schattenstern's page

Having to deal with "starfinders" doing shit again is kind of tedious and lets you question why we still have these people in the society.

From an encounter standpoint the starshipcombat does its best to show the players EVERYTHING wrong with the system with giving them a bad ship (no turret and no aft weapon and the sides being weak enough to not really be there) and having the enemy have a superior ship (it can fire 2 weapons nearly every turn while the PCs can ever only roll one attack and have better statistics in every relevant kind.)

Whoever equipped the mechanic for this scenario did not consider the enemies.

Having over half the enemies resist or being immune to your main weapon is great and "fun".

Pregens should not be that missequipped for a scenario and feel useless in a lot of cases.

I must compliment the great use of skippable encounters in this adventure:
You can either do intelligent/creative solutions (and skillchekcks) or fight and the skill challenges were all fair to do. This was a pleasant surprise to me.

The scenario was a mess storywise and from a skill perspective.
It started with the worst influence setting I have seen in a long time… The skills are unfitting and force you to use sense motive as they do not really fit. Especially with the priests all being lorebreaking

and weirdly written this part does not work at all. Especially with the primary being dependent on having either Sense Motive or being able to guess unfitting skills for the one character that matters.
After reading through this section at least the success is dependent on getting everyone convinced which is a nice change of pace.
All in all this felt like a bit of a mess, which is helped by mistakes regarding the skills (Asking for non-existing skills like Society) The combats were fine(ish) but nothing to write home about and would have profited from another combat as it ran very short.

Whoever thinks an APL+2 Boss should EVER get an elite Template should never ever work on a second edition Scenario ever. (played in high tier)
This is something we complained often enough about but some people seem to refuse to learn.
The Story was solid and would have warranted a 3 star review without that final part, but the last combat is enough to deafault the whole adventure to 1*.

The scenario has atrocious success conditions and the balancing is a travesty.

And AGAIN requiering a crit success on a random skill check with no indication that it is important is something they should have learned is a idiocy 2 seasons ago (we complained enough about these checks).

This is assuming the clarifications are used:

This scenario is a good replayable with nice flavour and a interesting use of the chase rules.

Without the clarification this scenario is utterly insane and would get 1 star at best.

After a long time this is a good scenario in tier 1-4 that you can run without having too many problems.

This will be added to my convention reportoire for the forseeable future.
As this has easy forst combats to get new players into the system and the story not being bound by any gloarion specific tidbits but easily understandable.

Well the adventure has a interesting setup, but then it goes down the drain:
The first encounter has very strong creatures but the following skillchallange is just insane:

After 2-11 this means back-to-back catastrophes of scenario design.
This scenario feels like it was written for/playtested by a party of rogues and not a normal balanced pathfinder party.
This combined with a trap that does not work as written and most likely a wrong adjustment in the first encounter just add insult to injury.

Having a lot of the enemies being able to hit you on a 4 also feels GREAT and makes for FUN gameplay for everyone at the table and not just the GM… PLEASE do not use APL+2/3 encounters anymore … But even for GMs there is too many missing information to consider this a good sandbox.

As a level 1 scenario it seems to be aimed at new players, but while 1 of the 4 parts is fine and has nice RP opportunities, the second part (spells) has a great setup (solve a situation with stuff given to you) the “solutions” teach the players things that DO NOT WORK within the rules. (Using stuff against a creature that is immune against it or using spells against illegal targets)
The 3rd setup (swords) has a potential TPK in the first round of combat and RAW one encounter (the brooms) is impossible as they are immune against nonleathal which everyone has to deal.

The final part not only has the betrayal but also this guaranteeing 2 hard back to back encounters which WILL kill new players.
I can only warn against running this for new players, as they will get slaughtered and be taught completely wrong things.

This scenario was quite interesting, and while short it had a good social part, one combat part and a good two-parter in the starship.

The chase was a interesting changeup and worked better than the vehivle chases in previous sceanrios, as the rules seem to flow better and less new rules to focus on.

This scenario was quite solid.

I liked the setup of the final encounter.

One small criticism regarding the chase:

This adventure has a good mix of combat and non-combat encounters and an appropriate number of failsafes for a low level adventure.

Also even as a part of a series it can work good without playing the other parts.

After a lot of very dissapointing scenarios (espceially with problematic mechanics) this season this is finally a scenario with a good story and the mechanics to back it up.

The callback to Reign of Winter was fitting and the interaction with the town was very well made.

More of this kind of design would be nice.

Well this scenario is just tedious.
I very much like the idea of "building" a starship to use (and the showcase of new starship mechanics (+1 Star in the rating) the rest of this is just BAD.
Our table played lowtier and after 3 turns of the first starshipencounter everyone HATED the ship, that was shooting worse than a pegasus, had the limited fire issues of the drake and was slow as the Gorgon.
The ship had no damage (not really fixable as we had the highest DPR configuration) and NEEDS to be in close range to do it (while being slow and not very maneuverable. (It could be somehow fixable if the Turret gets a LONG RANGE heavy weapon and the point defense in NOT IN THE AFT but in the Turret)
It does not help that the first combat is

The second encounter is ok-ish, as the enemy wanting to go close solves the issues of that catastrophe of a ship.

The one ground encounter is not better as it uses the age olf mummy problem that should be known to cause wonky math, as using 5 overlapping auras WILL disable players no matter how low the DC is.

The 2 Stars are ONLY for trying out the new systems which were fresh, if not for that it would be a 1 Star scenario.
And including this many new options at once will lead to option paralysis for every player not very into starshipcombat.

Not only has this scenario a very wierd retcon - that does not make a lot of sense in character

but also

The scenario has a nice story and (in lowtier) solidly balanced combat encounters. Do more adventures like this.

This scenario had a interesting story but it was a complete MESS in execution.

There were massive editing mistakes, like copy and paste Errors, and missing skills to roll. The riddle is just plain unfair if you are not having English as a primary language.

Now to the worst part:
The Chase:
The skillchecks are FAR too hard for requiring a success on average per PC. THIS IS NOT FUN, especially with only 2 Skills (sometimes 3 per skill) and requiring a roll of about 10 on an invested character.
THIS DESING is discouraging a lot of players in my lodge and it SHOULD NOT BE USED AGAIN.

For the story and encounters I would give 3 stars, but this skillchallangedesign will remove 2 stars for a final total of 1 star.

This was a very solid story with fitting encounters.
You can do more of it.

This was a very interesting and challenging scenario. Especially the sceond combat was extremely interesting.

This scenario has a interesting story and a very unique and interesting final encounter.
I would like to see more encounters like this that are that interesting and use unique environmental options that are flavorful and fit the theme that well.

The setup for the scenario seems to be a fine follow-up to the earlier iruxi scenario, BUT…

The number of enemies is completely out of line with what PCs can reasonably save against (hightier with adjustments). This was the worst developed encounter I ever played since the catastrophe that is 3 Seugathis or 8 mummies in PF1. This encounter design is prone to TPKs, unfun to play and even the incapacitation trait ONLY matters for level 6 players. While this would make a fine balancing for a encounter for a group of only level 6 players this makes it completely unfun to play but also WILL lead to one or more players going AFK for quite some time.
I hope whoever is responsible for this NEVER writes/develops anything again, this is BAD design. (and similar encounters were already very hated/criticized in earlier scenarios so there is no excuse of “trying something new”)

This encounter alone is responsible for a 1star review.
The scenario is also a fail regarding being a repayable as there is not a lot of variance in it (and especially with the story of the first encounter being that illogical that it breaks all suspensions of disbelief…). This was one of the worst experiences I had in 6 Years of organized play… Congratulations on topping “gems” like SFS 2-02 or PF 8-05 or PF2 1-16/1-17 in a negative way. The final skillchallange is too overtuned and mathematically stacked against the PCs. This all contributes to this being the worst replayable currently offered in all of organized play. (4 out of 6 in skills where you realistically need to be expert to have a chance to meet the DC 22. NEVER EVER do something like that again where every check is a skill where there is a chance to not be trained in)

The second encounter showed a lot of potential, but the number of effects cause a bit of confusion at the table.
By far the funniest encounter was the optional, as it had a great RP-setup. (If not for the MASSIVE problems with the first encounter it.

The scenario is ok-ish, but it does not capture fe feeling of the maze (mostly extraplanar stuff) and the revieal of the "traitor" was not very... interesting.

Player review:
This scenario was great. It served as a great finisher of the dispassion storyline and delivered good background on Datch.
Mechanically it has one of the best spaceshipcombats and a very interesting boss encounter. The skill challenges fest fair, but the scaling of the saves in that challenge was weird as they used the same table as the skills.

The scenario was quite good, the story was interesting, and the skill challenges felt fair. Especially allowing perception (so everyone is at least trained) was a VAST improvement compared to the other 3-6 two-parter.

I played it in hightier and felt the combats more annoying rather than challanging. A big offender here was the Encounter B.