A Look at PACG's Murder in the Marketplace

Thursday, September 28, 2017

Not your friends.

Season of Factions' Favor, our current—and weirdest—Adventure Path for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is well underway. Designed by Keith Richmond with story by Katina Davis, Adventure 1, Chasing Yellow Sails, kicked off at Gen Con, leading the adventurers into the slave markets of Okeno in pursuit of a captured criminal. It's a rollicking adventure, and the upcoming Adventure 2 is also a mindbender.

But it's our first free promo scenario, the newly released Murder in the Marketplace that takes place between those adventures, that I think everyone will talk about for some time.

When the Pathfinder Society's John Compton and Tonya Woldridge first approached me about their plans for this Adventure Path, they had to answer the burning question: How do we justify the inclusion of our upcoming Hell's Vengeance Character Deck 1 and Deck 2? The characters in Hell's Vengeance are all unrelentingly evil. Unlike in the RPG side of organized play, the ACG can handle evil characters. So characters like Wrathack, Tontelizi, and Wu Shen are all street-legal. But with Hell's Vengeance, these folks have a purpose. They work as a team. An evil team. For evil.

To make it clear why they would work with good guys, we needed to justify their inclusion in the story arc. I won't spoil for you why they're there. But I will tell you the way we set it up, because it's cool. Designed by Keith and written by Linda Zayas-Palmer, Murder in the Marketplace is not one scenario, it's three. Each one is a battle to find and defeat one of the Deck 1 iconics: the cleric Lazzero, the hellknight Linxia, or the antipaladin Urgraz. You can play any one of the scenarios you want, or all three. Because the purpose is not only to defeat these baddies, it's to unleash them.

If you win one of these Murder-fests, you get a special reward. Here's Lazzero's, with Linxia's and Urgraz's following the same pattern.

Each player may, for each future scenario, choose to exchange his character that completed this scenario with Lazzero from Hell's Vengeance Character Deck 1. Lazzero gets the same number of skill, power, and card feats as the exchanged character, as well as all other applicable rewards that character has earned (including any valid deck upgrades and a role card if appropriate). Build Lazzero's deck from the Hell's Vengeance Character Deck 1 box using the Hierarchy from the Pathfinder Society Adventure Card Guild Guide. The exchanged character receives any rewards and upgrades from the scenario. Report the character as Unlocked Cleric Lazzero.

When you unlock this character, you can swap him in for any other Adventure Card Guild character that completed that version of P1. At any time. At any tier. You don't have to build up the character over time. You just pick a character to swap for and say "I want to play this scenario with the guy in the devil hat here." Or the woman with the forehead tattoo. Or the guy with the crossbow bigger than his body. Whatever. And something similar will occur between adventures 2 and 3 for the Deck 2 characters.

Why do they get this amazing flexibility? I already told you that. It's because they're evil. And rules are for suckers. We'll have a preview of Deck 1 next time, and you can see what I mean.

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer