ikemook's page

During the scenario, the players come upon two sites clearly associated with archaeology and/or heritage in the region: an “elephant graveyard” with signs of past trade and an iruxi monument preserved with impressive time magic. In both cases, if they players want their treasure bundles, they have to utterly destroy these sites. They’re not given any warning that this will happen (such as through checks that might alert them to the danger) or any choice in the matter, assuming they want their treasure bundles. They players, most of whom will be outsiders to the region, basically (unwittingly) wipe these heritage sites out for the sake of minor amounts of loot. When I played this scenario, this issue caused a fair bit of consternation in our party, and let to some debate and even a vote on how to proceed.

To me, this was disappointing and a bit disquieting. I realize, of course, that in some scenarios Pathfinders are basically tomb raiders. But even in those scenarios, we generally haven’t completely destroyed the area we’re investigating. Furthermore, it seems to me that Paizo has been moving away from situations where treasure and treasure bundles come from robbing graves and destroying sites. A good example of this would be Origins of the Open Road (1-00), where you get 4 treasure bundles simply from returning stolen documents to their rightful owners. So it felt really jarring that our PCs literally destroyed clearly interesting and clearly important sites without any chance to preserve them (or even know ahead of time that our actions would result in their destruction). It’s difficult to tell if this is supposed to be some kind of meta-commentary/deconstruction of how Pathfinders operate, or if it’s just poor design on the part of the designer. It’s particularly jarring because most of us are going to be outsiders, travelling through and destroying relics that belong to other people; in this case, they’re people (iruxi) that we’ve actually helped in other scenarios! I mean, in 1-09, you clear an iruxi observatory of hostile squatters! And that's not getting into the fact that this it seemed completely out-of-step with where the Society seems to be going. One whole faction—the Grand Archive—focuses on studying and preserving the past, and the only other faction that might consider destroying heritage in this way (Vigilant Seal) at least would be doing so to protect people from foul magic. That may not be convincing to some people (like me ^_~), but it makes for a far better case for the destruction of these sites than “I just want my treasure bundles.”

My issue here isn’t so much that Pathfinders end up literally destroying heritage sites, or for the presence of moral quandaries. It’s more that there seems to be little to no player agency in it, and the scenario seems clearly designed to incentivize their destruction in favor of treasure bundles. Despite being qualified explorers, we are given no checks to determine if the sites are in any way unstable. And even when we discover that they are unstable, after the first encounter at the “elephant graveyard”, we cannot actually prevent their destruction except by abandoning our treasure bundles. As I said, I could see that being intentional (if unartfully done), except that there’s no mention of this or the consequences of it in the conclusion, reporting notes, or success conditions!

I could easily see an alternative situation where we would have been faced with choosing the lesser of two evils: perhaps a choice between saving heritage and finding a bad guy more quickly. But these kinds of “hard choices” come out of situations fostered upon the players by the agency of others. The choices made here were entirely a result of the (in-game) agency and planning of the Pathfinder society and which, paradoxically, reduced the (out-of-game) agency of the players. It’s just…bizarre.

And because I don’t want to just critique without making suggestions for improvement, let me give an example of what I think could have been done. The first of these encounters is when the PCs find an “elephant graveyard” with evidence of historic, regional salt trading. The way the encounter runs now is that the PCs are given a chance to notice some quality salt blocks and take them. As they leave, the remains sink into the sand due to the PCs moving in and through the area.

An alternative way of handling this could involve a few things:

1. The PCs are told, at the very beginning of the adventure, that the society would be very interested to learn about any sites along the way, though PCs should be careful to not destroy them, as the society doesn’t want them lost and doesn’t want to make a bad impression on the locals.

2. When the PCs reach the site, they are given two choices: they can take time to investigate it (which might delay them) or they can just move through.

3. If they move through, they find the treasure bundles but destroy the site, as they did not take the time to investigate it and realize how fragile it was.

4. If they investigate, they realize that the site is highly fragile, and likely to be destroyed if they move directly through it. They can make skill checks to figure out a way to investigate without destroying the site. If they fail (or don’t want to try), they can move around it. Either way, it takes them extra time to get where they’re going, but they are given treasure bundles as rewards by the society for locating and preserving such a site.

5. When the PCs make it to Dafaka Outpost, if they’ve preserved the sites, they’re greeted neutrally or friendly. If they didn’t, word has already reached the town (the Society has been travelling “off-road”, so to speak, and so word of them has spread ahead of them) and the locals are unfriendly, imposing penalties on checks to find the final site.

6. PCs finding information about both sites grants them an additional secondary success, to offset the risk of losing out on the “get there in 10 days or less” success condition

This way, PCs get treasure no matter what, but you reward PCs for taking the time to be careful.

Obviously, this particular solution might not the best one, or might have issues, but that’s not really the point here. The point is that I don’t think PCs shouldn’t be in the position to be effectively forced into destroying heritage without any built-in mechanism in the scenario to give them some kind of agency. It seems to run afoul of both the direction the Society is going (in-game, with its increased emphasis on preservation, improving the Society’s name, and fixing its mistakes) as well as player agency.