NiTessine's page

Do your players need to see the blurb though? They just need to see the aforementioned, "diplomatic meeting with dragon and kobold assistant."

Yes, yes they do. In convention use, it is, in fact, required that a scenario has an interesting description.

“Go to a distant land for a diplomatic meeting with a dragon, aiding their kobold helper” is the gist of it.

Yeah, but the blurb is like the trailer for a movie. It tells the players why they want to play this and not the other fantasy game for the inexplicably more popular game system in the same time slot. It has to sell the adventure. That takes more than just the facts. Writing that takes effort.

Looks interesting. I look forward to PFS venturing into Tian Xia again.

However, this blurb is seriously not good. 1-4 scenarios should sell to the first-timer crowd, but this is a pile of proper nouns that say nothing to anyone who hasn't been playing the campaign for a while. If you're not an old hand at Pathfinder Society, this is word salad. I cannot use this. I have to rewrite it before I can offer the scenario as a public game, and because I don't run in a primarily English-speaking environment, I have to do it twice.

+1 mithral full plate. I'll see if I can fix that...

I remember Erik running the introductory piece/adventure of his in-house campaign called Kings in Absalom (?) back in 2011. I was too caught up in work at Ropecon that year, so I sadly couldn't participate as a player or watch a whole session played through. I've regretted it later, but as I was supervising our participation in that convention it just couldn't be helped. It was great to meet Erik in person, though. :)

Anyway, this is pure speculation, but considering the adventure description above... I think that I might know how and where The Dead God's Hand begins...

You know, as one of the players in that session, I thought exactly the same thing when I read the description. We were on the brink of TPK when time ran out in the slot, and I thirst for a rematch!

It's also noteworthy that Yesteryear's Truth references Into the Unknown, and the briefing in Fugitive on the Red Planet is written to assume that the team has a few gigs under their belt already.

So basically that order is pretty solid. Yesteryear's Truth is also slightly tougher so it's a good idea to have them at 2nd level.

Chance Phillips 187 wrote:

I'm super glad that Spelljammer got called out. Even if Starfinder is going a different direction tone wise, Spelljammer WAS one of the first science fantasy RPG settings and in my mind still one of, if not possibly, the best.

Eh, Spelljammer was just fantasy in a fantasy cosmology of space. There was absolutely no science in it.

No current science. It did draw a lot from outdated and disproved cosmological models.

Before anyone asks, no, the giant space hamsters they just made up.

Seriously impressive literature list. Like, I can quibble (BANKS!), but I love how it's so cutting edge that it's got things that are up for a Hugo this year. I'm literally reading Ninefox Gambit right now. The history is acknowledged, but it's a modern list about where SF is now.

Mind you, I'd also jettison a third of the video games to make room for more comics (VALERIAN & LAURELINE!), but that's just me hating video games.

2. The author HATES foreign GMs who have to translate the poems and plays on words into other languages. ;)

Yeah, that was a fun thing to notice when starting to prep for the scenario the evening before the game.

With a rhyming dictionary and a working knowledge of translation theory and poetry forms, it wasn't all that difficult. The important things are the translation of Caught's name so it retains the same number of letters and keeping the important stuff in the poems – namely, the suggestions of what the scraps are capable of summoning and the overarching theme of eating. Rhymes, puns and metre are less crucial, especially since languages have their own rhythms and melodies and native poetry forms and what works in one language may come across as contrived in another. For instance, the haiku looks kinda off in English and doing iambic pentametre in Finnish is a bit like going against the grain of the language.

Incidentally, if someone needs the poems in Finnish, I'll be glad to supply my translation.

I find this rather welcome. I consider it extremely unlikely that Finland will be able to support 50 tables of Pathfinder Society at a single convention in the foreseeable future and our only brush with Bonekeep has thus far been Mike Brock's visit last year. Now, we can put our characters through the grinder without the hassle of foreign travel!

I think the concept of the murderhobo highlights the inescapable truth that going down a deep, dark hole in the ground to effect genocide upon goblins is not the career choice of a well-adjusted person. I occasionally find it useful to reflect on what the realistic psychological makeup of a professional adventurer would be. I mean, if we think about this realistically, the adrenaline junkies would be at the healthy end of the spectrum and half the Society would have close, personal experiences with PTSD.

There's an index at the back.

shadow lodge = pathfinder society union.

And lemme tell ya, you don't wanna mess with the guys who negotiated a fifteen-minute working day.

This is the reason I never delete the PDFs of reserved Society numbers even after I've handed them all out.

I usually do not run seven-player tables, but for this module, I would almost have to make an exception.