Pathfinder Adventure Path #38: Racing to Ruin (Serpent's Skull 2 of 6) (PFRPG)

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Pathfinder Adventure Path #38: Racing to Ruin (Serpent's Skull 2 of 6) (PFRPG)
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Chapter 2: "Racing to Ruin"
by Tim Hitchcock

Finally reaching the port city of Eleder, the adventurers arrive with knowledge of the route to the lost city of Saventh-Yhi. But new rivals are also on the trail of the legendary metropolis, and soon the race is on to reach the fabled ruin and claim its unimaginable treasures. Will the adventurers ally with ambitious explorers like the treasure-seeking Pathfinder Society, the unscrupulous Aspis Consortium, the gold-hungry Shackles Pirates, or others on their quest into the jungle's depths? And what dangers will they face as they enter the Screaming Jungle, one of the deadliest wildernesses on all of Golarion?

    This volume of Pathfinder Adventure Path includes:
  • "Racing to Ruin," a Pathfinder RPG adventure for 4th-level characters, by Tim Hitchcock.
  • A tour of the exotic and tumultuous port city of Eleder, by Tim Hitchcock.
  • A look into the calm and calamity of Gozreh, unpredictable god of nature, by Sean K Reynolds.
  • Bar brawls and noble quests in the Pathfinder's Journal, by Robin Laws.
  • Five new monsters, by Tim Hitchcock, Patrick Renie, Sean K Reynolds, and Neil Spicer.

Pathfinder Adventure Path is Paizo Publishing's monthly 96-page, perfect-bound, full-color softcover book printed on high-quality paper. It contains an in-depth Adventure Path scenario, stats for about a half-dozen new monsters, and several support articles meant to give Game Masters additional material to expand their campaign. Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes use the Open Game License and work with both the Pathfinder RPG and the standard 3.5 fantasy RPG rules set.

ISBN–13: 978-1-60125-273-9

Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild Sanctioned Content
Racing to Ruin is sanctioned for use in Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild.

Download the rules for running this Adventure Path and Chronicle sheets — (495 kb zip/PDF)

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

Archives of Nethys

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Feels Like Filler

2/5

The first volume of Serpent's Skull felt like it had a strong premise and delivered on that premise. This second book fell flat in both regards.

I can get what they were going for with the story. The excitement of finding a lost, ancient city, of cutting through dangerous jungle, and to compete with other factions to be the one that "discovers" it. I put "discovers" in quotations because in the next volume it'll be clear that a ton of other factions have already discovered the city.

The core idea is one of competition and discovery: you're competing with other factions to be the ones to make this amazing find. Whether that premise is exciting to you is probably a matter of personal taste and can't be addressed mechanically.

However, the competition aspect could be addressed mechanically, and wasn't, really. It didn't feel like you had any means of helping/hindering any of the other factions. They didn't seem to meaningfully hinder you. The whole book was just a series of encounters spread throughout the jungle, with linear, Point A to Point B travel throughout. The encounters weren't thematically very strong or interesting. There weren't meaningful ways to increase the rate at which you moved, or any penalty for falling behind. The other factions didn't feel like they were doing anything to hinder you, or one another, or to interact with the story in any way.

So, mechanically, it's kind of a dull book that's designed to provide some content so that you don't get to the city too quickly. The content is neither bad nor good, it's mostly just content. It's a shame, because the book conveys a sense of what it was intending, and a GM could build on that to create the experience that was intended. However, the published material won't get you there, so the GM will have to put in the work required to make it happen.


A diverse overland-adventure with garundian flavor.

3/5

GOOD:
The description of the 5 factions (if a little short). The fight against the "Freemen" revolutionists. The quests the Priest of Gozreh gives the PCs.
I like the most encounters along the way, they really evoke a jungle vibe. In the ruins of Tazion is where this adventure really shines.

BAD:
The Eleder gazetteer could be more detailed - 8 locations marked on the crude map of this small city (pop 8,900) is not enough.
The Bestiary section is uninspired.

UGLY:
The rival faction attack in Kalabuto can very easily result in a tpk. In our game it didn´t because my paladin was the one standing watch at night, the 3 other PCs were almost killed in their sleep (one was).
The fight with the possessed dire ape was the same - without smite evil the shadow demon (CR7) would have tpk´d the party (level 5).

I had the fun of being a player in this book (Thanks, Elisabetha). I strongly suggest the GM read book 3 of the AP before running this (as the leaders of the factions are statted, shown and described more thorough there) and replacing the generalized faction agents with the real NPC stats from the INNER SEA NPC CODEX
If the GM invests a little time and likes the "african" flair, this can easily be a 5 star adventure.


Some good encounters unimaginatively strung together.

2/5

I am starting to think I may have a personal issue with the author of this one, Tim Hitchcock as I tend to dislike The adventures that he writes. In this case I read the adventure and realized it needed work so I went online and found tons of advice as to what other gm's did to fix this one. There is a wealth of good ideas out there and the rest of the adventure path is worth slogging your way through this one.

In this case I took about 75% of his encounters and changed the narrative to make it better for my players.

my suggestion for gm's:
do yourself a favor and instead of focusing on a single opposing faction to the players.. Have each faction mess with them in a different way. The mantis try an assassination. The government holds an inquiry into the ship wreck of the Jenevere keeping the players in town while the rest of the factions leave. The Aspis hire away a bunch of their local help. The pirates can steal a their supplies. The pathfinders break in and steal all their expeditions notes and maps. Give the players a reason to compete with all the factions. Not just one.


I wish this was better

2/5

Be warned, this review will contain SPOILERS.

Here's the TL;DR: It's not the worst thing in the world, but it needs work. Use it as a skeleton for your campaign and adapt what you need to. Customize it and liven it up to your players' liking and you should have a pretty awesome adventure on your hands. The bad part is that it takes a lot more work than an AP should.

Here's the full review: Getting some details out of the way, I am the GM for this adventure path and I have 3 regular players plus 1 addition "per diem" player. All in all it's a pretty standard party. I'm also a very "let the chips fall" type of GM and prefer to roll out in the open, so what happens, happens. I've been GMing for many years (and in many different systems, including FATE, Star Wars, Iron Heroes, Guildschool, and other more narrative systems or custom created ones), so I like to think I have some weight to my opinion. Regarding Paizo APs, I've GMed the first 2 installments of Kingmaker, played through Books 1-5 of Kingmaker, GMed the first installment of Legacy of Fire, Jade Regent, the first 3 books of Rise of the Runelords, and played/GMed in countless other homebrews - all pretty awesome stuff. There, that's my gaming background in a nutshell.

Onto the review. The first installment of this AP was awesome; likely our favorite AP introduction as of yet. I actually think that's why this one fell so short of the first book; the semi-open sandbox island was so jarring against the incredibly railroady plot of this book that it came off as that much worse by comparison. The campaign shifts gears in such a sudden and dramatic way that none of us really saw it coming. The matter-of-factness in the way it's presented is also irritating: in some places, it just reads as "and then this happens, and then this happens, because PLOT." What if the PCs were tight-lipped about their discovery of the location of Savinth Yhi, as mine were? How does word just get out all of a sudden? Right off the bat, before the book starts, it assumes the word spread. I don't have a huge problem with this per se, and I believe some railroady details have to happen to get a plot moving in the beginning, so whatever. No big deal, but it is a little irritating.

The whole "pick a faction" thing was really poorly done. To put it short, the PCs have to pick a faction (5 factions, each one conveniently lining up with the backgrounds and motives of Book 1's castaways, which came off as a little campy to me) to ally with to go and find Savinth Yhi. Cool. Except that each faction is just a cookie-cutter of the other with a tiny bit of different flavor. Ultimately, no matter who they pick, nothing really changes. That really bugged me. Not even little things were altered, you just pick faction X and get rival faction Y. Even the "rival faction agents" are all just generic rogue/fighters no matter who your rival is. That got on my nerves, but with some good GMing you can really spice it up. I would add roleplay scenes for each faction as it chooses to try and sway the PCs to their side - this was actually really fun. I also altered the faction agents to the enemy faction a bit more.

The next bit about the Freeman Revolt isn't too bad, but it's written in such a matter-of-fact, linear fashion that it pained me. A fire starts at the PCs supply warehouse just as the combat ends. There's not even rules to put it out, and then as their doing that someone important to them gets kidnapped that they have to rescue. I like to inject a few more elements of player control, or even at least the illusion of player control to feel like they're not just chugging along the plot rails. All in all, this isn't too bad, but again, irritating.

Then there's this weird part about finding a guide to lead them into the city. The book doesn't mention other guides for the other factions, so I guess we assume they either somehow know the way or they got guides of their own, which is also odd because the PC's faction says that this Nkechi hermit dude is the only one around who knows the terrain really well. Hmm. Nkechi can be really fun if you play him up as some half-crazed hermit, though, and he can be a great character to keep around.

Then comes, in my opinion, the worst part: the "race." There is no race. Each faction has a set number of days it takes them to reach Tazion and the only interaction the factions have are when they stop in a midway town and get ambushed by generic copy-and-paste rival faction agents. There's no real sense of time or urgency unless you take the effort to inject it, which I tried to do. I tried to have at least one meaningful interaction with each faction throughout the journey and kept track of days and gave more options for dangerous shortcuts to cut back on time and lured them with treasure to have them take more time. Also, I scrapped almost all the encounters along the way, which are really pointless. One encounter per day hardly challenges even the worst prepared PCs and a lot of them are completely random or have little to know backstory. A necromancer with a troll? Why? A swarm of CR 1/2 zombies? Really? At level, what, 5?

The last bit is okay. The part about entering Tazion is decent and we didn't have much trouble, but we also heavily adapted the dungeon crawl to a more Indiana Jones style place with traps and puzzles. All in all, not bad here.

I realize this review comes off as a bit scathing. I love Paizo, but some harsh criticism is in order here. HOWEVER, this is by no means a reason to stop at this installment. We're knee deep in Book 3, which has issues of its own but is a lot easier to salvage, and Book 4 & 5 look pretty awesome. This Book is really better used as a framework for a properly customized adventure for YOUR game, which should really be true for any AP installment. This one will take some work, so if you're not interested in spending some extra hours outside of each session altering things, then maybe it's not for you. Then again, maybe you're players will really jive with the linear adventure. Use your best judgment here, but I'll have you know that despite the fact that I, personally, disliked this Book, we had a ton of fun playing it after I spent some time altering it to their game.


Needs a Good DM To Be Awesome!

4/5

I see a lot of people here are complaining about how linear the whole campaign setting is, as well as a few problems with how boring a lot of the journey seemed to be. I played this as a player and we had a blast. While we did have a minor complaint about the linear path we were to take to get to the destination it didn't take long until we were simply having a blast journeying through Gorund.

The random encounters proved to be something that everyone hoped for since it boosted our XP bonuses, and allowed for us to feel like we were back in the turn based RPG days where we would farm for hours to get to the next level by walking in circles in one room. While few people enjoyed that portion of those games I loved it since it enabled myself to get to a much higher level without fighting higher level opponents.

The various NPCs that you meet and travel with are interesting and fairly unique. Add in some of the difficult weather encounters and it feels like you're looking into an actual epic journey instead of just fast traveling there. It gives you respect and perspective on what your asking your characters to do. With an interesting group and a good DM this can be a really great AP, but since it's a little hit and miss for those purposes I can't give it five stars. I guess my group just lucked out with a DM who has run this campaign before, and a group of fairly evil individuals who made the journey seem very strange compared to a lot of other APs we ran before.


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Paizo Employee Creative Director

David Cummings wrote:

When I noticed Nyambe in the OGL section 15 (yes, I read that), I had high hopes that Paizo might put the open source Wakyambi elves in the Mwambi Expanse. Call me crazy, but I really like those crazy prehensile-tailed people.

I don't think those elves will ever exist except in MY Mwambi, but it's good to see the Pathfinder APs go further afield in OGL stuff than Tome of Horrors. Thanks!

david

We do like going "further afield" than Tome of Horrors for OGL stuff... but there's an unfortunate pair of reasons why we don't do this often.

1) A lot of OGL stuff is just unfortunately not good.
2) Of the good stuff that remains, an unfortunate amount of it is crippled content; the publishers made the monster stat blocks open from the size category to the end of the combat info; the monster's NAME is not open. This more or less is a dealbreaker for me, since without a name, there's no way to reference the monster and no reason to go with the monster's stats. Frustrating.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Luckily, the three best 3.5 era 3PP bestiaries (Tome of Horrors series, Advanced Bestiary, Book of Fiends) were done "right" and may Paizo long continue to use them !

Not to mention the stealth ninja "liberation" of dozens of WotC IP monsters in Tome of Horrors, something we should be eternally grateful to Clark P. for. After all, without it, Orcus wouldn't be ever available for Paizo to use :)


Area B does not seem to come with a map.
It's pretty simple (three mostly static locations), however an approximate location in relation to Eleder would be welcome.

Regards,
Ruemere

PS. Two further potential issues with this adventure:

Spoiler:
1. Adventure does not specify which NPCs of rival factions are expected to survive.
2. There is no information on resources available to faction leaders - can they really support the characters?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

ruemere wrote:

Area B does not seem to come with a map.

It's pretty simple (three mostly static locations), however an approximate location in relation to Eleder would be welcome.

Regards,
Ruemere

PS. Two further potential issues with this adventure:** spoiler omitted **

Area B isn't on a map simply because we didn't have a map to put the location on; it's quite a ways off the city map of Eleder, but on the world map it'd be close enough so that "A" and "B" would mostly overlap. I guess we COULD have put in an arrow that pointed off one side of the Eleder map and said "This way to Area B" or something, though.

As for the spoilered questions...

Spoiler:

The adventure makes no assumptions about which factions survive, which ones the PCs join up with, and which ones they end up rivals too. That's all stuff that should develop organically in each specific game. The adventure assumes that all of the factions DO survive to reach Saventh-Yhi, though, because it's in the third adventure where the factions and their leaders get stats.

As for whether or not they can support themselves or the PCs, at one point there was going to be a pretty extensive element of outfitting your expeditions, directly leading them, and managing their supplies. This was inspired by Chaosium's EXCELLENT adventure, "Beyond the Mountains of Madness," but the author decided to focus instead upon the adventure element of the adventure. As a result, we don't worry about supplies and whether or not the expeditions can function at all—after all, if they can't they don't go on the "race to ruin," and thus their involvement doesn't matter. If they CAN, then they DO get to take part in the adventure, and there's no need to bother with supplies and the like. Basically... this whole element is simply hand-waved because it's not really relevant to the adventure's focus.


Much appreciated.

I do not mind working within loose framework, it's just that when I do so, I tend to make assumptions as to what happens by default (unless PCs or fate intervenes).

Regards,
Ruemere


James Jacobs wrote:

We do like going "further afield" than Tome of Horrors for OGL stuff... but there's an unfortunate pair of reasons why we don't do this often.

1) A lot of OGL stuff is just unfortunately not good.
2) Of the good stuff that remains, an unfortunate amount of it is crippled content; the publishers made the monster stat blocks open from the size category to the end of the combat info; the monster's NAME is not open. This more or less is a dealbreaker for me, since without a name, there's no way to reference the monster and no reason to go with the monster's stats. Frustrating.

Yeah, it's pretty frustrating when the monster name isn't open content... or worse, they only open the stat block... no name or ecology.

david


Got my copy yesterday afternoon and haven't had time to give it the full once over (in fact, I just finished reading part 1 this morning), but I did read the fiction section. Good stuff!


What are the names of the five monsters and what are their CR (if James doesn't mind me asking).


I have read through the AP 1-4 and have a question on Racing to Ruin. It's a spoiler, though:

Spoiler:
Why are the Mzali rangers lawful evil? Just because they want to kick non-Mwangi out and purge Mwangi collaborators? By default because Walkena is Lawful Evil? Is there writeup anywhere that goes into this or Walkena beyond the text in Heart of the Jungle?

Did these rangers or guys like them make the gallows tree bodies into zombies? I don't see anything in their stat block that would allow it. Were the zombies deliberately created, say by a witch doctor traveling with warriors? Are the zombies just "natural"? Are they a byproduct of Walkena's being a mummy?

The Exchange Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6

Is it just me, or does the picture of Amivor Glaur on the cover bear an uncanny resemblance to Rob McCreary?


Hi guys, I'm re-reading the first volumes of the AP, and I've got a question about this "race". It's spoiler-y, so... here's the spoiler:

question:

At the beginning the group has to decipher Yarzoth's notes, and it seems pretty safe to assume they own the only copy. Also, they may clearly state to the GM that they are reasearching in secrecy (some players may really do their best to do so), and it's even possible that no NPC castaway survives from the Shiv.

That said, how come that everybody instantly knows they're looking for Tazion/Saventh-Yhi, and moreover, everybody knows exactly where Tazion is? Frankly, it's a pretty serious plot hole. The text only says that "rumors travel fast", a pretty weak statement. This could justify other groups tailing the PCS and arriving after them, but winning the race? Of course they need to know Tazion's exact location. For this to work there should be a plot hook, eg somebody stealing the notes, or a crooked librarian making some copies, or something.

Of course it may be that Yarzoth is still alive, or that an NPC knows everything about the "library use" (or even partecipates to it). Once the news are out, the GM can assume that the various faction spy each other out of every detail.

Yet, the whole thing is still pretty hard to justify, and I'm frankly surprised that the text does not go in more depth. Since the whole adventure revolves around the race, it would have been nice to set it up a little better...

So, what is your best idea? How would you set up the scene and justify the race?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

stepanxol wrote:

Hi guys, I'm re-reading the first volumes of the AP, and I've got a question about this "race". It's spoiler-y, so... here's the spoiler:

** spoiler omitted **

About the concern...

Spoiler:
We have no way of knowing how fast information about Tazion and Saventh-Yhi will spread in any one game, because that depends on how secretive the PCs are about that information. There's a good chance that some groups won't be secretive at all, while other groups won't tell ANYone. As for how the rest of the world finds out that the PCs know some important information, the more folks the PCs tell, be they fellow castaways, contacts among their faction, or just folks who overhear them talking... that's also something that depends entirely on your group.

If your group is super secretive (like mine was in my Serpent's Skull game), then there won't initially be much for their competitors to dig into. But the fact that they were wrecked on Smuggler's Shiv and are soon thereafter helping to mount an expedition inland will get other groups thinking... ESPECIALLY if some of their fellow castaways return to their factions and blab. In this case, the other factions can easily mount their own expedition to Smuggler's Shiv to find out what the PCs found out. This'll put them behind the PCs by a few days, but then again, if the PCs spend several days in town recovering from their ordeal and crafting items and doing other things... those days get eaten up quickly.

In any case, since the exact ramifications depend so much on the specifics of each game, we chose to only lightly cover the topic so as to make it easier for each GM to go forward with however they need to go forward for their game.


Inference I drew is the very fact the PCs get rescued lets the cat out of the bag.

The PCs will almost certanly get off the island in a way that will pique the interest of the Sargavan government. If the PCs are then tight lipped about what they did and learned there, it'll only increase the incentive to see for themselves. Considering the level of intrigue in Sargava, it won't strain suspention of disbelief to say that once that happens, wikileaks is nothing compared to the Eleder rumor mill, and it'll be the subject of gossip from The Adventurer's Club all the way to the pineapple fields.

I plan to use this to set the stage for what Eleder's like by having the news of what they found actually preceeding their arrival, and them (hopfully to their suprise) being recognised in the street by passersby running up and asking them questions about it, or muttering behind their hands.


Asphesteros wrote:
Inference I drew is the very fact the PCs get rescued lets the cat out of the bag.

Yeah, but as I wrote above, the real problem is the other factions knowing the exact location of Tazion. The module itself implies that at the beginning they don't; that's the very reason why they vie for the PC's help (since in fact the PCs offer nothing more than that, being a low-level party with no experience whatsoever in jungle expeditions).

James, above, suggests that the factions can mount their own expedition to the Shiv. If they do that, of course they need no more info from the PCs (and in this case they are not even going to ask for their help anymore).

So, what really needs some work here is justifying the fact that everybody knows Tazion's location. You can have the notes stolen or copied from the PCs in Eleder, have the other factions mount their own expeditions to the Shiv, or a mixture of that (considering also that the factions can steal info from each other "off stage").

At the end, and at the risk of sounding a bit annoying, I still consider this part of the adventure seriously under-developed... APs are nice because they don't require a huge amount of work. Serpent's Skull is more open-ended than most, and that's something to commend it for, but it doesn't mean it can't help DMs consider and manage all options.

Liberty's Edge Contributor

stepanxol wrote:
Asphesteros wrote:
Inference I drew is the very fact the PCs get rescued lets the cat out of the bag.

Yeah, but as I wrote above, the real problem is the other factions knowing the exact location of Tazion. The module itself implies that at the beginning they don't; that's the very reason why they vie for the PC's help (since in fact the PCs offer nothing more than that, being a low-level party with no experience whatsoever in jungle expeditions).

James, above, suggests that the factions can mount their own expedition to the Shiv. If they do that, of course they need no more info from the PCs (and in this case they are not even going to ask for their help anymore).

So, what really needs some work here is justifying the fact that everybody knows Tazion's location. You can have the notes stolen or copied from the PCs in Eleder, have the other factions mount their own expeditions to the Shiv, or a mixture of that (considering also that the factions can steal info from each other "off stage").

At the end, and at the risk of sounding a bit annoying, I still consider this part of the adventure seriously under-developed... APs are nice because they don't require a huge amount of work. Serpent's Skull is more open-ended than most, and that's something to commend it for, but it doesn't mean it can't help DMs consider and manage all options.

Hey Stepanxol,

While I feel your pain, and yes I love to see more development... What the explanation all boils down to is word count and what it should be spent on. I needed to leave some areas gray (and up to the discretion of the GM) in order to give them more stuff which they can use to run the adventure. Its a matter of options the PCs will see and interact with vs options which make for great backstory or provide a viable explanation however may or may not be pertinent. Simply put- I felt there were too many possibilities/variables involved in determining who knows what to explore all of them in great detail.
When in doubt, I focus my word count on what the PCs will deal with directly.
I offer this- sometimes in life- things don't make sense and you don't know how they came to be... and you never find the answer.
I could be wrong here, however the PCs might never look for a justification for why the other people are headed to Tazion or might never find one.. its ok to let them speculate and give you their own theories because realistically, they're theory which they might never get an answer to.
Finally, the other groups might (like many explorers) simply be heading in the general direction of the ruins, having some idea of their proximity, but far from a precise idea of where they are located (which of course is sort of how I pictured it).

Hope that helps,

Tim


There is a complete, very high-resolution (6300x7874) map of Golarian embedded in this document (Its the route to Taizon map, which shows just part of it). Oops!

No wonder these PDFs can be so slow to open, especially on iPad.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

hello_monty wrote:

There is a complete, very high-resolution (6300x7874) map of Golarian embedded in this document (Its the route to Taizon map, which shows just part of it). Oops!

No wonder these PDFs can be so slow to open, especially on iPad.

We've talked to the art department about that, and they should be better in future.


Now that I've complained about the image resolution being too high, let me complain about it being too low :)

The maps in the adventure paths are beautiful. I love to extract the images and print them out full size for the table. Theycome out a bit blocky, but generally look good enough, except for the full pagers, which are too low a resolution to enlarge to 1"x1" size without looking pretty shabby. This is a shame because they are such awesome maps, I want to share them with my players.

I wish there were some way you could make higher resolution map images available to subscribers.

Thanks for all the great content.


Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

I have a question regarding the title of this adventure. I'm wondering in which sense the word "ruin" is used here. Is it a race to the ruins of Tazion (i.e. ruin = remains of an old city) or is it a race into someone's (the party's own?) ruin (i.e. ruin = doom). The singular in the title points to the second meaning, but the first one would make more sense to me.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

HelloMonty wrote:

Now that I've complained about the image resolution being too high, let me complain about it being too low :)

The maps in the adventure paths are beautiful. I love to extract the images and print them out full size for the table. Theycome out a bit blocky, but generally look good enough, except for the full pagers, which are too low a resolution to enlarge to 1"x1" size without looking pretty shabby. This is a shame because they are such awesome maps, I want to share them with my players.

I wish there were some way you could make higher resolution map images available to subscribers.

Thanks for all the great content.

Our maps are not created at sufficiently high resolution to do that--they're actually reproduced at pretty much full size in the finished volume. Having them created at 1"=5' resolution would not only be far too expensive, but the additional time required by the cartographer to do that would also make it impossible to have a single cartographer for the entire AP.

Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer

Zaister wrote:
I have a question regarding the title of this adventure. I'm wondering in which sense the word "ruin" is used here. Is it a race to the ruins of Tazion (i.e. ruin = remains of an old city) or is it a race into someone's (the party's own?) ruin (i.e. ruin = doom). The singular in the title points to the second meaning, but the first one would make more sense to me.

Some things have more than one meaning. Whether "ruin" has one meaning or two might depend on how your gaming group does with the module!


my whole question is a spoiler but I couldn't figure out how to start a thread for the product as the 'start a discussion' option directed by teh messageboards doesn't appear to exist. Really hope someone can answer this for me!

Spoiler:
=Encounter C in racing to ruin has the players take a 'shortcut' through a mine. However, the players are supposed to be trailblazing for a full expedition including caravans etc. The mine is shoulder-depth flooded. Why on earth are the players supposed to choose to take this path? My players are almost certainly going to choose to take the longer path because as far as i can tell, within about ten minutes of going into the mine it would be blatantly obvious that it's foolish to continue.

Be grateful for any advice to help me rationalise this IC to the players.

Sovereign Court Developer

dunklezhan wrote:

my whole question is a spoiler but I couldn't figure out how to start a thread for the product as the 'start a discussion' option directed by teh messageboards doesn't appear to exist. Really hope someone can answer this for me!

** spoiler omitted **

Be grateful for any advice to help me rationalise this IC to the players.

For future reference, each volume of an AP usually has its own "GM Reference" thread in that volume's forum. Racing to Ruin's GM Reference thread may be found here.

To answer your question:

Spoiler:
The level of water in the mine varies between knee-deep and shoulder-deep, so most of it wouldn't be impassable, even to caravans. Once the PCs have cleared the mines of danger, it would be relatively easy for the caravan behind them to construct stronger bridges to cross the deeper sections in the mine. While this would take some additional time, it would still be less than taking the long route around the hills.


Thank you so much Rob, I tried and tried to find a forum that wasn't on the product page itself, I really did. I searched, I browsed... Sorry. My Paizo.com-fu is weak :)

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