A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 7–11.
The occasional unexplained disappearance is common enough in Ustalav, yet a rash of unexplained abductions has led to fearful speculation on the verge of panic in the streets. Hoping to improve the Pathfinder Society’s reputation in Ustalav, Venture-Captain Basia Kalistoff has offered her lodge’s services in putting an end to this crime wave. But in a city where countless terrors haunt its underworld and institutions, can the PCs unveil the true culprit without unleashing an even darker fate on Karcau?
Content in “The Darkest Abduction” contributes to the ongoing storyline of the Scarab Sages and Sovereign Court factions.
Written by Jerome Virnich.
This scenario is designed for play in Pathfinder Society Organized Play, but can easily be adapted for use with any world. This scenario is compliant with the Open Game License (OGL) and is suitable for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
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There are some well-written combats with strong creatures. When I ran this, I had a Venture-Captain, two Venture-Lieutenants, a former VL with 5 stars, and two other 3 star GM's, all playing well-optimized characters, and the final fight still managed to last half-a-dozen rounds and almost killed a character, and that's with a fair GM that gets no enjoyment out of killing players.
However, this scenario has some issues with story and mechanics, but the biggest problem is the potential negative boon and the method in which you acquire it. Negative boons will always cause bad blood, so they need to be handled carefully, and in a way that rewards a thoughtful style of play. This particular negative boon rewards murder-hoboing in a very unfortunate way.
I respect what the writer was trying to do, showing off all of the cool flavor of Karcau (the best city in Golarion imo), but the scenario does so at the cost of a strong, player-driven story. An investigation—particularly a high-level one for an unspecified party—needs flexibility, and this scenario unfortunately lacks that. The railroad tracks are particularly unfortunate in that they make you hit red herring after red herring, which compounds the frustration of both.
This scenario is thoroughly three stars for me because I appreciate the author's ambitions and I felt the mechanics were well-thought-out, but there are serious problems with the implementation of the negative boon and the story that keep it from being the amazing scenario it could have been.
The plot concept is great, a famous person has been abducted and it looks like the Pathfinders are to blame, time to solve the mystery and clear our name. The flavor is not bad either, dark folk, swamp people and a kyton, all surrounding a gothic city, sounds interesting.
So let's see where this scenario goes off the rails. You quickly arrive at the scene of the crime and learn of the abduction of Olivina, a local celebrity. You quickly find out that she has been taken by someone unknown and that you must rescue her, whatever shall you do? Oh that's right, you are a party of levels 7-11. Sounds like it is time to scry and teleport, surely the bad guys must have taken precautions against this.... nope they did not. Scenario solved by two common spells out of the CRB.
Ok, ok, so you decide, hey let's not bypass 90% of the adventure, because hey it's about the trip not the destination. Well that leaves you as a group paying 3000 gold or losing out on a lot of prestige, for what, wrong information that you did not need anyways. Can this loss of resources be avoided, of course, but only if you choose to skip the adventure by hitting the big red flashing easy button of scry and teleport. Otherwise you are out of luck and paying a significant amount of gold or prestige. This scenario would be a 1 star rating were it not for the great flavor thrown in, as it stands it is merely a disappointment for it really could have been good had it been designed a little better and not punished the players for playing.
A Railroady Investigation that Should Not Have Been Tier 7-11
I have played this scenario last sunday during a convention in Quebec city, and I should say that I was rather disappointed.
The premises weren't bad for adventure. In fact, it could have been an enjoyable scenario. Instead, what we got was a railroad scenario that could not manage to even make you stay on the rails. It was too much of an open investigation at the beginning, and it switched to a non-sensical railroad encounters.
Our gamemaster told us before hand that the scenario did not make sense and was really bad. He instead improvised with what sensical solutions we were providing to the story, as 7-11 characters would have done. As such, we skipped three quarters of the combat encounters of the scenario, and thanks god we did not do them!
The scenario was also too much railroady, even having a to-do list from A event to Z event without variation. Bad design is bad.
Spoiler:
The venture-captain in Ustalav told us before hand that the Pathfinder Society had a bad reputation in the city of Kartso, so that we should'nt be 'murderhoboing'. Great, that was a good step toward an enjoyable scenario.
Instead, it happens that if we had been good guys with the druids in the swamp, we would have been heavily penalized. How is that fair...
The scenario also lacks coherence. The chief of the Aluchino cult bought robots, even thought they are trying to be an undercover cult of riches and nobles alike. How in the world did he manage to get robots without having the Technic League comes in his city to grab their own with bazookas and lazer guns... Far from being subtle in a city...
At last, I feel this scenario would have been best suited for a tier 3-7 scenario, since divination magic is easily accessible at this level, thus making us circumvent three quarters of the scenario, even though that was beneficial for us with such bad scenario design.
Creative Minds Need Not Attempt to Solve the Mystery
As many of the reviews below go into at far greater length than I feel like, the plot for this is...questionable at best. There's a heavy over-use of red herrings here, and even reading the scenario and thus knowing everything going on, the villain's scheme is full of tenuous assumptions and leaps of logic. My players, even at the end seemed to only partially understand why the enemies were doing what they were doing, and the player who most seemed to get it mostly did so because he had just prepped to GM the 'prequel' to this (Darkest Vengeance).
But zooming in from the macro view of this scenario, the individual encounters here are also just hit or miss. The theater was a solid start (with a player groaningly expecting a haunt the moment he found out about a ghost in Ustalav), but led them to immediately want to search the entire sewer complex. This is a reasonable plan for a team of highly trained pathfinders, but as the scenario doesn't allow for such apparently unpredictably creative thinking, their only choices were to faff about for a few hours or get back on the very visible rails of the scenario.
The rest of Abduction's encounters are fine, but after the third 'your REAL clue is in another castle' they seemed jsut resigned to do what the adventure wanted to get to the end. The swamp encounter was an interesting idea for a multi-choice resolution, but as my players were not murder-hobos, they never considered fighting the swamper (and thus avoided the likely best outcome simply by listening to their briefing orders). The creatures in the house itself at the end could have been quite dangerous, if one of the players wasn't an aasimar (not entirely the scenario's fault, but the main villains' gimmick is certainly goes from awesome to useless depending on whether a single ability's present.
All in all, its not the worst scenario I've ever played (and the Scarab Sages boon is quite nice, with a fitting mission), but its certainly the worst I've GMed.
I will second whoever mentionned GMs should read, re-read, then read again the Blog post on darkness
I played this today and we did have fun together, but this isn't measuring up to the generally high standards of season six. The plotting is awkward and feels more like a season one adventure.
The big problem is that the scenario is a bunch of scenes that individually are flavorful and evocative, but they have only the most tenuous relation to each other. The only reason you go to the next place is because it's the only clue given, so even if it doesn't really make much sense, you do it anyway.
Another thing: don't play this if you haven't played The Darkest Vengeance. All the other players today had, I hadn't. They'd all played it with different characters, so couldn't really share. So all the time the bad guy is throwing accusations and I'm like "I have no idea what he's actually upset about". The scenario doesn't really manage to carry that story across if you haven't played the previous part.
It's not an ideal scenario for good guys either. You meet a lot of people who really need a spanking which you can't give them. You actually get punished for being a good guy instead of a murderhobo. And the person you're supposed to rescue is so irritating my paladin wished we could burn her at the stake as an unbeliever.
Combat-wise, it's an okay scenario. Most of the fights weren't very original, although the end fight has some stuff you don't see too often. But if you're playing at this tier, presumably you know to take steps against an irritating effect that the scenario's title has already spoilered to you.
We played with a paladin 9, barbarian 9, cleric 10, bard 10 party on the high tier, and found the difficulty of the fights to be fine, not too easy and not too hard.
I just got finished playing this, It is one of the most ridiculous adventures I have been on. It is so railroaded that the GM was apologizing to us about how limited our choices are. there was so description on things that really did not need it and so little on actual plot. It became a running joke that we were on the tracks about halfway through the game. and we felt like it was a really bad Scooby Doo episode( we had a large cat for scooby stand in). all in all the best part was taking the villain and making them a pincushion in the end. and mind you my character started this adventure really not a big violent person but by the end he was the biggest supporter of murder death killing. all in all the adventure is one that try's to be investigative mission without really letting and/or you dont make the rolls and you are kinda left wanting. sorry for the rant but damn was looking forward to this and was more comedy (for the wrong reasons than suspense)
A couple possible errors I noticed reading through the scenario while doing prep.
Scaling Encounter C2:
Subtier 10-11 says to "Reduce the Perception DC of the nightmare vapor trap to 23. Reduce the Disable Device DC of the trap to 27."
The trap starts with Perception 30, Disable Device 25. My guess is that they got the numbers swapped for reduction, and it should read
"Reduce the Perception DC of the nightmare vapor trap to 27. Reduce the Disable Device DC of the trap to 23.
Map on page 17:
The D6 notation is placed over the foot of the stairs to area D10, but the description for D6 on page 18 describes it as the rear entrance.(Which appears to be to the right of the D7 notation.)
We played this tonight. It was a very interesting investigative scenario, and enjoyable, despite major railroading. But, despite investigating moderately quickly in the beginning, skipping the optional encounter, and some major GM squeezing of the later investigation time, we ran just over 5hrs.
Please Paizo, you really need to edit/playtest these kinds of scenarios for time. I'd hate to run/play this in a convention slot.
This is the worst scenario I have ever played. I have previously played this writers 4-05 scenario and I continue to be unimpressed by his scenario design. The scenario is overly deadly, 1 player dead and 2 unconscious in the first encounter which isn't even a combat, in the end the party walked away and this is overly deadly. There should be a warning on this adventure and it should be tweaked, when you have venture captains telling stories of losing 4 people to this mod this isn't fun this is sadistic cheese.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
