Mattastrophic's page

I can understand that the authors and developers of Siege had to make a lot of compromises to make Siege work at GenCon 2013. Unfortunately, those compromises lead to an inferior product outside of the Sagamore.

Siege is a poorly-put-together slugfest, a chaotic mess of descriptions, stat blocks, and NPCs who might as well not be named. It might have been appropriate for GenCon, where the energy of so many tables can overcome the mediocre content, but it's a terrible product for the rest of us.

-Matt

But the 32-page format really kills this adventure. There are just too many needless fights which push out what could have been dialog or developed NPCs. A third of the fights are easily bypassed by just being 15th-level, for example.

Also, the production quality of the maps is well below average for Paizo. The maps are, for the most part, vacant grey boxes which do very little to reflect the room descriptions given. It's as if the cartographer drew the maps from gridpaper-sketches, and did not have access to the actual room descriptions.

In all, The Moonscar has some solid statblocks (even if they suffer from Core-only-itis) and an epic adventure seed which can be layered onto many high-level homegames. It seems like it is half-finished, though, and could really have used some more development time.

-Matt

...and not much more. Dragon's Demand does have four pages on the town of Belhaim, and a creative mechanism about midway through to advance the story, but a grand total of six(!) dungeons represent the rest of this book. There is very little NPC development and very little time spent on a very basic plot.

It's unfortunate that Dragon's Demand is the first of the expanded module format. There is nothing Dragon's Demand contains that could not have been accomplished in the old, 32-page format. All it actually manages to do is stuff in a greater number of dungeons and stat-blocks. There are so many dungeons that their maps have to both line the inside covers and be placed in the interior.

I purchased Dragon's Demand because I was looking forward to a developed Belhaim with fleshed-out NPCs and a solid low-level storyline with twists and turns. I was eagerly awaiting a departure from the 32-page module line, in which the requisite maps and stat blocks left very little room for very much else. I was tantalized by the variety of quests and side-quests on Page 3, and the opening sentence of "Getting Started" on Page 5 was what really drew me in:

A large part of the adventure is getting to know the people of Belhaim and exploring its hinterlands...

Six dungeons of room descriptions and stat blocks later, I now know how wrong that sentence is. In the end, this is all that Dragon's Demand is:

-Start PCs at Level 1.
-Grind for XP until Level 6-7.
-Hand out a heck of a lot of magic items, putting the PCs waaaaaay over their wealth-by-level. (Even a 54,000GP rod!).
-Fight a dragon.

That second step, the XP grind, is wholly unnecessary. So is the third, but treasure handouts don't take up many pages. It's as if Paizo has shackled itself to its own XP progression table, and Dragon's Demand is the result of feeling the need to cram all that XP into 64 pages, solely to reach an arbitrary level target. James Jacobs has previously confirmed this problem, though within the context of APs.

I wonder, if that arbitrary level target had been something lower, say level 5, if Dragon's Demand would not have turned out to be the definition of an XP grindfest. The question becomes, will Paizo make the same mistake again?

Will the now-quarterly Module line contain intriguing, ambitious 64-page adventures, or is it doomed to be filled with 64-page XP grinds?

-Matt

Requiem of the Red Raven is simply the best scenario PFS has ever produced.

If PFS were to strive to have more scenarios like Requiem of the Red Raven, the campaign would improve vastly. The players get to bask in Golarion canon, meet established canon NPCs, receive exposure to the canon instead of isolated dungeons, and fight interesting combats which do not have straightforward objectives. I cannot recommend this scenario more.

Just make sure that you have a Cheliax faction member in the party. They get the best faction mission ever in Part I.

-Matt

The bulk of this review is very spoiler-filled.

In short, Season 4 has taken opportunities to present some innovative and quality offerings, such as Blakros Matrimony and The Disappeared. Kirin is not one of them. It instead represents a style of play in which any semblance of plot or storytelling is quickly dispensed with so that the tactical miniatures battles can commence.

-Matt

King of the Storval Stairs presents a very simple scenario, the most straightforward of concepts. It's a slugfest in a pure form.

The fights are pretty epic, but it suffers greatly from having four of them, and from having too many monsters who are both hard to kill and cannot effectively damage the party. Thus, the whole thing became a huge timesink, my runtime lasting a total of seven hours.

Also, I noticed that the scenario really went out of its way to make the "tough" fight easier for the players to handle,

This assistance drops the CR of the big fight by more than the numbers would suggest. Giving 7-11 PCs that much assistance and that much prep time and that much terrain advantage is overkill.

I also noticed that the scenario tries to be really tough, yet goes out of its way to pull punches, with subpar feat, terrain, and spell selections on the monsters. It even goes so far as to hand the PCs an easy surprise round at one point!

In all, Storval Stairs tries to be a pure-form slugfest, but suffers from too many pulled punches, under-capable-yet-hard-to-kill monsters, and too much generosity. This combination leads to a grindfest which takes way too long to go through.

-Matt

Waaaay too much, in fact. This scenario is reminiscent of the Josh Frost era. Except the too-many combats take longer to run.

-Matt

Asking level 3 PCs to bring 3rd-level spells with them or TPK said optional fight is also stupid.

PFS is already a hack-and-slashfest. Optional fights take up valuable time, they have from time to time been the toughest fight in the scenario, and too often the difficulty level of the module comes down to whether the GM chooses to run the optional fight. Here, the optional fight's tactics create a very lengthy, very swingy, and very TPK-possible fight.

That's just bad campaign design.

Shame, PFS. Shame.

-Matt

The Disappeared is a scenario with a sweet plot, which showcases NPCs and treats them as more than quest-givers, which contains sweet puzzles that are actually puzzling, and most importantly, is a scenario where cold-blooded murder doesn't solve everything. I wish every scenario were like this one. It's only issue is that 1-5 is too low-level for it's proper Tier.

-Matt

Skip this one. After reading through it, I found a promising urban-adventure prospect that dispensed with the urban part as quickly as it could in order to become a super-dungeon.

Video games handle this style of adventure better than this book does.

EDIT: Reviews that solely act as replies to other reviews are silly reviews. What is this, Metacritic?

-Matt

Great scenario. Lots of atmosphere, with lots of roleplaying cues.

-1 star for an overly punishing, un-fun final combat which relies on frustration to challenge the players.

-Matt

This module is yet another boring dungeon crawl which recycles statblocks over the course of its fights. There's a puzzle in there, but it's very poorly-described, and needs a rewrite.

Second star for not having too many combats.

-Matt

This hardcover consists of many reprints of old items. However, these reprints do not correct any previous errors. We have mispriced items all over the place.

In addition, Ultimate Equipment does not reprint all of Pathfinder RPG's magic items. If it is to be a collection of reprints, then it needs to be a complete collection. It found room to reprint even the rules for masterwork items, why could it not be a complete collection?

Why pay money for a incomplete book of cut-and-paste, error-filled reprints?

Further, the original content in Ultimate Equipment spans a wide range of writing quality. Prices for magic items are often inconsistent. Also, the active monk hate, from the brawling armor enhancement to the blade of the sword-saint, was not appreciated. Including a monk's holy avenger and making it such that a monk is not proficient in it was a fine piece of work.

It's as if the entire book is entirely unedited. If I actually wanted to use this book, I would have to wade through so much text and fix many, many items myself.

One star. There's no excuse for this book. Edit your books, Paizo, so I don't have to.

-Matt

...too much combat. I ended up narrating Acts 4 and 5, the latter would probably be what I'd cut out of the module entirely next time. Act 4 needs to be simplified, too. Even with these methods of speeding things along, the module still took us six hours.

That being said, the foundation is excellent, with nice Law & Order investigation. This is one of the best of Season 3's modules, though I recommend not playing this one with a time limit.

-Matt

Red Harvest is simply the best scenario in Season 3 thus far. Based off of Kurosawa's classic film Yojimbo, the PCs are presented with two opposing factions, and need to make choices regarding which side to back in order to succeed at their mission.

It's that "make choices" part that makes this scenario so great. Where nearly every other PFS scenario is a no-decisions railroad, this one is a sandbox, where the PCs' choices govern how the story plays out. Even better, this module has mechanisms which prevent the party from refusing to choose. The players can't take the easy way out and remove themselves from the scenario's conflict; they have to get involved. It's that choice mechanism which really places this scenario head-and-shoulders above the rest of Season 3's offerings.

This is the campaign's second module from Alex Greenshields, the first being both Season 2's best-written and most-infamous scenario, The Dalsine Affair. That one was my favorite from both sides of the GM screen, and I anticipate that this one will be my Season 3 favorite once I GM this one! Paizo's got a talented author on its hands, and I hope to see more from Greenshields in the future.

-Matt

This module is just fifteen pages of a map and some statblocks. Skip it.

-Matt

Simply put, this module has way too many combats, and that's all it consists of. It gets a second star for a neat mechanic at the very end, as well as for not pretending to be anything but a slugfest.

That being said, this module is another example of what's wrong with Pathfinder Society.

-Matt

Just returned from playing this one at Tier 4-5. This module, full of potential for character-focused and canon-referencing conflict, quickly devolves into yet another module with way too many combats.

Slugfest modules like these were what drove me away from PFS in Season 0 (specifically, the horrid #7 Among the Living), and I really hope PFS isn't returning to that horrid model. The combats were all pushovers, where the party rolls initiative, kills everything really quickly, then taps their Cure Light Wands a couple of times and moves on to the next fight.

There was a lot of potential for an engaging conflict between two sides who were both in the wrong here, and the opportunity was wasted by yet another slugfest.

This module represents exactly what's wrong with PFS modules. Avoid as-written, but enjoy with a GM who is able and willing to develop the conflict presented and harness its potential.

-Matt

A potentially-epic romp through Absalom, ruined by having the execution consist of:

There are mechanics in place for the tables to work with each other to achieve a goal, but the execution both falls flat and does not cover important situations, situations I had to make up as my local group went along. For example, when all the tables are on the same map, bardic performance clearly affects everyone on the map; this is not covered my the module. Similarly, when all the PCs are fighting the end-guy in the same room... how does Channel Energy work? This, combined with the entirely-silly point in the spoiler text, made this special event a horrid work that I am sorry to have chosen for my local PFS group to play.

Skip this one.

-Matt

I really enjoyed this module; it has an excellent horror-movie/Resident Evil flavor, and a great mystery, but...

Long story short, the new monster in the back of it is way larger than a CR 5 critter. It's more like CR 7-8.

My advice to anyone running this module is to replace that monster with something else, so as to not kill your entire party outright.

-Matt

This module had a very nice premise which could potentially lead to a lot of nuanced interaction encounters with NPCs, due to NPCs with intriguing motivations.

However, it has too many combats in it to fully realize the potential for not just good roleplaying, but in-character decision-making. The rails have to be followed just to get through all the combats.

Modules with plots like these really need to have three or fewer combats, maximum of two required combats, and one either bypassable or a trap, to really work.

If only I got to play this in an eight-hour timeframe, or some combats were skipped in favor of more plot-time, such that the party could do anything but stay on the rails, I would have enjoyed this module a lot more.

That being said, I do hope that PFS releases more modules with interesting, choice-driven plotlines, and this module is a step in the right direction.

-Matt

Just got home from having played The Dalsine Affair at Tier 6-7, and MAN was it an excellent module. It's got in-depth background that the players can care about, encounters with flavor and which can be tackled in more ways than straight combat, and the best climactic encounter of all of PFS so far.

I really do hope that Season 3's modules rise to the quality level introduced by The Dalsine Affair; this one is an example to be followed.

-Matt

In short, this module's combats are way too difficult at Tier 1-2. The ACs are just too high for new players' PCs to touch, and two of the combats feature simply-overpowered foes.

It's really a failure of the Pathfinder itself, though, because of the rules for humanoids with class levels, and how their CR is lowered by one. A Fighter1 with masterwork equipment, 10+Con hit points, 20 points for stats, and a favored class +1 HP, is *not* the same challenge level as a Human Zombie, even though they're both CR 1/2.

But that failure of the system does not excuse the module at all. The author, who was at the time the campaign coordinator, did not have to place such overpowered combats into Tier 1-2. But he did.

Avoid running this module at Tier 1-2.

-Matt