andreww's page

I played this today at high tier. I dont particularly mind the society being the bad guys here. We are dealing with Rakshasa's who are hardly blameless. I do take issue with a number of issues:

1. The map makes literally no sense, the descriptions simply do not match up. It felt like the author turned over a scenario with one map in mind and it was changed in development.

2. The puzzle made no sense at all. Pointless, immersion breaking, unavoidable with no apparent way to work it out.

3. It ran very short for a 7-10, we were done in 2.5 hours which was very unusual. We did sneak past one group of enemies and we stole stuff from the sleeping ones but even so, very short.

4. The denouement is terrible and utterly undercuts everything you do in the scenario, making the entire adventure pointless. We really should not trust anything we found.

5. The conclusion told us that the Grand Lodge had also accepted a statue similar to the one found, apparently Pathfinder security has learned nothing over the last 15 years.

I played this one at high tier with about 33cp. Its an enjoyable romp of an adventure but was really very short. We finished in less than 3 hours. Two combats and one pseudo chase scene are fine but if you have a very well prepped GM and a table which works well together it wont take long. The first encounter felt especially underwhelming.

The nature, setting and premise of this scenario is interesting but it has one of the worst skill challenges I have ever seen in a PF2 scenario. Obscure or unusual skills with DCs way above the expected level almost guarantee failure.

I have finished prepping this but am yet to run it. I thoroughly like the look of what we have here.

Part 1 is a big, sprawling, extended combat scene. It is reminiscent of the start of AoA Part 6 without being quite as brutal as that particular AP. Lots of stuff for people who really enjoy the combat system to do here with a variety of challenging fights. Also, heavy use of troops in this one so you had better remind yourself how they work!

Part 2 involves the exploration of an ancient city as you start collecting more cards in order to obtain more information about who attacked your home and forge various additional alliances. Its a bit "monster of the week" as you explore different locations but the scenario provides a range of different ways to handle these encounters. Plenty of opportunities here for enjoy exploration, diplomacy and negotiation.

Part 3 sees us return to the site of the old Harrowing module. Lots of interesting call backs to that module and people who have played it will find a load of easter eggs here. Again, a variety of different locations, not so much diplomatic options here, the people now in charge are not terribly reasonable but you never know. It as interesting to see what has happened to the Harrowed Realm.

Having obtained what you need from the Harrowed Realm the group can now strike back against their enemy in his home. Here we are off on a planar trip to the Abyss! However, you wont manage it without help so best hope you made plenty of friends in part 2. This part is very short but utterly brutal, a suitable finale for the second part of this AP.

Overall I am very excited to run this, it looks excellent.

I have finished prepping this (bar sorting the maps) and am thoroughly looking forward to running it. It has a broad mix of social, exploration, travel and combat against an interesting mix of opposition. A wide range of different methods are available for dealing with different obstacles and there are plenty of interesting NPCs to interact with.

My one disappointment is that the AP doesnt provide us with art for all of the cards and that the new Harrow deck will be a physical only product.

I ran this at the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is fairly straight forward to prepare, highlights a region we havent visited much before and has one of the most amusing NPCs to run that we have seen in quite a while.

I would highly recommend this one to people. Lots of fun and games. If your party are lacking in skills then it could run long. Mine werent, they avoided all of the avoidable combats and we finished up in around 3 hours.

I played this at the weekend and enjoyed it but I have still given it a fairly low rating. Overall the premise, setting, theme, mood and flavour are all good but it has some seriously flawed mechanics if how it was described by our GM is right.

Unlike others I dont mind the conflicting faction goals. What I disliked was that it was almost impossible to actually make one of them. The timescales given in various parts for what was achievable within the hexploration timescales were hopelessly unrealistic. It would have taken a party of elven monks with fleet to make anything like the times suggested by the missions.

Also, please stop putting spellcasters with Vampiric Touch in 3-4 adventures. Vampiric Touch has the death trait so f it reduces a PC to 0HP they are flat out dead with no way to prevent it. Only a very lucky hero point saved our level 3 rogue from what would have been perma death as they were a new player with their first ever character.

I have just started to prep this and I am about 2/3rds done. So far it looks absolutely excellent. I love the setting, the feel, the themes, the brooding menace, the NPC's, the range of challenges and the open ended nature of what I have seen so far.

Highly recommend this, its as good as if not better than Night of Gray Death (which was excellent).

I have played this at high tier and run it at high as well. This is an enjoyable dungeon romp with some interesting exploration, combat and social encounters. There are lots of things to do for different types of characters.

The combat encounters are interesting and suitably challenging and the puzzle is interesting with plenty of clues seeded through the area.

This can I think have the potential to run a bit long and needs plenty of prep as the CP adjustments often involve elite or weak adjustments and the altered stat blocks are not provided.

I played this today at 36 challenge points and I have prepped it to run it.

Overall this is an excellent addition to the Society scenarios. It has things to do for all sorts of characters. The combat encounters are suitably challenging, the investigation has lots of meat to it and we even meet up with old enemies in the form of the Aspis.

This does feel a little like Mosquito Witch with the Maid as the crypto critter which is definitely a good thing. It leaves various questions hanging which I hope get followed up in subsequent scenarios.

This does have the potential to run long and plenty of prep is required.

I have played this in high tier and have prepped it to run it.

Overall this is a great addition to the Season 2 metaplot. It has a slightly goofy start but the rest of it is very solid. You have an escort mission with all of the funky troubles of escort missions you will be familiar with from pretty much any video game with annoying NPCs who run themselves into trouble.

There is a good mix of exploration and combat with some challenging combat encounters. There is limited social stuff so I wouldn't bring a diplomancer to this one.

This would be 5 stars but it loses a star due to editing issues. In particular treasure bundles are wrong. The scenario lists 8 or 9 depending on if you look at the boxes or the text. This really shouldn't happen and should be a simple thing to spot. I wouldn't mind so much if editing issues were infrequent but they seem t crop up with every scenario.

I have played this at high tier and prepared to run it. Overall this is a great 3-6 adventure. We go back to see some old friends from first edition and go off for some old style pathfindering.

It involves exploration, dungeon delving, recovering ancient artifacts and cleansing the forces of evil. There are a few opportunities for npc interactions but this is a strong dungeon crawl adventure. There are a mix of different combat encounters which were suitably challenging at high tier.

My one slight disappointment is that you receive a reward at the end but it is not reflected on the chronicle. Obviously chronicle loot has often been criticised as being often irrelevant, it would have been nice to see some slightly early access to the item on the chronicle.

I have played this at high tier (with a group of 5 casters and me, a rogue) and I have now prepared to run it.

Overall this is an excellent 5-8 scenario. It deals with stuff suitable for the level, its nice, simple and straightforward. It looks easy to run and was a lot of fun to play.

If I have one criticism, I would have liked the interactions with the trapped guests to have a little more weight in the scenario. Otherwise I highly recommend this one.

I have run and played this at high tier. Overall I enjoyed it a lot, it has a mix of stuff to do, is suitably challenging across various types of play and, potentially, has a big reveal at the end.

Having said that I do have a couple of quibbles.

1. The exploration part potentially involves an awful lot of dice rolling. Checks for finding game trails, checks for finding food, checks for events. There are a huge number of hexes to explore and I can see the dice rolling becoming a bit of a grind. Oddly, this makes the scenario a really good choice for PbP. I am not sure I would want to run this in face to face games. For VTT I provided the map and covered each hex with a marker for the Glyph of the Open Road. As they explored hexes I moved them aside.

2. When I played it we negated a lot of the dice rolling with create food, a rather low level and easily accessible option. When I ran it I did away with foraging after half a dozen hexes when it became obvious the group would never run out of food.

3. I think this could have made a brilliant repeatable. It has an excellent set up, there could have been a choice of 2 out of 4 fixed encounters (maybe one for each element) and then a mix of extra encounters to pick from scattered across the map. I know its part of the metaplot which would mitigate against this but it struck me as a missed opportunity given how well this format lends itself to being repeatable.

I have played this at high tier and prepared it to run.

The scenario is called out as an investigative one but there is very little investigation. You are led by the nose around the city engaging in various combats while you get to chat to the main NPC. She is an interesting character but it isnt really possible to learn much about what is going on with her through the influence system. Given that is what you are supposed to be doing this is a missed opportunity.

The first two combats are both fairly weak and also present the Society in an extremely poor light. You are pretty much engaging in Hunger Games style death matches in the middle of a major metropolis. The first encounter is particularly egregious are you are essentially killing a group of desperate locals. I cannot imagine why the society would have chosen to operate in this way, it feels like an extremely retrograde step. The scenario doesnt even bother to address the issue that you are being sent out to engage in death matches, as if this was a completely normal thing to do in a massive capital city.

The mechanics of the first two encounters are particularly weak, and neither presents much of a challenge to even a moderately experienced group. Twilighknights view that adding unusual abilities to an NPC is lazy writing is utter nonsense. Enemies often had abilities PCs could not have in 1E PF and now NOCs explicitly are not built using the same rules as PCs.

The final encounter again sees us using enemies that can massive damage one shot level 1 PCs.

Overall, the idea behind this scenario is great, expose a dangerous underground fighting ring and find out what the purpose of it is. The execution however is deeply flawed with the society pushing its agent to engage in deeply, deeply dubious activity, all the way up to outright murder.

OK, I have prepared Book 1 and Book 2 and so far have run the first level of Book 1. My group recently completed the Keep level, have done the graveyard event and are about to head back to start the first underground level. Or they would if we hadn't had effectively two TPK's.

This review focuses purely on the Keep. We have had two sessions.

The Keep level itself is interesting. The map is beautiful and well laid out with plenty of room to explore and various different routes to different places. The enemies are varied and interesting and there are some decent opportunities for role play interaction to break up the dungeon crawling.

In the first session the group happily explored much of the Keep. They negotiated with the mitflit King and enjoyed learning about his plan for the flying cavalry. At the end they found the shrine and just eeked out a victory. It is a very difficult encounter.

Returning the following day they headed over to the outbuildings where things started to go wrong. Putting something with vampiric touch in at level 1 is as bad as the Wight in thornkeep. It is a virtually guaranteed death as the spell has the death trait so there is no messing about with death saves when a regular fail drops everything except a dwarf barbarian on an average damage roll. 22 damage to the groups Champion ended him.

Heading back to town they recruited a replacement PC. Heading back they met up with Tangletop which they enjoyed. They gave him the shiny and decided to finish off exploring the Keep. They entered the scorpion room from the north and here we got TPK number 1. This thing is a terror with high AC, reach, opportunity attack, a dangerous poison and a lot of health. I had Wrin save them and they woke up in bed back in town.

Nervous they headed back, ignored the scorpion and entered the lighthouse. I had the haunt activate even though its only supposed to do so at night and it nearly murdered all of them. It is particularly mean that the entry door crumbles away giving the haunt clear line of sight down the very long hallway so it can continue to affect people if they try to run away, which my group did. Fortunately I have been having the mist limit vision pretty significantly.

They fled and just managed to stop the bleeding in time. I let them level up, restore themselves and then had the light show start. They rushed back to the graveyard, easily dealt with the undead and then were finished by the Skalthrax which is well above the recommended stats for a level 4 monster. I had the guard rally themselves and save the group.

A bunch of this leaves a fairly sour taste in the mouth. This is supposed to be the introductory level, the stage at which PCs are at their most fragile. We have had two effective TPK's and one outright murder and I am running for very experienced 2E players. This has certainly felt like a trend with similarly problematic encounters in starting levels for all previous APs.

If I was rating this for the lore, the setting, the maps, the layout and the presentation it would be a clear 4 stars. However, the encounter mechanics for level 1 PCs are blatantly too severe in a very obvious way. If I were running this for newbies I dont think we would have a session 3.

I have played this scenario at high tier and have prepped it to run. It is not nearly as bad as the initial reviews suggest. Some of those contain inaccurate information which suggest the scenario was run poorly.

There are some reasonable complaints and issues with it. The first encounter at high tier is difficult and dangerous, however this is a combat light scenario and I for one dont object to some difficult combats. The deus ex machina is a cheap get out for this encounter and undercuts much of the challenge of the scenario.

The camp investigation is well done. There is lots to poke about with and the scenario gives you many leads to follow. Some of the DC's are high however the scenario gives you more than one way to approach them. This could sometimes have been more explicit.

There are a lot of typos in the scenario. The scaling for the high tier of the first encounter is clearly wrong, referring to the low tier creatures. This results in a trivial encounter at CP23-27 against two level 5 creatures rather than 2 level 7's which it should be. This is significantly easier than the base version of the encounter.

Beyond this however it also have a number of basic typo's, some of which would have been picked up with simple proof reading software.
See for example "that they’ve been that have been" on page 13 or the duplication of the reward entry on page 14.

I have prepped this and run it once so far. I should preface this with saying that my group come out with full rewards but that was very much down to luck.

This is a poorly edited scenario with some significant issues, both mechanical and story based. I am not as critical as others have been, I think it can work but it needs careful preparation by a GM. Running this cold is likely to be a disaster. This is also not a scenario I could recommend for new players, it is simply too lethal in too many parts.

Paizo really needs to get away from the idea of level+3 boss encounters, especially in low level adventures. They are deeply unfair and extremely lethal. Watching a PC get dropped every round by something that crits even the best armoured level 1 PC on a 14 isnt great.

The betrayal at the end feels very forced and well outside the way the modern society has operated. The use of potentially expendable mercenaries getting killed for a small amount of pay as part of a "test" paints the organisation as pretty vile.

I have run and played this at high tier. Overall the story is interesting, the challenges varied and the mystery an interesting one which you gradually uncover.

It does have one or two editing issues around the empty hallway which isnt terribly clear and it presents the worlds deadliest ever Oppossums. This does run very short, neither game took more than about 2.5 hours.

I have run this twice now at high tier. It is an interesting set up giving us a closer look at an ancestry which are often presented as little more than brutish monsters to kill. Overall the story is fine but I would have liked to see more exploration of Dawns Reach. Rather than the somewhat stilted trials I would have preferred to see more interaction inside the community with its residents. It is presented as a diplomatic mission, diplomats will be largely useless here.

Where I have more of an issue is with the combat elements. The first encounter is pretty easy, especially as you have help. They are completely unrequired for a vaguelly competent party.

The second encounter, at high tier, is uttery irrelevant. It is little more than a brief speed bump as the primary risk from the high tier enemies is almost entirely removed by the incapacitation trait.

The last encounter has a lot more going for it, mainly due to the terrain. My second group found the clock issue rather ufair given the locations of the items and the difficulty reaching them.

Lastly a note on DCs. We have seen some scenarios with very high DCs for their level, the chase in this one has what felt like extremely low DCs. Both groups I have run for have either passed Mahja or arrived at the summit at the same time. Neither ever felt in the slghst danger of falling behind.

I have played this at high tier with 34 Challenge Points and I am part way through preparing it. The story is an interesting one, it opens up a bunch of background information about the museum and Nigel and the structure makes sense. It is well put together BUT there are some significant issue.

The editing of this is really very poor. One of the maps provided is the wrong side of the flip mat. The elite template is inaccurately applied to one of the enemies. The CP scaling for encounter 1 in the high tier uses low tier CP values. It uses the influence subsytem but Nigel has no perception DC for discovery despite perception being the default skill and the chronicle has an item priced at 20gp which should cost 228gp.

The combat encounters felt really very weak for our group although we did have 2 rogues, a fighter, bard, cleric and oracle. As the oracle I ussed all of about 4 spell slots the entire game. Nothing felt terribly threatening.

The influence encounters were intereting and pushed us into using up a bunch of hero points. There seemed to be a decent spread of useful skills which was helpful.

Overall I enjoyed the story but found some of the mechanical aspects rather weak and the editing very poor. For the story this would have been a 4 star review, for the implementation it is 3, the editing errors drop it to 2. I also disliked the retcon for Nigel, it felt rather hamfisted and similar to the after the fact justifications for Torch in Passing the Torch.

I have played this and prepared it to run. Overall I really like this adventure but it has some issues. The structure works well and it is easy to prepare. It has a good mix of combat and investigation with some RP opportunities with the kobolds.

However, there are some issues, particularly at low tier. The first encounter is particularly lethal for level 1 characters and I can easily see one PC dropping a round. This really hghlights the issues when you put level 3 solo monsters into low tier adventures. Having the potential for death from massive damage for level 1 characters does little to help foster new players which is important with a 1-4.

The skill challenge is challenging but the DCs are reasonable. The damage is low but given what happens when you get inside it seems unlikely you will rest before moving to the final confrontation. That is likely to make things even more dangerous.

I have run this once and played it a couple of times.

It is a strong addition to the list of repeatables. It pushes PCs into an unfamiliar environment, makes them look to adapt and forces them to work together to win.

It can be quite a long run depending on which choices you make.

I have played this at high tier and run it at low. It is a great adventure, highly recommend it. I do find the premise a little strained, "we sail off into the west hoping to hit a continent at a relevant spot" but apart from that the rest is excellent.

There is a strong mix of combat, exploration and roleplayiing involved. The fights are potentially challenging, we played at 30+ CP and the final encounter had a lot going on which was thoroughly enjoyable.

The possible conflict with the drunken guard looks like it could go very hard but at least it can be avoided. The negotiation of the land dispute forcing the party to split up feels a bit forced with no real convncing reason given for it.

Once thing I have noticed which seems to be a very backwards step is that the text of the scenario no longer tells us what counts as a treasure bundle. We have numbers linked to locations at the back but with no explanation of what counts. This creates the potential for confusion and given we have seen more than one scenario now with missing treasure bundles this doesnt seem like a good change. Please put what counts as a treasure bundle back into the treasure bit at the end of each section along with the table at the end of the scenario.

I have run and played this at low tier. Overall this is a good scenario, it has a nic mix of exploration, combat and diplomacy but there are some issues:

1. Some of the combats are pretty rough, especially at certain Challenge Points. This is exarcerbated by the map change to use the god awful tles in the first encounter creating confusion.

2. There are also a lot of combats. Three mandatory encounters, one optional and one which you might provoke are a lot for a 1-4. Expect this to run fairly long.

3. There is a puzzle. Puzzles are fine but this one has some issues around how it uses language.

4. There is a chase. The appearance of a chase in 1E was often met with groans. 2E chase rules are better. Unfortunately this doesnt just use the base rules in the GMG and instead it adds it own variation. Unfortunately these variatiions are poorly explained and the chaase was significantly changed in development. Despite the issue being raised in the GM forum there has been no dev comment on how it is supposed to be run. This, unfotunatley, seems to be the default now with issues like this just left to hang. I can appreciate that the covid situation creaes pressure but these sorts of issues shouldnt take too much time to resolve.

5. There are other editing issues as well such as the attack stat blocks for the low and high tier hound not changing.

Overall I did enjoy playing and running this and would have given it 4 stars if not for the issues created in development. I would give it 3.5 if I could.