An excellent undeniably five star product... with a large BUT! attached.

First off the good. I doubt I have to go into much detail, previous reviewers have beat me to it and doing another itemized list of all the good stuff in this 500+ page product seems a bit pointless and just serves to tire out anyone actually reading over these reviews. But to sum up... a well written product with an incredible amount of detail that still lets you be as free form as you want to be while undertaking an incredible adventure path. Evil characters are evil without being pure bwa-hah-hah, they're evil is understandable and a GM can adapt their motivations and plots on the fly. Good characters are not just shining paladins out to smite evil because it is there but also have their quirks and reasonable personalities... for the most part (see below). The area is well fleshed out with lots of options but still a couple of less developed spaces on the map a GM can use something of his own in. It is expensive, but given the amount of stuff you get in it I'd say it's well worth the price. Seriously. Less then 10 cents a page here, compare that to some of the $1 odd deals you see around this place with six or seven pages including the cover and think about that.

BUT!

There's the odd formatting and spelling error, nothing major and more then forgivable on a project this size but I remember them being occasionally jarring. The native population comes off as a bunch one note noble savage types, getting into Mary Sue territory. It's not too bad but after the excellent characterization of everyone else it can be a bit grating. But the biggest 'flaw' of this book is how basic it is. I want to emphasize this, it's not a bad thing that the Razor Coast doesn't require you to have a dozen different pathfinder books to run it. And that's not taking into account the mind boggling effort it would have taken the writers to keep looking over everything and updating thie FIVE HUNDRED PLUS page book while they were busy converting it as each new supplement came out. However, the book as a whole simply cries out for some of the advanced stuff. Ironically perhaps the additional book you'd want most is the Advanced Class Guide, the Razor Coast is simply screaming for the Swashbuckler and Brawler classes. You can see the writers trying to put the archetypes in with just the basic classes but it doesn't work as well (IMO). Similarly Bloodragers and Skalds could make interesting additions to the natives and there's another half a dozen classes between the Advanced Class Guide and the Advanced Players Guide which would be useful, thematic, and/or interesting. I'm especially torn on the Shaman class, on one hand it might make the natives a little too powerful. On the other hand, certain local patrons for some sort of Hex using class could really help or thematically explain certain native abilities while remaining perfectly within the rules. To a lesser degree the campaign might lend itself well to some Mythic additions. I can't see it working as an out and out mythic campaign but the addition of a few mythic levels to certain 'appropriate' bad guys (I'm trying not to spoil here) would be thematic, differentiate them from the more convention bad guys in town, and help explain a couple of things that had gone on before the players came. Similarly, certain recommended points in the outline, not to mention the mysteries of the local area, lend themselves to giving the PC's a mythic level or two before the end of the campaign. I mean that literally though, I wouldn't do more then tier 3 on anything here (except MAYBE the biggest bad of the bunch) and even then I'm worried about how much mythic stuff could unbalance an excellent setting if you're not careful.

All in all it's still a five star product but keep this stuff in mind when buying.