A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 1–5.
Rival explorers have beaten the Pathfinders to a valuable site in Katapesh, but fortunately most of the riches—including the obscure text the Society sought in the first place—have ended up in the capitol’s extensive bazaars. What is at first a routine shopping trip spirals out of control as the PCs uncovers the writing’s secret past—and secret messages.
Written by Sean McGowan.
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.
Product Availability
Fulfilled immediately.
Are there errors or omissions in this product information? Got corrections? Let us know at
store@paizo.com.
I enjoyed this scenario, although as other reviewers have noted, I think Act 1 could have been shorter. Some clever mechanics with the monsters in the latter parts.
I ran this 5 times at GenCon, and thought I'd never want to run it again when I started, but I can't wait to run this for my hometown players. The story is engaging, assuming you have a good GM who takes the time to make sure the players understand the story. New GMs should not choose this for their first scenario, nor should anyone ever run this cold, but a well prepped GM can make this scenario shine. Mixing the Matrix with Inception and a little bit of Hellraiser, and you have a great scenario in the proper GM's hands.
This is from the player point of view and it was in tier 4-5 with 6, more 5's then 4.
It was interesting. It ran about 4.5 to 5 hours but it really felt much longer. The beginning started off as a great low-level typical go fetch type scenario, reminds me of my days of First Steps part one, was a good bit of nostalgia. I kept waiting to get ambushed by the Aspis Consortium because they wanted our cool relic we bought.
Turns out, nope. This scenario pulled an Australia, the movie, and decided to go through 3 acts and then start anew again with 3 more acts!
I am pretty sure the author had two great ideas but was only allowed to do one scenario. That or he had one scenario already written and was then told to add that second bit about the mindscape stuff.
All in all, had a fun set up and seems simple enough and then just rams a bunch of difficult and confusing rules and maps down the players through.
Tldr: I was happy at first hoping scenarios would harken back to the days of old when things were simple and then got slapped in the face by difficult and time consuming nonsense.
I had the opportunity to run four tables of this at GenCon.
minor spoilers:
The first part is like anyother scenario go do x, y and z to get item a. The difference in this scenario is that is only the prologue. Item a opens up a whole new half of the scenario.
First couple of runs were 3.5 to 4 hours, by my third run of it I had the run time down to two and a half hours. This is not a scenario to do cold. There is just too much going on. If you have a well prepared GM this should easily fit into a four hour time slot. If the GM has only casually prepared be prepared for a long scenario. I definitely like the flavor of the scenario and it has fun concepts. The first half could have been shortened a task or two in order to leave more time for the "fun" part.
Perspective Player, in a party of 6.
Subtier 4-5.
Time 5 hours.
Even though we finished this one in 5 hours, it seemed like much longer. The scenario actually felt like one-and-a-half scenarios put together. I think the scenario would have been much better without the first act entirely.
Also, I was disappointed with this scenario for another reason.
Spoiler:
I was hoping that this scenario would feature the Aspis Consortium.
But that is a minor issue.
Overall, I think this scenario had a lot of potential. It had cool locations and interesting encounters. But it just didn't work for me.
When is this scenario expected to be available for purchase? The status jumped from 'available tomorrow' to 'unavailable' 24-48 hours ago, and hasn't changed since.
None of the product descriptions of the first 3 season 7 scenarios mention which factions they grant boons for / advance the storylines of. Is that no longer a thing in season 7, or has that information been left out by mistake?
None of the product descriptions of the first 3 season 7 scenarios mention which factions they grant boons for / advance the storylines of. Is that no longer a thing in season 7, or has that information been left out by mistake?
Not every scenario has something that relates to a particular faction. Several season 6 scenarios were like that, too.
I remember Compton said they won't arbitrarily force a faction thing into every scenario.
Yeah, that's an obvious typo on the chronicle sheet.
I had so much fun playing this at GenCon that I signed up to GM it in two weeks at a local store. Just a warning, though: this is definitely NOT a scenario to run cold.
Out of curiosity, this does seem like it's very likely to run long. Is that everyone else's experience, too? I don't think it was just my table at GenCon - we actually finished in a reasonable time, but there were a ton of other tables around us still going in the same scenario. This just seems to have a lot more encounters (some combat, some not) than most.
If you are going to run this you need to be prepared. Had trouble getting a seated at GenCon (a recurring problem for my Core group) and ended up with a GM that had never seen this scenario. She did her best but it was a brutal grind.
I ran this 5 times at GenCon. I had a blast. It was awesome. It usually ran 3.75-4 hours. It takes a lot of prep, but is so much fun for everyone. Great scenario.
The page numbers are referencing those pages in the scenario itself.
Furansisuco:
Page 14 has the Shadows of the Mind sidebar explaining what the shadow conjurations are meant to be, and page 22 has the actual stat block in the appendix of the scenario.
When in the PRODUCT REVIEWS section for this scenario, clicking on Page 2, 3, 4, or 5 takes me into this PRODUCT DISCUSSION section. This is happening to me in both MS Edge and in Google Chrome.
