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****** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden 15,582 posts (16,603 including aliases). 171 reviews. 4 lists. 1 wishlist. 45 Organized Play characters. 5 aliases.



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Good story, correct but not quite fun difficulty

3/5

Perspective: played a level 4 magus at Monkhound's high tier table

The skill DCs seem a bit high for the level, which hurts when you're already below the level of the scenario. Overall it feels like the skill DCs are tuned towards the high end of the tiers (4 and 6) rather than the low end (3 and 5).

On the one hand, you don't need to succeed at every skill challenge to get the happy ending to the adventure, so it's fair. But on the other hand, that means for a lot of the situations, you end up doing the scenario what feels like the "bad" way because you just can't succeed at the DC for the "good" way.

The boss is also particularly unpleasant for people playing up. He projects a debuff onto everyone, which up-players are especially likely to fail. Then they get into a spiral of failure. This means you're also at a big disadvantage if you try to leave the boss to the high level characters while you keep the mooks busy.

So yeah, the difficulty in this scenario doesn't really feel fun, even though it's "technically" correct. It's particularly sharp for people playing out of tier.

On the other hand, the overall story of the scenario was good, with interesting situatins and possible solutions. And the choice of minions for the BBEG makes me really curious about the next scenario in this storyline.


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Rather rough combat clashes with the intended whimsical tone

4/5

I think at heart this is a great scenario. It has a lot of really fun NPC interaction, both with the students and the fae. However, there are also a couple of points that hold it back from perfection.

- It's long. There's a lot of encounters in this scenario, and each of them takes a fair amount of time to resolve. They're all interesting encounters and it would be a shame to skip any. But overall it's hard to run this in a normal time slot.

- It's actually a fairly challenging scenario, with enemies and hazards that hit pretty hard and with not a lot of time to recovery. And some also require specific countermeasures, which you might not have, or not have enough of. This kinda clashes with the theme of fun and whimsy the scenario is trying to push. I feel like for this scenario it would have been fine if it had been a lot easier on the combat side. Especially the nominally "trivial" hazards hit very hard due to a rather generous avoiding of MAP when attacking the whole party.

Also, considering how hard the various hazards hit and that it could have been a kid instead of a level 3+ PC who is the first to encounter them, it is kinda unbelievable that you don't decide to blow the whole thing off and evacuate the kids before there's a mass tragedy. Especially when you find out about some of the bad stuff that you can be sure is still to come.

The scenario does somewhat handle those points, but not really fully to my satisfaction. Overall it's really a fun scenario but these things do hold it back from being a full five stars.


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excellent

5/5

A clever skill challenge, a combat that's got a bit of teeth but with a safety net, and fun RP prompts.


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Finish big

3/5

We played this high tier. At first I was a bit skeptical, but I warmed to the scenario near the end. It does a thing I like, which is having an ending that feels tense and climactic (even if you're not super high level). Not that many low level scenarios manage to have that epic finish feeling.

Overall difficulty felt right to me, some of it was easier and some of it was harder but not unfair. There were a couple of points that I think could have been better.

One was the pacing: you're on some kind of timer, but as player, you have very little insight on how much time you have and how important various things you could be spending your time on really are. So you're being asked to make very blind gambles, which doesn't feel that meaningful to me.

There's also the hazard at the end. What annoys me about it is -

Spoiler:
There's a mechanism to "restore elements to it" that prevents it from making attacks with that element, but instead it just has to use a different element. So that doesn't really accomplish anything unless you do it six times. This seems like a variant on something I've seen in hazards before, where you can do some action to prevent it from targeting *you*, but it doesn't target fewer people, so it's just going to hit someone else.

Compounding this, the hazard strikes only non-elementals. Just... because. It's being guarded by metal elemental (because). I feel like this is a big obvious missed opportunity for an interesting combat gimmick. What if the hazard *did* also target the elementals, but at first there was a big chance they'd resist the attacks? Then you could remove the energy types those elementals were resistant to, turning the hazard more against them.

In the end you can kinda see why the whole thing got in motion, but it's kinda missing a "why was this here in the first place" satisfying discovery.

That's starting to sound a bit negative, so I wanna emphasize that it was a fun and exciting adventure, especially towards the end.


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Tries to do too much and ends up diluted

2/5

I was rather disappointed with this scenario (GMing) and I don't think I'll bother running or playing it again. There's nothing actively harmful in it, but it kinda brings together a couple different things that PFS2 scenarios seem to have a lot have that I don't like;

- "Random" elements that don't matter.

Spoiler:
It really doesn't matter which lodge you choose to go to. Which consumes a surprising amount of word count.

- Encounters that dilute their XP budget so much that they become anemic.

Spoiler:
Two of the fights are "moderate" but spread that across three enemies. The fights were over before the end of round 2.

- Too much mechanical setup that doesn't really pay off that much. A very large amount of word count seems to go into setting up a complicated mechanic that in the end just doesn't do that much.

Spoiler:
The last fight has a page and a half of description about how NPCs will stand around giving you advice on how to do the fight. But the fight is so easy that they don't get time to say their lines. And their advice isn't really that good anyway, because simple violence is faster and totally effective against a L1 and two L -1 enemies.

I feel overall that the adventure tries to do too much and ends up not really shining in any of them. Maybe it needs to introduce a LOT of new NPCs for the season while also showcasing new books?


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Very pleased to meet you

5/5

Played this at low tier with a mostly new party. Really enjoyed it.

What stood out for me were the skill challenges. They had nice prompts for roleplay and were just plain funny. Mechanically, they were nice and straightforward, no more complicated than needed to do what they were there to do.

The combats were a little bit on the easy side, I wouldn't have minded a bit tougher opponents, especially at the last fight. But the enemies did interesting things so overall I was entertained.

It was nice seeing Valashinaz and Purepurin, I'm looking forward to continuing this storyline.


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Brutally dangerous old-school Osirion fun

5/5

Perspective: played this yesterday with a party of monk 8 (me), fighter 8, ranger 7, gunslinger 6, investigator 5. So high tier but not by much, but fortunately the high levels were the front row.

At first I was thinking if this was going to be a three or four star review because while I really liked the dungeon design and the lore bits, the big fight really shocked me by how brutal and hard it was. AFAIK this is the only PFS2 scenario so far that's gotten a revision to tone it down due to too many TPKs, and even after the revision it's hitting like a truck.

But after sleeping on it I'm bumping it to a five. We had a lot of fun fighting for our lives and barely snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Pulling out some tactical tricks and learning lessons. And when I'm looking through the scenario now, I think this is just about the hardest fight you can write that's still fair. It doesn't rely on just one boss with super high numbers that are just frustrating, but all the enemy monsters add a real threat. But all of them have soft spots that can be exploited too, if you can pivot your tactics.

It's only the end of a short story arc, but it feels like this scenario can be listed next to the grand PFS1 Osirion capstones like Ancients' Anguish and Salvation of the Sages without embarrassing itself.

For GMs, I think two things to beware of:
- This season 1-4 scenarios seem to be fairly beginner friendly and easy. 3-6 scenarios a bit more challenging. But by 5-8 the gloves are really coming off. Might want to warn the players.
- Make sure you have the revised version of the scenario, for the love of Desna.


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Fun!

5/5

I enjoyed playing this adventure a lot. Good RP scenes with NPCs that make you enjoy punking them. And a "big bad" that's quite different from what we're used to, very nice change of pace.

The fights I guess were not particularly special, I didn't have a problem with them but they weren't really the most memorable part of the adventure.

The scenario succeeded really well in making me curious about the sequel and the ongoing storyline. And once I played that one, it didn't disappoint. This is one of the best coordinated multipart adventures I've seen in PFS.


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More scenarios like this please

5/5

Perspective: played at Monkhound's table.

This was a really enjoyable scenario. I enjoyed the overall lighthearted pranksterish tone of it, and the symmetry with the previous one in this arc; last time we were causing mayhem, this time we're playing defense.

The A7 encounter I agree with Monkhound, I think the proposed solution by the author is cute, there but are also plenty of other reasonable ways to solve the situation so that encounter is a bit "fragile". It was easy enough to cope with for the GM though that it didn't detract from the scenario.

I don't agree with P.B. that it leans too heavily on the same skill check. We got to use mental, social and physical skills. If a character turns out to have none of them, then maybe this is a good wakeup call to diversify your build a bit because you'll also feel frustrated in other scenarios?

I liked the exotic vibe, and the interaction with the "big bad" and "little bad". It's a power dynamic you don't see very often. It makes me curious to see this storyline continue.


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Fun story, fun combats, but a bit sloppy at the edges.

3/5

Perspective: I GMed this on low tier

Overall this was an enjoyable scenario. The plot unfolded in an interesting way that had the players wanting to know what's coming next. Special mention for the art assets; the picture of the bell is really good. I also dove into the Mwangi setting book to get some extra background. I recommend that to GMs; it's not strictly needed, but it does make the story a bit richer. The scenario's pretty solidly grounded on the setting. Nice work there.

The combats were quite entertaining, with creatures having an environment to work with so they can do interesting things, but not hopelessly contrived.

The big social part in the middle worked out well, my players juuuust managed to get the happy outcome out of it. They weren't especially good or badly statted for it, so I guess that speaks to good balancing (it sure looked dicey right up till the end).

There's a couple of points though where I think it could be better though.

* Several elite adjustments, without those statblocks printed. There was plenty of room on the page. This just seems lazy editing?

* I'm not convinced the encounter difficulty tags were correct. Especially the final encounter seems very easy on low tier and very hard on high tier. Especially the CP scaling seems to swing rather wildly there.

* Some of the skill challenges seem a bit shoehorned in, or require a high success without really signalling that they're particularly important and perhaps worth spending a hero point on.

* For the big central social part, I don't love what would have happened if the PCs don't get full points. It's a bit railroady. Maybe this kind of skill challenge isn't the right one for what the rest of the story needs to have happen at this point.

None of these are especially egregious but they do prevent it from rising from decent to great. In the hands of a moderately experienced/prepared GM you can still have a good afternoon with this.


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Strongly recommend low tier

3/5

This was an enjoyable scenario, enough opportunities for RP, the investigation flowed quite reasonably. And then you get that sudden monster at the end for no apparent reason. Which results in level 2 characters that are already playing uphill in high tier, fighting a level 6 monster. WHY?


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A good solid adventure

4/5

This adventure ticks a lot of boxes for me. The skill challenges are pretty spot on for difficulty and run smoothly. There's a couple of good opportunities for social interaction. Couple of combats with good build-up and use of venue. The scenario is thoroughly grounded in lore, so you're not just going through a dungeon corridor by corridor, there's some actual story to uncover here. The puzzle is well-done too, and can work well both for players who want to think their way through it themselves or who like letting character skill be the driver.

Some of the other reviews mention the lack of a climax at the end. I agree, BUT: the floor plan is also more open, so you actually get a bit of freedom in how you want to take on this dungeon instead of proceeding in linear fashion as we often do. It's tricky to combine those things. I for one really enjoyed the freedom.


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Starfinder showing off :)

4/5

This scenario could have been a 5-star scenario, because it does a lot of really cool stuff. Unfortunately there are also some annoying bits that didn't have to be this way.

I really liked the story, environment, reveals, and the general mood of craziness piled on craziness. It really feels like epic high level adventure.

Where it loses a bit IMO is this:
- Monsters in high and low tier were quite different. This makes the GM's job harder than necessary while players get to see only half the content. In Starfinder scaling a monster up or down a few levels is much easier than Pathfinder 1 so having entirely different monsters seems really unnecessary.
- A monster that's got "lower CR than it's stats indicate because it moves slowly" together with a lot of other monsters that hamper the PCs' action economy. This is Pathfinder 1 style fiddingling with the numbers to squeeze more out of your CR budget that we don't need.
- Several success conditions that hinge on you asking exactly the right question (reading the author's mind) just after a big combat. I really don't like this because that's the moment when peoples' attention is all over the place, they're tracking character resources, considering healing options, and generally blowing off steam a bit. This isn't supposed to be some kind of concentration test, it's a game that we might be playing to unwind after a long day at work.

Those things detract a bit and I think they were unnecessary. But they're not really terribly bad and the rest of the scenario is still really good.


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Deeply wrong in many ways

1/5

This is the sort of new-job onboarding where your boss congratulates you on making it through boot camp and you tell him you quit. I'm really ANGRY at this adventure. Seriously, I was playing this with a new character and I'm having trouble imagining even wanting to continue playing with the character after this.

the Scrolls:
What a pointless flogging of a flipmat. Also, what exactly is the replayability here? The exact same riddle in a random order. And you have to solve it by rolling dice because it's so simple that even on the first run you could otherwise solve it just from hearing the scene descriptions.

the Spells:
This section has some redeeming aspects and you're encouraged to come up with creative solutions. It's also marred by rules-technical mistakes with areas of effects. And in general it's written with the sort of "you better make all your checks" mentality that should have died in PF1 when characters could stack their bonuses to auto-succeed.

the Swords:
The fights started interesting and I thought this was going to be a good lesson about how you should be prepared for particular enemy types. But the main lesson here is that "the PCs have numerical advantage" is BS when confronted with a high-level enemy with an area attack that can easily drop half the party in the first round of combat.

and then the ugly:
The ending to this adventure needs to die in a fire. This sort of backstabbing crap pisses me off so very much. In any sane company this sort of behavior would lead to executives being fired and put in jail.

Honorable mention for the monster that gets upgraded to level 4 for a 6-player party.

Also, the adventure mentions that the enemies all use lethal force, although "the three deans observe from just far-enough away to intervene if things get out of hand". Like, how? Some of these enemies can easily kill a character instantly with massive damage.


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Fun to play

4/5

I played in one of andreww's games and I rather enjoyed this one. The "trials" element is maybe not blindingly original but it's executed well enough, and they help the plot forward. I liked the chase because you actually feel like competent, even powerful adventurers. I think in some previous scenarios the difficulty had been too high and now people are expecting them all to be grueling and unfair.

The encounter difficulty seemed okay to me - maybe a bit easy for a group that's teamworked like a well-oiled machine, but challenging to a random grab-bag of people you end up with on roll20. I rather liked the second to last encounter because it feels like "hey, we got better at this" while the last one is really quite challenging. So, a bit varied difficulty, I like that.


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Good buildup, bad letdown and way overtuned for level 1.

2/5

We played this with a mostly level 1 party and the encounters are badly balanced.

Spoiler:
The use of terrain in encounter B inflates enemy defense to a point that is very problematic for level 1 characters.

The tactic of running away when half the enemies are beaten is a false victory for the players, because it just makes the next encounter much harder. Especially since they had such good defenses that the ones running away are probably still unscathed.

And the last encounter has a boss that's listed as CR 3 but has stats that are pretty good even for CR 4. Plus the reinforcements from the previous encounter.

The bad guy tries to initiate combat with a readied action, which isn't possible in the rules. If readying actions before opening a door was an option, then expect players to start doing it too. This is a dark path you don't want to go down on.

Add to this that while the buildup is pretty nice, the final reveal is just... ugh, these things again?!


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Good but the influence game is too long and boring against 1 NPC at a time

3/5

Overall I liked the scenario. I've played all the Blakros/Museum stuff in PFS1 so this was very interesting for story. And I found the fights pretty enjoyable.

I thought using the Influence rules for the audit was an interesting idea, and I think it's really good that the NPCs have so much to say. Being stuck for small talk topics is the bane of some Influence scenes.

What I don't like is that the Influence scenes are (1) too long and (2) against one NPC at a time.

(1) There's no punishment for re-using the same skill so everyone is just rolling their best skill every round for ten rounds which becomes a grind.

(2) One NPC at a time means that there really is no tactical depth to the minigame. There is no "worker placement" or real strategy as the players figure out which PC should talk to which NPC, it's just everyone using their best applicable skill over and over again against the same target. Button-bashing, when playing on VTT.

Playing this with six players means a grueling 24 rolls against the first NPC and 36 rolls against the second NPC. Really, you run out of interesting things to say as you use the same skill for the sixth time against the same NPC. I think this could have been improved a lot by simply halving the number of influence rounds and halving the number of required successes.


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Feels a bit lacking

3/5

Yeah, it's an evergreen in a sweet level range, and the combats are pretty good combats, and at a challenging pace. I liked them.

But I'm really missing some theatrical RP encounters in between. Where are the interviews, weird commercials and whatnot? This could have been much better with a few skill challenges and a bit fewer combats.

The starship combat in particular just wasn't that interesting, and could easily have been cut to free up an hour for RP/skill challenges.


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Overall fine, but...

3/5

Most of this quest pack is fine. I rather like the running theme of "complications" on each mission.

I felt very railroaded in the third quest though;

Spoiler:
We're basically told "go shoot down those freedom fighters". The adventure doesn't really permit you any other option than to side with the imperialist Veskarium. This could have been far better if we'd had some kind of interesting choice to subtly sabotage the mission to let the freedom fighters go while pretending we'd done everything to catch them.

Being railroaded into siding with the fascists doesn't sit well with me.


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Very cool!

5/5

I really enjoyed playing this adventure. Excellent use of sci-fi tropes with a fine seasoning of light horror. Cool action scenes (like how you actually get to the station). I'm impressed by how all this is accomplished with neat lightweight mechanics. As a player you can keep your eyes on the plot without getting distracted by game mechanical baggage. The scenario's ending was quite a nailbiter!

Peeking into the scenario (planning to GM soon) I'm also impressed by what the GM gets: clear writing about how the adventure is intended to develop, guidance on how to make some GM calls to best dramatic effect instead of nailing you down to a rigid script. Difficulties seem well-scaled for the tier, neither too hard nor too easy. The new season 3 style appendices with encounters in them are a big usability improvement as well.


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Pretty good

4/5

Perspective: played this, and GMed it three times so far.

Few scenarios are truly perfect, and this one isn't either. But I really like the "reception" part, I think it's one of the better social encounters I've seen. The mechanics are kept straightforward but the NPCs have a lot of content to talk about, so as a GM you're not condemned to empty small talk and a dice roll.

There are a variety of clever bits happening under the hood to attach the social encounter to the next bit. The start of it is set up quite cleverly, with an unusual combat. Sadly, the final combat in the scenario is rather underwhelming by comparison. I feel like that last combat could have been trimmed and instead a more interactive social bit could have been added in the "tour" part of the scenario.

Despite some warts, I still think this is a very enjoyable scenario.


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What could go wrong?

4/5

I thoroughly enjoyed playing this. Some interesting set piece battles, getting knocked out of your comfort zone a bit, working together to survive. Good use of tropes and some challenging moments. Our party didn't have it easy but we felt pretty good about ourselves at the end.


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Fun but could have been better

3/5

I played at andreww's high tier table. Overall the scenario was fun but I really don't see this being very repeatable. There's too much fixed plot, the variable elements aren't really that important. In fact, I would say that parts of the final challenge being interchangeable devalues them a bit. To compare to Tome of Rightous Repose: that was an unapologetic dungeon crawl with a huge bestiary. The amount of variation possible was very large, and really, in many replayables, combats and the luck of the dice are one of the bigger parts of keeping things varied. It's very hard to have a plot that's both modular and meaningful. I think this scenario doesn't make sense as an evergreen, but as a single-run scenario it's got a lot going for it. Also it refers very often to a boon that you'd get from a non-evergreen scenario, that's also not ideal for an evergreen to do.

I'm a bit weirded out by how on the one hand the iruxi get presented as perhaps more advanced than humans, but on the other hand they're the only playable race with an intelligence penalty. It almost feels like people writing iruxi stories wanted to write stories about a different ancestry than the one that's actually in LOCG. I'd be okay with either one, but this feels a bit split personality.

The combats in this scenario were great set pieces. I dunno how evergreen they are but as "done it once" I really enjoyed them.

The main skill challenge I'm not so wild about. What particularly annoys me is that you get told there's a penalty for re-using the same skill, but the choice of skills in each phase is very narrow and basically gives you a choice between niche lores or repeating a skill. This is feel-bad writing. I also think that the amount of successes required was on the high side, so to get enough everyone has to pitch in but with the narrow choice of skills actually many people can't help well. I think these kinds of challenges need a bit of a rethink because this isn't the first scenario to have that problem.


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A-mazingly disappointing

1/5

Where we in a hedge maze? I couldn't really tell by the maps. It felt like we absolutely had to visit an entire map pack and meet some random elemental opposite monsters - most of which should be highly intelligent, but little conversation was possible. It felt just... dumb. Lacking in any interesting plot or things to think about as players. Such a wasted opportunity. And a tired old "surprise" plot that we've seen multiple times already.


Not boxed, and not numbered: a storage nightmare

2/5

I've already complained before about how the pawns in previous Starfinder boxes/AP collections weren't numbered, like they are in Pathfinder 1E sets. This makes keeping them organized and finding a given pawn a lot harder. Why did they remove this useful feature?

This product makes it even worse because there's also no box to store it in. This makes the product much less usable than it could have been!


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