RSS RSS Facebook Twitter Email
Paizo / Archive / GameMastery® / Compleat Encounters

GameMastery Encounter: Terror in the Chamber of Pain (OGL) Compleat Encounter

1.70/5 (based on 3 ratings)
GameMastery Encounter: Terror in the Chamber of Pain (OGL)

Our Price: $16.95

Unavailable

Facebook Twitter Email

Twisted and depraved beyond measure, The Seeker in Shadow wanders the planes inflicting pain and savage torture upon his hapless victims. Now, the heart of his perverted chapel, the Chamber of Pain, beats with the blood of his newest "guests"—and only the PCs can stop his evil once and for all.

A Compleat Encounter, scalable to any level, featuring a depraved human torturer, his demented half-orc servant, and a wicked torturer’s table.

• Written by Keith Francis Strohm
• Designed by Andrew Hou
• Sculpted by Dennis Mize
• Cartography by Christopher West

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
  • 4 double-sided full-color 5"x8" minis-scale map cards
  • a detailed level-scalable microadventure with statistics compatible with the world’s most popular roleplaying game.
    •

"Adventure Only" products include only the adventure and map cards, and do not contain the miniatures.


Miniatures painted by Keith Robertson.
(The product includes unpainted metal miniatures.)

Original sculpts for the miniatures.

Desktop wallpaper of the painted minis
640x480 • 800x600 • 1024x768 • 1280x960 • 1600x1200
 

Product Availability

Unavailable

Are there errors or omissions in this product information? Got corrections? Let us know at store@paizo.com.

PZO2005

See Also:

Average product rating:

1.70/5 (based on 3 ratings)

Sign in to create or edit a product review.

Pretty Bad All Around

1/5 —

NO SPOILERS

Terror in the Chamber of Pain was a very early Paizo product, part of its “Compleat Encounter” line that combined a few miniatures, a short adventure, and gridded cards that fit together as an encounter map. I’ve run a few of these now, and I wasn’t particularly impressed with this one. The cards fit together in a confusing way and don’t always match the room descriptions given in the adventure text. The artwork for the two NPCs in the set is fine, but neither one is particularly tough for the planned party of 8th level PCs. And although I only have the cards, in the picture of the three minis, one of the minis is very different than what’s promised. The adventure backstory doesn’t make a ton of sense either. I guess the one good thing I can say is that the adventure is cleverly written to be easily inserted into pretty much anyplace the PCs find themselves.

SPOILERS!:

Terror in the Chamber of Pain involves an evil cleric/torturer named the Seeker in Shadow, who, with the aid of a half-orc assistant, wanders the planes inflicting pain on hapless victims out of a sheer delight in cruelty. The backstory is that the Seeker in Shadow was once a cleric of “Astanoth, God of Truth and Beauty” (a deity that never appears elsewhere). But after his family was savagely murdered, the cleric fell into madness, despair and a thirst for vengeance, so his god cursed him to wander the planes for all eternity in his perverted chapel, the “Chamber of Pain.” Astanoth isn’t exactly inspiring confidence in his decision-making as a deity.

Anyway, the cool thing is that the Chamber of Pain, being a mobile, inter-planar building, can appear literally anywhere. There’s a ton of easy adventure hooks to get the PCs involved in checking it out—such as the kidnapping of an NPC they know, being hired to investigate disappearances on the streets, or simply stumbling across it in the wilderness where it wasn’t when they camped the night before! But apart from that useful premise, the adventure itself falls very flat and is rather unmemorable. The Seeker in Shadow is a chump and no threat to the party, while his assistant is dangerous only if he lands some shurikens laced with purple worm poison. The “Compleat Encounter” products usually include a unique magic item or artefact, and in this case it’s a fairly uninteresting “Rack of Ruin” that provides a bonus on Intimidate checks to interrogate a foe. The artwork for the “Rack of Ruin” looks like one would expect (a medieval torture device), but the pictured miniature is just a wooden table with some tools on it—not sure what happened there.

All in all, there’s not much reason to track this down and play it. Unlike some of the other “Compleat Encounter” adventures, it doesn’t even have a proto-Golarion lore element. Probably best to leave it forgotten.

Weakest of the Compleat Encounters line

2/5 —

In general, I am a fan of the now-defunct Compleat Encounters line. I might not have bought more than one had this been the first instead of penultimate set I picked up, though. The adventure here is the least captivating and the NPCs don't really inspire. I think the map is fairly useful, especially for a generic temple encounter, but the minis are the least versatile of any in the series. While several of the Compleat Encounters include a prop mini, the table of torture supplies in this set is the only one I don't think I'd ever use. Similarly, the humanoid figures are not particularly useful outside of the context of the adventure.

Search Thread

Search this Thread:

I have some trouble with the maps. I can't link the map of the chapel(zones 1,2,7) and the map of the other building (zones 3 to 6). They are two separated buildings ? What are the position of 2 two zones ?

Thanks

Raskal
Liberty's Edge

The chapel itself is made up of three tiles, while the fourth tile represents a side-structure, like a sacristy or antechamber.

You can set them up in different ways, but they were designed to be placed like this:

1 2 3
4

With the above arrangement, Tile 1 is the altar, Tile 2 has the church benches and candle shrines (oubliettes on the evil side), Tile 3 is the entranceway with the pool and double doors (and gallows on the evil side), and Tile 4 is the adjoining area with a bedroom, table, fireplace, and dressing room (prison cell on the evil side).

Tiles 1, 2, and 3 are placed next to each other in vertical positions, while Tile 4 is placed horizontally.

When in doubt about placement, note the direction of cast shadows from furniture and walls, and make sure the shadows all fall in the same direction.

I hope this helps!
Christopher West wrote:

The chapel itself is made up of three tiles, while the fourth tile represents a side-structure, like a sacristy or antechamber.

../..

Yes Christopher this help a lot

Thanks to you

Where does the 5th tile (the outdoors one with the "Y" forked road and statue, shown on Card 8) come from?
Liberty's Edge

I originally designed the cards as one large rectangular space with a bit of exterior area showing in the lower right-hand corner (featuring a statue and path). I don't think there was a full card's worth of space there, as it was always intended to be cropped out so that the cards were all the same size.

I wasn't aware that the extra corner was ever shown in the product. Now I'll have to go take a look at that. :)

OK, so I'm not missing anything (other than a cool tile that was never real)...I didn't know if it had come from one of the other Gamemastery products.

Thanks for all the great work on those tiles!

I was looking over this and also noticed that the fifth card (the outside) was not present, but was displayed on card 8 (Krauk card). Was it ever determined if it was suppose to be in the set or was deleted by the image accidently left on card 8?
Paizo Employee Chief Technical Officer
pres man wrote:
I was looking over this and also noticed that the fifth card (the outside) was not present, but was displayed on card 8 (Krauk card). Was it ever determined if it was suppose to be in the set or was deleted by the image accidently left on card 8?

It was never meant to be a separate tile.

Community / Forums / Paizo / Product Discussion / GameMastery Encounter: Terror in the Chamber of Pain (OGL) All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Product Discussion
Pathfinder Howl of the Wild
Last post: by Terevalis Unctio of House Mysti