Rakshasa

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**** Venture-Captain, Online—VTT 393 posts (1,152 including aliases). 9 reviews. 11 lists. No wishlists. 42 Organized Play characters. 5 aliases.



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Excellent storytelling

4/5

An excellent, touching, and at times troubling scenario that investigates the Societies past and how those who built the foundation of it sometimes took advantage of others to do so. How responsible are people who have benefited from, but didn't take part in such events? How can amends be genuinely made when those most directly harmed aren't alive anymore? It asks some hard questions and characters may have to consider things they haven't before.

Mechanically very sound with excellent challenges and fantastic roleplay opportunities.

It's certainly not for everyone, but if the themes and ideas presented are something that makes you feel uncomfortable perhaps it's worth a little self reflection and examining of why that is.


10/10 would commit crime again.

5/5

Mark of the Mantis is one of the most well written, reactive, adventures Paizo has printed. It's the only time I've ever seen the stealth mechanics of games like Assassins Creed or Thief replicated in a TTPRG format and have them actually feel like your players are being stealthy, that alone would rate it 5 stars given how hard it is to do in any format.

But then the story itself is fantastic, the pregenerated characters are a brilliantly written range of options and as if that was not enough, the adventure is truly a free form one, a huge array of options for the players are provided so they can create their own plan and the GM has everything they need at hand to run it! If there's an opposite to the railroad game then this is it, they have a target and a mission and what they do, how they do it is entirely up to them but the GMs content prepares you to deal with all of it!

If you've ever seen a heist movie and thought how cool it would be to play one, or enjoyed Assassins Creed, etc then this scenario delivers.


Beautiful

5/5

This book is a delight to read, it brings the characters to life in a way that few other lore books have managed. Not only that, but it also has a feat of plot hooks for ways to introduce them or their influence to your campaign, some might work as employers, some as rivals or enemies, but all of them are well fleshed out enough that you can bring them to life with ease.

The style of having personalised text relating in some way to the character in each section was a wonderful choice and as well as making it an incredibly easy read is also a brilliant option to let your players find such correspondence, of hear the stories and rumours about them characters.

An excellent read and a fantastic resource for including movers and shakers into your campaign, well worth it.


A mixed bag

2/5

First off, if you were hoping for a treatment of Absalom that was similar to how previous books in this line have dealt with their areas of concern... this is not it.

This book is more like a 'GMs guide to locations' for the city, it's a big book, really big, and basically covers almost 250 separate locations in solid detail, along with numerous NPCs and plot hooks for GMs to help flesh out the city for games that spend much time there. For this, it's fantastic, and if that's what you're looking for then it will absolutely hit the nail.

However, in my opinion it lacks the voice and soul of the previous Lost Omens books, the others have bought the locations to life, the writing/editing styles previously have been allowed to give you a feel for the places and in many cases done as much or more than actual physical descriptions to help get a feel for them, as well as some problematic issues with events that had seemed to be settled (in regards to slavery) and quite strange errors (the anti slaver Torius Vin is listed as a CE slaver...). This book reads more like a tourist guide than a passion project, it's descriptive sure but it's not evocative, which personally was a big disappointment.

I hope that there's a lot of GMs who get good use out of this, and if you're running Agents of Edgewatch I'm sure it's going to be a great resource, but as a fan of the Lost Omens line in general but someone not running a campaign set in Absalom this book is definitely a miss, I'd probably give it 2.5/5 realistically if that were an option.


Great Story, average mechanics with a few weak spots

3/5

The story behind the scenario, the roleplay potential and the history of all involved is truly excellent and I'd be happy to see more of them or an expanded version. This is definitely the high point of the scenario and does a fantastic job of drawing you in and getting the players interested in seeing what happens, what is going on, solving the riddles, etc, some really great work!

Unfortunately the mechanical side is significantly less great. The product is riddled with errors, especially concerning the pregenerated characters (Edit: many of the pregen errors have thankfully been fixed with an updated pdf, but that doesn't excuse the incredible amount of them that were initially present), and the balance of the combat encounters isn't terribly well designed from this GMs perspective, ranging from ridiculously easy to quite easily killing characters (even following the rather unusual tactics for a mindless creature). There is also some, what is presumably meant to be helpful, advice about weapons to use vs the last boss... except that for the only character who really needs to follow that advice it actually lowers their damage compared to using their normal weapon, even taking into account resistances, this shows very poor rules knowledge and planning that ends up actively punishing players who listen to the story.

Love the VTT map assets, amazing and so welcome! The fact it has a tagged and untagged map is excellent, but making the untagged version gridless just makes using the map that much harder and annoying for GMs to try to resize appropriately on tabletops. As a minor quibble, the file size for the scenario seems... unusually large, a quick pdf optimisation was able to get the contents down to well under half the size for no loss of graphic quality, considering the reliance on digital media in this day and age (especially right now) and that many places, even in countries such as the US, have data caps or very slow internet speeds any efforts to ensure the file sizes are a bit smaller would be much appreciated!

Overall, very interesting and engaging story, let down by errors and unbalanced mechanics. This serves as an excellent starting point for a GM willing to put in the work, but new GMs or those running for new players should probably think twice.


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Edit: So much better!

4/5

Edit: The review below was written before the scenario underwent revisions, with these revisions the scenario is a much better, more player friendly excellent introduction to the Society. Paizo deserves much praise for going to these lengths and it is very much appreciated, if you've played it before and weren't happy then I urge you to give it another try now!

Rating altered from 1 star to 4 stars.

Original review follows:

I understand that this scenario has had a troubled path to publishing, with drastic changes necessary due to the change from multi-table special to stand alone repeatable, however that doesn't excuse the numerous issues present. If changing it was that problematic it should have been shelved or pushed back to a later date imo. As well as the mechanical issues of DCs and monster stats and the sheer number of that seem... on the high side for some groups, this scenarios story is very out of place, though it would have fit very well into the early seasons of Pathfinder 1.

Spoiler:
Back then players expected and were used to having their characters be treated as disposable agents of a shady power, of not trusting their superiors, it was a plot point. However that was resolved, in the current story meta, there have been numerous efforts and examples to show that the Society has undergone some strenuous efforts to reaffirm their support for agents, to earn their trust, and to prove by its actions that it values those who are a part of it... ignoring all that on an institutional scale seems utterly bizarre.

Whilst some of the adventure challenges are interesting and could perhaps have made for solid encounters with a bit more work and development, the overall scenario suffers from issues with both the level of the mechanical challenge and the story itself. This would have worked perfectly as "Aspis Consortium Trials", where the leaders didn't really care about survival, and just wanted the most skilled, paranoid, agents possible working for them. But for the Pathfinder Society... it's all sorts of wrong.

For a scenario that goes out of the way to repeatedly stress non lethal is the intent it's utterly incredible that 6 level 1 players face a creature with a +14 to hit capable of doing 40 damage on a critical, of which it is likely to score quite a few, potentially causing death by massive damage to any level one character.

Ultimately it's impossible to recommend this as a scenario for GMs to run, if a GM still wishes to persevere they should be very experienced to try and help smooth over the issues and should in no case run this for new players in my opinion, it easily has the potential to poison them against the Society for good, both from a character and player perspective.


5/7 Prophets Favourite Book

5/5

I may be biased as a I'm a huge fan of the Prophets and have been looking forward to this book for a long time, add to that the authors and... well, this book had a lot to live up to!

Did it live up to it and more! Everything you could want to know about the Prophets for playing one, how they act, their prohibitions, their philosophies and everything else. But far more than that it explains their history and the reasons they came to be in a way that really lets both GMs and players understand where they came from and where they aim to go in the future to some degree.

I won't go into spoilers but... damn, the information about the accuracy or not of the Prophets beliefs is fantastic, it's incredibly well thought out and meshes with everything we've learned so far really well.

If I had any complaints it would only be that there might have been the opportunity for more feats, etc related to the subject matter than we actually see, especially given the fact it's the last PF1 book we'll get on the subject. That said... it's really hard to even feel bad about that as the book is so well written I can't imagine what I would want cut to replace with rules, hell, I'd happily have bought it with an extra 20 pages of lore and rules in it!

tl:dr; If you're interested in the Prophets or the Mercenary League this book is for you, all that might be expected and more (plus a wealth of GM secrets and things they can work into plots, more than enough to set an entire campaign here).


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Perfect for new players

5/5

I tend to run a lot of games to introduce players who are new to RPGs to Pathfinder, a lot pick it up quickly but for some it can take longer, there is no better book for all of them than the Strategy Guide. I'm frankly amazed how well it's written, it's basically the Core Rulebook for new players in a far, faaaar more easily digestible format.

Every new player I've sat down with this book has come out of it with not only a solid character that actually fits the idea they had, but a much better grasp of the rules than those who don't, it's my go-to now for any new players.


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Great flavour, troublesome mechanics

2/5

The scenario has an excellent flavour, Nidal is suitably unpleasant and the Cairn is very well described and does a fantastic job of evoking a Hellraiser feeling.

Unfortunately that's about all that's easy to compliment, mechanically the rules for sight, movement, traps and just about everything else are going to cause issues. Not simply in that they seem rather harsh with respect to low tier players, but also they are contrary to how such things usually operate and require both the GM and players to quickly adapt to this, for no real gain that I could see.

There is also an issue with essentially removing treasure from the players after successfully dealing with a trap, which seems rather unfair. The scenario in general also has numerous points where it is very punishing for non physical characters, requiring numerous skill checks from them if they wish to participate and which failing these checks poses significant risk that seems out of proportion to what might be expected.

I genuinely enjoy the atmosphere of the scenario a *lot*, however I can't recommend or highly rate it since all the problems listed create a very difficult environment to enjoy the actual gameplay, there are also some map issues with it seeming like at least one room is not depicted and things that seem to be depicted not mentioned in the text.

Overall a great concept but let down by far too many mechanical problems and the potential to excessively punish many characters.