Pathfinder Society GM. Starfinder Society GM. 542 posts (2,619 including aliases). 7 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 25 Organized Play characters. 4 aliases.
The result here was absurd. Basically, getting 2/3 of the gold and your second prestige is completely dependent on resolving a specific skill check successfully. The way this plays out feels like a big middle finger to the players. The rest of the mod was fun, and good combats with the support to make an underwater adventure work. It's a shame the whole was sabotaged by having a single linchpin.
Played this last weekend at a local store. Party was Magus 11, Ranger(Archer) 11, Wizard 11 and Bard 10.
At least two of the combats could easily have gone against us if we were less prepared/made poor choices.
That said, this scenario was so much fun. Challenging combats, combined with fun RP stuff like do we really want <redacted> to come with us? I don't care on this character because I've not interacted with him.
The final fight was amazing - try this, nope can't do it - hey, who has skill x, go do that one while we keep the <redacted> occupied. Reminded me of an MMO raid boss.
Highly recommended, but at least on high tier, make sure you can handle hard combat & have a skill monkey as some of the DCs are pretty high.
If you want an investigation with minimal combat this is your bag
I enjoy social encounters in a scenario, but this was 3 hours of note taking and diplomacy and maybe 20 minutes of combat. This is too far on the skill swing and seems to require a very specific line of questioning and acting on found information.
Ran it this weekend for a party of 4 - Brawler, Sorcerer, Oracle and Bloodrager. I don't mind being able to bypass some or even most of the combat encounters in a scenario, but I'm really not interested in one where every single situation can be resolved with skill checks. Some other skills were involved and a lot of RP, but I felt like the whole thing boiled down to murder-hobo it up or Bluff until your tongue turns blue and have one meaningless combat encounter at the end. Not a total loss as the RP was fun with good NPCs, but I want at least one good fight and the recommendation to make the only one non-lethal left me disappointed.
Just played this tonight. Combat in a huge open area against multiple opponents was awesome! That said, the influence mechanics seemed to be set up to reward those people who put skill points in obscure things that 90% of players will not use and punish groups that don't have a critical mass of knowledge junkies.
Spoiler:
Who puts points in knowledge History or Geography? And if a large number of influence points are not gained by the party, the secondary success is impossible. I'm not sure what the max on points was, but with 9 points, it was not actually possible for us to complete is successfully.
Ran this for a high tier table at GenCon. Thankfully, I was able to draw out my maps ahead of time. This would take far too long to draw at the table. A few things off about the map - stairs on the second floor, but none matching on the first? Stairs to the basement, but unless the players know to avoid it, it becomes 'outside the scope of this adventure'. The final encounter would be near-impossible for a party without a fairly narrow set of abilities to deal with it.
Spoiler:
the wand of remove disease and a magus with a swarmbane clasp meant that two players defeated the final boss basically alone after Pendleton was put to sleep
All in all, it was fun, but not something I will be running again unless someone specifically asks for it.
Ran this twice at GenCon, both times low tier. I had fun with it, the players seemed to have fun as well, and they got to experience a new type of enemy. Be careful on running the optional encounter.
Spoiler:
If the party is split (mine was in the first session with a full table of level 1s), my suggestion would be to give those in the lower room a way to know what is happening. I had the fight show up on the holographic interface and let them call the lift to avoid having 4/6 PCs go down
. In both cases, we were done in about 3 hours, including a fair amount of RP time with NPCs.
Having already prepared stat blocks available for everything in the SNA list is awesome. I have these printed and bring them with me whenever I go to PFS games. Such a time saver. Thanks!
Pathfinder Society GM. Starfinder Society GM. 542 posts (2,619 including aliases). 7 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 25 Organized Play characters. 4 aliases. 
