Ascalaphus's page

I recently GM'ed this for Damanta, and played it earlier with Monkhound as GM. When I played, we did so at low tier. When I ran it, high tier.

This scenario works quite differently depending on tier. Low tier, with four players, makes you apprehensive. You know your character is fragile, and there's a lot of scary things in the museum.

At high tier, with a somewhat bigger party, it's just a bit too easy. You don't play a plucky explorer, level 6-7 characters are stormtroopers used to stomping all over the monsters. It's a very different mood. And for this scenario, I like the low-tier mood better.

Adding together middle- and high-tier encounters helps to make things more interesting without going overboard on danger. It offsets the monsters' action economy problems (intended as 4-player scenario!). It's against PFS rules, but since it only makes things harder for the players without extra XP/money, and I did it with their permission, my conscience is clean.

Even at high tier I thought this was a nice scenario; it's got some fun monsters and encounters in it. And the boss fight worked better at high tier I think, because at top tier the boss gets a few nice toys to play with.

I ran this yesterday on low tier for a group of very experienced players. We had a good time, and they felt nicely challenged. However, the adventure has some deadly parts in it, and I wouldn't in good conscience put it in front of inexperienced players or non-optimized PCs.

The premise of the adventure is pretty simple, and is then elaborated on nicely. The selection of monsters is strongly thematic and creative. This leads to some original combats. Furthermore, there's a fey NPC accompanying you, that puts events into a bit more context than "things try to kill you".

However, the adventure also has some issues.

Originally, there was a major RP scene that was all about faction missions. But since those have been discontinued, that scene is basically obsolete. In fact, it doesn't really make much sense anymore; you're just been told someone was abducted, and then get invited to spend the night. So when I ran it, this scene was cut very short and I had time for the optional encounter instead.

Some of the statblocks contain clear errors.

Further, two of the creatures have abilities that on closer inspection should've gotten more attention from the Bestiary writers;

The optional encounter was disappointing; you face the same main creature as the previous encounter, plus some hidden enemies that (at low tier) don't want to fight the PCs.

The scripted fights however were all pretty good. The opening fight was potentially dangerous (but then killer barbarian happened), the second fight was cool because

The boss fight was good too. The BBEG is well-equipped to challenge the heroes;

But this is tempered by the heroes having adequate hints;

A few final tidbits that bother me:

I think the basic structure and monster of this scenario is sound. The boss monster is really quite cool, the players were all enthusiastic about how nasty it was. But it really needs another round of revision, to deal with the rule-errors, bad optional encounter and the change to faction missions.

Also, maybe just a "not for beginners" warning label on it.

I was the Sovereign Court player in the game Monkhound ran (below). We played with a mix of players, most relatively inexperienced with either PF or PFS, and mostly level 1. (I kinda stuck out at level 2 with much more experience.)

I'm happy with the way the faction mission was handled here; there was a primary goal which was achievable if you kept your head in the game, and an "extra credit" goal that was harder to get. The reward for the normal faction goal was enough to make me go "nice", and the extra credit one wasn't so extreme that I'm upset I didn't make it. All in all I think it's a healthy balance.

I dunno how the NPC mechanic works, but it seems to work well. There were clear opportunities that didn't feel contrived and they didn't disrupt the flow of the adventure.

The fights were original; the goals in them were more varied than "kill everything, fast". I only thought the last fight was a bit too easy; discussing it Monkhound and I concluded that it felt like the high-tier end fight was written first (which looks cool), and that this is the watered-down version using the same race of creature, but that the lesser version just lacks the necessary combat oomph.

I don't think this adventure should've been split, as another reviewer suggested; that would've made two too-simple adventures. Maybe the first part should've been shortened slightly to make the second part a bit longer.

What I think this scenario does quite well is make good use of its location. The previous adventure in Jalmeray, Assault on the Kingdom of the Impossible, felt like it could've been placed just about anywhere on Golarion. But this adventure makes good use of the place. The mood is excellent: you're accompanying two 19th century Brits with guns on a safari in India, where there's weird indigenous cults (that I OOC really didn't even know!) and strange monsters never seen before in PFS. All of the encounters have something exotic in them. That's really well done!

---

So I'm kinda torn on whether to award four or five stars. I had only two minor gripes; the final encounter on low tier felt too simple, and

Because I think this adventure meshes action and RP well, and does a good job of redeeming Jalmeray as an exotic adventuring location, I'm gonna go with five stars despite these things.

I played this a year back and now I'm reading it through with an eye to GMing it. It was in fact the first PFS scenario I played, and also with a paladin. After seeing quite a few "paladin panic" threads, I was a bit nervous about what it'd be like to play a paladin in PFS.

This was a really fun scenario to play. We had a nice GM who brought the tale in a pretty upbeat manner, and we had generally nice-people PCs all, so that pushed us to approach this scenario in one way. Now that I'm reading it, I see it would also work well for a much more cynical party, leading to a different ending but also achieving mostly complete success.

I'm particularly impressed by the mood and humanity of the scenario. It's got a very post-Revolution US vibe to it; the whole thing is still new, working out the kinks, and not everyone is playing nice. There's idealism and conspiracies both. People make mistakes because they're human. These aren't black and white villains and heroes.

"Under the hood", it's a somewhat railroady investigation, but not annoyingly so, because the direction of the trail makes sense. I think it's a good investigatory adventure for players who aren't hard-nosed veterans of the genre. The combats aren't really difficult or grim. Again, that's very beginner-friendly.

I certainly plan to run this.

Played this on low tier. This was an interesting scenario. Story and premise are solid, but they work best if the players are into Golarion lore.

The tea ceremony was interesting; our GM (Maglor) made us think about what we'd done and how to demonstrate that it showed us to be honourable.

I thought the fights were so-so. Maybe they're more interesting at high tier; at our tier the minions had some tricks but they didn't really feel like special tricks. All in all it felt a bit easy.

The idea of defending the house against waves of enemies fell a bit flat, I think, for several reasons. One is that interaction with the mass of enemies outside is too abstract. Basically, without AoE attacks you can't do anything, even if you have archers that can normally inflict quite a bit of hurt. Second, I thought there should maybe have been more waves of enemies, or pressure to defeat a wave before the next wave hits.

The BBEG went down rather quickly, although it did look like he could dish out some hurt if we'd given him more time. I think that's disappointing; I'd rather have a tenacious boss that trades blows for a while with the party and requires some more tactics to beat, than one that maybe drops some PCs but gets smeared pretty quickly himself as well.

Overall I thought the scenario was okay, but I wasn't deeply impressed. Maybe it's because the whole Lantern Lodge storyline was over before I got into PFS.

This scenario has all kinds of nice things in it, but what I particularly like is that it's very newbie-friendly. You don't have to know the rules well to succeed here; the challenges are more to your ingenuity and quick thinking than to having a good build.

Also, I think this is the adventure that "has everything";

I think this is one of the best adventures to run for new players, because it's funny, it's varied and it's generally happy.

It's also got a cool chronicle sheet that recently got a bit cooler;

This was the second-ever scenario I played in PFS, and recently I GMed it. I enjoyed both.

First, this is a story scenario. It's about Taldor and about Golarion's history. To GM this you have to delve a bit into the Golarion lore so you can bring that story.

The premise works very well for me; Taldor's half-forged history that yet contains some very valuable information. Anyone who's thought about how high-level magic could change warfare will appreciate that the Society really wants to learn how to wage war against the Worldwound.

The faction missions work for me. I particularly like the Taldor one, it tells a good story about the Taldan faction.

Second, this is a "clever" scenario. You can do it without making a single attack roll, if you do everything right. On the other hand, if you're a retarded barbarian, this is really horrible. I think "classic" Pathfinder does okay here; classic Pathfinder is an explorer that can both defend himself and gather some lore.

Season 5 sets a very nice standard; a well-rounded character and/or party that can cover talking, lore and fighting, does much better than a murderhobo party that can only brute-force its way through scenarios. This scenario is another example of that.

It's got some puzzles which are doable but clever enough to be satisfying to solve.

The location is "penetrable", and there are good reasons for that.

The NPCs are amusing to interact with, and a lot of fun to GM. This scenario has way above-average RP opportunities.

I enjoyed playing it, and when I ran it, my players were very happy as well.

Okay, so I'm not giving 5 stars. Why not? Mainly the GM experience. This scenario has a lot of moving parts behind the scenes. There's four different special rule systems to keep track of, and fairly little help given for that in the scenario.

In addition, some fairly important information is hard to find;

I'd like more scenarios like this, but with some refinement on the GM-side on the things you need to keep track of.

We played this with a party that was basically a zoo. We had a shaman (playtest time) with a wildly OP spirit animal, a gnome paladin on a dog and a halfling on a worg. There was another halfling sorcerer, a Merisiel pregen and my human paladin. There was some weird stuff with the levels of PCs and basically, Merisiel was level 7, the dog-riding halfling paladin was level 6, and everyone else was level 5 and the sorcerer level 4; but we played high tier. *Gulp.* Our GM was Maglor.

It was pretty nasty; the monsters didn't kid around. The halfling paladin got killed in two rounds in a fight by soaking up 1.5 full attack from a monster. We paused for a bit in-game so she could get raised with a Debt to Society, before continuing.

The house was morbid and nasty, truly demonstrating why Cheliax is known as The Fun Place.

I think for me the optional encounter was actually the high point; I hear it's been pretty hard for other parties, but we managed to cope with it through having such a huge zoo of a party, and good teamwork.

The final encounter was pretty weird; MAJOR SPOILER

I played this together with Damanta (I was the human paladin) and with Maglor as GM. We played up with 4 player adjustment, but no hard mode. In the end the 4-player adjustment made the difference on several crucial checks, so anecdotal evidence suggests it's well-balanced :P

I rather liked the puzzle on this one. When you think about it, it might not make a lot of sense (since enemies would be able to figure it out as well), but it's good use of Golarion lore.

I liked that while it's half dungeon crawl, like many other scenarios in season 5, this one rewards you for thinking before hitting stuff. A little genre savvy can't hurt either. [spoiler]When you find bottles that you can charge by taking negative levels, you bet that you'll need them filled later on.

We avoided some fights, but the ones we did get involved in were pretty scary. Unsurprisingly, this is a good adventure to bring paladins. The final fight in particular was pretty edge-of-your seat.

In the end, the premise of the scenario is fairly straightforward, but it's quite thrilling to actually do it.

Addendum: the chronicle sheet has quite a bit of nice things on it. I think I'm gonna GM this one just for that alone, and also because I think this is a relatively straightforward highish-tier adventure, good for getting more experience running higher level adventures.

I played this with Carla as the GM. We had a low-tier party except for a level 6 witch (Woran).

I was really looking forward to playing this after playing Siege of the Diamond City a year back, to wrap up some loose threads. Now I've got some more new loose threads to follow up; this is a good scenario for people who want to follow the metaplot. This one really ties in to several past and "future" (later in season 5) scenarios.

Our GM really hammed up the RP of the main NPC you deal with here, and that helped a lot to set the right tone. I think he got something good to work with, too.

It's basically an investigation, but in a hostile environment. So you'll want to have some smart PCs along. The scenario rewards people who take the investigation seriously / it punishes people who expect the GM to spoonfeed it to them. I like that. The investigation also tells a story.

The fights are tied intimately into the investigation part. Quite a variety of (gross) monsters, but none of them felt random or contrived. The fights were pretty fierce; fortunately we had a ridiculously optimized warrior (with levels in just about everything) and powerful witch with us. Her Misfortune stopped at least five natural 20s cold in their tracks.

Carla (our GM) likes giving his players a proper scare, and the final fight had us quite nervous. He was cackling that "my tactics are working perfectly!". With teamwork even in the face of a nasty situation we eventually made it through.

I think this adventure is a very good whole of setting, story, mission and fights. Everything fits together and reinforces each other. It's not an easy adventure but it's fair and satisfying.

I'm looking forward to GMing this one as well.

Implausible

Let's take a look at the prerequisites for the Cyphermage prestige class:

Feats: Cypher Magic (Inner Sea World Guide 284), Scribe Scroll.
Skills: Knowledge (arcana) 5 ranks, Knowledge (history) 5 ranks, Linguistics 5 ranks.
Languages: Thassilonian, Varisian.
Spells: Able to cast arcane spells.

So basically any cyphermage is a level 6+ spellcaster, probably a wizard. The head of their order is a level 9 diviner (according to Second Darkness). If there's NPCs with this prestige class anywhere in the world, it's gonna be in this city, their headquarters. And divination is basically their thing. But they need the help of some level 1-5 pathfinders, because their organization is under attack and they don't know where it's coming from.

Next, there's people walking around with rabid dogs as pets.

Finally, the "BBEG"

Disappointing

"Cyphermage Dilemma" makes you expect cyphermages, as well as tough choices. Maybe some puzzles, some magic/rune stuff. Well, disappointing.

The story is a railroad. The fights would be easy for a fresh level 1 party; our four-person 1/2/2/2 party sleepwalked through them. (Merisiel 1; fairly mediocre level 2 gunslinger; level 2 support cleric and level 2 arcanist that never even cast a level 1 spell, there was no need. Basically, Merisiel beat people up and took their lunch money with some flank buddy help.) Supposedly the enemies are exotic races and exciting classes. In practice they're low level and die before doing anything special.

There's some implied intrigue but you're basically brought in to do the mopping-up so it doesn't apply to you.

It gets a little bit tricky at the end;

It would've been better to omit any reference to cyphermages. Call it "carefully beat up the BBEG at the end of the railroad" and it'd be better, because you're not raising expectations.

I played this with Woran as GM and Damanta as fellow player; I was the inquisitor.

I'd previously played Tide of Morning with the same Abadar-inquisitor; I had some unfinished business in this forest. Pave The Earth and all that. For my character, this primal business was very unsettling and had to be dealt with.

I've read the adventure, and Woran pulled more RP potential out of it that you'd get from a dry reading. There are some good tips on that in the discussion thread. They really make the scenario great instead of just okay. They turn it from just a job into a fantasy adventure.

Difficulty seemed okay to me, we were a smallish party and we triumphed but it wasn't too easy.

I've both played this and run it. When I played it, the GM didn't really manage to play up the spookiness or lore-background of the place. When I read the adventure I saw how much more it could be, and tried to put it in there.

This adventure has some things I really like;

I played with this with Damanta and Monkhound; I was the paladin.

I've previously played Siege of the Diamond City and Year of the Shadow Lodge, and I think Paizo's really getting better at making these. YotSL was chaotic, the interaction between groups was poorly worked out. In SotDS I played at the bottom tier and after beating back the 8th wave of nearly identical critters I was getting rather tired of it. So I was gratified that this special did much better.

Interaction between tables: this went smoother than before. I think part of it is the scenario; the big boss fight is set up a bit more plausibly than in YotSL. The Aid token came in very usefully, although we didn't really understand how it was supposed to be used. All we cared about was that it gave us a shot at curing a very nasty curse. I recommend that GMs have a handout with these rules for their table.

The combats were what you'd expect, but in a good way; we'd already played 6-01/2/3 earlier, and a lot of season 5, so we were quite ready for them. Even so, they were scary enough to make it exciting. The fights weren't terribly original, but they were a good fit for the place and time.

There was some RP here and there, but this isn't a social-heavy scenario. That was to be expected. Earlier in the year I'd found a boon to learn Dwarven. I took the hint and learned Dwarven, since it makes good sense when you're gonna storm a Dwarven ruin. This opened up some more options for our group.

There were quite a few puzzles and traps, which rewarded players for being sharp and attentive and bringing the right skillset. I know Monkhound was pretty happy to get to show off just how good his Ranger/Living Monolith was at the skill portion. Proper validation for anyone who's been told that Trapfinding is unimportant. But what sold it for me was that the traps were fairly clever; if all you do is throw dice at them you'll fare badly, but if you think things through it gets much better.

The time pressure element worked well for me. The organizers were well aware of it and planned for it. After a certain point you're told "this place is gonna become very unhealthy after X time", but the time is based on how much real-world time is remaining. In that time you want to achieve as many successes as possible, so playing together and playing fast is imperative. It also means that at some point you're like "we have only 15 minutes left before something horrible happens, do we try another side quest or do we run for the exit?" That gave us all a good adrenaline rush. How well this works out depends on how well your organizers plan for it.

In the big boss fight, you can fight at your own tier or choose to play up a tier. (It's literally on a sort of stairway, with scarier monsters on each rung. Which lampshades the metagaming very nicely.) If you win at higher tier your successes count for more. We'd been doing fairly well but weren't sure what to do. So like proper cautious Pathfinders we flipped a coin and went up high. That was a pretty furious fight. I think it's good this choice has been put into the scenario.

The "big twist" in this scenario isn't the most original thing I've ever seen, but it works very well. It's cliche but it's fun for the players so that's fine.

I've said that in a way the scenario isn't super surprising. But that's not the point; it's the climax of a big adventure arc and there's been a lot of foreshadowing about what you'll find there. So the challenge to the writers was to meet all those expectations. To set before you a dungeoncrawl for an army of PCs with worthy foes, a working system for intergroup cooperation, challenges of lore, ingenuity and combat. And the scenario delivers on that.

I played this as the Taldan Sarenite paladin in the same party as Damanta's bloodrager and Monkhound's living monolith.

We didn't have the kind of motivational problems that others had; we also had a Sarenite cleric in the group, and the bloodrager was a CG pirate type. Monkhound and I have also played Rats of Round Mountain together, so overthrowing tyrants of small isolated South-American states is something that we just do.

It helped that our GM was able to with just a few key comments sketch things, indicating that the BBEG was in fact BB and E. "Your fellow Pathfinders are guests" quickly translates to "they're prisoners". "The BBEG is warlike" translates to "time for regime change".

So then why should we set up an actual insurrection, instead of saying "we're the PCs, we'll take it from here"?

Plot (4)The plot is straightforward enough for a single slot game. It's a bit simple even, but that's fine; this is a small town after all. If you're playing heroic-minded PCs, it's enough reason to do what you have to do.

Since we didn't play it that way, I don't know how well the "low road" works, where you don't actually help the town. I do think it's good that the scenario explicitly anticipates the possibility.

RP (3) There were okay RP opportunities here, although not the best I've ever seen. Rousing the downtrodden masses was entertaining though.

All in all this adventure was a satisfying afternoon for me. We were heroes, we kicked fiery butt.

I've both played this on high tier with a party that barely qualified (eeeep!), and run it for a low-tier party. Both were a success.

RP: 2; there's pretty much no RP in this one. You're exploring the island of nasty things that want to kill you.

Location/Story: 4. The location has nice flavour. You can really milk this as a GM. There's some story too, I hope that gets developed further in later seasons. There's clearly a buildup to more scenarios, so the story in this one is a bit simple, but satisfying enough.

Combats: 5. There's some pretty fierce fights here. But the environment gives the players the chance to apply some tactics to improve their chances. Props to the writer for making the fights rough but fair.

GMing perspective: 5. This one is uncomplicated to run, maps are easy to draw, and it's not likely to run overlong. It's enough material to give your players a good time and proper challenge yet pretty easy on the GM.

I'm keeping this scenario in my binder to run again. It's a good scenario if you suddenly need to run an extra table and a lot spicier than yet another Confirmation run.

So I played this last night at high tier, together with Damanta and Carla, with Woran as GM.

I was playing a Taldan paladin with the Remove Disease mercy, and boy did I feel like the right guy at the right place. Also, I have the Title prestige award, which made things even more appropriate; I'm the nobility as it should be, and in this adventure we bump into the grim reality of Taldor's would-be nobility.

I'm a fan of Taldor and I'm looking forward to running this scenario myself. But I'll make sure I have more than 5 hours, because I don't want to cut things short like we unfortunately had to. Even so, we had a good evening.

---

And now I've also run the scenario. I thoroughly enjoyed that as well.

I ran it at lowest tier, with a party of Bard 2, Cleric 1, Ranger 2 (archer) and Barbarian 3. They were lucky to have the barbarian, otherwise it would've gone badly for them.

As I GMed this I detected another issue with the terrain and combats;

I think the writer went overboard with terrain usage here. It's okay to use terrain to make a clever encounter, but this wasn't just clever, it was frustrating.

At least be honest about it. CR guidelines specify that if terrain works to the advantage of the monsters, that's worth +1 EL. I wouldn't make the encounter easier to stay under some ceiling, but just be honest in your scenario-writing about how hard it is!

Finally, a comment about treasure:

Damanta and I played this at Carla's table. We were the second group playing it; the first one had a miserable time due to catastrophic miscommunication about tier selection. So when we sat down we were so very very ready to work together, communicate well and not let things get out of control. Carla's known to be a hard-mode GM (to say it nicely) and the scenario to be deadly, so we were really dug-in, mentally. After playing the Technic Siege the day before the ranger stocked up on an adamantine earthbreaker, and that was gold well-spent.

Perhaps amazingly, I found this scenario much more a combat scenario than the Technic Siege. We went for overwhelming force and it got us through. We had to, because most things hit back really hard as well.

There's some "RP" in the middle but it kinda fell flat, and so we missed some important clues. That gets me to the weakness of this scenario: you need some clues but it's very easy to miss them, or worse, to think they point to something else.

I think the scenario needs the GM to be a bit generous with the clues; if the scenario says players can make a knowledge check for something, tell them they can, don't wait for them to ask it. As it is, there was a lot of "gotcha!" going on which really drags it down.

Combat: 4 Excluding the repeated gotcha factor in the last combat, I enjoyed the other ones a lot. However, that one soured it a lot for me. Also, lots of arguments about how (object) Hardness and creature types interact and that sort of thing; if the GM makes a mistake things get a LOT harder all of a sudden. Note that the combats are fairly brutal but doable if you bring the right stuff.

Story/scenery: 3 The museum is a nice location of course. Wasn't too impressed with the TL part. I'd been leveling my alchemist a lot because this was advertised as a Dark Archives mission but ended up playing my paladin to make sure we were all in the same tier. Afterwards I'm glad of that, because the Dark Archives mission looked rather lackluster.

RP: 1 Although Carla's portrayal of Nigel was entertaining, it also made us despise him. I think that's a poor move in the end, because it means you won't really care about the boons/antiboons at the end. We actually never realized the TL sniper was TL, although I did notice she wasn't on the list of museum employees. This could be better if the GM plays the NPCs differently. Since it's not a RP-focused scenario I'm not weighing this too heavily.

Miscellaneous: 1 The fragile clues and the Technologist nonsense really took this down a notch for me. Because of that we failed the secondary mission, but all ended up feeling that we really couldn't be blamed for it.

All in all we had fun through most of the scenario, especially the fight against the "stuffed animals", that was glorious for us.

It was hard enough that even though we failed the secondary success, we still felt victorious just for making it out alive and killing the BBEG. With better clues/better clue handling it could've been great.

Played this at low tier with Damanta at Maglok's table.

So far this is my favorite S6 scenario, and one of my favorite PFS scenarios period. It's got a strong story, strong challenges, and a lot of different possibilities for player strategy. It's also a big scenario; you do a LOT of things. You want to make sure you have no time constraints when running this, you don't want to rush it. But it's well worth that. Man, I'm getting adrenaline pumping again thinking back to it.

First, the setting: Nantambu. Woran had done his homework, and took a moment to lay out the flavor of the city to us. We briefly saw a really pretty map although it played no role in the rest of the scenario. Nevertheless, it's one of those maps that really set down the idea of the place in your mind. Nanatambu is an interesting place for this scenario because it's quite far away for both the Society and its opponents, and the playground of the Magaambya, a badass (but Good!) magic college that we did not want to end up on the wrong side of. So while we had a party of heavy hitters, we yet had to be a bit subtle about things.

Second, story: it makes sense. A book with a lot of precious information, and the TL will stop at nothing to destroy it. They WILL destroy the lodge and kill civilians to get to it. That MUST be prevented somehow. Just getting the book out is not enough, that'll still destroy the lodge and people. It's up to you to be heroes and prevent that from happening.

Which is where it gets really awesome: you actually get to choose your own strategy on how to do that. There are many things to work with; you can try intrigue, you can try preemptive attacks, or you can dig in. Or you can do combinations of the above. At one point we contemplated inviting a bunch of Magaambya wizards for a social function around the estimated time of TL attack :P In the end our strategy was actually determined by morality;

After that we pursued another lead and continued our attacks against the TL, attacking fast and furious. However, we weren't fast enough to stop the TL from finding our lodge, so when we got back they were already inside. However, our preemptive strikes had weakened their forces, making it a fair but hard-fought fight. They had some seriously scary stuff with them. This is one of those scenarios where the final fight does not disappoint.

Then, RP. This scenario has quite a bit of it. From just talking with our first informant, to various NPCs we rescued, to some other people whose help we wanted, there was good RP to be had, all of it relevant and a lot of it very funny.

Combat: 5 Challenging but fair, original enemies and interesting tactics. On a bigger scale, in this scenario you not only have to think about your tactics in combat, but you have to find a strategy for the whole scenario, and your choices matter a great deal. That's really well done.

Story/scenery: 5 The story makes sense, is interesting, and the stakes are high. And Nantambu is a very cool place for it: both we and the TL were nicely out of our element there.

RP: 4 Good RP was had. I understand that it's possible to solve a bigger part of the scenario socially than we did, but given our militaristic methods, there was still a lot of nice RP. This is not a murderhobo scenario, this is a scenario for heroes that can handle fighting.

Miscellaneous: 5 The whole Technologist thing really isn't an issue in this one; it's annoying in 6-01 and 6-02 but it doesn't cause any problems here. Here, the TL are worthy opponents using their own exotic powers against our exotic powers. Also, this scenario allows for a LOT of player creativity while still maintaining a focused story, and that's rare.

I think this scenario does really well on what I want from PFS: a good challenge, a story that works, in a cool setting.

A final warning: as a player you won't be able to do everything in this scenario. You're on a clock and need to pick your strategies, which means you get to see those parts you choose. I don't consider that a flaw; there's no false decisions where the same thing happens regardless of your choices.

(player review)

Played this with Damanta at Woran's table. I was playing the alchemist.

After the usual sort of roundup, where a VC scolds you for just hanging about the place, you're sent off into an ancient ruin on an obstacle course. And people wonder how the Shadow Lodge got anywhere.

The obstacle course was interesting; the ranger's player has really gone into handling traps and got to show off. I think the fact that the traps are meant to embarass, not kill, makes it even nicer; avoiding getting color paint all over you feels like besting the other team.

The Technologist feat tax is a bit silly I think; Golarion is full of exotic things. Why technology would be so much more incomprehensible than qlippoths, aboleths or Tian magic is beyond me. Getting constant "sorry, you need that feat" felt a bit stupid. Luckily succeeding at those checks wasn't actually needed; just handle hostile things with extreme violence and you're fine.

Handling the technology to get through the scenario felt slightly like information laundering; as players we quickly recognize what everything is supposed to be, and then we search for an IC reason to come to the right conclusion.

I thought the fights were fine; the monsters are new and different and look scary enough. Even though you can quickly guess at some of the mechanics at work, they put enough pressure on you at the beginning of the encounter to make it exciting.

I thought the NPCs were a bit boring; after we got what we needed from them, they didn't really do anything else anymore. Maybe if I had any clue about the Silver Crusade's interest in them that might have been different.

Something many other people complained about needs mention. At some point you've gotten the dingus that you came from, and you could just turn back and report. So why would you go on exploring? That question never occurred to us. We're pathfinders, we're naturally curious, and there's definitely interesting stuff going on here, so let's see what's over there. I think the complainers are playing the scenario too cynically, only focused on the hard official objectives. If you keep "Explore, Report, Cooperate" in mind I think there's no problem here with the scenario.

Combat: 4 interesting fights, not too hard but you do need to work together. If party members get hit with conditions, reading up on those conditions helps the PCs a lot. It also helps if you have heavy hitters.

Story: 3 I like it when the adventure takes place in an interesting location, so that's good. Competition with a hypothetical other team of pathfinders also sets a good tone. Other than that there's not all that much happening here.

RP: 2 After a short talk with the NPCs where they gave us the dingus we needed, that was pretty much it. Which makes this basically just a dungeon crawl in a really fancy dungeon. Okay by me; there was nothing actually unpleasant about the RP, just nothing special either.

Miscellaneous: 3 a half orc steals a flatscreen monitor. There's quite a few chances for nerdy humor in the scenario. On the other hand, the Technologist nonsense is a downer.

(player review)

This scenario wasn't what I expected. Based on the description I thought I'd be playing some sort of epic finale in Mendev, where factions backstab each other in the middle of hordes of demons. This turned out quite differently.

It should be understood that we had a fairly strong party of mostly level 3-4 characters and my level 6 paladin, with a healthy spread of abilities. I played this with Damanta as a fellow player (see review below). We were told we'd gotten back to Absalom for some R&R after the business in Mendev was concluded, and as it happened there was a funeral/public festival, so that worked out quite nicely. As it turned out the missions weren't hard for us, so we treated the whole thing as a sort of holiday; kick some butt in the morning, go to a party in the afternoon. We felt like veterans dealing with some light issues at home after a season of heavy fighting abroad. So while the adventure as a whole wasn't all that challenging, everyone had a great time.

Basically what happens during this adventure is, you play 3-4 faction missions against a backdrop of a city councillor's funeral. We did Silver Crusade, Osirion and Cheliax missions.

So, although there's quite a bit of combat in this scenario, it's not particularly hard. There's some RP in it, but you can keep that either minimal or expand on it according to taste; most of it isn't mission-critical but it's available if you want it. I think the strong point of this scenario is that it actually does what it promises: it shows you the new directions for the factions in a way that makes sense.

Combats: 4 Not too hard, but both SC and DA were interesting. All the fights were entertaining.

Story: 4 The scenario does what it's supposed to do. The backdrop adds some flavor but doesn't distract.

RP: 3 It's got possibilities, but not a whole lot of RP is required.

Miscellaneous: 4 We went on to play the first S6 scenarios with roughly the same party, and this was an enjoyable teambuilding exercise. And feeling like a bunch of badass veterans showing the people at home how it's done was enjoyable.

I'll probably GM this at some point as well, it looks like a nice bag of things to work with as a GM.