Prince Thorgrim rots in jail, wrongly accused by the corrupt sheriff and his cruel gaoler. Whispered rumors speak that those in his keep are tortured and sometimes murdered. Only the truly brave or fantastically foolish would try to storm the jail and free the prince. A Compleat Encounter, scalable to any level, featuring the elven sheriff, the shackled dwarven prince, and his foul gaoler.
• Written by Jason Bulmahn
• Designed by Andrew Hou
• Sculpted by Dennis Mize
• Cartography by Corey Macourek
Paizo Publishing's GameMastery™ Line is designed to help GMs run interesting games quickly and efficiently.
Compleat Encounters provide everything you need to run a single encounter:
3 brilliantly sculpted, high-quality, 25mm-scale one-piece metal miniatures
I recently ran The Liberation of Prince Thorgrim for my "Roots of Golarion" campaign. This product hails all the way from 2005 and is part of the short-lived "Compleat Encounter" line that consisted of a short adventure, stats for three NPCs, double-sided gridded tile cards, and three unpainted pewter miniatures. (Apparently, they were also sold in a variation that didn't include the miniatures, and that's the version I have for this one.)
The story is a simple one: a corrupt sheriff has pinned a murder (that he himself conducted) on a completely innocent dwarf ambassador from a nearby kingdom. The dwarf has been locked up in the sheriff's jail, guarded by a powerfully obese gaoler. The PCs' mission is to sneak or break into the jail, free the prisoner, and (ideally) find proof of his innocence. The adventure is pitched at Level 8, but there are instructions on how to scale it up and down for different groups. A few basic adventure hooks are included to explain why the PCs could get involved, and I really like a variation that has the prisoner be a PC whose player has to be absent for the session--a great way to the players who do show up something important to do while providing a natural pause to whatever ongoing storyline they're involved in.
The gridded flip-tiles are designed that one side shows a nice, clean jail, and the other shows a filthy, squalid place. This adds a bit of reusability to them. It's only four cards though, so don't except something like a full Pathfinder Map Pack.
Regarding the NPCs, stats are provided for the sheriff, the gaoler, and the dwarf prisoner. The sheriff is fine (and is given some background), but the gaolor is my favorite--the artwork is great, and he has a memorable personality. There's probably not much value in having the dwarf's stats, and I think it might have been better to conceptualise him as a character more suited to being a cohort or follower. I can't speak to the quality of the miniatures, as mentioned above.
Overall, I thought this was fine. It probably provided more like an hour's diversion than an entire session's gameplay, and I always find it cumbersome to flip through the cards to figure out which ones I need (the numbering is often confusing). On the whole though, it does what it sets out to do, and it is handy to have these little encounters ready to run right out of the box.
Nah. I had a little fun bumping the other one, but these are extremely ancient OGL encounters from before Golarion was formally conceived, and were written for 3.5, rather than PF1E proper. Even as a historical product, these are wildly out of date now and I wouldn't be surprised if the source files are missing at this point. Trying to convert them to PF2E would be nightmarish, and interest in the PDFs as historical documents would be low enough to not even justify the labor of PDF conversion, and that's if the source files survive.
Your best bet at this point is eBay; you can find each Compleat Encounter new-in-box for ~US$25-30. They'll come with the minis and cards describing the full encounter, which was meant to be plugged in to a wider adventure.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/166007521791
They are, at least, a fun time capsule into pre-Pathfinder Paizo and how Paizo was surviving prior to Pathfinder #1: Burnt Offerings launching.
Wow, I wish I knew about these in, say, 2007. Love the idea--mini adventure complete with map and minis! I expect the cost of production did not make them worthwhile to keep going, sadly.
Yeah, the metal minis ended up being not nearly as cost-efficient as a lot of other options. On top of this, because the adventures were *so* short and had to slot in to other things (and thus couldn't have real narrative hooks), their quality tended to vary wildly, as you may note from the reviews. (There are a few Compleat Encounters missing, as well, as they went on to... other things.)
On the whole, it's a neat idea that still kind of worked in the 2005-2007 timeframe of their production, but was already kind of on the outs. They make for neat historical artifacts, but in a Pathfinder-having world (these debuted before PF existed!) there's better ways of accomplishing the goals.
Chief Technical Officer
