Pathfinder Society Scenario #6–23: The Darkest Abduction (PFRPG) PDF

personally, i actually remember darkest vengeance fondly. sure it was hard but it was at least interesting. darkest abduction also has some interesting fights, and difficult ones to boot. the fights aren't my problem with this scenario.

my problem with this scenario is that if run properly, the best thing for the group to do is classic murder hobo their way through it. one of the encounters actually penalizes the team worse than any penalty i have ever seen on a sheet if they use diplomacy to get through it.

honestly i cannot understand the justification for this. personally i think this scenario is the worst product for society play because it only encourages being murder hobos. actual investigation will yield no results and will actually make it harder for the team to get prestige. crazy, just crazy.

I'm not going to be redundant with my review. I agree that the plot is terrible. The needs to be a timeline and a better description of how the heist was pulled off. Many times during the scenario the GM can be faced with relevant questions and has nothing to offer but improvisation. The only thing that saves the scenario from a 1-star review is the final combat. While challenging for the GM to run correctly, it keeps the players off-balance and punishes the murder-hoboism that has become rampant in Society play.

Any GM that runs this should review Mark Seifter's blog entry from May 2015 regarding darkness and light.

The follow up to the scenario I once referred to as "the second worst scenario (Darkest Vengeance) I've played" is here! Should I be excited?

Probably not. Nor should you, for while I can no longer call Darkest Vengeance the second worst scenario (primary due to five more seasons of scenarios added since), this scenario lives up to the unhype of its predecessor. Although for entirely different reasons, even though I suppose you can call this one a bait and switch too (since it's not the investigation it's advertised to be). Even with a very good GM at the helm, this one could not recover.

I could write something lengthy here, but I'll save your time and mine. Go read amugaba's review of this scenario, as it's pretty much right on the nose regarding why you should avoid running or playing it. As for my star, I didn't give Darkest Vengeance once star, so I suppose I can't do it to Abduction either (although I really want to).

I GM'ed this on high-tier, and our group generally enjoyed it. However, that enjoyment was in spite of the many flaws in this poorly designed scenario.

TLDR – The combats have cool mechanics and can be great fun if you take the time to prepare tactics. Ustalav is also a flavorful location. The rest of the scenario is...the darkest abduction of four hours of your life.

If you have to run this, tell your players not to investigate or think about the plot. Tell them to just pretend that each encounter along the railroad is an isolated event.

Here’s why…

1. Every player action is meaningless

The scenario presents itself as an investigation/mystery, yet nothing the players do will have any consequence. There are clues, but the clues do not lead to any answers. There are people to question, but their responses are all untrue. It may seem like I’m exaggerating, but there is actually not a single thing the PCs can do to “solve” anything. They simply must go where an NPC direct them, fight a combat, and then get pointed to the next location. Once they have done this three times, they will end up at the final location and fight a final combat.

I don’t consider railroading to be bad in a PFS scenario, simply because the scope is limited. However, even when the PCs only have one path, that path should include meaningful actions and challenges. The proper way to do railroading is to for Step 2 to require for Step 1 to be done first. Step 1 is overcoming some barrier or acquiring some knowledge that allows the party to do Step 2.

In this scenario, however, none of the steps rely on each other. They could be done in any order, because they don’t create any results. At the end of the three encounters (all except for the final one), the players know exactly as much as they did at the beginning of the scenario and no progress has been made in stopping the villains.

All knowledge and all progress are acquired in that final encounter.

In fact, since the preliminary encounters don’t accomplish anything, logically they could all be skipped. The PCs could complete the mission briefing, go to sleep for the night, and then walk to the location of the final event, and everything would still make sense.

About three hours into the scenario, players realized that everything they had done up until that point was irrelevant, and they were disappointed. We were also rushed during the final encounter because they had spent a long time trying to solve an unsolvable mystery.

2. The scenario document doesn't even tell the GM what is happening

My table was incredibly creative in using divination spells and out of the box thinking. Given the above point that player actions were meaningless, I want to add some meaning to reward players for investigating. However, I was mostly unable to do so because the scenario doesn’t even tell the GM what the villains are doing prior to them appearing out of thin air for the final encounter.

The scenario document is 39 pages long. I think maybe two paragraphs are devoted to the actual plot of the scenario: the actions of the villains and their abductee. The rest is incredibly lengthy descriptions of every room in every location. I don’t need to know what every rug, chair, desk, and bottle looks like, where they're from, and what condition they're in. I do need to know what the NPCs are doing along with when, where, why, and how they’re doing it, even if they’re off screen.

I ended up having to invent a great deal of detail for why things were occurring, simply because the document says "it happens because it's the next step".

3. Players must take evil actions or lose significant rewards

In both of these cases, the NPCs were completely peaceful, and there is no benefit to being good. I honestly think the writer didn’t even consider that these actions were evil. However, some Pathfinders are not murder hobos, and the scenario writing shouldn’t force players to act that way.

Played low tier as an Archer Ranger at a well-balanced and experienced 6-player table:

A Railroad scenario if ever there is one, although at first it doesn’t feel like it. The story line comes off as a poorly constructed winding railroad track with the false (and see-through) illusion of free will investigation as you slowly navigate through one dead-end after the other, building up a very full sense of frustration. Unfortunately, it is not like many of the other PFS investigation scenarios where you really feel like your PCs actions are successfully uncovering a plot.

There is a lot of description, but as others have written – as it builds up the prose is kind of odd with noting really adding to the real flow of the story. Some of the locations are quite interesting, but your reasons for being there are poorly constructed. There is a lot of history linked to a previous scenario but since only 2 out of 6 of us at the table had played the precursor from FIVE YEARS AGO – that fell completely flat with no one really “getting” it.

The 3 fights we had were mildly interesting (with my favorite part being the change-up of some sanctioned PvP), although the room size in the last encounter doesn’t really accommodate a party of 6 w/ 1 animal companion. As a well-equipped party, the boss fight was mostly a push over.

To be blunt, this might be the worst scenario of Season 6 I’ve played at this point (out of 17), and one I don’t plan on bothering on running.