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I ran this one for Paul and thoroughly enjoyed it. It has great opportunities for dealing with issues in a variety of ways and has some excellent creepy atmosphere.

As Paul mentions my group largely talked their way through. They had a total of two rounds of combat before the mercenaries ran away. They were very weirded out by Majordmo Pip.

I would have given this 5 stars if not for three small issues.

Firstly I think groups who enjoy combat are going to find a lack of teeth. None of the fights look terribly hard. The added creatures on high tier for Pip are pretty pointless for example.

Secondly

Thirdly, while the two new maps provided are very good the other two are not. The map for encounter one seems to have been chosen because it fits in the space available, it is actively detrimental to the encounter as presented in the text. There is no map for Area C despite having multiple numbered locations. The map for the encounter is a big empty room and essentially pointless.

I have now played and run this and thought I would jot down some thoughts. I played high tier with the 4 player adjustment is a group with 4 casters. I ran at high tier with a group with a witch and some melee/ranged. We couldn't have had different experiences. Both groups were able to employ significant reconnaissance. When I played we scouted with arcane eye, when I ran the flying invisible kineticist did it.

There are lots of opportunities for both roleplaying and combat, several encounters can be avoided or changed depending on your groups social skills. Having said that some of the opportunities are a little obscure. The opportunity to influence the council is a little strained. There is little reason at this tier why you would want to bring a group of low level warriors with you, it feels a little like sending cannon fodder into a meatgrinder.

Likewise the set up of the scenario feels a little like an MMO zone. There seems to be little reason for this to be a 7-11, it could easily have been a 3-7 or 5-9. I would have rather seen a set up session to reach and expose the ruins and a higher tier one exploring whatever is inside them.

The final fight does have some issues. Large area fear effects are potentially lethal. They can also be very dull. Two of my group members spent the entire fight sitting out due to the aura which is annoying when it is such a badly referenced ability.

I ran this today and have a few comments/observations about the module.

The Good:

The premise behind the module is interesting, you are off to a strange location to do what pathfinders are supposed to do. The town is interesting and it has some NPC's to interact with although I would have liked some more information on each NPC to help run them.

There is a nice balance between combat and social interaction. Murderhobo's are going to struggle a bit in this one and miss out on some gold and possibly prestige.

The Bad:

There is some information missing in this. I needed more information on the town, how big is it, what can be bought there, where does the unstuck half of the town go, lots of little background details that my players had questions about. In addition there are some more important pieces of information which are lacking. The entire first section with the Travellers is poorly written/edited with contradictory information on timings. In addition the 4 player adjustment is missing for the final encounter which nearly caused my group to be wiped.

The Ugly:

The Puzzle. OK, some scenarios have puzzles, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. This one just doesn't give you much information to allow you to solve it. The "handout" seems to be actively misleading and I struggle to see how anyone could come up with the solution just from the Handout, even if they had achieved all of the clues from exploring the tower.

EDIT: I was the GM for Pauls group. They negotiated with Henbane and therefore fought Nithra as they left. It is basically a guaranteed ambush giving the natural abilities of the opposition. The dangerous elements also all have high initiatives meaning they all went ahead of the PC's giving them 6 attacks before a single PC had acted. Two people were pretty much out from the very start in a 4 player group.

OK, I have now run this and its time to write up my thoughts having done so. I ran it a low tier with the 4 player adjustment. I have to say my initial impressions are largely confirmed having run it:

1. This is much too fiddly for a 1-5. Tracking 4 different factions is a pain especially when their influence varies over quite so many locations. The impact of the influence mechanic is also both trivial and aggravating. Imposing a tiny modifier on a small number of skill checks is barely worth doing anything for and have 4 different sets of tactics at the end is just aggravating.

2. Added to this the available influence points are very heavily skewed with one faction having a potential 23 points and another with a mere 12.

3. The NPC's the group interact with are not terribly well fleshed out and while there are lots of opportunities for players to roleplay with them there is too much for the GM to keep track of behind the scenes. I can see this is being very enjoyable to play with a well prepared GM but it is a pain to run.

4. The enemies are really not very effective at all. The guts encounter is presented as one combat but has enemies in 2 or 3 locations and the scorpions cannot reach the rest of the combat. The strix are a waste of space, spending their time trying to entangle and trip people. It might be viable if they outnumbered the party but they never will. The final encounter is pretty bad. The PC's know where the enemies will arrive from and can easily be in position for them. The casters tactics, especially at high tier, are actively terrible in half of the cases where she wastes her time buffing a pair of mooks who will go down in a single hit.

5. The surprise monster is a waste of space in both tiers. As a tiny creature it has to enter an enemies space to do anything and while it is presented as having grab it cannot grab anything larger than itself.

Overall this was a frustrating experience to prep for and run with far too much going on. My group had a couple of hairy moments but only due to some extremely lucky rolls on my part. I wouldn't recommend this one to people to be honest. If you are going to run it then DO NOT RUN THIS COLD.

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OK, I have played this once and am currently prepping it to run this weekend. This will not be a full review, it is simply some initial impressions. I will add more after I have run it and have decided on a final rating.

First off, despite this being a 1-5 it is extremely convoluted and complex. Do not under any circumstances run this cold. Do not run this having just skimmed it a couple of times. It will make little to no sense when you actually try to run it.

Part of that is due to the sheer number of moving parts to it, part of it is because it introduces elements of certain sub plots before you get to clear material about them. This is particularly an issue for the faction mission where, for example, there is information about a key NPC presented before you even know who she is.

Secondly, while I like the idea of the influence mechanic there are quite seriously far too many individual numbers for four separate factions which have to be kept track of. I shouldn't have to spend a couple of hours compiling a spreadsheet to be able to run what should be a fairly simple influence mechanic. If I am going to have to do that then the mechanic really should have a far greater impact on the scenario than this one does. Frankly it is barely worth tracking given the level of impact on anything other than the final encounter.

Thirdly, the encounter in the Gold Streets is just unnecessarily complex. I get that it is a useful way to give the PC's information but again having to track multiple different costs for multiple different pieces of information is just not necessary, especially when such costs are unlikely to be relevant to any group other than a bunch of completely fresh level 1 pc's.

I am not quite sure what is going on with the encounter in the Guts. One of the creatures is presented as being part of the rest of the encounter but it is stuck in a location where it is on its own and the rest of the encounter cant reach it even if combat does break out.

The tactics of the final encounter run directly counter to some of the enemy preparations. Announcing your presence and telling people they are under arrest for example seems rather to undercut being invisible. Likewise I am not really sure what the point of the "surprise" monster is given its size and inability to do much of anything to anyone who isn't helpless. It has some squick factor but it seems more likely to come off as comedic.

Finally I just want to stress again that this should not be run cold. When I played it our GM thought he had it down with a couple of read throughs but struggled. It cost us a lot of time as he flipped through the scenario looking for information when things made little sense and cost us our second prestige as he missed any stress on the goal for it.

At the moment, working on just a read through and some prep, it feels like an A for effort but a C for execution.

I have run this twice now, once in core and once in normal mode. Both times groups have fought the border guards and avoided Whiterook entirely. Both groups were high tier although one only just and both fought Vargrim.

He tore both groups a new one and while each eventually defeated him he killed Haltani in the core run which was only just APL3 with 5 players.

Overall I rate this scenario highly, it has loads of opportunities for role playing, non combat action and general exploration while also having some challenging combat. I am quite glad no-one has yet fought the guards as the lieutenant has a real chance of turning pretty much anyone into a fine red mist.

There are some gaps though. The trade goods aren't really described and we aren't really given any information on who the players might seek to make a trade deal with outside of the faction NPC. I would have liked to have more to work with in Dalun. Similarly we are given very little about the Baroness, I don't think there is even a description.

Finally I would stress that Valgrim is a potentially extremely difficult encounter, at least in the high tier. My first group had major problems with him despite brining a number of very solid characters, his damage output is very high, his defences are decent, his mobility will overshadow most groups and his starting position makes it very likely he ends up going after the PC's from the start.

I was the GM for Paul and I would echo much of what he said. There is an awful lot going on in the scenario and it has lots of opportunities to satisfy both the aspiring actors and the murderhobo's. I thoroughly enjoyed running it and will almost certainly run it again.

Having said that there are a few issues that could really do with being ironed out (spoilered to avoid temptation).

All but the last of those I consider to be fairly minor if annoying detriments which stops this being 5 star.

So, I ran a core game of this over the weekend with 4 players at the lower tier and it was again a blast. I incorporated some of the suggestions above and had a great time with it. The party negotiated with Grondel again, I havent had her fight anyone yet, and navigated the river fairly easily. The fey was a bit more troublesome and the party wizard spent a lot of time stuck in an Orb but they overcame him.

The gate guards were dealt with easily, it isnt a difficult fight on either tier and they negotiated with Tanbaruk. He got them to the forge without incident where Muerrit was hit with a Suggestion to surrender. She did but the Xorn was having none of it and attacked the party viciously, downing the barbarian with a critical bite. Muerrit was distresed by people attacking Droskers representative but affected by the suggestion she limited herself to casting buffs on him. Fortunately the 4 player adjustment meant she hadnt cast any on herself!

They overcame it eventually and moved on to the sanctum where again things went south. Ironwhip is an absolute beast in combat, especially when using earht glide to gain cover in addition to his other abilities. This time he again dropped a wall of stone near the door to slow down the group and just started wialing on them. His minions went down fast but he was piling on the damage. In desperation the wizard dropped a stinking cloud to provide some cover.

His snake familiar was sent into the office to retrieve the sky key under the cover of the cloud. It grabbed it and set off the trap but fortunately wasnt affected. The barbairan ended up fleeing with the snake and the Key using a fly potion, the Barbarian and Wizard similarly flew off (but into the citadel as Ironwhip blocked the exit with another wall of stone) and the poor pregen Kyra was reduced to a wet stain from a warhammer crit. Ironwhip animated her corpse out of spite which I think shuts down the Kyra clone vats so everyone else has to play a different pregen now.

In the end the group completed their mission but lost a PP from the secondary as Tanbaru wouldnt ally with them as they fled Ironwhip.

Overall another excellent game and I heartily recommend this one to everyone.

I ran this yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed it so thought I would add a few comments. I ran it at APL3 with 5 players, so high tier with 4 player adjustment. This would prove to be very dangerous. We had:

Level 5 enchantment focused kitsune sorcerer
Level 4 Paladin
Level 3 Paladin/Swashbuckler/Fighter
Level 2 Paladin/Oracle
Level 1 Ranger

The set up is decent but the adventure is in effect two different adventures, a fairly linear hunting expedition and then an exploration of an old abandoned temple.

Part 1 had lots of opportunities to roleplay with the two Nobles which our two Sovereign Court members got stuck into. The hunting encounters were fairly easily dealt with, the Monkeys were dispatched fairly quickly and the snakes weren't much of a problem (although the big one hits hard and its poison DC is high) but the we got to the "tiger"

I would echo what a previous poster said, the 4 player adjustment monster is quite a bit more dangerous than the full 4-5 tier creature, largely because its bit damage is quite a bit higher. We lost the Paladin/Oracle here to a 39 damage bite crit.

Reduced to 4 the group pressed on to the temple. they negotiated past the looters and then we got to the Asura...They were a player down but as I don't believe you adjust tier because you lose a player they were still playing 4-5 with the adjustment. To be fair I had warned them of the risks of doing so.

The creature heard them approaching so set up its buffs and then they faffed about at the entrance as one of the Paladins could sense an evil aura. As they were hanging back the Asura dropped a spike growth all across the entrance and part of the room which ended up causing a lot of damage over the many rounds of the fight. They still didn't come inside so it used its summon and I rolled an 8 so now they were facing two of them.

To make a long story short they ended up having to run away. The level 3 and 1 simply couldn't hurt the thing and no-one had a way to negate their regeneration. They managed to take down the summon (thanks t a 47 damage smite crit) and its duration ran out just as its regeneration got it back up but by that point it was very apparent that only the level 4 paladin could hurt it. The sorcerer had been dropped, was revived and ended up hiding invisibly. The group managed to escape but not by much.

The fled and rested up the night. They didn't want to give up so they came back the next day and snuck in under cover of invisibility. Two of them distracted the creature long enough for a third to complete their exploration and the mission.

I have seen various comments about the 4-5 Asura fight being pretty easy and that wasn't our experience. To be fair the group were right on the edge of the tier but between SR, DR, Regeneration, Blur and Mirror Image the thing is incredibly dangerous. It's attacks don't do much damage but it has 4 of them and they are all at a pretty high attack bonus. The fact that the monkeys can turn up and disarm the thing actually makes it more dangerous as it is then making 4 primary claw attacks at its highest attack bonus.

I ran this this afternoon so thought I would jot down some comments about the adventure while it was still fresh in my mind. I ran 5 players at the low tier. I had:

Gunslinger 1
Ranger 1
Witch 2
Ninja 2
Monk 3

1. The overall plot is a bit lacklustre. There is a bunch of background information which largely doesn't come out in the module. Sure it may come out in a later part but it isn't much use in this one. The "chase Sharrowsmith about the map" is not very inspired and it isn't helped by the lack of an actual map.

2. The grounds for success are not at all clear to the players. The primary mission has an extra qualifier which is far from apparent and the secondary success is absolutely not signposted as being relevant to the PFS anywhere. It is also time sensitive which isn't made at all clear.

3. Some of the mechanics are sketchy. There is a delay system which affects the course of the game but I suspect the author failed to read the overland travel rules. Even if you succeed at everything else you are looking at 2-4 days of travelling, probably more like 4 if you have any character with a 20' base movement. That makes the secondary success extremely difficult. If you spend 3 days travelling you cannot succeed at the secondary and are very close to potentially failing the primary. My group ended up with 0pp. They were far from a bunch of murderhobo's, they missed the final check with the Praetor by 1. That meant the miners were automatically dead (1 delay finding info, 1 day+ travel). There was 1 left at the end point by the time they got there.

4. The fights were a combination of trivial or frustrating. Everything up to the end point was pointless filler for a group of 1-2's made worse as they were divided by days of rest due to travel time. The last fight was a grind due to a very high AC enemy who hit like a wet noodle. The witch was keeping people alive with a wand while we waited for people to roll an 18+ enough times to kill him. Overall it was a frustrating and tedious experience rather than an exciting one.

So, not a great start to the 3 parter, I hope the next two are better.

So, I played this scenario at Gencon at high tier on normal mode and had a blast. We had 6 players, my Razmirian Sorcerer, a Barbarian and four friends playing together with a rogue, ninja, wizard and magus.

I should say at the start that this is potentially a very difficult scenario, at least at the higher tier. However, everyone in the group was level 10-11 with the exception of the Magus at 9. All of us had at least 20+ sessions of experience under our belt and tens of thousands of gold to invest in a range of resources. At this level people should have options to deal with the various challenges the scenario presents so, while it is tough, proper preparation will get you through.

Playing this has encouraged me to go ahead and pick up a copy to look at running it. We dealt with the following encounters:

Overall if you are looking for a challenging combat orientated adventure with an element of investigation then I would highly recommend this. If you don't have faith in your build, companions or preparations or prefer a stronger social aspect then look elsewhere.

I picked this module up recently and I should stress that I haven't had a chance to run it yet so this review is based purely on a read through. Unfortunately it seems to have some fairly glaring weaknesses and omissions.

1. My first and main issue is with the nature of the module. It is a pretty basic "go and establish a base here" adventure which is fine as far as it goes but seems to be well outside of the level range I would expect for such a module. We are talking about characters who may well have defeated a Rune Lord being sent to do basic first contact. Yes it is near to the Worldwound but it struck me as being far more appropriate for 3-7 or 5-9.

2. The Encounters are uninspiring. With a 7-11 adventure you have to expect that many of the players are likely to have some form of flight, quite possibly long duration flight for the entire thing. Most of the encounters feature purely land based opponents with little or no ranged attacks. Dinosaurs, Barbarians with a handful of javelins and undead mammoths. What flyers there are have generally poor ranged options (the Vrock has none, the Gibrileths offensive SLA's are weak as are the Kithangians). This feels like a probable cake walk to most groups at 9+.

3. Some of the encounter set ups are egregiously poor with little more than GM handwavium behind them. The Red Winter Scouts encounter is probably the worst offender with the scouts magically able to locate the group regardless of any precautions and despite their relatively low Survival skills. It also fails to account for groups who complete their exploration by means of flight such as Wind Walk. The actual encounter set up is similarly poor. The Barbarians seem to be presumed to be able to sneak up on the PC's with a fairly arbitrary DC29 perception check required with no consideration of their ability to actually see the group. Given their generally weak perception skills this seems like an awful lot of fiat.

4. Elements of the module are incomplete. At the start of the module you are given various trade goods as gifts for NPC's you might meet. The GM is told that some NPC's will react more favourably to some of the gifts than others but no clear information is provided on which elders prefer which gifts.

Overall this was a disappointing read through. It is likely to be an easy ride for any reasonably competent group.

This is an interesting scenario which suffers from some significant flaws in execution which marr what would be an otherwise excellent module. It is also a refreshing change from some of the more combat centric modules which PFS play has in spades.

As you can see from the blurb the players are specifically dispatched to attend the social event of the year, a crucial marriage to a member of the Blackros family. The party is sent as Emissaries of the Society with specific instructions to make the Society look good and impress the guests. This could work well however we immediately run into the central mechanic of the scenario, influencing NPC's.

The goal of the group is to impress at least three different npc's during the function while also dealing with various issues. Each npc has a weakness which can be exploited if you can identify it for a bonus but this uses up one of your opportunities to influence and these are already highly limited. Influencing an NPC is only possible with Bluff, Diplomacy and Intimidate. This creates our first immediate issue, those skills are only class skills for a limited number of classes. Given they are also Charisma based skills then only that leaves out even more people from meaningfully participating. Even if you arent a Cha dumping min/maxxer the average Monk, Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, Wizard, Rogue or Druid is going to struggle to participate meaningfully and thats before we even start looking at non core classes. I would have liked to see other skills being able to exert influence. For example there is no real reason why players couldn't butter up Nigel the Elf (really Nigel?) with Knowledge: Arcane by complimenting him on his work with the museum or Bedard with Profession: Politician by commenting on the Andoran political system. The aid rules could also have been expanded a bit to allow characters with fewer social skills to feel they were able to contribute rather than being hosed.

This brings me to my second major issue with the module. The DC's dont scale between tiers. A character fairly focused on social skills could be looking at anywhere between a 6 and 8 point skill difference between level 3 and 7 when accounting for skill points, stats, feats and magical items. I would not want to be playing this mod at lower level.

My third major issue is that the module is not scaled between groups of 4, 5 or 6 players. A group of four players will have a significantly more difficult time of things as you still have to make the same number of influence successes but now you have fewer people to do so and are less likely to have people with focused social skills.

This brings me to my fourth major issue. The greatest chance of success is with a larger table. However, this mod really demands that each player gets far more face time than you might see in a more combat centric mod. Trying to run this for a group of six in a four hour convention slot is likely to be next to impossible.

Fifthly there are a lot of npc's to keep track of and it would really help to have something to show the players to help them keep them straight. A printable sheet of face pics would go an enormous way to help in presenting the situation.

Sixthly the module only addresses what happens if players try to use mundane means to convince people. It doesnt address what happens if players try to use Charm Person, Suggestion or other means to gain influence. Given the nature of the PFS and the easy availability of such effects the mod really should address what effect using such magic provides and what happens if you get caught.

Finally the plot of some of the side events is really really thin. I appreciate that some of it comes from previous events but the justification given for the Barbarian actions is especially flimsy. There are also potential issues with the Faction mission relating to him which brings matters very close to the Dont be a jerk/no PvP rule as there is a real chance of players coming into direct conflict over that particular mission.

Overall I would recommend this scenario for people but with various caveats. If playing in an official PFS game then you had better warn your players about the focus of the module so they can decide what character to play. If playing in a home game I would recommend modding some of the Influence mechanic to make sure that more characters have a chance of being able to take part.

Finally I am always amused by how often the initial boxed text has some senior PFS official saying how the group are just the right people for this mission. I can only assume that Ambrus Valsin is trying to keep a straight face when claiming that the Cha 7 Barbarian, Wizard, Cleric and Rogue group are "more qualified than anyone else in Absalom to undertake this mission".