A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 3–7.
When the necromancer-king Tar-Baphon rose as a lich and threatened to conquer all of Avistan, Taldor rallied its neighbors and led the Shining Crusade, a glorious campaign that defeated the Whispering Tyrant’s armies and sealed him away. For the better part of a millennium, Lastwall has guarded Tar-Baphon’s prison and fended off the orc tribes to the north, rarely sparing a second thought to the rich archaeological secrets that lie just below the soil. A local venture-captain has found a lost chapter to the Tome of Righteous Repose, which chronicles the demise of countless heroes of the Shining Crusade. At long last, this has earned the Society Lastwall’s blessing to uncover these lost sites, lay to rest the fallen crusaders, and repatriate the family heirlooms they carried to battle.
"From the Tome of Righteous Repose" is an evergreen, replayable scenario designed to provide a flexible adventure that confronts the PCs with a variety of threats more common to higher-level characters—all while uncovering the history of one of Avistan’s greatest conflicts. Depending on which lead the PCs take, they might explore the proud crusader nation of Lastwall, travel into the gloom-shrouded mountains of Ustalav, or risk an expedition into the orc-ruled wastes of Belkzen in pursuit of lost history.
This scenario is designed for play in Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild but can easily be adapted for use with any world. This scenario is compliant with the Open Game License (OGL) and is suitable for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
I ran this for a group of six players, all pretty experienced, and everyone agreed that this is a super scenario.
It is rather different from other scenarios, in that the GM chooses which encounters the PCs will face and where they will face them. Coupled with three locations and four storylines, you would have to play this adventure very many times before it became stale.
I can see how this could be a very tough scenario, so it is worth either encouraging your players to come loaded for dire bear, or to make sure that the encounters you set aren't going to destroy them if they're newer players.
The scenario requires more prep by the GM than a usual scenario, but it does walk you through the process; there is a step-by-step example at the end that I found particularly useful. The prep is definitely worthwhile, and will, I think, help with prepping for home games.
There is some opportunity for role-playing at the beginning, but once my PCs entered the location and encountered the [redacted by Drendle Dreng], they were very much on the back foot, and seemed to think every shadow hid something awful.
My players and I were particularly impressed with the way the story was worked into the scenario. I don't want to give anything away, but there are lots of little elements that really allow the PCs to either discover or figure out the backstory.
I'm sure it's a lot of work, but I'd love to see more scenarios like this (once I've played through all the options)
This scenario is exactly as advertised, it helps me to fill convention schedules and introduces GMs and players to new systems in an organic fashion.
That said, there is definitely room for improvement:
- A sample scenario, or at least having the way a dungeon is constructed would help new GMs to familiarize themselves with this scenario.
- In some aspects, this is more like a toolkit than a scenario. While there is a lot of potential for ambient storytelling and showing your skill as a GM, if you don't do that it might look like a random collection of monsters.
- Filling out the chronicle sheets is not fun, for future scenarios please add some sort of page where it is easier to see which items you need to remove from the chronicle sheets (since players didn't find them in that version of the scenario). It sounds like a minor gripe but after your fifth time running the scenario, you will know what I am talking about.
- Variety, having a number of harder and easier encounters to choose from is very welcome, but slightly more would be even better. The scenario already gives the GMs a lot of freedom when it comes to difficulty, why not give GMs a little bit more to counter certain player tactics and make sure that the scenario is entertaining for the whole party, not the player who can efvade/dismantle every challenge the scenario provides (maybe a couple of treasure/equipment packs for the monster to use and add as additional loot).
Of course, it is important not to overcompensate, but GMs should already be aware of that.
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So this scenario has a lot of room to improve, so why still 5 stars?
It was an experiment and it delivers, most of the complaints/wishlist I have... might not have something I could have come up with without the scenario.
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An update/expansion of this one (new locations ?) or even a new everygreen would be very wellcome.
I got to play this with the author at a recent convention, and it was a real blast. One thing I love is that as a well prepared GM, you could literally have the party generate the scenario at the very beginning with dice rolls (something he did) that allows it to be truly a random adventure.
Something else I really loved about I think deserves spoiler tags but:
Spoiler:
I loved how we had to actually do research to find the site; that we simply weren't told "here's the dungeon entrance, go kick in the door and murder hobo it!" It was cool to actually do some of the legwork for your own scenario, like I would imagine an actual Pathfinder agent would do! I even used the library rules for once!
Something else worth noting: Lastwall isn't the kind of place you'd think about having a gambling hall. Maybe you should ask the Venture Captain about that ;)
An evergreen that will have you wide awake with adrenaline
We've wanted a higher-level evergreen for a long time now and finally got one. The design here I think is ideal: focus on varied and seriously challenging encounters. There's still story, and actually with more variation than in for example the Confirmation. But the meat of this one is really in the tough as nails fights.
The author has been quite explicit that in this dungeon it should be possible to withdraw to recover and come back if needed - there's a lot of TPK stories of groups that tried to complete this one in a single day even though they'd already taken heavy beatings. Hoskins also meant this scenario as an instructional one, making sure most monsters have at least one "interesting" ability that you might run into more at higher levels. The dungeons are full of "you'd better learn to be prepared for this" things.
I like how the scenario gives the GM a lot of room to adapt it for his playes. Although you can roll randomly for the encounters, you don't have to, and the tables are sorted from easier to harder to brown pants scary. So a GM with less experienced players can also assemble a dungeon that's fair for them. But the scenario has also been able to challenge seriously experienced groups.
(Conversely, "it's not my fault you TPK'ed, I just rolled maximum scary on every table" is not an excuse - the GM is under no obligation to roll randomly or abide by rolls that turn out too extreme.)
I've found my new favorite scenario to run for my local PFS group.
The amount of variation that this scenario offers is excellent, and I look forward to running this many times again in the future. My players also agreed and actually wanted to grab a second set of characters last night after we finished and play another round.
Everything is laid out for the gm, which is great. While it's definitely not a "pick up for the first time and run in an hour" kind of scenario, it does allow for the potential to have several different "scenarios" prepped after running a few times.
Also, the complaint that it's too deadly is kind of off. Yes, the monsters are tough, but that's nice. It finally gives a bit of a challenge, and because of the variety of monsters, you can almost tune it to the group.
In all, definitely a 5 star product aND a must get for any pfs gm to have in their "always available" group.
Played this last night with 4 on the upper sub-tier. It has a nice story arc and integrates well with some of the early Pathfinder AP/Campaign content (Carrion Crown, especially), further developing an important storyline. We played a variant with exceptionally creepy monsters for Halloween that kept us on our toes! There are definitely some nasties in there! :-) We had fun, and it was a 4 hr. delve. I am looking forward to the next random run!
Just going to ask... why not just make three cool scenarios that can be played in any order rather than try fit so much cool sounding content between two covers?
Because an evergreen is meant to be replayed by the same players multiple times. Three separate scenarios would have less variance between playthroughs and be less useful as replayable scenarios, if they were even classified as such.
Also, the experimental part of this scenario is giving GMs more freedom in assigning encounters and tactics, since a major complaint about organized play is that there is no recourse to adjust the scenario on the fly.
Pathfinder LO Special Edition, PF Special Edition Subscriber
Shifty wrote:
Just going to ask... why not just make three cool scenarios that can be played in any order rather than try fit so much cool sounding content between two covers?
The way the story is structured, it could probably just be one non-evergreen scenario. Imagine that during the writing process an author brainstorms several possibilities, then chooses the best one. This scenario chooses the best dozen or so and leaves it in the hands of the GM to randomly select or choose what is best for their gaming group.
Essentially, GMs get access to all the crazy ideas the author has, instead of just one idea.
I have a question about GMing this scenario multiple times. I've GMed this scenario twice. Both have been reported, but in my sessions list for the second session it says
"Player has already run scenario at session # 138 of event # 63471 A Muse N Games on November 08, 2016."
And the prestige for this session is reported as 0.
To me this implies that I DON'T receive credit for the second session. Could somebody clear this up for me? I've already run this scenario 2 additional times and applied the credit to future GM blobs so I'd like to know if I can keep applying the credit! Thanks.
How are we GMs supposed to handle the chronicle sheets? I take it we need to cross out all of the items not listed in the specific encounter arc treasure package?
I have a couple questions about applying credit from running this scenario as a GM:
1. Do I still have to cross off all the items that were not from the encounter arc I chose to run, or can I access all of these items because none of my characters were there?
2. Do PCs only receive the Worthy Foe boon affecting one of the four groups of enemies, based on which encounter arc they went through? How do you apply this boon to GM characters?
Aside from that, I'd just like to make the comment that this scenario was my first time GMing a table of PFS, and I think this scenario is really nice to have as a GM that doesn't have access to any other scenarios yet. Having one book that I can run forever is pretty cool.
