KestlerGunner's page

NOTE: I was a player, I was not the GM.

The Midnight Mirror is a very intelligently crafted module in which the team of adventurers are embedded in a remote town named Karpad with little to no ideas on what to expect. Early in their trip they find an extremely disturbing disease ravaging the populace, inexplicable disappearances, racism, social intrigue and the cloying sense of dread that comes with everyday living in Nidal.

Roleplayers will delight in the first half of the module, which involves investigation into the town of Karpad and its memorable inhabitants. There’s plenty of plots going on and in the first two to three hours of play, you’ll be constantly revising your theories on ‘Just what the hell is going on in Karpad?!’

When you do come to discover the true extent of the problems, it’s time to ready your spells, pull out the enchanted weaponry, don the armour and embark on a highly dangerous operation — an operation that cannot be taken lightly by 3rd level adventurers or an uncooperative team. It is deadly.

We had two deaths out of a team of five, we got cocky and we got served. The boss battles in particular are horrifying. This is a tough scenario to complete with good results. If you have a mishmash of a party, if you have team members that can’t contribute in combat, you are going to have blood on your hands. I do think the boss fights are too hard. We had many, many things go wrong for us on the battlefield, but despite this, the power of the two greater evils in the final operation seemed overwhelming. That’s the only flaw I could draw out of this dark, gothic investigation.

I highly recommend this module for experienced players.

This is a high quality scenario that showcases the best that PFS has to offer. When an ancient mystery forcibly interrupts a present day conflict, the Pathfinders must investigate the complicated history of the city of Korvosa to discover the secrets beneath an enigmatic locale.

PRO
+ The episodic narrative style really shines in this self-contained adventure. Neat storytelling with no loose ends or bizarre inclusions of monsters, motives or unbelievable conflict. It's like a great episode of 'The X-Files' or 'BPRD'.
+ The scenario introduces, and adds flair to, the relations and history of Varisian ethnic groups, making the campaign world richer and more believable.
+ Great mix of role playing, danger, and challenging strategic combat.
+ The faction metaplot has led to some important and flavorful faction missions that give a sense of progress rather than tedium.
+ A powerful final boss with formidable accomplices means your players are in for a challenging and climactic boss battle.

CON
+ Would have been nice to have a method for smarter role players to use a combination of evidence gathered and diplomatic 'conversation combat' to take an edge off the difficulty of the final battle somehow.
+ Paizo word count limits mean that the templated monster stats aren't available in the document. The author has made them available here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6HbhugcxRl4T3MzM0tqdHFVZTg/edit

This is a disappointing finale to the First Steps trilogy.

The module is 33% roleplaying and 66% dungeon delve.
The social element allows a thriller genre scene where the adventurers find themselves in a 5-star restaurant where a deal must be made. It's a clever and memorable event.

The delve channels all that great old school ecology of the dungeon goodness that you know and love. The dungeon site has a history and a function. Everything works together. And the map is just great too, although not suitable to be printed for the players to view.

The boons available are creative but take some smart playing to achieve, which is great to see. Romantics and anti-hero arcane casters will love what's on offer.

For story-telling, GMs need to develop a strategy to tell some of the story of the primary antagonist. There's some good material to relate to the PCs, but you need to think ahead of time about how it'd be delivered. I've left some extensive notes for GMs in the Product Discussion thread.

Fantastic entree, satisfying main and the clever boons on offer with a challenging finale make a delicious desert. Would recommend.

I need to add another five star review.
This is a rich and complicated module with so many great things going for it. I had a blast running this session in a home game that went overtime. Major spoilers ahead.

I agree with Entropi (see below). As written, this scenario is an unfulfilled and unglamorous trudge through the mud. As a GM, I felt I needed to edit and tweak encounters to make this scenario work. SPOILERS AHEAD.

PRO:
-The closing scene where the Muckmouth tribe discusses the possibility of alliance with the Pathfinder Society is a nice touch, and is a great chance for some decent roleplay. The diplomacy modifier penalties listed is a nice addition. More meta-quests like this, please.

-The Cheliax faction mission. Great job on this, it's a streak of colour that really shows how the faction mission can challenge the players creativity and create tension. Beautiful.

CON:
-The adventurer stat blocks are woeful. Is it a condition of membership to the Aspis Consortium that you need to take the worst multi-classing ideas and feat choices in the game? The 'archers' selection of feats is basic at best. My party played up and it was still mostly a cakewalk, aside from a little bit of stonewalling during the boss battle.

-There has been no effort made on the terrain description. Aside from a paragraph telling us what muddy conditions are like, there's little effort to show the terrain of this adventure locale. I needed to redraw the waterfall room to make it seem like a challenge for the party.

-The lack of fulfillment in the story. How did the enemy trespass into the Tapestry? Who is behind it all? If this is a three part story, tell us so. Don't leave us hanging here.

-The elephant in the room for the 'Wonders of the Weave' series is the lack of imagination seen in the creation of Hao Jin’s tapestry demiplane. A demiplane can be anything – a crystalline forest, an MC Escher landscape, the innards of an enormous creature. Anything! What we get instead is a misty, featureless swamp, inhabited by creatures found in material plane Golarion. It’s a lost opportunity that the world within the weave wasn’t actually wonderful. This was a great opportunity for an imaginative and interesting adventure locale for PFS play and the developers blew it.

This is how you handle a good delve story. It’s just a shame that the title and offering of the mod suggested a different quest entirely. I was expecting planar mystique, so it was weird to find a story that’d probably be better suited to Osirion itself.

PRO:
-This is a creatively written and well handled dungeon trawl. I have added a star for the ingenious combinations of monsters and environmental hazards that cover the opponents bases and make for a more difficult and challenging number of combat encounters. Both the thinking behind the encounters, the dangers of the environment and the layout of the dungeon are top notch. Jonathan Keith knows how to write a good delve.

-A dungeon puzzle that is just hard enough. I was grinning while sitting back and watching my players try to decipher the hieroglyphics.

CON:
-The elephant in the room for the 'Wonders of the Weave' series is the lack of imagination seen in the creation of Hao Jin’s tapestry demiplane. A demiplane can be anything – a crystalline forest, an MC Escher landscape, the innards of an enormous creature. Anything! What we get instead is a misty, featureless swamp, inhabited by creatures found in material plane Golarion. It’s a lost opportunity that the world within the weave wasn’t actually wonderful. This was a great opportunity for an imaginative and interesting adventure locale for PFS play and the developers blew it.

-The finale with the antagonist isn’t that interesting, leading the penultimate combat to be seen more as the ‘boss battle’ than the actual boss himself. While it’s good that there’s a chance to talk many of the NPCs out of the fight, there’s not enough storyline here to provoke much interesting conversation apart from ‘him bad, we good’.

-The Canid Carcanet is a cool item, but it’s cost value is prohibitively expensive. I can’t imagine any PFS character making the choice to lose their neck slot and losing 15,000 gold to this item, as flavourful as it is. Which is a shame, because it’s a great versatility-boosting relic that could be really nicely used in future games. Please cut the cost to 10,000 gold.

-We’re beginning to suffer here from pointless faction missions, in particular, the Qadiran faction mission. How exactly does a useless bauble improve their standing in Absalom, exactly?

This was an ambitious and panic-driven adventure that carries off an original story quite well within a limited time frame. The concept of the adventurers battling an insidious threat that cannot be taken out with a high bab and str bonus to a two-handed weapon is wonderful, and the focus on skills and knowledge in this adventure perfectly shows off Society's respect for skillful and well-rounded characters. This is a must-play for a party of smart players who want to get away from the hack & slash.

As you can see, the pros definitely outweigh the cons in this adventure.

PROS:
-Original, inventive concept for an adventure that escapes the dungeon yet is still packed with increasing danger to the characters.
-A brilliant 'Pathfinder: Emergency Department' scene whereby creative skills and knowledge are responsible for saving the day, not a greatsword. I would like to see more of these situations in future seasons.
-Immersive backstory for the origins of the evil.
-Simple, easy to use disease resources that lets the GM keep the threat foremost in the players minds.
-Suitable faction missions that don't feel 'tacked on'.

CONS:
-Maps drawn are too large for the medium sized gaming table.
-Combat seemed to be the norm for Pathfinder Society (easy), which means it really needed a formula for GMs to add more creatures to challenge the party. Front-line party members boasted they hadn't taken any damage at the end of the session.

This is a hilarious and well-executed module that manages to perfectly blend adventure, spooky horror, comedy, cinematic battles and canny diplomacy. It captures the atmosphere of an accessible and fun Pathfinder Society mission and is a great choice for lively tables. It’s criminal to play PFS and not run this module.

PROS:
-The use of goblins. As everyone else has said, roleplaying the goblins is wonderful. As I told my table “think of them as 5-year-old children who’ve been chugging red cordial for two days straight.” Players who would normally slay monsters on sight suddenly have squealing little mischief makers tied to them and making their lives hell.
-The atmosphere of Irrisen is captured perfectly.
-The battles do not feel ‘inserted’ and for the most part, are differentiated.
-Faction missions are clever and build the theme of the factions, especially the Sczarni and Andoran missions.

CONS:
-The module has provided minimum guidance to the GM on how to add that extra flavour to the goblins. I suspect this has been done to allow serious tables to have the goblins be more sadistic and for wacky tables to have the goblin nudity, explosions, self-combustion, all-sorts. Creative GMs will excel, those that follow words as written might struggle to make the module as great as it can be. You must definitely give separate personalities to all of the goblins.
-The encounter in the woods is scaled back poorly for low level parties and results in a strange ‘one-trick’ creature that’s not as effective as it could be.
-The final combat map is gargantuan! Too big for any flipmat in it's entirety.