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I almost TPK'd a group last night in this scenario.

In B8, low-tier, I put out the creatures listed. I hadn't really looked at high tier. But within two rounds one PC was dying 2 with persistent fire, the fighter had 5 hit points, and another PC had maybe 20 and was about to be engulfed. It really didn't feel right.

Before the bard died I stopped and when back to the encounter table and did the math—the encounter was off the chart, literally. I realized that two of the creatures listed for this encounter in low tier had the (0) left out. Looking at the high tier stats confirmed that everything besides the main boss is just for scaling. It's a severe encounter with just the boss.

So yeah, the scenario has a lot of issues.

Yeah, I like the scenario but it's really confusing.

Mapwise, it's not clear how the PCs get to the southeast watchtower. And while the map seems to show the levels of locations with the black outline, I'm not sure what the spot labeled B5 is really supposed to be—there's no apparent way in, and it's clearly not the top of the watchtower with a trap door for access. That's not too hard to resolve—using the first side of the map, it shows the top of the watchtower, so there's no need to transition to the second map at that point.

As for the events of the ritual, the timeline is very confusing. You can stabilize the victim, but with the ritual still ongoing it seems they're going to die anyway and you've merely burned time you need to stop the ritual. Do you have to stop the ritual AND stabilize them? That seems to contradict the development when stopping the ritual, that it frees the victim.

If you go directly to the ritual, you have 25 minutes to disrupt it or the victim dies. But if the victim isn't stabilized in 20 minutes, they die. This scenario really would have benefitted from a timeline of the events from the time the ritual starts to when the victim dies.

My GM at GenCon was very lost at times and now I understand why.

So trying to unwind my general confusion about the state of the Battles subscription. Are both Fearsome Forces and Armies of the Dead back to shipping automatically as part of the subscription?

I'm assuming the only things I have to order manually for these are the Death Coach, Gholdaku, and Yamaraj figures. Is that right?

Pretty sure all data will be able to be copied over. Just passwords are affected. So there shouldn't be a need for bulk data entry.

We're ready to add the new scenarios once the migration is completed.

How did I miss that? Thanks!

Edit: I missed it because it's not showing as an option in HLO. Off to file a bug report!

The Ranged Reprisal feat didn't make it into the remaster. Is there a replacement that I'm missing somewhere? Or is there no option to build a ranged paladin anymore?

Arong also mentions that they can offer food to the spirits. I can't remember what happened when I ran it but I would have had them roll the exploration activity if they made an offering of food of their own accord.

If they had a critical success on the Event 1 check, I would have explicitly told them about the Befriend the Anito activity.

I can't find anything in the PFS guide saying this has changed. You should apply credit as directed by the chronicle sheet.

Yes, it was passed along to Maglok.

The number of scenarios released each year hasn't varied more than +/-6 or so since PFS started in 1st edition. How many scenarios do you think should be released each month?

There are always a good number of no shows. Go early and queue up for the slots you want. Especially by Saturday, when people are starting to feel the pressure from overloading their schedule.

And people are constantly changing their plans and dropping tickets—there are 15 to 20 PFS games open right now in the event list. Just keep checking.

Unfortunately it's a two-fold problem. The filters are hard-coded, so new seasons require code maintenance. And the database has been locked down for awhile, so those of us who were helping maintain the data can't make updates.

Maglok has other priorities these days and has generously kept this going far beyond his involvement in PFS. We're looking for options to keep it going but I'd need to find someone who can maintain the code.

Registrations opened today for games at GameStorm. We have about 40 sessions scheduled for PFS or SFS. You can purchase a badge and join sessions at the GameStorm website.

If played as written it isn't so bad. It's certainly not easy and I've usually had someone go down during the fight. But no TPKs.

The dragon doesn’t try to catch all the heroes with this attack, but focuses on just the nearest opponent. Once the dragon uses the breath weapon ability, they can’t use it again for 1d4 rounds or until they get a critical hit on a Strike.

The dragon can't use draconic frenzy and the breath weapon in the same round. So more likely it will breath weapon and blast one PC then strike, possibly recharging the breath weapon. The second round it could repeat or do draconic frenzy.

I have the dragon using all its abilities, so I tend to fit in a draconic frenzy rather than just repeatedly breath weapon. It will make three attacks, at best at +14, +7, +6 or thereabouts. Using all its abilities seems intended, meaning the breath weapon will be available every other round.

Have you read the scenario? In the Pathfinder world, a buso is a tree-dwelling one-eyed flesh eater and the scenario has buso void zombies, i.e., buso corpses infected by akata larvae. 'Busoborn' is pretty clearly an akata that matured inside a buso corpse.

The art looks like a combination of a buso and an akata. But that merging of creature characteristics isn't something in the Bestiary entry. So I'm wondering why the busoborn akata is different than any other akata.

I've only done my initial skim of the scenario, so I may have missed some explanation that buso somehow mutate the akata. Or maybe the author took some liberties to amp up the cosmic horror angle. I just wouldn't be surprised if my players see the art and ask what is going on.

This is sort of an aside but I've never seen reference to a [whatever]-born akata. Is the akata taking on the form of the buso a thing they've made up in this scenario? Or is this a standard thing for the creature?

This only contains what is in Bestiary 1, 2, and 3.

To add to the thread for anyone running this in the future: I ran this yesterday and we had to cut it off at 6 hours. They climbed the tower and triggered the midges, which meant there were 5 combat encounters throughout the scenario.

I tried the 1 gp per NPC approach and likely won't do it again. A few issues:

- They went through all the gold and were consuming a lot of their own.
- They frequently had to hire no one, or hire less than 3. There's no allowance for that in the results for their downtime rolls. I pro-rated the results based on how many people work engaged on a given activity but it seemed overly complicated. (You earn 1/2 day progress!)
- The tight gold led to a lot of lengthy conversations about who works on what and how many NPCs they should hire for each activity.

While they seemed to enjoy it, it took a long time. I know others will disagree but I can't believe "accounting challenge" was intended to be a fun part of this scenario. I'm going to go with 3 gp/day for as many NPCs as they need in the future. That ensures there's gold left over for their last 3 treasure bundles and makes this more a standard series of skill checks.

I think that will also move it along faster. This is important because at low tier it's very unlikely anyone is an expert in Crafting. Multiple activities that unlock other activities require the stonemason, so there will be bottlenecks when only some of the PCs will be able to work on anything.

I missed the line "The PCs cannot participate in downtime activities that aren’t directly related to repairing the fort during this time (such as Craft or Earn Income)." Does that include the Whispering Lilies and Talking to the Locals? I had one PC that spent most of the time Talking to the Locals and so that also slowed down progress on the repairs. I'm not sure if the intent there was to keep people working on the fort and then move to the other downtime activities once they're finished.

They also spent a little too long on what traps to place where. Given that these only have a narrative impact and no mechanical effect, it's probably worth it to tell them if affects the overall battle but that they don't need to micro-manage the placement of their traps. And be prepared to describe how the enemies get to them. The players are going to want to strategically position themselves and will be behind the gates, so I had them scaling the walls in the first wave and then battering at the gate while the PCs treated wounds.

Anyway, people had fun but I suspect I could never get this into a 4 hour slot without really pushing the group from place to place. FWIW, I typically complete scenarios within our 4 hour slot, so I'm not particularly slow, but this would have taken 6 1/2 to 7. If we cut the midges and the geckos and just repaired the fort, I think we could have had a pretty epic final battle across the 3 waves of enemies.

Lastly, for our 5 player, 16 challenge point group, the skeletons were BRUTAL. A couple people were taken out by all the exploding skeletons, and one nearly died when they were downed by a corporal and then the skeleton soldiers were fought over/next to their unconscious body. If a couple people hadn't bought an expensive game or two at the store they might have all died. They were saved by the Heroic tier of the Retail Incentive Program.

I do love this scenario as the finale does feel like it's happening in the midst of a huge battle.

I don't know the technical details. It's something Maglok deals with.

The flood was triggered, so after Laslunn went down I had Barushak escape again and jump into the water and get flushed down into the main central chamber, hoping to use the shadow giant and drowning captives to buy himself more time.

If I recall correctly, Laslunn kicked off the water flow and the sorcerer cast wall of stone to seal off the flooding—and Laslunn. He drowned before we could smash through the wall or disable the water spouts. Pathfinder suffocation rules can be brutal.

Good day everyone. My PCs are going to Tanessen tower and will likely encounter Barushak this week. They did defeat the gelugon after a well timed natural 1 save vs paralyze..so they're feeling a bit tough at the moment.

Did 1 round make that big a difference?

My question is: has anyone had Barushak escape and actually join Laslunn at the mine? Her, plus the velstrac and trap already seems like a pretty challenging encounter. Adding him to the mix seems (on paper) to be overkill. But this seems in line with the intent of the AP, and what he would likely do given the situation.

It can be a tough fight. Barushak didn't survive in my game; waiting until he's below 25 hp to try and escape is cutting it pretty close, so he's likely to not live through it. If he did, there's any number of things Laslunn could assign him to do. He doesn't have to be standing next to Laslunn when they arrive.

So the teleportation circle from the Mead Hall to the Testing Grounds sends them there with the sigil "challenger" on their forehead. And "victor" when they return.

I don't see anything that otherwise changes how these teleportation circles work. Is there anything to prevent the PC from using the circle to travel to the Testing Grounds and immediately return? The change of the sigil implies that maybe they need to actually prevail in the Testing Grounds, and the circle is described as "charred" but the text doesn't say that this end is broken.

As far as I can see, there is nothing to keep them in the Testing Grounds if they just want to bail out. Did anyone handle this differently?

I think I started my group in the middle of the southern edge.

I don't think it really matters. I'd probably still start them at the bottom right corner if they went overland but you could start them anywhere on the eastern edge. Just be aware that the encounters get harder as they move north, and they may miss out on more loot if they end up bypassing the southern half of the map.

We're looking at options to continue development. For the moment we're still stuck.

Am I correct in understanding that there will be no rebuild boon for Player Core 2, so I either rebuild them by 12/31 (before the alchemist becomes remastered), or I need to buy a rebuild boon after Core 2 comes out?

Your free rebuild is available until 12/31/2024.

I hope we see you at one of the games. You can sign up for local PFS at Warhorn. There's also a link to the community Facebook page and Discord there.

I'm also confused by the development at the end of the Alystair fight. It says

The horde pounding at the wards falls to the ground

Did I miss something? Where do they first mention this horde pounding at something?

Do they have an image of the color cover on the inside (as an extra, not just the ghosted-out image on the title page)?

I haven't received my Core books yet but none of the previous special editions had a reproduction of the full color cover inside. Early special editions had no image, and recent special editions had the ghost image on the title page.

As mentioned above, there are ongoing games twice a week. There are 15 wide open tables being run this weekend at Kumoricon. And PFS presence at other cons, especially GameStorm.

And there are plenty of players, if you want to run games on the east side.

During this transition, how should GMs apply those champion abilities though? Many of their additional bonuses are good damage. We can translate to holy damage but it seems like unholy will be less common than evil was for foes. It feels like a champion's damage should apply to things it always has until they get remastered but I'm not sure that would be the case if we treated it as holy.

The stats are in the scenario. There's just no description of ancestry, just the "humanoid" trait. So someone decided on human for Foundry, but that's not in the scenario.

My assumption is that they left an ancestry tag off so they can be represented by any humanoid the GM has handy.

I didn't encounter this. I'm assuming you're having problems with the map of areas B-K, where they are all combined on a single page. Even with those, when I increased the size they were fuzzy but not illegible.

Having you extracted the actual map, or are you working with screenshots? I find it easiest to open the AP book (I really find the interactive maps useless for my purposes) in Adobe Reader. You'll be able to select and copy the image in the PDF. There are also a number of tools that will break the PDF down into all the component images if you're having trouble copying. But at least on my Mac, I can CMD-C on the image in the PDF, and CMD-N in Preview to create a new image from the clipboard.

This scenario has an encounter with "Goldmongers" but there's no description or art. The traits tell me they're medium humanoids. Are they just a collection of foes of any medium humanoid ancestry?

There are a number of scenarios missing right now.

Unfortunately, the internet being what it is, someone started trying to hack the admin panel for the database.[Editing in some corrections] External database access was disabled. Then it was necessary to upgrade the server, and that broke some things.

We'll get back to it once we get access.

You can, at the considerable cost of one action. With two weapon ikons you can use that action from something productive instead.

Which is why I said "as long as you don't need to use your third action for anything else."

Maybe I misunderstand because I thought you could do that already, as long as you don't need to use your third action for anything else. Can't you do Weapon Transcend for 2 actions, and then Shift Immanence to put the spark back in the weapon? Or Shift Immanence as your first action, then do the Transcend? Or is it just that you want to attack with the second weapon as well?

The second thing is I feel like the additional ikon feat is a little unclear or awkward. My assumption based on my reading is that any feat or epithet granting an imminence or transcendence ability applies only to a single chosen ikon (not to all ikons of that type or when the feat prereqs are being met), so if you gain an additional ikon you need to chose to give it abilities from feats before it has something other than its default ones.

Yes, I am not sure I understand this feat. The only purpose I can think of is to be able to Spark Transcendence and keep the current Immanence. E.g., my worn ikon is active because I want to provide an aura to allies. If I Spark Transcendence the divine spark has to move to another ikon. If I had an additional worn ikon I could Spark Transcendence and have the spark move to the other worn ikon, maintaining the aura.

One thing about the champion—moving is often a good action to force the enemy to use an action to get in range but the champion also needs to be cognizant of where their allies are. They need to keep their position within 15' of both the enemy and their allies.

The champion reaction is fantastic. In heavy melee, they should be using it virtually every round. The monk and champion splitting up is a mistake. The champion's Achilles heel is they can't use their reaction for themselves, only for allies. So entering melee in a way that the champion is the only available target of the enemy in range of the reaction means you're guaranteeing the reaction isn't going to get used.

A lot of people have given great advice here. So I'll just agree with the general idea—tactics are more important than DPR.

You’d probably get faster and very comprehensive responses in the PF2e channel on the Foundry Discord. They are super helpful.

I've never seen anything that suggests the resistances change as a general rule, although I think there are some creatures that might specify that. I would have ruled the same way as you.

The swallow whole ability says the rupture damage frees the "engulfed creature" when discussing being able to attack while inside. I wouldn't let multiple creatures get out, or treat it as a permanent hole.

The thaumaturge seems like a gray area but I'd rule it the same as you. The exploit vulnerability mortal weakness doesn't change the damage type, so I'd consider it all slashing.

Yes, in the abilities section of the Bestiary, the parenthetical indicates associated traits.

This is also explicitly covered on page 51 of the Beginner's Box GM Guide. It explains that +1 weapons are different than +1 striking weapons.

It will. But it looks like it's only 18 minis. So I'm uncertain if Paizo will be shipping collated bricks, or a collated case with way more dupes than normal. Or maybe there are more in this set that haven't been announced on the Wizkids site.

With the rules in this book being updated for the upcoming Core series, does the new barbarian elemental instinct need some alterations to play with the PHB rules right out the gate? Or is it simple enough to not really need any changes?

With few exceptions, the upcoming rules changes don't have a lot of impact. I don't see anything in the new Instinct that isn't compatible with the current version of the Core Rulebook.

Thanks!

That makes sense. And if Lifelink was chosen, does that just make a link between the ally and the familiar? I'm assuming when Familiar Mascot is used, it replaces whatever role the master has with the ally.

(My player thought they'd get to establish a lifelink between their PC and an ally to help the ally, but I think this just lets the master move the lifelink to a sturdier player to take the familiar damage.)

How is familiar mascot supposed to work? Is it sharing the ability, or giving the ability to someone else? A couple examples:

With Extra Reagents, is the familiar now growing reagents for the ally, or are the familiar master and the ally both getting extra reagents.

With Lifelink, does the alchemist/familiar master create a lifelink with the ally? Or does the familiar mascot ability cause the lifelink with the familiar to be transferred to the ally?

They're not going to release a book with no license. The OGL will be replaced by the ORC license. The final version of the ORC license wasn't announced until the end of last month, long after this book went to print.

7 will be difficult. I'd find ways to add minions.

Voz is already gone. So it doesn't really matter if they check out the shop first. I wasn't trying to imply there's time urgency that drives the vault exploration.

I was responding to the notion that the "party could skip the vaults entirely and it wouldn't matter" to the story. I disagree—it's part of what they were hired to do. If my group had ignored the vaults, the town would be pretty unhappy that they decided to drop the job halfway through.

The whole point is that they're investigating on behalf of Warbal to help the goblins, who have been chased out of their basement home. The AP reasonably assumes that the PCs will help ensure the goblins are safe and the basement is neutralized before returning to town, since that's what they were hired to do in the first place.

(My group became friends with Pib and Zarf. They appeared in the group portrait I commissioned for my players, and they who were the ones firing the ballista during the attack on the Citadel in Book 6.)