A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 5–9.
A recent assault on the Pathfinder Society has renewed hostilities with the Aspis Consortium, and clues left behind point to one of its masterminds: the gold agent Maiveer Sloan. By infiltrating one of the Consortium’s artifact-smuggling operations, the PCs can sabotage their rivals’ criminal operations and send a clear message: No attack will go unanswered.
Written by Matt Duval.
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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GM'ed this scenario at high tier for party of 7-8.
Firstly, it is a really fun scenario that lets players turn the tide on the Aspis Consortium. The combats are good and the story enjoyable.
The problem is that ultimately it is too long for a four hour slot. The first half is fine but there just isn't the time to fully search the site of the second half.
I hope this scenario leads on to the main plot of the season.
Just finished this scenario. Our group had 3 max-minned characters in it who consistently rolled 30-45 on their skill checks. It was obvious that at-least one of them had done the scenario before (or read it before) and wasn't at all shy about using that knowledge.
What was kind of frustrating was that there was one player who just talked and talked and talked and didn't really give room for other players to do anything. It never occurred to him that there were other people there who wanted to play too. It was all about him and him being cool.
It's hard to write an actual review of the scenario because I more or less received an escort through it.
The DM talked about the arbitrary railroading at the end where you get captured and have to spend 5 pp to escape. I'm of the opinion that if you are railroaded unreasonably, ignore it. Don't spend the 5 pp and continue to play your character as if it didn't happen. Just because something is written down doesn't make it right.
Was in a party playing out of tier (up), only 1 character of which was level 8. We averaged level 7, so had to play up.
This scenario partially hinged on the end party having MULTIPLE impossible to make skill rolls that all had to succeed for an out-of-tier party to get a secondary success condition (for a party with only one level eight).
Further, and this may have been the GM's flawed interpretation, the party was captured and arrested automatically (even though we had the means to evade capture) and forced to spend 5PP to "get out of jail" just for doing nonlethal damage
Spoiler:
in a night raid to knock out sleeping scribes to prevent them from awaking and destroying vital evidence. This counted as "engaged in a preemptive attack on employees of the Bronze House" and such was a "heinous crime" according to the scenario. This was made all the more ridiculous because the party was given a writ allowing them to "detain any persons found to be engaged in such unlawful practices as the possession or looting of such goods" and there was enormous amounts of looted goods in the Bronze House that the employees must have known about.
This scenario basically just sets the players up.
PCs who didn't have that 5PP already banked were marked as dead due to rotting away in jail, no way around it - not even other players could bail them out with their own PP. We however DID have the resources to escape an arrest (dimension door etc.) but just couldn't due to how the scenario is written.
Add that all to the fact that this scenario runs too long, and makes it basically impossible to do if running out of tier (even if combat goes well they take longer because the enemies have much more in the way of hit points).
Anyways do yourself a favor and avoid this one! You'll just be very annoyed and earn -5PP which is effectively a death sentence if you don't have it banked.
A really neat scenario, that's hard to figure out how to run at the end
There are a lot of things I really like about this scenario. This is the sort of thing I'd like to see more of. It's one that rewards more creative roleplaying -- in fact, it will downright punish a direct murderhobo approach. (But it's fair, because the initial briefing makes it very clear that a direct murderhobo response would be a bad idea. Even still, when I ran it, I found myself early on reminding players (in the form of asking them if they remember what they were told in the briefing) that that was in the briefing. The "kill your prisoners if you have the slightest excuse" form of playing your character seems to be pretty deeply ingrained in the PFS.)
I also like the fact that the second part (parts B-C together) of the scenario allows for multiple approaches-- my players took a variation on one, and it still worked, although the result was that for about 1/2 hour or more, three players were playing while the other four were just waiting.
I have a couple of problems with it, though. I may be a little bit sour on it because the game of it I ran went long, and it went long at the end of a gameday where we were going to get kicked out of the room, so we ended up having to rush the end. Still, I think there are problems at the end with how it's written.
I would strongly recommend that any GM running this only run it with four players. You don't really need more than that to get through it, and more than that would probably become cumbersome. There's a lot of searching, investigation, and conversation in this. The result is often that a small number of players end up dominating that section, either because their characters are best suited for it, or because they're the sort of players who just take the lead on this kind of thing. (I've long found over many years of gaming that this kind of thing is better for player involvement with 3-4 players than with 6 or 7. My table had 7, and it was just too many for this scenario.)
The biggest problem with the scenario is that the last section -- which is really cool in concept and in what can be accomplished -- doesn't give the GM enough guidance on exactly how to run it. For combats, we all know how to run it. (Well, sort of, once you take out that everybody remembers lots of the little rules slightly differently....) But for this kind of thing, there's not really an established standard, and the scenario doesn't do enough in telling the GMs how to actually go about doing it. More in a spoiler.
Spoiler:
The biggest thing I didn't understand, and that I probably didn't do right, is just exactly how much to tell the players. The way it's laid out, there are three stages to the negotiation with Sloan, and only some questions are really appropriate in each stage. If you don't explicitly spell this out -- and even if you do, or try to -- players will of course jump forward with questions that are only appropriate in later stages. How do you handle this? I'm not sure the three stages thing, despite how cool it seems, really is a good idea, because getting players to go along with it is tough. I suspect you need to spell out the mechanics a whole lot more, but that has a lot of the hazards of introducing a whole new mechanical system in a PFS scenario. (Not enough time, some players pick up mechanics faster than others, some players will come in naturally skeptical and will be annoyed by the new mechanics, etc.... (I saw this in "Assault on the Wound", where there wargame section I thought was cool, but I had to get the players through it. Their left over annoyance from that (and, frankly, from the behavior of a couple of players at the table that annoyed everybody else) led them to open rebellion when I started telling them about the Troop mechanic.)
In my game, we were rushed towards the end, so I probably should have thrown out the entire last section and run it as a more direct social interaction with a handful of bluff and diplomacy checks, but because the secondary success condition is based the mechanics of the final stage of the last section, I couldn't really do that. Argh!
In particular, look a the first section. The text tells us that the PC's get exactly three checks, and tell us what those checks are. However, at the end, it also says, "Once the PCs have... or run out of ideas for unsettling Sloan". Since it explicitly describes the players coming up with ideas, I took that to mean that they get to figure out their apppach. So, I told the players, "OK, this is the part of the 'social combat' where the lions are circling, trying to show off how badass they are, without actually using their claws. All you're trying to do is unsettle him, not actually get down to brass tacks about accusing him of things you know or getting him to tell things you know." However, still players were confronting him with clues (not supposed to happen until Part 2), and weren't sure what to do.
In retrospect, I think I should have said, "You can do three things here. Put him off balance by showing him the Writ, needle and insult him, and try non-violently to get his guards to back down. Here are the checks you use." Given that the scenario tells you EXACTLY which checks get the players a +2 in the next section, that's probably the only really fair way to do it; the clause about players coming up with ideas is an ill-considered thing that leads GMs to run it the wrong way. This way of doing it makes me a little sad, though, because it takes what should be a more fun roleplaying interaction and reduces it to a set of checks that you roll. Still, though, for a PFS scenario, I should probably have been much more railroady about the social interaction, and it would have gone better.
(For example: in the first section, for the third goal, it says "...the PCs must convince his guards to back down without attacking them, requiring a DC 18 Intimidate check." [emphasis mine]. My players used a charm hex to make the guards less aggressive, and I gave them credit for that. The "must" and "requires" writing of this sentence indicates that there is only one mechanical way through this, just like at trap or resisting an aura in combat. I think I did the right thing, but the writing is bad if I did.)
As it was, it was frustrating as the PCs were trying to figure out what they were really supposed to be doing here, especially since we were short on time. I strongly advise any GMs out there to really be explicit with their players and enumerate what they can do in each section, even though it means a lot of annoying "GM now telling the players the rules that they will only use for the next several minutes" and it somewhat stiltifies the social interactions. It makes it much more possible to have this last section run the way the author envisions, and in a way that lets you really know if the players satisfied the secondary success conditions.
Part 3 of Section D is a little weird, too. Sloan gives up some clues on things that we have absolutely no information to follow-up on (e.g. the spy in Druma), but players naturally are going to try to follow up on them. I was left as GM telling them, effectively, that "further questions on this are beyond the scope of this scenario". It's a little bait-and-switchy.
So, in summary, a lot of the scenario is really cool, and I really like this sort of thing in roleplaying games. There are serious problems with the last part of this scenario. It's the sort of encounter that most of the time in Pathfinder would be run in a much more free-form and fluid way, with a lot of improvising on the part of the GM and the players. It doesn't expcitly tell us not to run it that way, so no surprise I, at least, and I suspect other GMs come in reading the box text and asking the players what they say or do next. The scenario should really tell GMs to fully lay out the mechanics for the players. And, then, I'm not sure I like this extremely-structured, extremely-railroaded way of running a social discussion.
Put my mixed feelings together, and that's why this gets three stars.
A skill heavy adventure with lots of options in the second half
This adventure was a nice change of pace from other, more combat-focused adventures that I have played in. There are combats to be fought, but there are also chances for strategic planning and out-of-the-box thinking to overcome challenges. Skill-based characters have a chance to show off and roleplayers have NPCs to charm and deceive. This open nature of the second half of this adventure allows for many different play styles to succeed. Our group succeeded with a combination of roleplaying, creative spellcasting and strategic planning. A "kick-the-door-down and guns-blazing" approach might work as well but with more complications than a stealthy party would have to deal with. Having dealt with many linear adventures (sometimes a necessity for con play) it was nice to see one that allows the players a little more choice in how they approach a scene.
Is this going to be Severing Ties Part 2, or are people who played Scions of the Sky Key going to see a lot of usefulness from a certain sword?
Answering that is a minor spoiler so...
Spoiler:
The objective is not like Severing Ties p2, but I think a group could approach it in a similar manner and have a fun adventure. The objective and challenges should hopefully allow for a lot of discretion in your approach to solving them.
