P.B.'s page

Part 1 has an interesting premise but chapter 4 is very combat heavy and the circus theme is barely there after chapter 2.
Make sure to communicate that to players because this is absolutely *not* a circus themed AP in the long run.

As someone who never played pf1 and not familiar with backstory, this scenario left me completely cold. It doesn't help that it has 2 influences in a row, followed by a plethora of skill checks. The final battle was fine for my ranger with appropriate class feat and certain resistance but I can see how that could be a problem.

Having played this with a sniper pregen, it really gives a bad impression of the class/way. Dealing 1d6 damage per turn because of having to reload is absolutely not fun. To make things worse, none of the pregens have any decent healing so if one PC goes down it easily snowballs into a tpk.
If I run it, I will only run with custom characters.

We started at level 2 and everyone had fun with no TPKs.

I just finished running it with a group of 4 (cleric, paladin, wizard, monk), and it was an enjoyable romp. The party sliced through all encounters with ease, in fact, and they seemed to have enjoyed the story well enough. Granted, I had to do a bit of retuning, and I made chapter 3 shorter cause running the same dungeon with different enemies is not very fun (hence 1 star off). Overall it's a solid adventure as long as GM makes a few adjustments.

Interesting idea, fun RP, but once we got to combat things got really ugly, pace-wise. A bunch of enemies in super tight quarters that barely leave space to move or use ranged attacks. Basically ended up with 2 characters fighting while the rest jumped around menacingly.

The final twist was quite amusing though, and the last encounter was fun.

I appreciated the ability to use social skills in encounters, and the puzzle map encounter made positioning key.
Final boss didn't last long for our party but the idea was interesting imo.

Played at max cp.

The scenario had a good mix of exploration, combat and mystery.

The rp parts had some interesting decisions and rp opportunities, provided the player can separate their knowledge from their PC.

The encounter balance was on the side of quantity over quality, but fair.

Timing: the scenario took nearly 6 hrs at max cp.

Played at high tier.

The scenario was engaging, the combat was not overtuned, and I appreciated the narrative fork allowing for player choice as well as the effort to make research system less boring by using "random" events.

Played in high tier:

I liked that the 1st half gave a good opportunity for RP, and I liked the switch to the sense of urgency in the 2nd half. The "murderhobo" trap in the 1st encounter was very clever and forced our hard hitting characters to try a different approach. However after that the encounters were just not very hard at all, to the point where after defeating the final boss there was that "is that really it?" feeling. (and normally I'm the one opposing APL+2/3 bosses, but APL-1 boss didn't feel good either).

So the balancing is why I'm taking a star off, the rest was very enjoyable and I hope we get to resolve the final mystery soon.

I think this is a very interesting scenario with a nice puzzle that is fun to piece together.

However, as mentioned below, the final encounter is out of the left field and does not match the rest of the tone.
It would make a lot more sense to switch that for the one before.

Also, 2nd hazard is brutal for 1st level characters.

Note: played in low tier

The scenario has an interesting premise and explores Mwangi lore in more detail. However, the final encounter is, according to the rules, extreme at 24cp.

And while it may be appropriate for a well balanced party, for a random pfs group it is just too much imo.

Please learn from brilliant 2-18 and either make those optional for groups who want a challenge or give GM tools to adjust it as needed for RNG party.

P.S.: Just noticed that in text the encounter is erroneously marked as Moderate.

Imo this is a very interesting scenario. What starts as a relatively simple task soon becomes an unraveling conspiracy, with lots of obstacles that seem random but make a lot of sense in retrospect. Once the party gets to the location, things begin to fall into place, leading to the logical final confrontation.
The balance seems good as well, for the most part, and the npcs behave and act logically.

The only issue I have is

I'll update my impressions after I GM this

I GMed this for my group.
The adventure is on the combat heavy side and the chapters are barely connected. But the challenge level is on the easy side, as it should be for newcomers to PF2 (APL+1 is the highest enemy you will face).
Overall, I think it's a good alternative to the BB if you don't want pregens and want to run in Campaign Mode.

Played this in a group of 4 in the middle of low tier.
It feels like either the GM instructions on monster tactics were not clear or the encounter design has some major oversights.

1st encounter spoilers:

The 2nd encounter wasn't as bad (only moderate) but again ended with party barely alive and no time to recover since there were other activities that needed to be done. So the choice was either do the activities needed, or spend time healing.

3rd encounter spoilers:

Finally, as others have said, because of the monster tactics and tough encounters the scenario just runs very long - took nearly 7 hrs for our group.

I give it 2 starts because it's an interesting idea overall but, as written, I would definitely not recommend it.

As an intro to the 4th season, the scenario really doesn't explain much. It ends with more questions really.

It's also quite combat heavy (played at low tier) although with two level 3 hitters it didn't pose much of a challenge.

I'd have to replay it at high tier to see if there's much variability there.

As a newbie to Starfinder, I wasn't sure what to expect from this scenario. However, I ended up pleasantly surprised.

The scenario is a good mix of RP, light combat, and, of course, starship combat.
Granted, the latter made it run a bit longer than expected, but the GM made the starship combat flow really smooth and as a pilot it was a lot of fun figuring out the best ship maneuver each turn.

If nothing else, I would replay it just for that part.

On the plus side:

Interesting puzzle that was really fun to put together (although I felt like our GM gave us the solution a bit too easily)

Intriguing npcs that do not attack on sight for a change

On the minus side:

As someone new to Starfinder I was concerned I'd be confused starting at season 4, but the scenario did a good job of showing what starfinders are about and what they do.

Not sure how much repeatability variation there is but I'd play it again.

Played this at Paizocon and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The characters are colorful and I liked that their relationship is given as backstory. The party seems well equipped for what lies ahead with a few exceptions:

The story may have been simple but personally I enjoyed the puzzles and the combat encounters felt fair (except the final one that is).

If I ran it I would make a few minor changes to help the party and maybe rebalance early encounters a bit depending on how the party handles the first one.

I also would love for this to be a repeatable so I could come back and experience the story and the characters again.

Played this at PaizoCon as written and I have to say it left mixed feelings. One the one hand it's intriguing, on the other hand the party feels very ill equipped for the challenge.

The encounters were challenging and felt quite deadly. The party was scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to stay alive by the end and we skipped two encounters as it turned out.

There were no clever puzzles to speak of, and it felt like it was down to pure luck quite a bit.

Having played Sundered Waves recently, I would strongly recommend it instead.

As I understand, this was supposed to serve as an introduction to season 2. And while the first part is ok it doesn't have many meaningful NPC interactions compared to Absalom initiation (1-01). The map exploration is basically one check per zone, with fairly high DCs too. The haunt would be good if it wasn't in an open area where it can easily be avoided. Finally, the library as mentioned before is just a bunch of same skill checks over and over which got my group bored pretty quickly. The final boss fight can easily tpk the group if the GM uses the swipe attack liberally.
Overall, it's just too uneven to recommend imo.