Pathfinder Society Scenario #49: Among the Dead (PFRPG) PDF

What made this whole scenario work for my party was Hustavan. The comic relief and situations they found themselves in wouldn't have been half as much fun without him around. At low tier, they had a hard time finding the multiple traps, and thus became overly-cautious, which is the intent from Mr Frost's comments. It did slow the game down a bit as they checked every situation for a while.

The encounters were fairly bland and the BBEG wasn't very difficult to defeat, but the tension was real getting there and the foolishness of Hustavan kept everyone laughing.

All in all, the scenario without the comic relief might not have been more than a low 3-star adventure, so be careful if you struggle to GM the follow-on character. Ultimately, in our game, it was one of the more fun times we've had at the table.

(I GMed this.)

This is a great adventure purely because of how silly the entire premise is. The story is easily forgotten and I won't waste any words on it, but the way it's presented is amazing. A big Zyphus-style deathmatch is an amazing setting to walk around in. It's a bit of a shame most of it has already passed, I'd loved to have seen some traps triggered "in the background," as it were, but a creative GM can go nuts here. I invented even more (triggered) traps just to keep my players on their toes, and they loved it. Easily worth playing just for this experience.

What I'm less enthused about are the combats. One combat has a big, scary monster just standing there waiting to be put down. Another encounter, in the lower tier, has

Bottom line: if you ham up the ridiculousness of the scenario, you'll have a great time, despite some problems.

When signing up for this session, it occured to me that I would be playing this scenario somewhat out of order. After all, I had previously played Among the Gods, a scenario that is to be considered the sequel to this one. To make things even more confusing, I've not played the prequel, namely Among the Living, to this unofficial second part either. I would have missed out on a lot of background information had the GM not been kind enough to explain it to me regardless. If anything, I'd highly recommend playing the three scenarios in order, which also means that Paizo should mention the existence of 'Among the Gods' in the description above (even though I still recommend people to not play that scenario).

But back to Among the Dead. I was worried at the start that it would be similar to its sequel: annoying, no storyline and simply no fun. As I'm sitting at my desk behind a computer, I'm happy to say that Among the Dead is far better as I actually had a lot of fun. The storyline is still iffy and a bit on the weak side, but the overall theme was fun. This scenario is basically a big dungeon crawl with an emphasis on 'accidents', whether they already happend or still waiting to happen. Even the monsters really fit the theme. If the GM does a good job accentuating these, let's call them 'unfortunate situations', you get a very thematic, memorable unique setting. That is to say, I enjoyed what could best be described as Golarion's version of the Hunger Games. It really gave me, as as player, good insight into the worship of Zyphus.

As others mentioned before, you do require a certain skillset in order to reliably make your way through this hideout relatively unscathed. If you don't, the scenario could very well be a frustrating endeavour that requires either a lot resources, or a fair amount of creativity to even stand a chance. Luckily my party had two characters to deal with the issues at hand: a telekineticist and, perhaps surprisingly, a gunslinger. Instead of taking the normal approach of stealth and cunning, we took a more loud and arrogant approach. Things were flying everywhere to great effect, and while the scenario is limited on role-play opportunities with NPC's, our party ended up spending a huge portion of time interacting with each-other. We shared an equal amount of laughs based on our interactions, as well as the scenario. Without a doubt I will recommend this scenario to others.

Just played this one at GENCON.

Cultists, monsters, and a labyrinth, what's not to like about that?

A good little adventure.

I hadn't played the prequel, but my buddy had, and he says it was a good follow on. I'll likely play the other on another PC to get the storyline.

I think the only characters who won't enjoy this one are the bookworm talky types, but very one else has a role.