TJSM's page

I just wrote an 8,000 character review that the Paizo website then caused me to backtrack too far.

Because I'm not rewriting it again:

TLDR - Influence was good with breaks, but 8 rounds was way too long and players stopped RPing after round 6, which hurts DCs. Scenario was structured so morally good PCs have no reason to move the story ahead as they were told to behave, and were told not to go into the manner without permission and didn't have a strong reason. The players perceived a time pressure (which made sense) and rushed through missing clues that would have helped the rest of their party come along. The arc for the BBEG was really well done and a shame that my players rolled badly.

Paizo did the thing where North in the PDF doesn't correspond to up and that is a massive GM cognitive load. There were as many small bonuses in this scenario as a confusing special - every influence NPC seemed to have something including one that had a bonus to an influence skill you couldn't use on that NPC. The lower map doesn't say where the PCs start and has windows and a door but is supposed to be an underground hidden place.

The PFS reporting means that a failed check kills two reputation regardless of how non-lethally or redemptive the players choose to make it. The secondary conditions really don't even give the GM latitude because it is run as written. The chronicle items you can get at low tier are almost all level 1 and 2 things any character can get with no discount, so it is just extra GM paperwork.

Awesome story, engaging plot, but it felt more like paperwork than playing pathfinder and had some logical holes that required serious railroading - which isn't fun for a GM or players who are trying to roleplay (which is the huge strength of this)

I feel like this scenario could easily have had five stars, but agree with a lot of points made in other reviews. The NPCs have such niche skills, abilities and immunities that even figuring out RAW is hard in some cases. There are pieces of lore, but it is almost like only half the information you need is there.

The selection of the flipmat for the basement floor is lazy at best - look at this intricate, detailed description of an empty room that is central to the plot, and the house as described in the text doesn't fit the haunted house flipmat either. The basement should have had a custom created map - I know they cost more but this is a 7-10 that you pay more for.

Lastly, given the complexity of the enemies and the volume of partial lore and number of NPCs this should have had the glyph tag. It is a great way to let GMs know the difficulty of running is above average and that a lot of rules interpretation is necessary.

I wrote a very thorough review, but the Paizo webstore decided that I backtracked too far, so here is the TLDR:

Really good scenario, but low tier at 16 CP means the party potentially faces two barbazus. There is no reason why any designer should place one Barbazu in a scenario, let alone two. Dimension door at will, reach 10, opportunity attack, a bleed that takes DC 20 to stop or requires a DC 21 counteract to perform magical healing, high perception, high attack, high to extreme damage, resistance, weakness to a relatively uncommon type, high AC, a special attack that ignores MAP. The only thing that they have against them is low HP for their level. But when your perception is as high as theirs it is hard for someone else to go first. Seriously, who playtested **two** of these attacking once?

Would I run this as a GM? Absolutely. But would I ever run the barbazu encounter as one of the options? No. I don't play PFS to TPK parties, and if five GMs with about a dozen glyphs between them had to spend a few hundred AcP on second chance boons, then probably everyone should avoid that particular encounter.

The skill challenge to the start of this was a really interesting way to do the adventure, and was a surprising amount of fun. Really unique and really made sense for the story. My party was two fighters, a barbarian and a sorcerer. Not exactly the "right combination" for this type of scenario, because other than potions our only in-combat healing was one person with battle medicine.

Really good use of exploration activities made the second section easy, although it was weird that the enemies started a bit of a distance away. That being said they did "come to play". The GM really kept Urwal as an important focus which added a nice extra dimension to think about with combat.

The third fight probably could have been harder, but two high tier fighters made pretty short work of it, which could have made us a bit overconfident.

Thanks to really high athletics scores, although our GM made good use of Foundry to make this puzzle really shine, we sort of autosucceeded it. I did feel like the clues that we came upon earlier didn't really lead me as a player to the solution, and the trial and error method of puzzle solving didn't have any consequences, so some small difficulty bump here I would have liked.

I haven't read the final encounter as a GM, but our GM made this clear that this is optional and this is difficult. Without healing it definitely was. Fortunately only one player went down although we were all in the single digits at the end and that was mostly a bit of luck and decent team tactics. The last fight can easily TPK, but a party of martials who made good use of the range even survived the barbarians poor choice of attempting to use the alternate form of damage twice with a skill level that might have been a little low for the DC on high tier.

So that last fight is definitely a challenge, but our GM made clear it was optional (given our party composition, it wasn't optional... we all had in-game reasons to help) but this is where a party that uses PF2e tactics well can really shine. A party that hacks and slashes or doesn't protect its squishy players will have a *really* difficult time with this one. And honestly, even if you do play it essentially perfectly the dice can easily tip the balance. The encounter is definitely between Severe and Extreme, and based on Paizo's definition of "severe" and "extreme" encounters this is definitely lethal combat.

If this was a new group of players, after playing this scenario I doubt they would continue to play PF2e.

With 5 players, a DC 20 fortitude save, where a roll of 15 or lower (5 is the average fort save for an iconic, it's 13 for most martials and a whopping 17 needed for the investigator) makes you unable to effectively participate in combat isn't fun. And it puts the GM in a really bad spot. Especially when the NPC rolled a Nat 20 in stealth for initiative. Unless we metagamed because we were in initiative order, why wouldn't we keep walking together as a group on the presumably well-traveled road from Otari to Absalom?

Neat scenario concept, very poor NPC selection, poor way to show off the system to level 1 players. If you have players new to the system or society play, skip this bounty.