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Pathfinder Adventure Path #79: The Half-Dead City (Mummy’s Mask 1 of 6) (PFRPG)

3.90/5 (based on 12 ratings)
Pathfinder Adventure Path #79: The Half-Dead City (Mummy’s Mask 1 of 6) (PFRPG)
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Chapter 1: "The Half-Dead City"
By Jim Groves

The Mummy's Mask Adventure Path begins with "The Half-Dead City," an exciting new adventure in the pyramid-laden realm of Osirion, Land of Pharaohs! In the city of Wati, the church of Pharasma holds a lottery allowing explorers to delve the tombs of the city's vast necropolis in search of the nation's lost glories. In the course of investigating dusty tombs and fighting their ancient guardians and devious traps, the heroes encounter a group of rival adventurers intent on keeping one tomb's treasures for themselves. At the same time, the heroes learn that a dangerous artifact has been stolen from the tomb. Can the adventurers defeat their rivals, or will they fall to the undead defenders of the city's necropolis?

This volume of the Pathfinder Adventure Path launches the Mummy's Mask Adventure Path and includes:

  • "The Half-Dead City," a Pathfinder adventure for 1st-level characters, by Jim Groves.
  • A double-sized gazetteer of Wati exploring both parts of this vibrant city dedicated to the dead, by Crystal Frasier.
  • A rough welcome to Wati in the Pathfinder Journal, by Amber E. Scott.
  • Five dangerous new monsters, by Jim Groves, Will McCardell, and Michael McCarthy.

Each monthly full-color softcover Pathfinder Adventure Path volume contains an in-depth adventure scenario, stats for several new monsters, and support articles meant to give Game Masters additional material to expand their campaign. Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes use the Open Game License and work with both the Pathfinder RPG and the world’s oldest fantasy RPG.

Cover Art by Tyler Jacobson.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-588-4

The Half-Dead City is sanctioned for use in Pathfinder Society Organized Play. The rules for running this Adventure Path and Chronicle sheet are available as a free download (595 KB zip/PDF).

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

Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop
Archives of Nethys

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

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Perfect For My Group

5/5 —

I started GM'ing this over the past weekend, and my players were quiet taken with the "straight to delving" aspect of this AP. Having experienced past Adventure Paths, they enjoyed not being the center of attention. Jim Groves did an excellent job of combining an old school feel of dungeon delving adventures with the flow of Adventure Paths to date.

Disappointing Start

2/5 —

When I learned that Paizo was going to put out an Egyptian themed AP, I was excited. When I heard that the first adventure would feature dungeon-delving and a rival adventuring party I was ecstatic. Unfortunately, having now read The Half-Dead City, I feel it could have been much better. So what went wrong?

Likes
1) Exciting themes: Egyptian tomb-raiding featuring lots of death traps and a rival adventuring party
2) The author does a good job with room descriptions which are lush with detail and give the adventure an atmosphere of mystery and dread that is appropriate to the themes
3) The first dungeon-crawl features a very evocative Water Flooding Room Trap.
4) The third dungeon-crawl has clues to the fact that the PCs are not the first ones to explore the temple. It's a nice mystery which is related to the rest of the adventure path

Dislikes
1) Slow start: The opening of the adventure seems like a huge time waster with lots of speeches and a sham tomb selection lottery (i.e. there is no real element of chance with regards to which dungeon-crawl the PCs will enter first). The PCs also cannot gain much in the way of meaningful information from this opening scene. Since it's the start of the campaign, why not just start with the adventurers standing outside the Tomb of Akhentepi with a short explanation of what went on before?
2) The first two dungeon-crawls have little to no bearing on the rest of the adventure which makes them feel more like a series of linked Pathfinder Society Scenarios than the start of an adventure path.
3) Unfortunately, as written, the Water Flooding Room Trap (mentioned above) malfunctions and leads to the room being filled to a maximum of 2 feet of water?!? As stated in the adventure texts "There is little danger of drowning, even for Small creatures, but smaller creatures such as animal companions or familiars might require assistance, and any PC who falls unconscious into the water will require immediate aid to avoid drowning." Seems really anti-climactic even for a 1st level party.
4) The ambush encounter is bland and unavoidable
5) The other Rival Adventuring Parties: The adventure introduces a half-dozen other adventuring parties. Unfortunately, they are featured in a single roleplaying encounter, the sole purpose of which is the introduction of The Scorched Hand, which is the main rival party of the adventure. It would have been nice to have these other rival adventuring parties to be encountered in the first two dungeon-crawls because there is currently little chance to do any roleplaying during the first two dungeon crawls given that the enemies almost exclusively consist of vermin, constructs or undead.
6) The Scorched Hand: I was hoping that the adventure would provide a timeline and guidance on how the main rival adventuring party would explore the dungeon in parallel to the PCs. As it currently stands, the DM is given no guidance for how to play the rival party beyond "You should deploy them wherever makes the most sense for your story and campaign " and as a result, it is assumed that the Scorched Hand merely waits patiently for the PCs to arrive.
7) The fact that there is only one way to access each and every level of the three dungeon-crawls makes the adventure feel like more of a railroad than it should. A good dungeon-crawl would allow the PCs to approach from several different directions. Yes, in this adventure, the PCs can choose to go left instead of right, but there is only a single entrance on every floor and the PCs must find this entrance in order to proceed.
8) Finally, because the rival party is not showcased enough in the rest of the adventure, it didn't feel satisfying to me for it to be the last encounter and it's quite possible that a party completing this adventure might feel as if they had not really achieved any meaningful milestone. Sure, the Scorched Hand paid off some thugs to ambush the PCs earlier in the adventure and their leader has ordered some sort of temple guardian to block the PCs way, but there's a good chance that the PCs may not even find out that the Scorched Hand had any roll in this until they actually come face to face.

Overall Impression

I feel disappointed by this adventure and think that this is a missed opportunity on many fronts. I would have much preferred that the three dungeon crawls be combined into a single larger one that required multiple forays to completely explore. I would have also preferred it if the adventure allowed the PCs to interact more with the rival adventuring party and featured more puzzles and obstacles that needed to be solved by thinking on the players' part rather than just rolling dice.

Simple Hook, Good Adventure

4/5 —

Short Version: If your players build characters who are interested in exploring tombs, this'll be great. But don't expect the adventure to steer them there.

I prefer APs to start with a bit of a bang to get everyone emotionally invested along with getting the path moving. This takes a different approach, basically assuming that you have a party of adventurers looking to explore some tombs and... hey, there are tombs here.

It's kind of old-school that way and complements the tone of the path well, but isn't to my taste.

The tombs themselves are exactly what they should be: a nice mix of traps and combat encounters. The adventure is also structured very well to allow some roleplaying with Pharasmins and rival explorers.

The back matter is mostly taken up by a description of Wati (the setting of this and the next installment). The bestiary is thematically appropriate and features several new monsters that surprise the players in the adventure itself.

The story is in a new format that focuses on a location featuring in the adventure and features several handout-quality images and maps. The entire thing could also serve as a spoiler-free handout, which is actually really cool.

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Paizo Employee
Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Accessories, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Garret Candoor wrote:
Anyone else have any issues with the booklet coming apart? I have only had it a week and the pages are already coming apart. Very frustrating.

I'd start a thread in the customer service part of the forum. I've always had really good luck working things out with them.

Cheers!
Landon
Lorimez wrote:

Can I ask a question or two as a new GM to pathfinder?

1. Which books, in your opinion, are essential for running this campaign? (Feel free to include core books to this)

2. When is the release date for the second installment?

Any advice, experienced players of AP, is always welcomed. (Feel free to PM me rather than take up the good people's time on here with my noob questions :-))

Thanking you in advance.

G.

The NPC Codex seems to save alot of time for some of the other adventuring party stats and random encounters. Not sure that info is available online.

Webstore Gninja Minion

The NPC Codex is on the Pathfinder Reference Document.

Thanks very much Liz!
Landon Winkler wrote:
Garret Candoor wrote:
Anyone else have any issues with the booklet coming apart? I have only had it a week and the pages are already coming apart. Very frustrating.

I'd start a thread in the customer service part of the forum. I've always had really good luck working things out with them.

Cheers!
Landon

They are already resolving mine! Thanks for the suggestion Landon

archmagi1 wrote:

1) This one (and books 2-6). The other 2 Osirion books released with it are very non-essential, and as a GM running this, I don't own them. D20PFSRD.com gives most of the OGL mechanical stuff from the Player Companion lines, so if your players want more, they can go there. The Campaign Setting book for Osirion, while a very good read (I've read it twice at FLGS), isn't needed at all to run the AP; infact, the areas covered in the AP receive much less attention because they are detailed in the AP.

Non-essential books that would be nice to have at hand: Inner Sea World Guide, the new Osirion CS book, and any whatever mechanics books your players bring to the table.

One word of advice regarding d20pfsrd.com: because they are not allowed to use setting-specific names (at least, those not found in the core rulebook), they have to re-name things like traits and prestige classes that have proper names in them.

This means that it's not always obvious when something is an inappropriate choice for a particular character. For example, one of my players found a good trait - but when I finally found the original printed version, it turned out to be only for gnome worshippers of a particular gnome deity (and thus completely inappropropiate for a human worshipper of Desna).
Lorimez wrote:

Can I ask a question or two as a new GM to pathfinder?

1. Which books, in your opinion, are essential for running this campaign? (Feel free to include core books to this)

2. When is the release date for the second installment?

Any advice, experienced players of AP, is always welcomed. (Feel free to PM me rather than take up the good people's time on here with my noob questions :-))

Thanking you in advance.

G.

There will also be some good advice to be found in the Mummy's Mask section of the message boards, found here.

Paizo Employee
1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories, Starfinder Accessories, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Psyonis wrote:
They are already resolving mine! Thanks for the suggestion Landon

You're welcome! I'm glad they're getting that sorted for you.

Cheers!
Landon

Will there be minis (a.k.a. paperminis and pawns) for this line besides the NPC codex pawns?
Webstore Gninja Minion

Pawns are currently scheduled for an October release.

Guess i´ll start this end of juli/august, so might be just in time for the thrid one.

Ok so I am GM'ing the Mummy's Mask Adventure path and while I am overall very pleased with the layout and general progression with the 1st module I have observed that the total XP count for the first part of 3 for the Half-Dead City gives about 7500 XP. Part 2 is worse giving out only a total of 12800. If I want the PC's to have any chance of hitting 3rd level by part 3 I have to have about 30K XP available to me in Part 2 which is simply not there. While this would not be a problem for a small party of 3-4 players I have 6 in my campaign. So, as a result I am having to retool the encounters so that I can be sure the PC's are keeping pace with the adventure path. Kind of a pain in the arse but what else is there to do!
Liberty's Edge
Gentle Paladin wrote:

Kind of a pain in the arse but what else is there to do!

With 6 people, there really isn't anything. I would suggest buffing the encounters through the first book, then revert to the standard ones in book two. By the end of the second adventure your PCs will be about a level behind and will stay there for the rest of the AP, but the extra action economy should offset the higher difficulties.

Sovereign Court Senior Developer
Gentle Paladin wrote:

Ok so I am GM'ing the Mummy's Mask Adventure path and while I am overall very pleased with the layout and general progression with the 1st module I have observed that the total XP count for the first part of 3 for the Half-Dead City gives about 7500 XP. Part 2 is worse giving out only a total of 12800. If I want the PC's to have any chance of hitting 3rd level by part 3 I have to have about 30K XP available to me in Part 2 which is simply not there. While this would not be a problem for a small party of 3-4 players I have 6 in my campaign. So, as a result I am having to retool the encounters so that I can be sure the PC's are keeping pace with the adventure path. Kind of a pain in the arse but what else is there to do!

I'm running an office game of Mummy's Mask with 6 PCs. Since 6 PCs increases the party's APL by +1, I've been pretty much bumping up the encounters by +1 CR, usually either by adding the advanced simple template or adding a few more monsters to get the CR where I need it to be. For the really difficult encounters (where the CR is already pretty high for the PCs' level, either APL +2 or +3), I pretty much leave them as is, though I may make hp adjustments on the fly as needed (in other words, if the PCs seem to be having too easy of a time, I might max out a creature's hp).

Dark Archive

Does the PDF purchase include the interactive maps for this book?

Ck,

I've always assumed those were separate...
1 person marked this as a favorite.
ckdragons wrote:

Does the PDF purchase include the interactive maps for this book?

Yes.

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Every AP book after Carrion Crown (and maybe Carrion Crown) includes the interactive maps for that book with the pdf.
Dark Archive
1 person marked this as a favorite.
captain yesterday wrote:
Every AP book after Carrion Crown (and maybe Carrion Crown) includes the interactive maps for that book with the pdf.

Thank you. Wanted to confirm because Paizo also has Mummy's Mask Interactive Maps PDF, "a compilation of 31 maps from the entire Mummy's Mask Adventure Path". Didn't know if that item would be an extraneous purchase after I purchased the 6 PDFs of this AP.

That is geared towards people that buy the physical books, and not the PDF, I suspect.
President, SmiteWorks

The Fantasy Grounds version is available for just $7 now if you already own the PDF here at Paizo.com and synced your account.

Mummy's Mask AP 1 for Fantasy Grounds

The rest of the Mummy's Mask series is available as well.

I saw the print edition of this was available for a little while. I was hoping I'd have money to buy it before it disappeared again, but I was too late, as I see today.

Is there any chance the print editions will be listed again?

I, too, would also like some information on why the

Pathfinder Adventure Path: Mummy's Mask Part 1 - The Half-Dead City

is only for sale between $75 and $150 while all the other books are less than $20... what asshattery is afoot, PAIZO???
Dark Archive

The first book is sold out and won't get a reprint as no Pathfinder AP volume was ever reprinted afaik and it also is for 1st. edition, which is discontinued after august 1st 2019.

I would get the pdf and print it, thats cheaper than the aftermarket prices.
Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

Actually, Adventure Path Volume 2, "The Skinsaw Murders" did receive a second printing. As far as I know, this has been the only such occurrence.

Also, Pathfinder First Edition is not discontinued, is ist still being sold by its publisher and will continue to be sold even after the release of the Second Edition.

That is correct, Paizo doesn't discontinue anything.

I have a similar problem as above. Book 1 can only be found for atrocious resale prices, if at all.

I can make do with the pdfs, but I would love to have a full collection of the physical books for the first campaign I've ever run for a total of three groups by now, so I'd really love to see a reprint...

(Alternatively, if anyone has the first book for resale for -not over 100-200 bucks-, I'd really appreciate a DM.)
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