So, when that adventure starts, you find this playing card in your house, which gives you a time and a place. You go there, meet the rest of the party and a lady questgiver who gives you a hint where you can find Lamm(person who was hyped up as this untouchable unfindable mafiosi, who ****ed over everyone in the party at least once, and at that point you are thinking "Well, here is the BBEG for the first book"). Lady very unabashedly hints that it was she who snuck the card into your house, bringing you all together. You later find out that she is dead and is actually a ghost thingy tied to the deck of cards, and the ones you got vere illusory.
Well, here is the thing. She literally couldn't have done it. She has no abilities that let her manifest illusions so good they don't grant a save when interracted with from across the city with no line of effect or line of sight and god knows how many walls in the middle. "O but it doesn't matter focus on the story hurr durr"-it actually does matter very much. I was told about this by a friend who played through CotCT, and at one point they had to get a piece of information to a person on the other end of town. So he said "Well, lets call up our lady ghost friend and ask her to do it, like she did with our cards". Nope. Not possible.
And by default you kill/capture Lamm in session one. Talk about overhyping.
Want more? A second serving of plot holes coming up! At the end of first book there is a scene with a public execution. One person participating is JJ's self-insert character who is pretty much batman. Yes, with the costume. Yes, makes about as much realistic sense as the original. What that batman does is stop the execution, right in front of everyone(like half a city is gathered) call for a rebellion, then attempt to escape with the executionee. Party is basically assumed to be helping them. Yep, help out an open rebel out in the open in front of like half of the city, the queen, her guards, and god knows how many other important people. But that's not the insane part. Insane part is that if batman escapes, he manages to hide from Queen's wrath for months. Queen is a high-level caster with a lot of time and money on her hands, and a particular hate for rebels. Batman is something like Fighter 3/Swashbuckler 1. How he manages to not be found in less than a day is beyond me.
Still here? Well, here is the big one. See, CotCT is generally considered the
best adventure path by Paizo out there. Pretty much everyone agrees on that. And out of that whole adventure, book 2 is the central point. Devs literally said that the rest has been written as more or less background for book 2. Book 2 of CotCT is where
the best of the best Paizo has to offer in terms of writing quality is. What happens in that book is complicated, but basically the whole city suddenly gets infected with a plague. Dropping the question of how the flying flickety flock a mundane plague can function in a world with Remove Disease(it's really rather easy when you consider population mechanics and how many clerics there are in a city), that plague is the whole point of book 2. You do all sorts of quests related to the plague, trying to find out how it started in the process.
Well, riddle me this. What does an adventurer who is just about out of the "amazing mundane people" range do with a problem? How about a threat?
They
deal with it. Directly. They don't run away or ignore it, that has been passed behind 2 levels ago. So, what's a good way to deal with a plague? Well, you try to find a cure. AP blessedly enough gives you a fair amount of downtime to allow for this, so unless your Wizard/Witch/Alchemist/Harbinger is particularily lazy or selfish, they would probably either try to either find a cure themselves through experimentation or try to join an existing research division(it has been announced that The Crown is working on the cure by that point in the AP). Well, guess what. AP has literally no support for this rather obvious idea. None. Nada. Nill. Nihil subsidium.
So, here we have the best book out of the best AP, and it assumes the players will sit on their hands and go on stupid quests on the level of "go and kill those 10 evil people, don't ask questions" to pass the time instead of actually trying to do something productive.
Yeah, not terribly sad about leaving Paizo forums.