcus, however, has no particular loyalty to the Cult of Moloch, and is happy to chat with the PCs because his boss is a real jerk. He'll even tell the group how to shut down certain heat vents that will otherwise trouble them as they continue their explorations.
There's a long ramp up to the fire temple that caps the second fortress, and along the way PCs could do various rituals to Moloch to gain some minor fire resistance, but it's really not worth it considering all the nasty side effects (interesting flavour, but not warranting the lengthy descriptions). The fire temple itself is well-described and evocative, with rivers of slowly bubbling lava, an elaborate altar containing the bull-headed man idol that pours lava from its mouth, vents of hot steam from the floor below, obsidian bas reliefs, and more. Probably, it'll all just amount to forgotten background as the PCs battle it out with the boss of the scenario, a cleric of Moloch who uses summons and whip-trips to give the invaders a hard time.
The Conclusion consists of two short sentences that essentially amount to "everything returns to the status quo."
So that's Citadel of Flame. An interesting location, flat encounters, and a storyline that could have been randomly selected from a d100 list.
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