Starring: Stewart Alexander, Trevor Littledale, Ian Brooker, and Kerry Skinner, with Evie Dawnay, Ashleigh Loeb, Cliff Chapman, Aaron Neil, Nisha Nayar, Wraith Johnson and Sean Connolly

Written by David Bryher (from a story by Richard Pett), directed by John Ainsworth

In which an arranged meeting with potential ally Vencarlo Orsini (Connolly) turns into a search for the missing nobleman. Dangers lurk in the lawless streets of quarantined Old Korvosa, and the Queen’s Champions are made an offer they soon wish they’d refused…

Considering how many tricky and/or potentially explosive situations they’ve found themselves in during the Pathfinder Legends audio drams, our heroes seem especially naïve when they unquestioningly accept the protection of Glorio Arkona (Neil), a very influential nobleman with a vested interest in keeping the status quo and wresting control of the streets from the self-styled Emperor of Old Korvosa (Johnson). Seeing as they’re already in the midst of a powder keg situation, I expected these otherwise intelligent and perceptive individuals to realise they were just digging themselves deeper into the muck that is Korvosan politics. But then again, if they hadn’t blindly stumbled into this situation, we wouldn’t have this story to listen to, would we?

While its premise beggars belief, at least Escape from Old Korvosa is populated with memorable guest characters. Wraith Johnson plays the aforementioned Emperor – a wheedling grotesque who could’ve sidled from the pages of a Dickens novel – in a manner redolent of Barry Humphries’ Goblin King from the first Hobbit movie. Then there’s Laori Vaus (Loeb), an elven devotee of the god of pain and suffering who joins forces with the Champions to locate missing artist Sebastian Scream (Chapman). Thanks to her high-pitched voice and off-kilter outlooks on so many subjects, she comes off as a hilarious amalgamation of Morticia Addams and Harry Potter’s Luna Lovegood. As Sebastian Scream, Cliff Chapman is a study in ever-mounting paranoia and hysteria thanks to so many different factions wanting to use the artist’s social prominence to their advantage.

The Champions’ confrontation with Glorio Arkona for playing them ought to be a highlight of this story, but since the listener has been privy to Arkona’s true nature since soon after the start of Escape from Old Korvosa, the Champions once again seem like chumps, lagging several steps behind the villain’s machinations. Adding insult to injury, they end up stuck in the deadly labyrinth beneath Arkona’s palazzo and must survive diabolical traps and ferocious monsters if they want to exact revenge. At least Arkona is a grandiloquent adversary and his booming vocal similarity to a beloved cereal mascot becomes much clearer in hindsight.

Verdict: Another entertaining installment of the latest Adventure Path, but one whose last act suffers from an influx of new characters and massive infodumps. 7/10

John S. Hall