Regional Venture-Coordinator, Central Europe 319 posts (323 including aliases). 11 reviews. No lists. No wishlists. 62 Organized Play characters. 1 alias.
It has the maybe best skill challenge/variant obstacle chase part I have seen in PF2 so far.
My one minor nitpick is the final boss. Taking the final boss from an obscure Dark Archive adventure where their overpowered abilities made sense in context of the party getting ways to counter them, and putting it in here without these counters was not that great and is the main reason this adventure does not get 5 stars.
A very combat heavy scenario. If you have an anti-undead character you will enjoy this.
Now for some minor nitpicks which prevent this from being a 5 star.
During the beginning you get introduced to some NPCs (from Knights of Lastwall) that don't matter at all for the scenario and I have honestly no idea why they are even mentioned. Also the combats feel repetitive at times (fighting the same enemies over and over again) and adding all the bonuses and penalties from the preparation part felt a bit too time-consuming to be fun.
Overall I think cutting one of the 4 combats and replacing it with a some more roleplaying/skill challenges would have been better as would be a bit more of variety in the opponents.
Overall it is a nice scenario with some sandbox beginning and then a more or less standard dungeon crawl.
But from the GM side it felt more like an IKEA set of a scenario than a finished product. Just getting lists with "this is something that you can add together however you like" and then having to make something up is not what I normally expect from a society scenario.
Overall a nice adventure but I have one nitpick from the GM side.
Having to prepare complex hazards and encounters that then get avoided by skills is cool for the players but as a GM it feels like a lot of wasted time.
When I played it I had one of the worst experience ever and I would give it 0 stars if I could.
As a GM it worked far better and I would have given it solid 3 stars, so overall that would be a 2 star rating.
More details below
Spoiler:
This scenario contains a starship combat, a starship chase and then some mostly diplomatic skill checks. There is no ground combat and most of the skills are of the "one roll per party" kind, so if you are not the envoy you can just spend 2 hours of scenario doing nothing and watching other people play. When I played my vanguard I did a total of 2 rolls outside of starship actions. Also some the role-playing scenes (the Drift Lab and the searching of the ship) felt very weird and could easily be removed to add a ground combat.
Also if most of the scenario is skill challenges make them challenges in which everyone can participate and not one roll per party.
This scenario runs a bit on the short side (2-3 hours) which can be good if your group has limited time but I really feel like some more content in it would have been better. Overall there just isn't much in it.
The combats are far too easy and sadly there are not many extensive skill challenges either. There are at most 3 NPCs you can interact with for any roleplay so this is not much either. Overall it just feels that this could either have been cut down to a 2 hours quest by reducing the long descriptions of the area the players are traveling through or just add some more meat for a full blown scenario.
But now for my big complaint.
There are multiple instances of missing information in the scenario which I as a GM consider extreme annoying.
In the beginning the PCs get some gifts that they are supposed to use to make some friends, those gifts never get mentioned again and there is 0 information about what they do.
The final encounter is seriously lacking some information about where the party and the enemies are supposed to be on the map and the text description is contradicting and confusing.
Overall this was ok-ish. There was some nice roleplay with varying skill challenges in the first half of the scenario and then there are some combats.
Radaszam and Ehu Hadif get some nice moments to shine and Ehu especially gets some much needed characterization and can show some passion.
Outside of the now massively nerfed hazard (GMs check out the update) the combats are more on the easy side, maybe a bit too easy for my taste, but I understand that is considered an intro scenario and they wanted to err on the easy side.
But now for my big complaint, there are far too many NPCs in that scenario that players are supposed to interact with. Once you introduced the 6th NPC (and there are still more to come) expect a lot of confused players and constant questions about who they are. It would have been better to focus on like 4 and give them some deeper interaction instead of overwhelming the players with this flood. And while it is nice to see some recurring NPCs from earlier content it would help the GM massively to at least write the source in the scenario.
Also letting players make decisions that literally don't matter at all in already short scenario feels like filler.
So overall I cannot give more than 3 stars for this.
I played and GMed this one.
Overall this is a nice scenario, there are a lot of abilities to roleplay and different characters can shine.
BUT
This scenario runs far too long for a normal 4 hour slot. Running it took me over 5 hours and when I played it took us over 6 hours, in both cases that was with only 4 players.
The vehicle chase feels rather pointless and doesn't really add anything. Adding a subsystem in an already overcrowded scenario without any major payoff was a big enough mistake for me to retract 1 star.
Wow, that was the scenario that made me really consider quitting PF2.
The original setup is nice, but then the first encounter happens.
Spoiler:
At 5-6 you have to fight an AC 30, attack bonus +21. To give some comparision, my maxed out lvl 6 animal companion has an attack bonus of +12 and an AC of 23. There might be people that enjoy missing 85% of their attacks, I don't. On the other hand the creature hits it on a 2 and crits on a 12.
After that the scenario just screeched to a halt because to continue every party member had to succeed at a DC 24 stealth or perception check.
Also you are stuck in a sandbox but you basically have to guess what the author intended you to do.
My main problem with the scenario are the skill challenges. Forcing everybody to roll on a very limited amount of skill against high DCs and then expecting 4 successes from a 6 player party is just bad. The DC is high enough that even just being trained means you have a more than 50% chance to fail, and being untrained means you are basically fishing for 20s. Apparently the author or the developer expect every PC to be expert in the 2 to 3 skills that get used over and over again. This isn‘t the first time they did this and I get sick an tired of this. You can‘t just use the average DC from the table and then epect more than half of the players to succeed.
Another critique is the first encounter. Letting the party fight 5 monsters with gaze attacks that can petrify them is just a joke. This just turns into „everybody rolls so often until you fail“. And of course the monsters start near enough to the party that PCs are affected in round 1 before they even could act.
The only good thing is the story and the setting, but this scenario really gets dragged down by the bad mechanics, that apparently weren‘t tested properly.
(GMed at high tier)
This is literally the best SFS scenario i have seen until now. The combats where challenging and interesting. There are not 1 but 2 different stories happening and both contain some twists to keep the players engaged. This is especially impressive considering that this a transitional scenario as far as the metaplot is concerned. I was contacted by players afterwards just to tell me how much they enjoyed it! I also need to praise the artist of the Izalguun, it is great when players meet an alien species for the first time and the first thing i hear is "this looks cool, i want to play that".
On a personal note i also like that it sets hooks for multiple sequels besides the main metaplot.
I have a few minor nitpicks from the GM's side. There are many bonuses to certain skill checks that are determined by stuff happening earlier and it was quite hard to keep track of everything. Some sort of handout where you could mark everything would have helped a lot. Also the sandbox part felt sort of bare, i was forced to add a lot of flavor.
All together this means 4 1/2 stars which in this case i can round to 5 stars.
Great work, i hope this sets the standard for future scenarios.
