 
Sign in to create or edit a product review. The dungeon crawl was fun and the story was intriguing, though a lot of the fluff conversations and room descriptions could have been cut. The opening investigation was kind of weird, but everything after that is fine. Although the end fight can be a bit too easy if you reach the villain soon enough. He rolled high on initiative, but his penalties were so big that 3 of us went before him and he died on his first turn from persistent damage. Spoiler:
Even though we could tell from behavioral cues alone who the thieves were, we weren't allowed to Coerce them into fessing up because the adventure didn't give enough information for anything other than "The players spend the entire first hour of the adventure gathering evidence and then present it when accusing the thieves." A very difficult encounter happens that foreshadows the villain, and then the scenario just sorta forgets there's a villain and now you're doing trade negotiations? The multi-wave fight was interesting though, if a bit on the easy side. "Oh no! I hate these sheep that I am currently eating and will continue to eat unless someone suggests eating wild goats instead! "Oh no! I can't Fly or Swim because I'm afraid of everything! "Oh no! I've Flown onto a boat, and now I'm trapped here because, as I just mentioned, I CAN'T FLY OR SWIM! "Oh cool! This stranger has candy in her van! I guess I'll go in because I'm definitely not afraid of anything." This entire stupid plotline depends on the everyone completely forgetting then occasionally remembering extremely important things. I usually focus on the combat aspects, but this story is just awful. Also, I'll put a specific encounter in a spoiler below because it sums up the quality of the storyline. Spoiler:
The guards approach you and the linnorm children.
One of the children laughs at the guards. The guards get angry and draw their weapons. The linnorm child laughs even harder. The guards acknowledge that they cannot harm the linnorm child because his father protects the city. But they need compensation for their hurt feelings, so they are still going to kill you, the Pathfinders. There's an official prank war, and we need to both judge and help with the pranks as if that isn't an enormous conflict of interest. And we're expected to convince a particular NPC from joining the prank war even though that wasn't one of our objectives? And also we need to stop the pranks from going too far, but it's completely subjective what counts as "going too far." We're Pathfinders. Couldn't we be stopping a human trafficking ring right now? Do we really need to be here? Not much to do, but what there is to do isn't bad. It's nice being able to actually finish a four hour scenario within four hours every once in a while. You can pick which challenges to take on based on what your party happens to be good at, minimizing the frustration of dealing with challenges that no one happens to have the means to overcome. This is a godsend if you don't have a say in what the party composition ultimately turns out to be come the day you play this adventure. Fun hazards, fun combat, fun puzzles to save the day. I'm a complainer at heart, but I've got nothing. I don't even mind the final boss not being a challenge, because the way he's presented in the story justifies it. A decent sequel hook is provided, too. Figuring out what the different NPCs wanted to get them to give up key items was fun, as was the hilarious sabotage of the party. Storming the ship was fun, too. The villain isn't very intimidating, though. Spoiler:
The sequel makes it clear that he's more comic relief than anything, but new players probably won't know that going in, so the writing may present itself as bleh. The scenario is difficult what with all the combat you need to do, the skill challenges and chase scenes you must overcome, and the extremely limited opportunities to pause to catch your breath. It's intense in a good way, though there are a few moments I find a bit mean. Firstly, a treasure bundle can be missed just for not getting enough successes in a single round of checks. The consequence for failing that is already a ton of damage. There's no need to rub it in. Spoiler:
Secondly, the GM told me after the session that the final boss is actually tougher if you participated in the blood letting minigame in the preceding adventure. How is anyone supposed to figure that out? The gauntlet at the beginning was fun, and the dance was pretty fun, too. The villain's plot doesn't make much sense, though. Spoiler:
He walks up to you foreigners, and he's just like, "Hello people trying to get on the king's good side! Wanna break into his vault to satisfy your curiosity?" Um, no? We're explorers, not idiots. What was he expecting? The combat is fun. Though there are plenty of encounters, they are short enough that finishing on time is not a tall order. I don't understand the spicy food challenge, though. It's so out of place in the story that I thought the GM put it in as a joke. This scenario frequently requires skill checks, but succeeding lets you improv things about the environment. For instance, when I succeeded on a check to survey the land, I made up a factoid about a rock formation that could be mistake for a dragon depending on the time of day. Very entertaining. This adventure gives you clues to follow to track down the nefarious villain besetting the town with horrid mosquitos, but the final showdown is very disappointing. Spoiler:
It's a Scooby Doo hoax. There's no Mosquito Witch here. The culprits were merely taking advantage of a legend to keep people away from a cave. And then rocks fall and all the culprits die. Towards the beginning, you can get tricked into receiving a status that makes the rest of the adventure unplayable. 1-03:
You can make a Fortitude save to scale a hill slightly faster than normal, but you can only attempt the check once because it takes a lot of effort. What the GM might not tell you is that the reason you can't attempt it again is because failing gives you the fatigued condition, which prevents the crucial exploration activities you need to perform the mission. Additionally, many of the rooms you can explore are phrased in such away that my GM was tricked into saying something like "You enter the building. There is a special MacGuffin sitting in the drawer, which can only be noticed if the players succeed on a- Crap! I wasn't supposed to mention that yet!" This resulted in some involuntary metagaming on our part. The final boss can be rough if your party has poor synergy. And this being PFS, that's not unlikely. I had a good time with it, though I've heard horror stories of players having to fight a PL+4 version of the boss fight due to the way the difficulty was calculated. The way the puzzle was presented, there was a solution that should have worked, but an exception was written into the adventure to punish the player for thinking of that. Spoiler:
Essentially, there's a sigil that collects the souls of your slain enemies in order to power up the final boss. So it seems like using nonlethal abilities should circumvent this. Hah, you should have known better! Didn't you realize that the sigil was the reason the enemies were instantly dying when you reduced them to zero Hit Points?! Of course I didn't notice! Enemies always die at zero Hit Points! Another issue is that there's so much content in this scenario that my GM had to skip the final boss. We already turned him into a trivial threat, but it was just unsatisfying that way. Those two issues are really it, but I could see the puzzle issue causing a TPK for people who aren't in the know. Nothing too exciting, nothing too aggravating, just a relaxing trip to collect mushrooms. Not what I'm looking for in a game, but I didn't hate it. Combat had not just enemies to fight, but tasks to do in the meantime to limit the damage they caused. Other enemies were intimidating, but not overpowered. I would have rather fought the final boss instead of automatically winning with a single check from one player, but that didn't really bring down the rest of the session. The thieves are unlikeable, the lengths you have to go to protect them are obscene, and your reward for collecting all the MacGuffins that help you resolve things diplomatically is for those benefits to NOT STACK and for you to have to get a total of four successes over two rounds in a skill that at most only 2 of the random strangers playing with you today are going to be trained in. Failing that, you have to fight the equivalent of a dragon with infinite Breath Weapons over a bottomless pit, and even low tier players will have to fight the high tier version of him if there are too many players. This is the worst scenario I've ever played. |
