Stephen Trone's page

After action report.
The players were shocked when the handout was their mission statement since they have become used to long paragraphs of textboxes. They were a little unclear on the mission, especially as the cause became clear.
They pretty much decided right away the portal was the more likely option but bungled their checks to find the cause until they met Azure. None of them really wanted to gamble since it doesn't seem to benefit them when they could just wait and see. Jamila not helping them fight rubbed them the wrong way since Explore Report Cooperate apparently only applies to players. They were then confused as to why the portal needed to be closed. In their mind a tropical forest would be beneficial to a town of loggers. Also the concordance might need a bit more motivation, their debut scenario involves them stopping a portal they should want to study instead.
One player almost drowned in the ice water and went back early to try and survive so the party face had singing hairclips for the rest of the scenario once they returned. Once the players got into combat range it was over quickly. The final fight was a cakewalk even with the environmental hazards.

The players absolutely adored the items they got. A pair of them are twin princesses and got hair clips that sing and a tiara that bubbles. They seemed to really like the flavor of the land and I think this scenario does a great job of making the first world seem alien and strange. As a GM I loved how the wild hunt responds to social skills, its a really good way to make them seem inhuman.
In summary, the NPCs are off putting and the fights are easy, but the environment is great and the rewards are memorable.
Players seemed to love it once they got to the first world.
Hopefully this helps someone figure out where to focus their effort.

So reading through this scenario I have several questions.
1) How did Jamila use plane shift to arrive before the party? The spell drops you off an average of 257 miles from your target. Unless she just spent several days doing it and/or got EXTREMELY lucky that seems like a very dangerous/inefficient way to travel.
2) Reading through the briefing the venture captain simply asked them to explore the phenomenon, not to actually stop it. What motivation does the party have to intervene when the alternative is to study the situation?
3) Azure states that the rift will remain so long as they remain bleached. What happens if the players go full murder hobo and just kill them? Have to be honest that does seem like the easiest solution to the problem, especially when the gnome was cursed by what is essentially a demi-god and helping them requires you to steal from said demi-god. I can easily see players balking at this prospect.
4) Are the other hunters not upset that the players may have killed their friend? I understand that death is not permanent in the first world but the negative levels they take are (and don't tell me that every fey creature has sacks full of gold to pay high level casters for a restoration every time they die) so at the very least the players have permanently crippled their friend.
5) Lastly, how are players collecting frozen samples? As soon as they leave the frozen area they should simply thaw out. And if the area makes things permanently frozen even after being removed, wouldn't access to that be more important than closing the portal?

The take-away I got was that she very much existed. And she had 2 sects of followers, the Roidirans and the White feathers. The former of which didn't understand what she was about at all, and she sincerely hated them for it. They were failures to her and didn't understand her teachings.

So she took away the thing they wanted/needed/desired most, herself. Stripped them of her presence because of that disgust. So they became ex-clerics. But the message she left them was that she was never real. She secretly reveals to the party the truth.

I feel like you're greatly exaggerating parts you didn't care for in the descriptions. I just double checked al-sahba's descriptions. There's at most one sentence of it that references her hair and the fact she has make-up. Both of which are reasonable to help put a mental image of her in someone's head. The players know she's very high society, and no different then a lot of character descriptions that reference facial shape, clothing, hair, etc.

It's actually even worse than I implied. I just did a quick word count check and the block text where Al-Sahba is first described is 136 words long, and 76 was spent describing her looks/voice. This is more than is used to describe the appearance of most characters in the Blackros Matrimony AND more words than are used to describe the tenants of the white feather cult. Seriously do a search in the scenario for the word "white feather" and count how much is spent actually describing what they believe and not that someone is a member or what they look like or that persons specific motivations. The white feather has a total of roughly 50-60 words describing what they believe in the whole scenario. They aren't even connected to Roidira at all except in as much as people assume that two cults in the same place at the same time must be.

I know that might seem petty, but word count is at a premium for these scenarios and when a scenario gives more importance to the looks of an NPC than to who these people are we were sent to investigate it comes off as gratuitous.

I will not derail this thread anymore, I left my review (3 stars) and thank you all for the feedback

I had a smaller than expected table because we had 8 players and so split into 2 tables. My players ended up idiot savanting their way through with terrible skills augmented by great rolls. I had trouble reading a lot of the prose with a straight face, the line about Roidira's "hair full of secrets" had us all giggling and now one of them wants to build a white haired witch on that premise. General consensus was that it was interesting and experimental, let down by silly descriptions, poor mechanics, and an ending that is not nearly as mysterious as it seems.

I am still confused by the scenarios logic (how do you have ex-clerics if the god never existed? They got their power from somewhere) but after reading an entire paragraph about an NPCs hairstyle and makeup I couldn't take the scenario seriously and neither did my players so we had fun all the way through.

I would like to see more from this author, there was a lot of potential for cool stuff and the play at the beginning was really fun and encouraged clever players which is always good.

This is why I don't normally prep. Knowledge only inhibits the process, better to wing it and fill in the gaps with whatever sounds good. Worked when I was selling cars, works now with pathfinder.

D3. The Reflecting Pool
This area is the heart of the shrine. Here the PCs find a
circular, shallow pool that glows with otherworldly power at
the center of a smaller crater also overgrown with trees and
open to the sky. A sharp odor emanates from the water, at once
smoky, earthy, and sweet. At each of the cardinal directions is
a Roidiran supplicant, knelt in mute prayer.

There are 4 there already

Also do the cultists at the pool witness the PC's actually talking to the goddess? It says they fill the PC's in on anything they may have missed so obviously they saw something, but I am at a loss as to how they can see their goddess and then claim she is missing when fallen clerics are a real thing. Wouldn't a more logical explanation be that she simply turned away from them or died since obviously they had power before? And if they don't see her, they simply see the people talking to thin air then dropping dead and items like an aegis breaking doesn't that raise even more questions?

I am not a philosophy major but it seems to me that a few logical steps were skipped for them to assume that she doesn't exist at all. I am starting to understand the reviews a little better. Hopefully my players will enjoy it though.

Would a 1500gp item settle the debate as to whether the goddess exists?

But if she restores the item would she restore potions drunk to mitigate damage? If an ifrit lit himself on fire to restore hp would she reset his daily count for how much he can get back? As written there is no mention of anything but a True Res.

So the ending is supposed to be ambiguous as to whether the characters actually met the goddess. The True Res. they get if they die helps to obfuscate this fact, but what if the character has an aegis of recovery? If it breaks it would seem to me that the character actually took a hit from something, but if there is no goddess then it should remain intact. The players in my area are sometimes much better prepared than I anticipate and I am sure at least one of them has this.

Would a 1500gp item settle the debate as to whether the goddess exists?

The death rate is comparable to driving yes, but driving fatalities are by and large due to human error and mechanical failure both of which are already going to cause deaths in the starfinder universe. This would be the same as having all the deaths from driving PLUS deaths from simply being on the road at all. The roads on earth do not spawn demons at random.

Edit: I do like the mystic air marshal idea though. I might have to borrow that idea for a home game.

I recognized all of these points as I was writing, but you are forgetting that these are simply the losses from random sky monsters. These have nothing to do with the losses from mechanical failure or human (alien) error that would also be dealt with and which cause the car crashes and merchant vessel losses on earth. This is simply the danger of even using FTL, the actual danger of flying is space is extraordinarily higher.
Not saying adventurous people wouldn't do it. After all adventure without danger is just Tuesday. Just a world building detail I thought deserved more attention.

So it occurred to me that given the dangers of the Drift as presented in the core rule book, I am not certain any major corporation would reasonably be expected to actually use the Drift as a method of travel. I don't have the core rule book in front of me so forgive my inexact numbers but I believe that an in-system jump carries with it a 1% chance of an encounter in the Drift. Now many people would undoubtedly carry weapons to defend themselves but let us assume for the sake of argument that 1% of all encounters end in the death of some or all members of a ships crew. I feel that this is not an unreasonable rate considering the threats presented and how the universe is portrayed. Basically 1/10,000 ships that enter the drift never make it to their destination.

Chicago O'Hare airport, the third biggest in the country, services approximately 527 outbound flights per day. This mortality rate would be the same as a plane from O'Hare going missing every 20 days. Imagine the outcry if that were to happen. 18 major crashes/year from a single airport. Would people even fly anymore? Multiply that one airport by the necessary traffic of an entire solar system and suddenly you see the problem. The odds go up drastically if you attempt a flight out-system. At 10% encounter rate in the drift you are looking at 1/1000 flights disappearing. 10 flights/day from 10 ports lose a ship every 10 days.

This is not even factoring in the number of ships intercepted by pirates and brigands in normal space. At those rates everyone who flies would know someone who never made it back just from entering FTL.

Food for thought.

If not mentioning specifically using it during AoO is enough to exclude it then I bow to the judgment of others. However an AoO is defined as "a single melee attack" which fits the bill. And if AoOs are not an attack action then what are they?

Yes, only a single attack is being made so it applies. Combat reflexes would still work because each trigger is a separate event.

Your question assumes there is a right way to play. Simply put, which is more fun for you. Do you want to be someone who channels fortune telling into the real world or someone like gambit who focuses their power into cards? Or do you want to be something else entirely? Not every fortune teller has to draw their powers from the same source, so have fun with it. That's why we have roleplay, so you can be who and what you want in these games.

I am liking the Sargava route. Thank you for your help, this is exactly what I was looking for.

So I have been looking at the Inner Sea World Guide and figuring out real world analogues for a lot of the nations listed. Examples include

Galt: Revolutionary France
Varisia: Romania
Osiria: Egypt
Lands of the Linnorm Kings: Scandinavia
etc etc.

Try as I might though I have not found an analogue for Mexico or Central/South America in general. I am attempting to build a Zorro style defender of freedom and can't decide on a country for him. Thoughts?

Snipe Hunt, Taldor. Tengu Gunslinger 6/Inquisitor 8
Venture Captain Eliandra Azucar, Sczarni. Aasimar Lore Warden 2/Scroll Scoundrel 11