gnoams's page

As an early scenario for the new edition, this runs into many of the same troubles they had in the first scenarios of PF1. Namely that they haven't quite figured out how to balance things appropriately yet. DCs are all over the board from easy to impossibly high for 1st level characters. Fights also range from easy enemies to monsters that one shot players on a normal hit and instakill them on crits. Having only enemies that were immune to mind affecting led to one player calling it his "worst roleplaying experience ever."

The scenario is way too long, running at 5 hours with the GM skipping and rushing through sections to reduce the play time. Especially as a so called intro scenario, where extra time should be allotted for new players learning the rules.

However, if you can get past these flaws, the scenario itself is great. I had a good time playing it.

This book should come with a warning label: assembly required.

On the one hand, the rules for making your own monsters/npcs are fantastic, every GM will love these. On the other hand, a lot of the creature entries come like a piece of ikea furniture. You get parts and instructions and have to assemble the playable stat block yourself. That's all good if I'm making custom creations, but if I want to use the space dragon that Paizo created I have to make that too.

As is, a GM either has to stop the game for 10 minutes before each encounter to calculate stat blocks for it, or spend a lot of extra prep time before the game on creating the stats for each encounter. For players, they added a summon monster spell... but again you have to create the stat blocks to actually use it.

Now I expect 3rd party sites, like d20srd, will eventually calculate and post up ready to use stat blocks. I feel like Paizo also expects this and is being lazy; hoping others will pick up their slack. Their smallest hardcover book yet, they definitely could have stood to add some pages to provide us with ready to play stat blocks for the creatures they created.

Major peeves out of the way, there's a lot of good stuff here. I especially like how they have goodies for players attached to creatures. Such as armor that can be made from the critter's hide, or special tech the species uses. And the make your own monster rules really are quite good.

If your idea of fun fantasy adventure includes belligerent, degrading Full Metal Jacket style boot camp, then you'll love this. It's not a badly done scenario, I don't fault the writing at all. The skill DCs that a lot of people are complaining about fit the scenario, and don't seem to affect the overall success or failure as far as getting your money and prestige. It all works well together as a scenario, and I think my gm did a great job running it. But I have no interest in being yelled at, embarrassed, and treated poorly for an evening of what is supposed to be fun time playing a game with friends.

Season 5 was the year of the additional rule sets. This one was performance combat. A solid all around scenario, if a bit combat heavy.

One of my favorites, something terrible has escaped from an ancient prison in the museum, you must track it down. Some potentially brutal fights in this one depending on your party make up.

It's just a dungeon crawl, but it's fantistic. A must play for lovecraft fans.

This was a fun adventure, some political intrigue, a short dungeon crawl, then wtf out of left field end fight that was surprisingly entertaining.

Pirates, spiders, a passable plot. No particular complaints. Overall decent scenario, though not particularly memorable. Like all season 0 it suffers from needing updated monsters.

This is a fun set up chasing around town after malfunctioning magic items. But the writing is pretty poor. There's no allowances for non combat solutions, even in several encounters where fighting sounds like it should be a terrible idea. But somehow you can get away with murdering a bunch of people in broad daylight in the middle of what you are told is the most secure market in the world and just walk away without any consequences.
The fights in this, like many of the scenarios written under 3.5 rules are badly in need of updating. The centipedes in particular do not translate to an appropriate cr challenge.

It's a night at the museum and the exhibits are coming alive. One of my favorite pfs scenarios.

This scenario's a bit clunky. The transitions between encounters aren't quite spelled out, making the GM have to adlib a bit. It could have used another round of editing to smooth out the kinks. There's also a couple of extra fights that really should just be removed or it runs to long and doesn't leave time for much roleplaying. That aside, it features some great fights, pirates, and a tense hostage negotiation.

If not for the awful chase mechanics, I'd give this one 5 stars. If the players succeed at the chase, then you get one of the funnest npcs to tag along with the group. Without that NPC its just a decent dungeon crawl.

Mammoths, demons, dinosaurs, barbarians, what's not to like? Theres statblocks for everyone allowing you to hack your way through the whole thing, or talk your way through half of it. The poor reviews here seem to be complaints that the GM ran the encounters incorrectly and did a poor job roleplaying. The fights are a bit easy, but the flavors so good I didn't mind.

I quite enjoyed this scenario. It had a sense of epicness to it. Large scale combats in an ancient underground metropolis and a moral dilemma in the end which sparked quite the debate.

One table I ran it for got the random carbuncle encounter which had everyone laughing. That's really the only redeeming part of an adventure consisting of a string of pointless encounters. Theres a plot here to unravel, but the players are restrained from confronting the villain and instead forced to babysit an annoying NPC.

This was a pretty boring scenario. The premise is, you look around a library for information. If you do everything correctly, than there's not a single combat. You make a lot of skill rolls representing your searching through books. Maybe talk to or just avoid a few npcs, solve a puzzle, find the info you came for and your done.

I enjoyed playing and running this one. Fun roleplaying piece at the beginning and potentially tense moment evading the police. Then into a creepy dungeon crawl. Some interesting fight setups. The chain mechanics could have used a few more details, like what happens if you try to fly or levitate through them instead of climbing. Overall a solid enjoyable scenario.

Worst pfs scenario to date. Only scenario that I will flat out refuse to GM again. Utterly pointless, does nothing to further the overall season plot, poorly written, clunky mechanics. Most of the questions the players want answers to are not addressed anywhere. Seriously, this is a murder mystery and the victims don't even have names.
It begins seeming like it will be an interesting conspiracy covering up some ancient ruins. Ends with you realizing it was all pointless, the ruin had nothing to do with it, the villains motive was because they felt like it, and nothing you did mattered.