A dungeon-based adventure for 1st-level characters.
The ruined siege castles outside Absalom have long beckoned adventurers looking to make a name for themselves. Now an earthquake has cracked open one of these fabled ruins, and its lost mysteries and fantastic treasures lie exposed for the first time in centuries. But the tower's empty halls once more echo with living footfalls, and a new master has claimed the Fallen Fortress as his own. Can the PCs find a way to get inside its shattered walls? What ancient dangers and fresh threats will they encounter inside its crumbling chambers? And will the PCs be able to defeat the current Master of the Fallen Fortress?
Master of the Fallen Fortress is a dungeon-based adventure for 1st-level chararacters, written for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and compatible with the 3.5 edition of the world's oldest RPG. It also serves as an introduction to Pathfinder Society Organized Play (Paizo's constantly evolving, world-wide megacampaign). The adventure involves exploring an ancient, ruined tower and rescuing the captured Pathfinder held within.
This adventure is set outside the great city of Absalom in the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting, but can be easily adapted for any game world. It also contains a preview of the six new iconic characters from the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Advanced Player’s Guide, available August 2010.
Written by Rob McCreary.
This special 16-page Pathfinder Module was initially made available for Free RPG Day on June 19, 2010.
Note: Due to the special nature of this product, it is NOT part of the Pathfinder Modules Subscription.
The Chronicles Sheet and pregenerated character sheets are available as a free download here (1.2 MB zip/PDF).
Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:
I find this a wonderful module to run for Pathfinder Society. How does one get good at something? Repetition, repetition, and then more repetition. I find the difficulty, amount of combats, and lack of story to all be positives. If you want your PFS players to be hard-bitten grizzled veterans ready to tackle the higher tiers later on in their careers, RUN THIS MODULE.
No plot. No story. No problem. What can be said about this dungeon crawl? I ran this for a group of 6 level 1 characters. Half of which are noobs. I did this according to Pathfinder Society rules (for credit), so I wasn't allowed to go 'off book'. This is a fun intro to Pathfinder. You learn a lot about different low CR baddies. However, there is no real story. Just go here and explore it.
This is a good intermediate step for bringing new people in to Pathfinder. You don't have to deal with faction missions or hearing a long schpeel at the Lodge. My biggest complaint about this beginner mod is that there are a lot of combats, probably twice as many as a normal scenario. This made our pregen cleric Kyra work overtime. She could have ran out of spells and channels really quickly. It would have been nice to have some potions of cure light wounds to make an appearance a little more frequently. Also, some of the rooms (like the stupid bat swarm*) was just a room with something to fight, and no treasure to reward the PCs.
Still, a nice noobie mod, and everyone had a good time.
I used Fallen Fortress for my very first module and heavily modified it with a new story, replacing some nonsense encounters, populating boring areas, and made it into a sandbox dungeon crawl trying to rescue a damsel in distress. It turned out great and the players had a blast.
What made it wonderful is that the map is absolutely fantastic. It's an intriguing shape with plenty of ways for you to set up alternate routes and surprises. It's small enough to make the adventure short, but large enough to keep players wanting to explore. It's also easy to add floors, if you wish to make it bigger.
The downfall is that the story is lackluster and many of the encounters don't make any sense, like a giant frog that's isolated in a room and one large room that has absolutely nothing in it except for a javelin trap. If you must make any change, I recommend swapping the fire skeletons for normal ones. Those things can easily kill a 1st level PC in one round, never mind the damage reduction.
I love that this is free however i have no use for it considering i only have the beginner box. This means that i can't get the stats for most monsters(i recognize that there would be a noticable difference for the variety of troglodytes), yes i know that i can find the stats online(but this will take time and require to print more stuff out). I do however like the previews of the iconic characters(i could use them for beginner box bash games). Overall i think this is a nice download.
This was a great way to start a Pathfinder group full of complete noobs to the PnP RPG world. The game went smoothly and within minutes, the group wizard was casting burning hands instead of the basic magic missle. The pre made characters were a nice addition but we disregarded them. Climbing was nice to have for it showcased some of the other mechanics PCs have to encounter in the world. This was my 2nd time being a GM and I would say this is a great module for new GMs. Great Work!
Just an FYI, this module is now under the "Evergreen" rules in the PFS Season 8.0 guide. This makes it perfectly clear that it is replayable at Level 1 infinitely, and can also be played (and/or assigned GM credit) at level 2 a single time per play/GM, per campaign mode (Standard/Core).
Also, since I asked the question a few years ago on the previous page, it assigned 1 XP, 1 PP/Fame, as all Free RPG Modules do (half on slow mode).
