Because it is CR 15.
The direct inverse of its page count...my years of experience studying ancient tomes on lost arts of numerology teach that this combination portends great things. PCs must survive, though, or they will never make it to the sequel.
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Almost done reading this one. A very fun read so far. Lots of Paizo product tie-ins (a good thing IMO!). I have not started running Society scenarios for my players yet, but I can't wait to run this one. I'm already planning on foreshadowing several things to build up to this.
Full review when I finish reading it.
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Please note that Episode #007 of Chronicles: Pathfinder Podcast features a lengthy review and breakdown of Eyes of the Ten, Part 1, Requiem for the Red Raven together with a spoilerific interview with Erik Mona concerning the development of the module and the rest of the Eyes of the Ten campaign arc. Of interest to many who may want to repurpose this PFS Scenario for other uses, Erik also explains what material was removed from this 51 page adventure -- allowing GMs to choose to put the excised material back in to their own versions of Requiem for the Red Raven.
Episode #007 of Chronicles: Pathfinder Podcast is available for download here
Recently I just finished be played through this scenario and after sleeping on it, I'm not really looking forward to playing the other tier 12 scenarios. Looking back and reading through the adventure to see what I should know when I was going to run it myself, there was practically every encounter felt like we were outrageously overpowered or it felt like the GM was going easy on us. I'm not sure if it was the scenario, the way it was run, the party, or some combination of them, but this isn't something I want to replicate.
We were a group of four players with a couple of characters that had made non-optimal character building decisions (Mine being one of them, I would change it if I could now, but that isn't available in PFS). It felt like it was expecting to challenge five optimized characters in this scenario and having less than that is just a horrible idea.
I sadly would never recommend running or playing this scenario at a convention. The story is nice and engaging, but with the random parties and GMs you get at conventions I think that this scenario will more likely be a bad experience.
The Tailspinning Ceremony was fun. Party had a good time.
The Red Raven encounter. This was horrific. Again the party was surprised and ended up trying to split up to try to control the opponents while we waited for the Venture-Captains to get up (Never happened, this bit of the scenario has led most members of the group to see them as absolutely useless.) The three Venture-Captains were disabled before I could even act. A pair moved to deal with the rogues and the Red Raven (to attempt to stop the assassination). On the balcony everything was relatively fine as none of the enemies (including the Red Raven) there could manage a sneak attack against the party rogue. The monk was injured but still capable of moving. Another character was caught between two stone golems and a scarlet worm. He lasted pretty well, but his character was dead on the third round. I was on the ground with him, I couldn't get into a position to heal him well enough to survive the assault. At this point everything shifted. The surviving rogues and Raven retreated. One worm started making ineffective attacks against the monk's dead body (until it was the only thing left) as the other characters came down and slowly finished off the golems and worms. The battle ended with the party each down to a handful of hit points.
Then we still had to deal with the sword being robbed. I didn't especially feel like running my character to my death, but at this point I felt like if I was going to give up, I might as well just quit the scenario. Was hoping for help from the Venture-Captains. Still didn't get it (See party opinion about their usefulness). This was a manageable encounter. If we had four characters still. Instead we had three and the battle was a long drawn out affair until the two characters were down and the remaining few enemies either teleported or surrendered to the remaining un-sneak-attack-able party rogue.
Got the raise for the character who's player got to watch us spend over an hour in a battle he couldn't participate in. Then we slept. At this point all my spells were spent in order to get the party back to full fighting strength, but all their daily abilities were spent as well. We couldn't move forward anymore. Ended up using my clairvoyance ability to peer as far into the maze as I could manage. Was given that the next encounter was a medusa.
We moved in well rested and began fighting with all the un-stoned servants. Most of the party was blind-folded (with Blind-Fight) and moved where the seeing allies told them to. When we fought the guardian naga the GM made special note (because of my knowledge check) that they had Blind-Fight and yet it was still turned to stone. I have no idea if he was trying to indicate that it had to fight eyes open or if the our eyes didn't have to be open to be stoned. For the moment I thought the latter. The fights were easy enough. Took about two rounds to complete each one. The ape was the hardest and it took us three rounds to defeat it with minimal damage thankfully. Right after it was defeated, the Medusa appeared. I was turned to stone. At this point it was an annoying losing battle for the party. It seemed to have unlimted uses of invisibility and fly and was able to avoid any serious danger from party members. We merely had to hit it, but at any point where we posed any threat to it, it used it's whole turn to escape and get completely out of range. We were forced back to cure the petrification on two party members before going back. Most the party just kept walking past the encounter as she declared that we were walking into a death trap. The monk that I cast air walk on moved up and stunned her and with that we dealt more than enough damage to take her out. I would have to say that dealing with just her took close to three hours total. It may not have been the most dangerous fight, but it was guaranteed the most annoying fight the party had to face.
At this point we found the tracks and followed them to the Red Raven's hideout. We declared that we were not there to fight and instead we wanted to end the bloodshed between the Pathfinder Society and them. They took it relatively well. The guard on the bridge felt compelled to give us that chance, but said that he would only let us pass if he was defeated in one on one combat. Given that this was the most peaceful arrangement we could set we accepted with no additional spells before or during the battle being cast on him. Both combatants fought dealing non-lethal damage (one of the party's monk had an easier time at it, but it still meant that he couldn't use some of his abilities that required lethal damage). It was a long battle and the guard barely won with one hit away from defeat. With that he felt challenged enough and let us move forward where we talked with the other members and told them what we knew and how we planned to remedy it. They accepted and we did not fight the giant bird and person controlling it.
We headed up to speak with the Red Raven directly about continuing peace only to find that he was on the chopping block. We had the other monk who still had ki points grab the don the Red Raven's cloak and use his monk ability to dimension door[i] onto the podium. Unfortunatly his words were not able to sway them away from continuing on and we were forced to move in. The Cheliax faction member did his thing, and the summoning of a devil was probably the most impressive thing I've seen from any faction mission. It moved in and destroyed the guillotine quickly as the fake Red Raven grabbed the real Red Raven and began running back to the rest of the party.
The devil, judge, and newly released specters were busy dealing with each other. The spectres focused on the devil while the judge attacked them all with a [i]blade barrier Once the devil was knocked out the specters attacked and killed the judge. On the other hand it was easy enough for the rest of the party to deal with the Gray Gardeners. They made full attacks to damage that missed too often and did too little damage to take us down. Soon enough they were all sneak attacked, bleeding, and flurried fast enough. I cast death ward on the Cheliax monk and he moved in with his ghost touch undead bane weapon to clean up the spectres before they could do anymore damage.
With that it was the end of the scenario. There was some fun had, but as far as difficultly, it isn't something I ever want to repeat. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have played this scenario with less than six players.
This isn't a review because I still don't know how much was the scenario, the party, or the way it was run and I don't feel comfortable adjusting it's rating based on this experience alone. But if I were forced to grade it now without reading through the entire adventure and running it myself, I would give it a 2/5, the story was great but I got to see it through a veil of frustration and uselessness which really hurt it for me.
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Recently I just finished be played through this scenario and after sleeping on it, I'm not really looking forward to playing the other tier 12 scenarios.
I enjoyed reading the details of your experience with this one. It reads just about how I felt about it when I played it, except you got a lot further than my group. It really deflated my desire to play the arc out, but I'm sure I'll eventually finish it off.
Director of Brand Strategy
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Does anyone have suggestions on altering the story line now, given what we know about ... ** spoiler omitted **
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Publisher, Chief Creative Officer
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Probably some unspecified affinity she has with the Maze that allows her unusual power over the statues. If her ability to animate statues seems too cheezy to you, I suggest dropping one of her feats and pretending it's a monster feat ability we haven't invented yet.
Probably some unspecified affinity she has with the Maze that allows her unusual power over the statues. If her ability to animate statues seems too cheezy to you, I suggest dropping one of her feats and pretending it's a monster feat ability we haven't invented yet.
Yup--when I ran it, I was a bit cagey and had them roll a Knowledge check, threatening the PCs that given what they'd seen, perhaps she might dominate the PC sorcerer who fell to her gaze attack (fortunately they dropped her the next round, but they blew plenty of resources to ensure that happened). It seems to have the same effect as dominate monster on any creature she has petrified, but without saves to end the effect, and I treated it as such for the purposes of which spells the PCs needed to use to remove it.
Can I bring a PFS compliant character that I leveled up in my home game to play this at gencon 2013? Or do I need to have leveled a character up in official Paizo run events?
The retirement arc (which this is) requires you to have a legal PFS character leveled up to 12 through actual play in order to participate.
All of the other scenarios permit you to use various level pre-generated characters to participate. If you do play your own character, you must start at 1st, per the rules to Organized Play which is a free download from the Pathfinder Society portion of this website.
