The first thing to note about this scenario is that it's just poorly edited. Several of the box text sections are missing punctuation, and/or have sentence structures so mangled that they are genuinely difficult to read aloud. In addition, several creature statblocks have outright errors - some of these are easy for an experienced GM to correct (such as the "off by 10" modifier that has sadly become rather common to see), but others (such as a unique ability with Success/Failure/Failure/CritFail entries) are harder to parse.
The scenario content doesn't fare well either, and was only salvaged by the richly engaging premise of preparing to present at a symposium. Players at both tables were invested in going about that preparation and understanding what they were presenting (which the scenario text doesn't facilitate), and both tables were loudly unimpressed with the execution of the eventual framing, but fine with investigating (largely in ways more interesting and relevant than the scenario text suggests). Combat encounters were also uninteresting.
Essentially, nearly all of the enjoyment I saw people have with this scenario came through improvisational riffing on the premise, rather than as a result of what was actually written *in* the scenario (beyond setup).
The notion of giving Pathfinders a genuine moral choice is well worth pursuing. However, there a lot of compounding issues with that choice and the scenario generally, and that makes it hard to recommend to most GMs.
Compounding Issues:
The info given for the negotiable characters is wholly inadequate, in part because the box text is so aggressively framed that the vast majority of players wouldn't consider negotiation, but also because little to no info is given on how the character would know the group has the item they're negotiating for. There are also potentially 6 encounters, one of which is in a space so untenably small that both sessions of it ended with multiple characters unable to contribute, and/or triggering different rooms and further straining GM attention. (I had to run three rooms of this scenario at the same time.) Another encounter is against a vampire whose coffin is never mentioned, leaving the GM to scramble to decide where it is on the map (or whether it's even on the map). A third encounter is in a mostly undescribed map that is used for a research subsystem, but if the players go any direction other than the room containing that encounter, the GM has to either ad-lib room descriptions until they go to the right room, or explicitly railroad them into searching the correct room.
On the bright side, the setting of "Numerian tech meets the undead" is at least delivered, and characters invested in either half of that formula will feel rewarded. But I had to spend extra hours disentangling issues with the scenario before I could feel comfortable running it, and even then I felt drained from running it compared to most other PFS scenarios.
Overall, this scenario left me thoroughly exhausted to prep and run, but only somewhat satisfied to play.
GMed in low tier.
All of my players had an absolute blast with this one. They were already invested from the previous entry (#3-11), which is always a good start, but the skill challenge in particular jumped straight off the page - I barely had time to keep up with all of the ideas players were throwing at me! The encounters were both challenging and interesting, and they repeatedly rewarded player choices and ideas. My only complaint, and this is truly minor, is with the decision posed to the players at the end:
Ending Dscision:
Muesello says he's bailing out, and asks what he should go off to research. All of my players said "neither, stay in because these people are out killing Pathfinders to steal *your* wayfinders" and like... I honestly agree? It seems lame for him to just bail on an ongoing investigation like this, and leave Gloriana to pick up his slack.
However, this didn't take much away from the experience, which my group already declared one of their favorites.
Played once, GMed once. Great hook, both groups got *very* invested in the investigation, and the dungeon crawl was reasonably challenging. However, it's worth warning that both of my groups also ran long - I had to cut out one of the encounters entirely, just so we could finish before closing time of our LGS! That's really my only problem with the scenario, that running it in the future will probably need me to block out 5 hours rather than 4.
