rknop's page

I just played this scenario, and it was a lot of fun. Now, the GM running this *did* tell us ahead of time that it should probably have a "Survival Horror" tag. As such, all of the players went into this game knowing what sort of game we were getting into, and as such didn't approach this as a standard "murderohobos murder everything bad thing they see" sort of scenario. We were on edge trying to figure out how to get through and survive everything, while also trying to dig up some of the sort of stuff that Starfinders exploring would want to dig up.

It was nice as a change of pace. Of course, there have been a number of changes of pace in Starfinder, and in the last handful of seasons of PFS 1, so it's not alone.

The pawns are fine.

However, there are no numbers on the pawns, and no set IDs on the pawns. The 1e Pathfinder Bestiary Box pawn sets, as well as most of the other pawn sets produced for Pathfinder 1e, had a small setid tag (e.g. "B2" for Bestiary Box 2) and a number. This made it possible to keep track of pawns, figure out what you had, and then refile them after a gameday or convention was over and you came back with a set of pawns.

Not having those means that pawns will ultimately be harder to keep organized. It means for me that I have to write a small set ID and number on each pawn before I can use them.

Please bring back set IDs and numbers on pawns.
I'm very sad that this satement from Vic Wertz two years ago was not followed up upon : https://paizo.com/products/btpy9trh/discuss&page=2?Pathfinder-Pawns-Her oes-Villains-Pawn-Collection#72

I want to echo the sadness about the lack of numbers and set IDs. (The pawns I have *do* have names on them.)

For *years* the Pathfinder pawns had numbers and a pawn set ID tag on the pawn sets. This made it very convenient to store and keep track of pawns, even as I had more and more sets. I could figure out what pawns I had by looking at a list, and going to the place where I keep them. When done gaming, I could easily and quickly put them back where they went.

PLEASE BRING BACK NUMBERS AND SET IDs!!!!! Why did you stop? They are so helpful.

This is a neat special. The encounters are varied -- it's not just a meatgrinder, the way some of them are. The story is fun, the locations are atmospheric, the NPCs you interact with are interesting. It's also got a significant and cool callback to the very first Pathfinder scenario. (Indeed, I'd recommend having played that before playing this one, just for story reasons.)

I'd probably give it 5 stars for a multitable special. However, it shares the fundamental (and, perhaps, damning) structural flaws that most (all?) of the Paizo multitable specials share, hence only three stars.

It can be very frustrating to be running a really neat encounter with a fun reveal in it... but then when that reveal is a round and a half off, the lead GM gets on the mic in the room and completely spoils it.

Likewise, you'll be in the middle of running multiple encounters at your table, only to have an announcement made to the room that the room has succeeded at that and you should move on. Indeed, even though I like this special more than others I've given the same rating to, it turns out that the structural flaws don't matter as much in a meatgrinder "the room must complete this many combat encounters to capture this section" scenario. There, its just one more combat encounter that you don't finish, whereas here, it's an encounter with a fun story point that gets subverted.

(When I ran this at GenCon a couple of years ago, it wasn't as bad as Solstice Scar; there, I was running 10-11 table of PCs who had only played their characters at GenCon. Enough years had gone by that they were high level, but you know how complicated high level characters can be -- and if you only play them a few times once a year, you don't really know them. This meant that all the players took a decent amount of time on their turns, and the majority of encounters we started were not finished. It was frustrating. It was a cool scenario with interesting NPCs and a neat story, undercut by the way that multitable scenarios work. I know I was not the only table with this experience; that night at GenCon, after Assault on Absalom and Solstice Scar, I overheard GMs in the elevator talking about how they'd learned their lesson and would never be doing a multi-table special again. In later months and years, playing Solstice Scar B and C, I had exactly the same experience as a player. The only reason we survived some encounters is because other tables finished them so we got to skip the encounter. It's gratuitous.)

So: really cool scenario, marred by the fundamental structural flaws of a Paizo multitable special.

There is so much in here. In fact, I think the scenario is designed so that you don't get to all of it. My players managed to fully succeed at the scenario despite not getting to chunks of it. The thing is, all the chunks are cool, and it would be fun to get to them all! There's a lot of roleplaying opportunity, and it would be a shame to cut that short. All of this means that 4 or 5 hours is really not enough to do this scenario justice.

The PCs go to Hell, quite literally, and have to perform an investigation and put together evidence that allows them to... well, get done what they need to get done. There are varied locations, and they are interesting. Hell is written in a way that makes sense for high-level characters approaching it-- it's not a pit of flame where everybody just suffers all the time, but it's a place in the multiverse where the laws are designed to allow the strong to do their thing and you have to be on the lookout for people finding ways to stab you in the back... but you *can* make deals and operate.

When I ran this, I had a good time. There's some interesting roleplaying in there, particularly if you have creative players. The setup is interesting, and there's a cool thing:

The story is a little bit random. I liked it, but I can see where it would be confusing. There's a big overarching time-limited thing happening, and you're supposed to deal with this, but if you succesfully deal with it too soon, it means that you'll miss out what it turns out the scenario really wants you to do. I would recommend to GMs:

The flaws are that it's easy to have several characters present who almost can't contribute at all to the skill check portion of the scenario. I had one player creatively contribute by making friends with locals and convincing them to do some checks for her, but others had to sit back and attempt checks they weren't that good at.

The combats turned out to be almost trivially easy. This doesn't really bother me that much; the scenario isn't supposed to be a meat grinder, and the combats aren't the core focus. (Indeed, I was playing the low subtier, and my players unanimously requested that I sub in the high subtier last encounter. That made it a little challenging, but they still handled it readily.) Part of this isn't a flaw of the scenario, but a flaw of Pathfinder -- the rules system is so amazingly bloated at this point, that yes, if a character wants to, he can create a Mr. Hyde like monster that gets seven attacks that all do a lot of damage all at once. (At least, others have assured me that that character was legal. All it did was convince me that Pathfinder has become broken.)

Fun scenario, good story, interesting NPCs. Five stars!

I'm tempted to ding it a star because the maps have a half square right in the middle. WTF???? If you print out maps, this raises questions. If you play online with Roll20, the grid on the maps can't line up with the software grid.

As with the Heroes and Villains set, it's a problem that the pawns have neither numbers, nor a small thing indicating which set they are from. Since this is the first Starfinder set, we could get away without the latter, but for all the same reasons that we gave in the discussion of the Heroes and Villains set, many of us really want to have numbered pawns.

The pawns themselves look good, and will be very useful in running fledgling Starfinder games. However, especially as more pawn sets come up, the lack of numbers is going to be an issue. For that reason, I've lowered the number of stars in my review.

I'm torn. The scenario is kind of fun, with some fun NPCs. The first combat has been interesting, GMing this twice and playing this once. The mystery is not all that much of a mystery, but the encounters end up being fun. And, it's a social, don't-kill-everything kind of scenario, which I like.

All else considered, I'd probably give this 4 or 5 stars.

However, then there's the Verbal Duel subsystem. It's a disaster. Mind you, the subsystem itself is kind of interesting and fun. It'd be great for a home game. But, (a) it's too complicated in an absolute sense, and (b) it's WAY too complicated to stick in the middle of a PFS scenario that we're probably trying to squish into four hours. What's more, the scenario stacks more complication on top of that by requiring you to lose, but not too obviously.

(Aside: I managed to get through it by simplifying the verbal duel rules. I didn't require everybody to recalculate all of their skills, and I replaced "edges" with generic rerolls that can be used by the whole party. I let them roll their skills as is and use any of the skills listed for a tactic without worrying about assigning each skill to only one tactic. I then didn't tell the players all of the mechanics. I gave them a qualitative sense as to how things were going, but I kept track of the numbers. This helped a fair bit -- we came in and were able to get going without *too* much pain and confusion as players tried to figure out a whole new subsystem that's needlessly complicated. My changes didn't really adjust the feel of the system, because exchanges and the tactics of the verbal duel remained intact. It was just a simplification. It probably gives the players slightly better bonuses for the tactics, but it's worth it for the simplicity.)

Run as is, all the players have to do a whole bunch of gratuitous recalculation of skill bonuses for their character. Sure, sometimes for some characters there's not much, but for some there is. It brings the game to a screeching halt as everybody starts to do arithmetic. And, then, there's everybody trying to wrap their heads around this subsystem.

The choice of using an overly complicated subsystem, and then pile an additional complication on top of it, was a big mistake. It's a big ugly sore thumb in the middle of what otherwise would have been an interesting scenario. As a result, this bumps my review down to two stars.

I ran this at the low subtier a couple of weeks ago. Seeing it get slammed in the reviews, I thought I would throw in a good review. The scenario is not perfect, but it's a cool scenario, and it's fun.

Are the combats too easy? Yes. One of them was pretty interesting, but the second one was over far too fast. Of course, my players did take a very good approach to it as they were getting close to it, so they deserved to have the combat not be too much of a challenge, but even if they had stumbled in, I suspect it would not have been too much of a problem. However, they really are side-lights to the real scenario, and that they don't take too long is a good thing. (Well, the first combat did take a typical amount of time for a low-tier scenario, but the second one was over very quickly.)

When I ran it, I did not know what player or characters I was going to have at my table. Still, it worked out that I had an interesting and diverse group that were fun to play with. The key is to ham it up a bit. The GM really needs to read ahead and be ready to roleplay various different NPCs in high-contrast mode. If you have players who are interested in that, and who will play along with being yelled at and belittled by a drill sergeant, the scenario can be quite fun. (On the other hand, if you have players who don't want to play along with being dumped on for a time, or players who just want to get past the talky bits and to the combat, they will not enjoy this scenario.)

My players did figure out what was going on and were ready to jump to a conclusion-type thing before the scenario wanted them to, but I found that not very hard to deflect.

Overall, I liked the scenario. I think the second combat could be beefed up a little bit, and the suggestion I make in the spoiler could probably be included in the scenario. Some particular groups of players will really not like it. (If your players didn't like The Stolen Heir or Library of the Lion, they won't like this one.) It's a nice change of pace from more typical explore-and-kill scenarios.

I actually agree with most of Le Petit Mort wrote below (including most of the criticisms), but I weigh them differently, giving this a four-star rating.

The scenario is pretty cool. No, there aren't necessarily plot twists, but that's OK. The plot is still interesting as it is. And, if *every* plot had a plot twist, then it leads to the kind of inevitable impossible-to-avoid metagaming that Le Petit Mort bemoans in the combat encounter. ("This guy seems to want to help us and like us? He's totally going to stab us in the back later!") It's nice if sometimes -- more often than sometimes, even -- things are as they appear in the briefing. Of course, making a plot interesting and engaging without surprise twists is hard, but worth it.

It's awesome to have an almost entirely social encounter that has almost no combat. A nice change.

Characters who are completely focused on combat are likely to be a bit bored in this scenario. However, when I ran it, the "spiky dwarf" (fighter with no social skills) did manage to contribute in the social part of the scenario, and we had some fun fish-out-of-water roleplaying as the servants tried to convince him to dress appropriately. However, the Soverign Court characters who like to hang out with mucky-mucks were really happy to have this scenario, a nice break from the usual mucking-about-in-the-sewers-fighting-monsters sorts of things that gets their noble outfits dirty.

The layout was troublesome, though, and is the only reason I don't give this five stars. Yeah, the combat was fairly standard, but that's OK. It's really a bit of a side encounter on the way to getting to the meat of the story. But it was spread out, and formatted as if it were two encounters even though it's only one. (It even says in the text that it's intended to be one encounter... so why not format it that way??) This lead at least once to me looking at the wrong subtier stat block as I was jumping back and forth between two different places for the single encounter.

Also, yes, there were a lot of potential circumstance modifiers that showed up in different places in each social stat block and in the description of each party. This also required some paging and a lot of keeping track.

It is essential that a GM prep this well ahead of time. You need to understand the Influence system and know it, and know what's coming. If you do this with a single read-through, you will make a hash out of it as you figure out how things are supposed to go.

I've now run this once and GMed it about a million times. (Well, six times.) This is a great scenario, and it has a couple of very interesting NPCs that are fun for the GM to play.

The scenario is much more fun to run if you have a group of players at least some of whom are interested in the roleplaying and negotiation. In those cases, it can easily run long; 2 out of my 5 slots at PaizoCon were pushing to be finished on time, and the other 3 all ran at least 4.5 hours.

I recommend printing out a color picture of the two key NPCs to clip to a GM screen or show to the players. In at least one case, I had a couple of players go gaga over the cover NPC....

It was also fun hearing the PFS Season 8 description partway through PaizoCon and realizing that this is probably one of the key lead-in scenarios.

A lot of people seem to have dumped on this one because of puzzle-hate. Yeah, the players are likely to seriously over-think the puzzle, but really it's not that bad. However, it's essential, as Andrew Hoskins notes, that you understand it yourself before running it, and that you also understand the various other interesting mechanics going on once the clock ticks T minus six seconds.

One hint I'd give the players for free -- not even really a hint -- is that the Fey slash numbering system is slightly different than the tally system we use. That is, I tell them that the fey use a vertical line for 1, but each time that line is crossed it counts as 2. This clears up some gratuitous additional complication, although honestly the puzzle is still tractable without it.

I enjoy the wackiness of the combats that occur in Uringen, and when I ran it the players had fun with it as well. It helps to have players willing to experiment.

There are a lot of things I really like about this scenario. This is the sort of thing I'd like to see more of. It's one that rewards more creative roleplaying -- in fact, it will downright punish a direct murderhobo approach. (But it's fair, because the initial briefing makes it very clear that a direct murderhobo response would be a bad idea. Even still, when I ran it, I found myself early on reminding players (in the form of asking them if they remember what they were told in the briefing) that that was in the briefing. The "kill your prisoners if you have the slightest excuse" form of playing your character seems to be pretty deeply ingrained in the PFS.)

I also like the fact that the second part (parts B-C together) of the scenario allows for multiple approaches-- my players took a variation on one, and it still worked, although the result was that for about 1/2 hour or more, three players were playing while the other four were just waiting.

I have a couple of problems with it, though. I may be a little bit sour on it because the game of it I ran went long, and it went long at the end of a gameday where we were going to get kicked out of the room, so we ended up having to rush the end. Still, I think there are problems at the end with how it's written.

I would strongly recommend that any GM running this only run it with four players. You don't really need more than that to get through it, and more than that would probably become cumbersome. There's a lot of searching, investigation, and conversation in this. The result is often that a small number of players end up dominating that section, either because their characters are best suited for it, or because they're the sort of players who just take the lead on this kind of thing. (I've long found over many years of gaming that this kind of thing is better for player involvement with 3-4 players than with 6 or 7. My table had 7, and it was just too many for this scenario.)

The biggest problem with the scenario is that the last section -- which is really cool in concept and in what can be accomplished -- doesn't give the GM enough guidance on exactly how to run it. For combats, we all know how to run it. (Well, sort of, once you take out that everybody remembers lots of the little rules slightly differently....) But for this kind of thing, there's not really an established standard, and the scenario doesn't do enough in telling the GMs how to actually go about doing it. More in a spoiler.

So, in summary, a lot of the scenario is really cool, and I really like this sort of thing in roleplaying games. There are serious problems with the last part of this scenario. It's the sort of encounter that most of the time in Pathfinder would be run in a much more free-form and fluid way, with a lot of improvising on the part of the GM and the players. It doesn't expcitly tell us not to run it that way, so no surprise I, at least, and I suspect other GMs come in reading the box text and asking the players what they say or do next. The scenario should really tell GMs to fully lay out the mechanics for the players. And, then, I'm not sure I like this extremely-structured, extremely-railroaded way of running a social discussion.

Put my mixed feelings together, and that's why this gets three stars.

I may have played this with Spaarky, as I also played it (yesterday) with the author as GM....

This is a fun scenario, and is among my favorite sort of scenario. It's flexible, in that there are a number of different approaches that work well for a fair amount of the story. It's also rich with lore, ties in with more than one PFS metaplot, and has at least three memorable NPCs (one of whom is especially so). (I guess you should ask me again in a month or two to tell you who the "memorable" NPCs are, to find out if they're really as memorable as I think they are!)

3.5 stars, rounded to 3, but I'm on the fence.

I played this at PaizoCon 2014 in mid tier (level 6 character at the time, I believe). I had a good time, and liked the mechanics of the intergroup interaction; that worked reasonably well. I brought the wrong character, though. This one is a meat grinder, and you need to have a character who can survive combat after combat. Yes, you need some other skills, but your entire party needs to be able to survive a basic dungeon crawl.

Then story around it was interesting, and John Compton makes a great Kreighton Shane. I'm not sure it all entirely made sense, but then, in character it wasn't supposed to. ("Wait! Where did those come from!" is an entirely reasonable reaction.) There was some good Pathfinder Society bits in here, of exploring and discovering forgotten lore, but it was a bit brushed under the rug in the meat grinder.

Read KestlerGunner's review below. I fully agree with it. I love this scenario, but see how it could fall completely flat with either the wrong GM or the wrong players.

I played this once as a PbP, and the GM pulled it off. It was a great and memorable scenario, and I really cared about the NPCs I was supposed to really care about.

I GMed this once, and it went pretty well. I don't know that I'm a great GM, but the players were the right kinds of players, and during the "big choice" towards the end

there was some legitimate debate amongst the PCs as they didn't think it was obvious which was the right decision to make. I love that kind of thing.

This one is atmospheric, the combats are interesting, and the story is great. It's a wonderful taste of what it would be like to be the Pathfinders cautiously venturing into the morass that is the crusade at the Worldwound. But, it's essential to have a GM who is able to play the NPCs, and it's essential to have players who are at least open to caring about NPCs as people (as opposed to viewing there characters as the equivalent of gamepieces in a board game achieving an objective).

This one was good overall. Not as good as the previous scenario in the series, but far better than Cassomir's Locker. To really make it work, in the last combat the GM has to play up the descriptive nature of the other things going on in the room in addition to the small part of the combat that the players are actually involved in in order to make it seem an epic struggle. If the GM has set things up right, and particularly if the GM has played up the Andoran faction missions, the ending can make a whole lot of sense given some interactions that the party has had in the previous two scenarios. On the other hand, the last fight can easily come off as seeming anticlimatic. ("That's it? This longstanding conspiracy involving disgraced noble houses of Taldor, cultists of an insane god, people going missing, and so forth, we just do a quick little fight like this and it's all over?") The GM would be well advised to emphasize how much else is going on the room in addition to what the PCs are doing. Also, if the GM can read this one before running the earlier scenarios in the series, he can lay down foreshadowing that will make this one more satisfying when it actually hits.

I was a bit disappointed by one room:

The denouement ties back in to the first scenario of the series. Hints are that that, rather than the actual overall plot and overall adversary of the series, is what this is really about, as that's the title of the series (which really only makes sense for the first scenario). To my knowledge, no further scenarios after this one have followed up on these two particular NPCs and this plot thread, but if so, I'd love to know about it, so I could play and/or GM those subsequent scenarios.

I'm a fan of the "Devil We Know" series as a whole, but this one is definitely my favorite instalment. There's a memorable NPC who's fun to play (assuming you have players who are willing to play along and have a good time with it). The puzzle aspect of the scenario is fun, and not too terribly challenging, meaning that players get to think and puzzle a bit, but also that they're unlikely to sit and remain stumped until you drop lots of hints. The combats are varied and interesting as well, and there's a setup for the last part of the series.

Far and away the least interesting of the "Devil We Know" series. There are some interesting bits in here, and the primary setting is an important part of the development of the backstory, but honestly I think it would have been better done incorporating that into one of the other scenarios and leaving DwK as a three-parter.

It's not bad, it's just that this scenario is kind of "there" and not especially interesting.

I've both played and run this scenario. This is a fun and memorable scenario. It's got some good atmospheric bits, some fights that matter, some twists, and characters you want to help but that aren't too nice.

The one drawback is that some players may "break" the scenario by doing something very foolish at the end that could lead to a TPK, at least at low tier with low-level characters. Players who either assume that anything they come up against is something they should attack, or who play characters who refuse to let any NPC make demands of them without losing patience and attacking those NPCs, may find themselves in trouble. Groups interested in thinking about how their characters might actually approach the situation rather than approaching the world as mindless murderhoboes or as "insult me once and you die" types could find this quite a fun scenario.

I ran this at low tier. There were three reasons I didn't have a TPK. One, there was a level-4 character along. Two, I softballed the tactics a bit. Three, one of the players didn't realize that UMD was a trained-only skill, so technically violated the rules keeping the level-4 character alive with a Cure Light Wounds wand. (I only realized after the game was over that the character didn't have UMD trained; as a Sorcerer, she could have, and her Charisma was good enough that the bonus was OK. I should probably have noticed during the game that the bonus wasn't high enough; oh well.)

The setup to the scenario and the story is potentially interesting, although it does take some finesse on the part of the GM to pull it off. But one encounter in the middle at low-tier is an almost guaranteed TPK. I'd recommend against this scenario because of that.

This is a nice "OMG we have to save the world, no time to get real help" scenario that can have low-level characters saving Absalom from disaster. There's a run around, and some interesting combats. Most modern characters won't have too much trouble with the combats, so if you're a player who is disappointed if the combats don't put you in serious danger, you may be disappointed by this scenario. At least one combat has an interesting twist.

The biggest negative is that the last map does not make a lot of senses. It's hard to figure out how to fully connect the drawn map to what's described, it's not clear where the enemies start, and it's not clear how the whole place fits together. The description assumes that there are some sorts of windows are arrow slits present that will be used tactically by the enemies there, but the maps don't make that clear, so the GM needs to make that stuff up.

Still, a fun and potentially exciting low-level PFS scenario.

I have mixed feelings about this one.

It's an interesting scenario, with a good setup, and a couple of very interesting set pieces. The combats are fun. However, in the middle, there's a bit of a slog that can very easily come across as a slog. I suspect that the two times I've run this, I just wasn't ready in the right way, and should have done some extra prep beyond what was given in the scenario to keep the slog from being a slog but making it more interesting. I might also "cheat" a bit on the middle part

If you have players who are going to metagame and think overmuch about the mechanics during the "slog", they will start whining that there's no way around some of the things that they get thrown into, and the scenario will become a bit of a downer. (That's what happened one time I ran this.) It will take some serious GM finesse to keep them from getting irritated and complaining about the writing during this.

However, the penultimate and final encounter

are both quite interesting. The penultimate encounter was a nailbiter that we barely got through when I played it, and remains a memorable FPS moment for me.

I'd give this one 3.5 stars; rounding down to 3 in this case because of the players who've come away with a negative impression because of the slog. I might round this up to four stars if I run it again, coming in better prepared as Damanta suggests below, and hoping for a group of players who are game for atmosphere and anticipation of peril.

I may be biased towards this one because I have run it three times. It's an investigative scenario. It's possible for it to feel railroady, as there is a clear direction to go, and most groups will do things in mostly the same order, but there is some freedom to investigate and look around to try to uncover what's going on. There are some surprises, although many people who either see them coming or think they saw them coming (because we have all heard many kidnapping stories over the years, and there are only so many plot twists you can do with them after a while), although I have seen some groups speculating that what's really going on isn't what's really going on. There are a few NPCs in this one that are fun to play as well.

The combats are fairly lightweight in this one. Indeed, depending on your group's approach, it's almost possible to get through it with but one (not very hard) combat, roleplaying your way through the other encounters. To my mind, this is a plus, but if you're the sort who likes a meat grinder with hardcore combat from beginning to end, you're probably not going to find this scenario to your tastes.