A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for 7th to 11th level characters (Tiers: 7–8 and 10–11).
The fabled ruined city of Dokeran, deep inside the heart of the Mwangi Expanse, has been found and it's your job as a Pathfinder to explore it and discover how it fell. After fighting through fiends, enslaved warriors, and the damned spirits of Dokeran's dead, you find that the ruined city has a dark secret—one you might not survive.
Written by Elizabeth Leib
This scenario is designed for play in Pathfinder Society Organized Play, but can easily be adapted for use with any world. This scenario is compliant with the Open Game License (OGL) and is suitable for use with the 3.5 edition of the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game.
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This adventure was poorly assembled. The maps are a mess, making no sense. The party is told to travel northwest, yet in the first encounter they are traveling east. The layout of the first encounter on the map is nonsensical, and for some reason, they've got north pointing to the left, which just confuses things. In the second encounter, the map legend states one square is 10' when a look at the map shows medium creatures taking up only one square...so they must have decided that the "temple" wasn't nearly big enough and tried to switch the scale at the last minute without adjusting the actual map. They say the temple treasure is hidden in the north wall...right where the door is according to the map. I could go on... There is so much sloppiness here that signficant editing will have to be done to make any of it make sense.
This is not a playtest review. It also concerns itself with running the scenario as a “normal” adventure outside the requirements of organised play. It also assumes that where it contradicts the Pathfinder Chronicles supplement Heart of the Jungle then HotJ will take precedence.
Overall, this is a solid scenario, but the end part shows signs of being written as a “generic” adventure conclusion and then ported to the Mwangi expanse afterwards. If (as I did) you buy it because of the Mwangi Expanse connection, then the end will either be a disappointment, or an opportunity to have a bit of fun converting the inappropriate elements.
The introduction, in Kibwe, has a Pathfinder representative giving the characters information about the Song of Extinction that the Pathfinder probably had no way of knowing. Hopefully, the players won’t think to ask him where he gets his information from.
The characters then head off to the ruined city of Dokeran. The subsequently published “Heart of the Jungle” has since seen fit to change city’s location (and spelling, but that isn’t an issue). Any players familiar with the geography of the Expanse may raise an eyebrow at travelling all the way from Kibwe to the Defaka River without incident.
The characters are then attacked by one of the few creatures in the Monster Manual but not in Bestiaries 1 or 2.
The next couple of encounters are pretty interesting, and then the PCs encounter the main bad guy, the renegade Mwangi witch doctor who brought the city to its knees. This is the bit I didn’t think was appropriate for the Mwangi Expamse.
Spoiler:
They meet him in a cathedral. And he’s a bard. And he wears a chain shirt. And he uses a rapier. And he owns a magical music box. Yuck!
If I ever run this adventure, the guy can stay as a bard, but he’ll have some custom spells (bestow curse, insect plague, entangle – and the “cathedral” will be a cave overrun with tree roots, so he can use entangle) to give him a completely different feel. The rapier is gone (he uses a staff or something) and the music box is a drum made from human skin that beats out a rhythm by itself.
The music box artefact effectively has no role to play here, which is a shame.
This PF scenario is 20 pages long, 1 page OGL, 1 page front cover, 1 page chronicle sheet, 2 pages faction missions and 1 page credits.
That leaves 14 pages of adventure.
The faction missions are cool and go beyond the standard "fetch me x" and "place y" stuff, at least some of them do. My favorite is catching one guy alive...harder than it sounds.
The scenario leads the PCs to one abandoned Mwangi city and there, they will face one of the hardest tests of the whole season - a fitting, climatic finale of the season. The artifact the PCs are supposed to unearth is cool and I can see it being used in the future. With some work, you could even run this scenario in another system like CoC - exchange some of the names, makes elves human, there you go.
My players thoroughly enjoyed this combat-heavy scenario that nevertheless did not feel like a n mindless hack 'n slash crawl. If your PCs are itching for a challenge in a cool, slightly creepy jungle-scenario, you should definitely check this out!
However, on a side note: It was announced at one time, that the seasons would have a meta-plot. In season 0, no conclusion or the like could be seen and the scenario was not a follow-up to any of the others. I'm looking forward to playing season 1 now, expecting to see something like that.
