Now that that's said, The Sixfold Trial adventure in Paizo's Council of Thieves adventure path is officially fucking awesome.
The adventure path is set in Cheliax, a nation on Paizo's game world for their Pathfinder games that is ruled by a diabolist house, with worship of Asmodeus the official religion. This is important to understand the rest of the plot exposition.
The PCs must gain entrance to the mayor's house to steal some documents, however the place is heavily guarded and invitations to his galas are nearly impossible to obtain without outright buying an invitation, which costs about our (third level) starting wealth to do. (By sheer luck, I'd actually built my character, a rogue, precisely to infiltrate the diabolist nobility, not knowing it would actually be the objective of one of the adventures, but because it made sense with the background material I was given.) However, the mayor is a great patron of theater, and there is a production of a play called The Sixfold Trial of Larazod set to begin production; the mayor is greatly excited and is sure to invite the stars to a celebration at his house after the production. The production is still casting for the lead roles.
But there is a catch: The Sixfold Trial play is a combination of theater and blood sport. The trials the actors endure are quite real, and no cast has ever survived the production.
Best part: You have to roleplay the play. The adventure includes the script.
I loved it. The play is short, but very well written. This stretched both my acting and roleplaying chops in ways I hadn't done since high school.
The best (or worst) part is that thanks to the results of roleplaying the auditions, my character was cast as the title character of the play, who gets tortured most. The basic plot is that a corrupt magistrate of Hell has made secret dealings with demonic lords, and Larazod has found out. To avoid being successfully accused, the magistrate has put Larazod and his companions on trial for besmirching his name, and a diabolical trial follows. Larazod's companions include a wisecracking wizard who is his family's servant, and a paladin who is inexplicably friends with the half-fiend, who is the comic relief (from a diabolist's perspective, anyway; he's played perfectly straight, which apparently devil-worshipers find funny). The erinyes on the tribunal who has the hots for Larazod is funnier, I think. The play is very dark; I'd never run the full thing if there were minors in the group, but that's the only thing I can say against it.
And that's before we even get to infiltrating the mayoral estate, which unfortunately I had to skip due to work. I'll try to get the group to run the second part again, and if I'm successful I'll review that as well, but I highly recommend it just on the basis of the first half. I wouldn't run it online; too much depends on face to face interaction in the play. I mean, it could be done, but where's the fun in everyone just copying and pasting their lines?
