Really don't like Worlansi...

Why is Brackett giving the briefing? Caudron Wallace is the venture captain for Augustana, has been since 0-13.

From the tables I've seen them at, they've been heavy hitters doing lots of damage. But these have all been level 1 games.

I'll be GMing this Thursday, then playing it Friday. Going to be tricky going through with only 3 players though. I think we'll make it through, but the reporting notes are gonna be bloody.

Yeah, for now anything that's not batteries is a major downside.

Yeah, Operatives can use it (and all advanced guns) at the same rate normal classes use martial guns. So they trade off -2 to hit for better damage / effects. I'm building up a character doing that.

As to casting through it, you can slot a spell gem into it and discharge that for the Caster element change, but your spell DC will be bad. Plus your spending those actions casting instead of shooting your fancy big gun, so it needs to be worth it.

I wish Shifting Surge had 'this spell gains the trait of the element chosen' - that would be excellent. Surge would give you the bonus on the first shot, then Caster would retain that element for a minute.

Next best I've found is Infuse Vitality. Oh, we're fighting undead? Couple people add 1d4 vitality next shot, and then Caster retains vitality as the base damage. But that's only vs undead.

For cantrips, they typically require a save or spell attack, which operative isn't necessarily good at. One candidate that stands out to me is the Prismini version of electric arc, which can instead add charges to batteries. So if you're fighting robots, it might be worth it to top off your battery then go blasting electric.

At first I was like "the grenade actually did something useful?" then it came back and I was... yeah...

Woo!

I'm really glad to see a return to a pdf guide for organized play.

If there's no appendices, where will we find the stats for the monsters? In-line with the scenario text like in early pf1? Will it be all the monsters there or just custom monsters?

I like removing treasure bundles, and understand removing CR for a 2 level range game. But removing tags.... why?

Also not a fan of the shorter scenarios as it messes with convention scheduling and badges.

An interesting comparison. Last week I ran Godsrain and the Dragon. Technically a 7-10, but felt like a 3-4 in terms of story. This is technically a 3-6, but feels like a 7-8 in terms of story.

I ran this last night for 6 players for 34 CR, and the infiltration was a pain. Everybody started the game with 2 hero points. By the end, there was one left on the whole table.

Starting with Preparation: We get to do one activity. Is that the party gets one point for one edge point? Does everyone get to make an attempt for up to 6 edge points? Neither the scenario nor GM core answer this one. I let my party do one attempt (forge documents), which they succeeded at.

Roaming patrol. The group as a whole needs 2 successes. No problem.
Winding Sewers. Every player needs one success. First pass had 3 success and a crit success (which I forgot to apply when we got to B2). One of the others got it on the second try, but the last didn't until their 4th. Still, that's 6 success before 5 failures, so they get the bonus room and knock off 1 AP.
Pit Trap. First guy crit succeeded to spot it. I assume they still need to disarm it to get past, so I had them do that too, no problem.
Arnisant alarm. WOOO BOY! Need 2 successes from every player, using only Arcana or PFS Lore. 2 players had done 3-04, so they're done. One player got success on his first two tries - fine. The last three... Got it on 5th try, 6th try, and 9th try. That's 14 fails JUST on this obstacle. And at 5 and 10 fails, it gets harder. So my last player needed to roll a 16 for each success.

Complication. Doesn't say if this is group or individual. How many successes are needed? Just one for the whole group is all I asked for. - No problem. Back to Anisant.

I ran the A1 fight once they finished Arnisant. Technically they failed the infiltration, but the threat's also gone now. Do they still do the Library Door and the Imps? I decided yes, because you're assumed to have the sword later. They immediately got the 3 party successes with no failures on the door. Imp had most succeed on the first go. One guy on the second, the last on the 4th.

Important takeaway? Don't make kineticists do skill checks.

The rest flowed ok. 4 of the 6 players were intimidate builds, so that got interesting. The CR meant we got real hellknights instead of animated armors, so I didn't even get to be immune to it.

The last fight was rough even if Marious couldn't use his cool trick. We had ZERO casters in the party. But 4 hellknights and 2 named knights is still a lot.

The scenario looks really hard.

As it happens, in my run there wasn’t any combat.

One of the players took an interest in the Appraiser having critically succeeded in their check to identify it. I had them give me a sense motive as they talked to the creature. This was during the round where they could question Minister Jo — the player decided to talk to the Appraiser instead. They rolled well so I had them notice how the creature was looking at Minister Jo’s bracelet.

While one of the players used deception to distract Minister Jo, another used Thievery on the bracelet. Then the fighter used Athletics to finish the process of removing the bracelet.

One little piggy left the market.

I think the bracelet is on the Appraiser, not Jo. Think genie cuffs. But there's also nothing written on how the party notices they're the problem, nor if they can be removed before a fight.

Mythic points replace hero points.

If they have both the party will steamroll this scenario.

I've run it 3x all 3x times it's run extremely long. Id make the ship encounter 1 round and narrate the rest. Id make sure the giants are a social encounter as well.

2 out of 3 times the party has destroyed the final encounter as well.

I'm not going to run it for a while because it's too long lol.

I first ran this at a con in the last slot of the night so that we could go overtime. Even with some overtuned PCs it took nearly 6 hours. I did not give out hero points, but afterwards realized that was a mistake.

The mythic rules in the set say to change ONLY these rules. They do not mention the hero points. Therefore, you should still give out the hero points as if there was no mythic.

I've since had this game at my local store. Since our store had a strict closing time, I directed the GMs to skip the spiders AND the statue fight. One table (23cp) finished right on time, the other (16 cp) about a half hour early.

Having reviewed the rules, this is very wrong. PFS does require the scenario to be run RAW, but it also expects the GM to adjust the adventure as required. This includes fixing obvious rules typos/errors; reskinning monsters that trigger phobias; and resolving players' creative attempts to bypass challenges.

In the last few months, GMs were given much more flexibility in handling such things.

I made a spell / ability list for the many monsters in this and put it on pfs prep. http://pfsprep.com/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewforum.php?821

I'm a bit lost on this. It seems like only one of Follow the Money / Gathering Blackmail / Confrontation gets picked. Though if Gathering Blackmail goes badly enough it gets the final encounter from Confrontation anyways. Is that correct?

Not the same if we're not hanging out with the staff in the bar after con.

...

Her write-up is much darker than her stat block

I suppose it's also in that player's guide. But I know it from scenario 4-01 Rise of the Goblin Guild. A corner of it is also used in 4-03 the Golemworks Incident.

This is actually pretty thoroughly explained in Divine Mysteries. Maybe wait to read it before passing judgement.

Oh, I have. It's a nice story that goes good to improve Torag's image after it was tarnished in Sky King's Tomb. And improve relations between dwarves and orcs. It still comes out of nowhere and has no support in any of the previous Urich material.

I also talked with the author who WROTE Urich in the scenarios, who agreed this felt unsupported. She's the one who pointed out the godclaw problem to me.

It's not that it's a bad move, and teaming up with Torag isn't even out-of-character. It's just out of left field with nothing to hint at it from his prior portrayals.

Uirch, one of the newly ascended Orc gods, has taken Torag's place in the Talon of the Godclaw. Appatently the two are quite close, having privately collaborated during Uirch's mortal life. Torag also served as Uirch's second during his crucible, and Uirch returned the favor by saving Torag's life when the latter was attacked by a vengeful Grask Uldeth. This revelation is apparently somewhat controversial for both Dwarves and Orcs.

And completely out of nowhere. Uirch is WELL documented over many PFS scenarios, and never had ANYTHING to do with dwarves. Teaming up with Sarenrae would make more sense, as he followed her in life. With all the revelations about Torag being kinda s**ty in Sky King's Tomb, maybe he's trying to redeam Torag, but it's a weird thing to add in.

As to joining Godclaw... WTF? Uirch is super CG. I know we're not using alignment anymore, but there's no way he would fit along side the regimentation of the hellknights.

How does this change to Primary Target interact with last round's change to Whirling Swipe?

The other problem was the orders that for these specific guards; we couldn't kill them. Nobody was built to do non-lethal, so we're taking penalties to hit for both fights. Except our casters, who were just SOL because they can't change to non-lethal on the fly. By the last fight I was willing to just eat the infamy and pay it off with AP. But then the trigger warning happens and it feels like a slap in the face to any attempts at nonlethal.

Something about this doesn't feel right to me. While the quality of presentation may vary from GM to GM, the ability to get the same game at any table is one of the hallmarks of PFS. Yes, GMs need room for improvisation and handling creative solutions, but that is a fine line and this feels like it misses the mark. I can't put my finger on why, but it feels like losing some of the 'organized' part of Organized Play. Maybe add some limitations that changes may only be in reaction to player actions or concerns.

I agree with the points made by Cirithiel, Tomppa, and Mr. Fred.

Reskinning enemies to avoid phobias I get. I've had to deal with a giant spider issue at a table I ran. But reskin for personal preference? I don't want to hear a conversation where one table fought tigers and another fought wolves.

On the note of 'adjust obvious typos or errors in a scenario' - the editing quality has gone down drastically in recent years. Please put more funding to editors and don't make GMs do the work that ought to be done in house. And when errors are found in scenarios after release, it's not like you're reprinting books - just update the PDFs.

As to formatting the text. Things that are listed in the bulleted sections (use alternate maps, fix typos) should not ALSO be listed in the header paragraph. Duplication leads to bloat and errors years down the road.

Edit: I'm not opposed to revising the text. Just think it needs more work.

Don't put it on top of one big fire. Spread it out over multiple smaller fires so each one triggers the weakness.

Note to those looking at Oracle dedication: there's a possible trap there. Unless you also gain a focus pool from somewhere, if you take cursebound feats you don't have any way to bring your curse back down.

They made it work for biohacks in starfinder, so they certainly COULD make it work in pathfinder.

A quirk of the Active Hands setting is that it actually allows a level 18+ Soldier Skittermander to hold more weapons than if all hands were active at once. Thanks to Damoritosh's Grip's wording Explicitly only allowing you to wield one two-handed Melee weapon in one hand and one two-handed Area or Automatic weapon in the other, if you could use all of your hands at once you would either have to forego using anything in your other hands at all, or ignore this feat. With this method though, you can hold three two-handed melee weapons (say, a Slashing one, a Piercing one, and a Bludgeoning one) each in one hand, and three two-handed Area/Automatic ranged weapons (say, a Fire one, a Cold one, and an Electric one) in the other three, and since there's no rule against Holding a two-handed weapon in one hand, and you'd only ever be Wielding one of each at a time, you could technically be battle-ready with 6 two-handed weapons at once, compared to the max 3 you could get without this combo.

That sounds awesome.

So I looked back more on how SF1 handled this. And then found out what ELSE this playtest took out.

In my 16 characters, I never played a many-armed race. But I did sometimes go for more handy options.

One is a Raxilite. This is a tiny sized creature that comes with a doc-oc style implant on their back that can collectively hold one medium sized weapon for them. Their own hands are left free to handle tiny-sized things. Mine was a caster so they weren't really using their hands in combat, so wasn't an issue.

I have a nanocyte who used their nano swarm to create a natural weapon, and could fight with that while keeping their hands free. PF2 DOES THIS TOO with many ancestries. So we already effectively have 3rd hand fighters.

Here's something they removed: Bayonets. They had clamps where you could attach a melee weapon of light bulk to a rifle, effectively a light-bulk finesse weapon to a pistol, or up to a 1 bulk weapon on a heavy gun. Or instead you could mount a grenade launcher on the gun. I had a vesk that fit the model for the new Soldier class: They carried a heavy flame thrower, with an underbarrel grenade launcher, and wielded a sword with their tail. IT WAS FINE. I'm still picking just one to use per turn, with the tail sword for AoOs.

Something else not in yet: Power armor. Power armor came with a number of mounts on it to put your weapons on and fire them while your hands were free. This let me have a sword, a shield, and shoulder mounted guns. The purpose is versatility in threat range response. Different element guns or melee as needed.

The last one, though I never used it, was that around level 10 or 11 you could just add extra limbs through cybernetics. That's missing too.

The unwieldy system can cover most of the issues people propose here. Word it that using an unwieldy weapon taxes the user enough that even if they have more actions or weapons, they're still unable to do it again without more feats.

I don't have an answer to people saying that it opens up lots of wand use - the PF2 tables out here don't get much wand use. But it sounds really expensive for multiple one per day items.

Hands were largely covered a year ago in this thread

We told you for a year to ditch the 'only 2 hands at a time' rule and the 'spend an action to keep flying' rules, yet you didn't listen to us. Why should we expect you to listen to anything we say NOW?

I had one come out of the stairs. So many corners.

No, the Halflight path is noted as an alternative to the cataracts route.

The rest of the quote:
"The vast majority of travelers to Kaer Maga make use of the trade roads that follow the Yondabakari up its cataracts to the top of the Storval Plateau, or else make the farther journey from the giant-sized Storval Stairs to the northwest. Yet for those desperate to make as much haste as possible, there remains another road—a route that twists and turns through the very rock of the cliff face, held open by the Duskwardens against the
creatures of the depths since time immemorial. This is the Half light Path."

Ah, nice. Ok, 445 mile path it is! Still 28 days...

Rereading my copy of City of Strangers from PF1E, there is a way up the Storval Rise right there near Kaer Maga:

"The vast majority of travelers to Kaer Maga make use
of the trade roads that follow the Yondabakari up its
cataracts to the top of the Storval Plateau, or else make
the farther journey from the giant-sized Storval Stairs
to the northwest."

But still, it's a very long journey just following the Yondabakari river from its mouth at Magnimar inland to Kaer Maga. Much longer than the scenario makes it seem, at least 400 miles.

I think that route goes up the Halflight Path - a completely valid route, but it comes up in the middle of the city, not coming in through the warrens like the scenario describes.

That's a lot of purple

Obvious error: in low tier, the elite version of the ooze has a +131 to hit with its range attack.

So the Pathfinder Society has a lot of leadership NPCs. We have:

* 10 members of the Decemvirate
* 3 Masters (of the Swords, Spells, and Scrolls 'schools')
* Zarta Dralneen (Head archivist)
* The 6 heads of the current factions

I'm curious what other people think about this. Do you think the Society could use a trimming/consolidation? Or if not, what ways could the large cast of leaders be juggled to have them make an impact?

Let's start with Waterfall. Doesn't HAVE to die, but definitely has no right to be in the society.

Definitely keep: Eando Kline. I'm super concerned for him because the last 2 seasons have had him butting heads with everyone, and they're setting up a confrontation. Yet he's been RIGHT every time. HE'S the good guy here. Don't do him dirty and turn him into Torch 2.0.

Yet the box text makes it sound like the trip is only a few hours.

The timeline also doesn't work - if we're coming into Kaer Maga through the warrens, then the caravan came in from ON the plateau. For that to happen, we would have had to go up the storval stairs and around the mountains - at LEAST 618 miles. At 16 miles per day (1st ed travel rules - 2nd doesn't have them) that's 39 days. Even if you stayed on the lowlands and went up the halflight path instead, it's 445 miles or 28 days. Plus who know how long it took for Nellie's message to GET to Magnimar. Yet Miso only disappeared 2 weeks prior to our arrival.

A simple solution is to have the Magnimar briefing say 7 victims instead of 8, and Nellie adds one when the party arrives. Or Magnimar is 8 and Miso is the 9th.

Yes it's petty, but I dislike it when scenarios forget the travel time between briefing and mission, especially for long distances like this.

Also, we never get Eando's answer about the Ustalav job, or why an Ustalav job would be handled from Magnimar instead of by VC Basia in Karcau or the gnome in Caliphas.

A-1, it says for levels 3-4 the DCs are 2 higher. I assume that should be for levels 5-6 the DCs are 2 higher.

Andrew the Warwitch wrote:

I am hoping that we start getting more scenarios for PFS. There is so few new content being written for Society, I can't even remember the last time I actually got to play scenarios.

Year 5 and Year 6 are both slated to have 20 scenarios plus an interactive special. Additionally, a two-hour Quest is released every other month. I cannot fathom how anybody could refer to this as "so few new content."

PF1 had an average of 28 per year (including specials). It's not a LOT more, but having a reliable 2 per month FEELS different.

Conversely, I could totally see a fringe, splinter sect of Calistria's church who do hold bees in higher regard than wasps. Perhaps they believe that revenge should come at any cost, even one's own life, and respect the bee for giving itself to get vengeance on whoever disturbs their hive.

I don't think other Calistrians would be big fans of them.

They could form the Apis Consortium.

Can't wait to help the city get that lich off the air.

I play a ton of guild wars 2, where your character is typically referred to as The Commander. So seeing commander as a class has me excited and a bit of a giggle.

Rob ran a game for me that was fun!

Though I really don't want to see these two thieves again.

At this point, I want it to be Norgorber, fear it's Iomedae, and expect it to be Lamashtu.

Rovagug lives! Awesome that the death of Rovagug kinda sorta ends the world.

Just one world though.

Yes, and are pretty much the only benefit you get for crafting. If you're making a vehicle with the intent of ramming it into targets, it's a great route to go.