Pathfinder Society Scenario #3-14: Wonders in the Weave—Part II: Snakes in the Fold (PFRPG) PDF

I played this last night and was disappointed. The last one was really kewel and the the idea of a Boon was super kewel. This is rated from a player perspective, and I understand, some GMs run these cold and it has an effect on the sessions.

Pros-

The Boss fight was better then the last one but was odd and the entire time I was thinking "Was this needed?"

The Roleplaying in this mod has some excellent potential, but I blame our DM for not being a good inprov. You can do a lot here and the end was a great surprise.

Cons

Most of the fights were a breeze and they weren't the slightest challenging. The variety of opponents were horrible, seriously, why can't the aspis consortium have a Naga or something, that huge lake should of been a major fighting ground.

The Boon, seriously? ONE time use? Super Lame.

The End Boss? Who the heck was she? Why is she of Importance?

I have played this, I have neither GMed nor read this.

Oh cool, a special boon for playing the series. Oh its super narrow and completely useless? :(

This disappointment turns an average scenario into a disappointment.

Also there was this weird room at the end after beating up the badguys that messed up the narrative flow.

I agree with the two previous commentors (see below), this scenario left me wanting.

I want an explanation for how the bad guys got there. If this will be explained later on somewhere/somehow, that's fine, but if not, an explanation should have been included.

Multiple combats against the same type of bad guys (cave inhabitants and generic bad guys) gets boring, even if they are a bit different in combat themselves (bow opposed to sword).
It also doesnt help that the generic bad guys are badly statted and have no feats that help them be effeective in the type of combat that the scenario says they are there for ('archers' with no archery feats at all, etc).

The lack of flavor of the setting made it pretty boring to run, and the scale of the cave was annoying. Also, along that line, if the map is on a 10ft scale, that means the 'human made bedrolls' in one section of the map were somewhere around 10ft wide and 12-15ft long...

Faction missions were decent, though some were far too vague to allow the player to know what he was even looking for, and the description of the sought item didnt give any hints that THAT would be the McGuffin, either.

Unlike whichever of the previous reviewers said it, I liked the optional encounter being after the BBEG. It was a change of pace from the regular, though the puzzle was poor and gave no way of how to handle the situation if the PCs are unable to make the required skill check, but still want to give it a shot.

I agree with Entropi (see below). As written, this scenario is an unfulfilled and unglamorous trudge through the mud. As a GM, I felt I needed to edit and tweak encounters to make this scenario work. SPOILERS AHEAD.

PRO:
-The closing scene where the Muckmouth tribe discusses the possibility of alliance with the Pathfinder Society is a nice touch, and is a great chance for some decent roleplay. The diplomacy modifier penalties listed is a nice addition. More meta-quests like this, please.

-The Cheliax faction mission. Great job on this, it's a streak of colour that really shows how the faction mission can challenge the players creativity and create tension. Beautiful.

CON:
-The adventurer stat blocks are woeful. Is it a condition of membership to the Aspis Consortium that you need to take the worst multi-classing ideas and feat choices in the game? The 'archers' selection of feats is basic at best. My party played up and it was still mostly a cakewalk, aside from a little bit of stonewalling during the boss battle.

-There has been no effort made on the terrain description. Aside from a paragraph telling us what muddy conditions are like, there's little effort to show the terrain of this adventure locale. I needed to redraw the waterfall room to make it seem like a challenge for the party.

-The lack of fulfillment in the story. How did the enemy trespass into the Tapestry? Who is behind it all? If this is a three part story, tell us so. Don't leave us hanging here.

-The elephant in the room for the 'Wonders of the Weave' series is the lack of imagination seen in the creation of Hao Jin’s tapestry demiplane. A demiplane can be anything – a crystalline forest, an MC Escher landscape, the innards of an enormous creature. Anything! What we get instead is a misty, featureless swamp, inhabited by creatures found in material plane Golarion. It’s a lost opportunity that the world within the weave wasn’t actually wonderful. This was a great opportunity for an imaginative and interesting adventure locale for PFS play and the developers blew it.

It's not fair to give a low rating on a scenario without giving constructive criticism, but it's kinda hard to be specific without spoiling the scenario. I'll try to do both anyway.

This scenario was one of the worst I ever GM'ed. Every other PFS scenario I've run has been kept in print on my shelve for another run, some other day, but this one is going straight to the trashcan, so it won't pollute my other scenarios by being in the same room.

First of, the idea of having Pathfinders venture into at museum demiplane filled with ancient wonders, and where whole civilizations have existed in isolation for centuries, perhaps even millennia, is awesome. The possibilities for interesting stories are endless, and I would have loved to explore the Wonders that Hao Jin found worthy of preservation, or experience the sociological changes that the isolation would have brought to the ancient and unique civilizations so brutally ripped away from the Prime Material Plane by the mighty sorcerer. Instead, I get an utterly uninteresting and generic mud-filled cave, and a story that only relates to the whole Tapestry-tale so faintly, that less that 0,1% of the written material would have to be changed to move the scenario to any other swamp cave on Golarion. Talk about a waste of potential.

Add to this a row of only mildly interesting encounters, and several opponents that are both boring, badly designed, and easy walkovers. The quality goes up in the end, but only the optional encounter goes higher than "bleh". Even then, it'll never make sense to the players, and is still has very little information for the GM. All in all, the scenario has the feel of a tier 1-5 scenario, and could just as well have been designed for this.

To top this off, the scenario is also sprinkled with a fine layer of bad design, inconsistencies and outright faults. It's like it wasn't really proof-read. The map is made with 10-ft squares, and is too big to draw on a battle-map, even though the large size adds absolutely nothing to the scenario. Bad design, IMO. Several times, the wrong equipment is listed in the opponent stat blocks, and that only goes to make remarkably boring loot even less exciting. A nice handout represents one part of a letter correspondence, but the other half is not made as a handout. An NPC that has apparently lived all his life in a tribe that has been isolated for many, many generations has somehow, as the only member of the tribe, managed to learn how to speak common, and there is never an attempt to produce an explanation for this. And, of course, there is the faction missions fault, where information in one place states that the mission has to be carried out in secret, and information in another place (and on the mission briefing) doesn't state so. And don't even get me started on the the special boon.

It seems to me like the author perhaps was given a bad assignment that he really didn't ever get his spirits up about, but wouldn't turn down. It just seems... uninspired. But it does have some good things going for it. I like the very last part of the ending, and how the resolution of the scenario was played out. I'd like to see more of this stuff in future PFSOP modules. I also like that you don't just have to kill everything you meet, even though it would have been nice for the alternative to fighting to have been more interesting than just a series of Diplomacy rolls. And some of the faction missions are quite fun. Not great, but quite fun.

I would have given this scenario a 1-star rating, but it's actually so bad that goes out on the other side of bad and starts turning good again, so much that my players had a decently fun evening playing this retarded love-baby. They found the bad design hilarious, and perhaps they just needed a scenario they could steam-roll after a long streak of close encounters with The Gray Lady. So, I end up with two stars, and a sincere hope that the author gets a chance to write some projects that will inspire him. Much of his other work for Paizo has been great.