RSS RSS Facebook Twitter Email
Pathfinder / Adventures / First Edition Adventures / Pathfinder Modules

Pathfinder Module: Doom Comes to Dustpawn (PFRPG)

4.70/5 (based on 6 ratings)
Pathfinder Module: Doom Comes to Dustpawn (PFRPG)
Show Description For:
Non-Mint

Add PDF $19.99

Add Print Edition $13.99

Non-Mint Unavailable

Facebook Twitter Email

Invaders from Space!
When the iron mines that made Dustpawn so prosperous played out not long after the Goblinblood Wars of Isger ended, the city shifted its focus from mining to goat herding with quite a bit of success. Things have, as a result, been quiet and calm in Dustpawn for the past several years, but that quiet is shattered the night a strange falling star roars across the sky above town to crash somewhere in the hills several miles to the south. When several locals eager to find the fallen star and strip it of its ore go missing, it becomes apparent that whatever has fallen from the sky is much more than a mere meteorite. There are those in town who claim the falling star was in fact a ship, and now a strange malady is creeping through the townsfolk. Can the PCs discover the truth behind the falling star before doom comes to Dustpawn?

Written by Mike Welham, the 2012 winner of Paizo Publishing’s annual RPG Superstar contest—in which unpublished authors compete before a panel of celebrity game designers and legions of their peers for the chance to write a Pathfinder Module—Doom Comes to Dustpawn presents the players with a classic trope of 1950s sci-fi recast in the fantasy setting of the world of Golarion. Can the PCs save the town of Dustpawn from a menace from the darkest depths of space?

Doom Comes to Dustpawn is an adventure of investigation and cosmic horror for 9th-level characters, written for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and compatible with the 3.5 edition of the world’s oldest RPG. This volume also contains a gazetteer of the town of Dustpawn and a brand-new monster template for a strange form of feral mutation, both of which can easily be integrated into any campaign setting.

Written by Mike Welham, RPG Superstar 2012 winner.
Cover Art by Grafit Studios.

Pathfinder Modules are 32-page, high-quality, full-color, adventures using the Open Game License to work with both the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the standard 3.5 fantasy RPG rules set. This Pathfinder Module includes new monsters, treasure, and a fully detailed bonus location that can be used as part of the adventure or in any other game!

ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-504-4

Doom Comes to Dustpawn is sanctioned for use in Pathfinder Society Organized Play. Its Chronicle Sheet and additional rules for running this module are a free download (111 KB zip/PDF).

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

Hero Lab Online
Archives of Nethys

Note: This product is part of the Pathfinder Adventure Subscription.

Product Availability

PDF:

Fulfilled immediately.

Print Edition:

Available now

Ships from our warehouse in 11 to 20 business days.

Non-Mint:

Unavailable

This product is non-mint. Refunds are not available for non-mint products. The standard version of this product can be found here.

Are there errors or omissions in this product information? Got corrections? Let us know at store@paizo.com.

PZO9541

1 to 5 of 6 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>

Average product rating:

4.70/5 (based on 6 ratings)

Sign in to create or edit a product review.

Fun, Original Feel

5/5 —

NO SPOILERS

I ran Doom Comes to Dustpawn via play-by-post for six Pathfinder Society players. One thing I can say off the bat is that the module really would work better with just 4 (as designed), because my PCs had little real difficulty with any of the encounters. But putting that to one side, the module has a great, original feel to it and is certainly a different adventure than the norm. The interior artwork (and cartography) is quite strong, and there's a solid amount of role-playing (especially at the beginning) to off-set the later combat/exploration sections. It also has a nice, epic-feeling conclusion. Although I wish I could go back in time and run it for a group that would be challenged more by the encounters, I think this is a great module and definitely worth experiencing.

SPOILERS!:

The adventure has a great backstory, some of which the PCs will be able to learn: over a century ago, a cabal of elven sorcerer-astronomers from the nation of Lirgen set out in a magical ship to explore the stars. Some years after they left, Lirgen itself was destroyed by the perpetual hurricane known as the Eye of Abendego. But the ship, Lirgen's Glory, kept going until it encountered the mysterious creature that had been beckoning to it: the Emissary from Beyond, a vespergaunt agent of the Dominion of the Black. The Emissary partially succeeded in enslaving the minds of the ship's crew and convinced them to lead it back to Golarion, where it plans to prepare the planet for its masters. This is the "doom" that's now on it's way to Dustpawn--a small mining town in the foothills of eastern Isger. The module includes a handsome map of the town and two-page description in an appendix (not enough to flesh it out as much as I would like, but enough for a GM to get by over the course of a module).

The PCs enter the picture when they hear about (or are hired to investigate) rumors that a mysterious meteorite crashed in the hills south of Dustpawn. No one has found the meteorite yet, but ever since it crashed, livestock and hunters in the region have disappeared and the townsfolks have started acting strangely. The PCs' primary contact is Dalviss Crenn, a former adventurer who now runs an inn called The Mineshaft. The module does a good job describing Crenn's personality and the layout of the Mineshaft, which will likely serve as the PCs' base of operation over the course of the adventure. Dalviss explains that one of his own staff members--a cook named Leeara--has gone missing while looking for the meteorite, and that he suspects it may be more than a simple hunk of rock. Additional intrigue is provided by the fact that four mysterious strangers are now staying at the Mineshaft, claiming to be prospectors but acting rather suspiciously.

One of the major strengths of the module is that it's open-ended on how the PCs pursue their investigation. If they look into Leeara's disappearance by searching her room, they'll find clues that lead them into a cave in a nearby swamp she used to stay in while foraging for cooking ingredients. Only, Leeara has been transformed into a feral catlike person! If they instead start off by investigating the suspicious strangers, they might learn they're local cultists of the Dominion of the Black who have been poisoning/cursing the town's water supply with "dream crystal toxin" to pave the way for the Emissary's arrival. Not only that, several more cultists (and their leader) are hiding out in a nearby mine. A third option is for the PCs to just start looking for the crash site of the "meteorite"--there are some clues that can narrow down its location, but things like divination or flyovers (the PCs are ninth level, after all) can help them spot it. But the crash site isn't from a meteorite--it's from Lirgen's Glory, broken in half from the impact! Inside, the PCs will encounter more animalistic "id mutants" (transformed by the Emissary's magic) and learn that they're dealing with a ship that has travelled among the stars! I especially liked the portrayal of Gelviel Zorriah, the ship's captain, who is (insanely) convinced that the PCs are his crew members and therefore orders the group to carry out various "surveys" of the "new world" the ship has landed on.

By exploring Lirgen's Glory, the PCs will learn that the Emissary's arrival is imminent. Here, they're presenting with an interesting choice. The Emissary is psychically connected to a minor artifact aboard the ship called the Orrery of Distant Worlds. The orrery is a quite powerful magic item (each of its planetary spheres can be detached to cast a different spell), but destroying the orrery will significantly weaken the Emissary before it arrives. The group I ran the module for was divided on how to proceed, which is the mark of a good dilemma.

When the PCs get back to Dustpawn, some very cinematic scenes show how the town is suffering from the madness brought by the Emissary drawing closer and closer. Some of the NPCs transform into id mutant monsters that have to be stopped (hopefully without killing them--another good challenge). As for The Emissary itself, it's a little underwhelming in appearance (vespergaunts are medium-sized creatures that don't look that different than an ooze) and there's no map provided for the big final battle. I ended up using the Town Square flip-mat, which worked fine. Again, the PCs I ran it for handled the creature with little difficulty, but I imagine it could be a more interesting fight with a different group.

Overall, I really liked Doom Comes to Dustpawn. It's a bit of 1950s science-fiction tropes integrated smartly into Pathfinder fantasy. It's also a different type of SF than the type presented in the Iron Gods adventure path (no robots or laser guns here!). If you get a chance to try it out, I'd recommend it.

Awesome writing.

5/5 —

My players and I sat dowm to play this. From the first box text to the final blow of the heroes, the excitement of the plot drove my players deeper into the mystery. The table had a fun time dying and battling the enemy, and with a mighty blow from the last of four players, saved the town. If you like horror and Cthulhuian themes, I fully recommend this module.

B-Movie Goodness

4/5 —

Ran this for PFS. Meant for four but ended up with a full seven players at the table which made a big difference.

First off, I loved this from a GM standpoint because it has a nice mix of Lovecraftian meets 50's B-Movie science fiction and it works wonderfully. Just right.

Taking into account that we had three players more than suggested I think that the encounters are just not tough enough once you get into the story. For the level of characters this is designed for it is still too easy to almost walk it in my opinion.

Good module. Fun times. A good option.

Taste of the Fusion Fantasy

5/5 —

Investigation + Horror + SF + Magitech?
Profit!
(the GN driv... demon engine is too awesome to leave)

—

1 to 5 of 6 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>
Search Thread

Search this Thread:

51 to 71 of 71 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>
Liberty's Edge Contributor, RPG Superstar 2012

I ran this at a PFS table with an APL hovering around 9.5 and they mopped the floor with most of the encounters. So, anecdotally speaking, you might be able to run this for a group of 8th level characters as a reasonably challenging adventure.

At any rate, as designed, the module provides enough experience to gain one level.
Webstore Gninja Minion
1 person marked this as a favorite.

Removed a post. Please do not use rape (and other variations of the word) in that fashion, please and thank you.
RPG Superstar 2011 Top 8
2 people marked this as a favorite.

Nice job on this, Mike! I finally got a chance to read through this this past weekend. I really like the open/sandbox nature of the adventure- a good mix of investigation and dungeon crawling.

Shameless plug, but if you want to add even more weird to the adventure, I recommend checking out Zombie Sky's "It Came from the Stars" Campaign book- chock full of player and GM material to add a little bit of the weirdness from space to any campaign. Mike was also one of the many talented designers on that project.
MJinthePitt wrote:

Two quick questions ...

If I was going to be running this for a party of 6, would people suggest dropping the starting level or two? (People are already commenting that encounters are under-powered.)

And as designed, how many levels are the players expected to advance?

Answered my own questions after talking to my players and reading through the PDF. We've decided to run this with a group of 5 players at 6th level. They're looking forward to the challenge.

I've gone ahead and stat'ed up a party of rather nasty Hobgoblins to drop into one of the other mines in case the players decide to head off a'wandering.

I'll post a review after we've finished running this in a few weeks. I'm guessing it's only going to take us two or three Wednesday evenings to finish this up.
Liberty's Edge Contributor, RPG Superstar 2012

It took 8 hours for me to run this, so you should be able to finish it in a couple of evenings.

I look forward to your review, and I'm especially interested to see how it works with your changes.

wow again an picture that amazines me where do people get this stuff :D
Contributor
1 person marked this as a favorite.

I want to run this for a local group.
1 person marked this as a favorite.

And I think it might tie nicely with another product I know of.

When the Sky Falls.
Webstore Gninja Minion
2 people marked this as a favorite.
Sethvir wrote:

And I think it might tie nicely with another product I know of.

When the Sky Falls.

That is full of awesome exciting things—as is this item!

Sethvir wrote:

And I think it might tie nicely with another product I know of.

When the Sky Falls.

Malhavoc Press's stuff was always genius.

Liberty's Edge Contributor, RPG Superstar 2012
2 people marked this as a favorite.
Liz Courts wrote:
Sethvir wrote:

And I think it might tie nicely with another product I know of.

When the Sky Falls.

That is full of awesome exciting things—as is this item!

Hey, I contributed to that! :D

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Mike Welham wrote:

It took 8 hours for me to run this, so you should be able to finish it in a couple of evenings.

I look forward to your review, and I'm especially interested to see how it works with your changes.

The players had a great time with the beginning of the adventure. I think the decision has already been made the we might end up stretching this module into some kind of story arc with these same characters.

Not really a spoiler but details about what went down in our game:
We started playing last night and didn't progress too far into the module. It ended up only being 4 players, our 5th couldn't make it. They had some fairly well designed 6th level characters but they aren't straight-up killing machines. The party was pretty successful of their investigation at the inn but interactions with the citizens of Dustpawn were laughable.

Always surprising me with something, they decided to rent a boat to get to the location in Part Two of the module. That figured out, the four of them made quick work of the encounter at B1 with only one of the characters taking significant damage. There was minimal bloodshed at B3 and the party returned to Dustpawn a bit more encumbered than when they left. Alyssia Turpin was not pleased to be awoken in the middle of the night and told the 'obviously' drunken adventurers to come back by the light of day after they'd slept it off.

And that's where we left it for the evening, we'll pick up playing again next week. The party has picked up enough clues that they'll likely be heading straight to Part Three or trying to check out A10.
Grand Lodge

This was the fourth anything I've DM'd, and it was the first time I really had a blast doing it, despite the couple of dozen hours of preptime. It took me quite a while to prepare because I'm somewhat of a perfectionist, and there was a lot of rules to cover that were new to me on the DM side! I ran this for a party of 6 players of levels 9-10. It took about 12 hours of playtime divided to 2 sessions.

Several interesting encounters and a few really fun-to-roleplay NPCs. Lots of scenes where to use ambient space music (or Lustmord). Nicely detailed areas. Disregarding the small mistakes and causes of confusion in the module text (further explained below), I give it a 5/5!

Minor causes of confusion and mistakes:

- Priestess Alyssia's roll for the rumor table given on page 31 is wrong.
- It would have been better to give this ^ info on page 10.
- 'Glibness' cannot be made into a potion, because it's a spell with a range of 'personal'.
- It would have cleared some confusion if it had been mentioned that 'before combat' buffs of enemies are added to their stats already. However this could be figured out from the AC bonuses.
- The 'meteorite' is often referred to as 'meteor' in the text. (nitpick)

What went down in our game:

The plot hook of the module was quite shortly explained, so I wrote a personal letter for the players from Dalviss Crenn, inviting them to research the meteorite. The evening the players arrived, they already went and found Leeara, but couldn't save her right away. I secretly gave her 1d4 days (2). They saved her two days later.

The next day they cleared almost everything there was to do. They went for Part 3 and cleaned the place up, except for cutting a deal with the cult leader to clean up Part 4. They cleaned up Part 4 and returned to finish up Part 3.

On the third day, they assembled the minor artifact and got the terrifying visions. This was my favourite part. On fourth day, they fought the BBEG and the party cleric was only a few HP away from disintegration, which would have been bad news for a PFS character.

None of the players got infected by the lake water because of high saves. But confusion gave them some trouble here and there!

I've added .pdf and .ods documents of monster stat blocks to GM Shared Prep. Feel free to make corrections. :)
Liberty's Edge Contributor, RPG Superstar 2012

Thanks, Skiedragon! I'm glad you enjoyed the module. As far as one of your concerns (mea culpa!), consider the potion an oil.

I really appreciate seeing how the module worked for PFS play.
Grand Lodge
2 people marked this as a favorite.
Mike Welham wrote:

Thanks, Skiedragon! I'm glad you enjoyed the module. As far as one of your concerns (mea culpa!), consider the potion an oil.

I really appreciate seeing how the module worked for PFS play.

No problem! A bit on the easy side for that level range of characters, but really fun to run because of the setting. A very well written module, Mike. I hope you make more in the future.

Played this in a PFS group yesterday in a 10 hour marathon session. Excellent module, tons of fun to be had. I'd love to see more content from Mike in the future.

A couple of the encounters seemed like throw-ins that didn't really contribute much to the plot. Overall, we had some incredible melee synergy with reach that negated a number of issues and trivialized those encounters. Most combat bent towards Good-aligned resolutions, which was highly satisfying.
Liberty's Edge Contributor, RPG Superstar 2012
Serisan wrote:

Played this in a PFS group yesterday in a 10 hour marathon session. Excellent module, tons of fun to be had. I'd love to see more content from Mike in the future.

A couple of the encounters seemed like throw-ins that didn't really contribute much to the plot. Overall, we had some incredible melee synergy with reach that negated a number of issues and trivialized those encounters. Most combat bent towards Good-aligned resolutions, which was highly satisfying.

Thanks, Serisan!

I'm glad you found good-aligned resolutions to encounters. My goal was to allow for non-muderous resolutions, and James Jacobs developed the module to reinforce that.
Dark Archive
1 person marked this as a favorite.

I have a couple of questions:

Spoiler:
Regarding the Fort save for the Curse of Bestial Dreams on page 5. Does the Fort save negate the "greater danger" of being sickened/confused as well, or just the -1 to Int/Dex/Attack rolls? The text also mentions "magical healing" as a way to bypass the lesser effect and headaches, which makes me assume the greater danger isn't negated by a good Fort save or healing.

Also, would a PC be allowed to take 20 on Perception to locate traps if they fail their Fort save? What if they make their save?

Thanks!
Grand Lodge
Mike Welham wrote:

Thanks, Skiedragon! I'm glad you enjoyed the module. As far as one of your concerns (mea culpa!), consider the potion an oil.

I really appreciate seeing how the module worked for PFS play.

Wait, sorry for the necro, but I'm finally errata-hunting for this product. How does changing it to an oil circumvent the personal-target rule? Oils use the same rules as potions for their creation process, and so an oil of glibness couldn't exist either. You'd essentially have to create a new magic item in the form of an elixir of glibness and treat it as a wondrous item.

Liberty's Edge Contributor, RPG Superstar 2012
Strife2002 wrote:
Mike Welham wrote:

Thanks, Skiedragon! I'm glad you enjoyed the module. As far as one of your concerns (mea culpa!), consider the potion an oil.

I really appreciate seeing how the module worked for PFS play.

Wait, sorry for the necro, but I'm finally errata-hunting for this product. How does changing it to an oil circumvent the personal-target rule? Oils use the same rules as potions for their creation process, and so an oil of glibness couldn't exist either. You'd essentially have to create a new magic item in the form of an elixir of glibness and treat it as a wondrous item.

You are absolutely correct!

51 to 71 of 71 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>
Community / Forums / Paizo / Product Discussion / Pathfinder Module: Doom Comes to Dustpawn (PFRPG) All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Product Discussion
Pathfinder Monster Core
Last post: by Jonathan Morgantini