The rebel group known as the Silver Ravens once fought for independence in the city of Kintargo, but after the Chelish Civil War came to an end, they disbanded—until today! Now, new heroes have reestablished the organization to stand against the inquisitor Barzillai Thrune and his oppressive diabolic regime. But before the Silver Ravens can rise up, they need allies—friends among powerful groups like the Order of the Torrent Hellknights, a hidden cult of Milani, and disenfranchised agents of the government itself. But until the heroes find the ideal hideout for their rebellion—a place secret enough and strong enough to withstand the battles to come—they'll be forced to stay in the shadows. When a perfect site for their headquarters comes along, will the heroes survive long enough to claim it as their own?
"Turn of the Torrent," a Pathfinder adventure for 4th-level characters, by Mike Shel.
A look into the ecology and society of the sinister aquatic humanoids known as skum, by Thurston Hillman.
Danger in a den of thieves in the Pathfinder's Journal, by Stephanie Lorée.
A collection of devious and dangerous monsters by Tim Nightengale, Mike Shel, and Todd Stewart.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60125-784-0
Bring your campaign to life! The Turn of the Torrent SoundPack from Syrinscape is a complete audio solution when playing through the second chapter of the Hell's Rebels Adventure Path.
"Turn of the Torrent" 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 (723 kb zip/PDF).
Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:
The adventure path continues going strong with a good second book. The adventure path has now settled into a formula of combining a major dungeon with smaller single session sized side missions. The side missions in this book are decent (but don't really feel like they have anything to do with a rebellion and could have been part of any city based adventure path), but the dungeon was a work of art that managed to be different and interesting, but also still be thematically consistent. It also manages to do something that I have wanted to see in an adventure path for a while, but never have (see spoiler). My only complaint is that this book is right where the rebellion rules (as detailed in the player's guide) really start to require the GM to keep track on the date "in game" and this will quickly become a major annoyance for the GM.
Spoiler:
A prison brake. The adventure gives you a flushed out prison and lets you be open ended about figuring out a way to break out some of the prisoners.
*DISCLAIMER*: This is a single review for all adventures in this AP.
Hell’s Rebels is the best Paizo Adventure Path. Of all the AP, it is the one that’s most coherent, approachable and GM-friendly. This review applies to all 6 books because their quality and style are so consistent that you don’t even notice the fact that they were written by 6 different authors.
Let me quickly list some of the most important things which Hell’s Rebels gets right:
1. It has a clear, believable and complex plot which goes from point A to point B to point C while at the same time allowing for multitude of side treks, optional quests and player-driven initiatives.
2. It goes full on Golarion. It touches upon core themes of the setting and is heavily nested in its history. It provides the much-anticipated opportunity to punch one of the biggest evils of the setting in the face. One warning: you can’t just lift HR and drop it into other settings without massive amounts of work.
3. The BBEG is front and center, introduced in adventure 1, encountered and fought against several times across the campaign. He’s evil, callous, quirky, nasty, brutal, amoral and good at being bad. He’s right up there with Ileosa from CotCT.
4. The campaign starts in one city and mostly stays there, with some small side-treks and one bigger detour which, fortunately, is also urban.
5. There is a cadre of sympathetic, recurring allied NPCs to play second fiddles to the PCs. There are also enemies whom you can interact in ways other than roll for initiative. The RP opportunities are plenty.
6. The cast of both allies and opponents is diverse in every sense of that word.
7. The players get opportunity to discover some of the setting’s secrets and, to a limited yet satisfying degree, reshape it without causing a Realm-Shattering Event.
8. The ending is epic to the core and fitting for a campaign of this scale and magnitude.
9. Episode 4 is a special issue with extra page count, longer adventure, more support material, an excellent article on Aroden and much, much more!
10. I love the blue colour theme for this AP AND Wayne Reynolds did the cover art. Double victory!
Edit Review
Hell's Rebels is my favorite entry in the Adventure Path line so far and Turn of the Torrent just continues the greatness that was In Hell's Bright Shadow.
Now in Old Kintargo the Silver Ravens are opened up to a whole new host of interesting NPC's and mysteries. The writing is top notch and as before the art is excellent.
I especially enjoyed the inclusion of a snap shot of the long ago raid on the Lucky Bones (which inspired me to write a pre-game narrative about the event) and the continuing highlight of my favorite Iconic couple of Merisiel and Kyra in the art.
The only small problems I had were with small hiccups in the flow of the narrative like the assumption that the Silver Ravens identities are well known by the end of the volume and lack of mention of the curfew rules or new consequences for breaking them.
Reading through Turn of the Torrent, it was my second favorite book of the AP, and the NPCs were my favorite of the AP. I mean, who doesn't want to see a good-aligned Hellknight, a ridiculously good-looking naval captain, and a Tien investigator with goggles?
Turn of the Torrent didn't run quite as smoothly as I anticipated, but not enough to take off a star. There was one part the players were supposed to get through without combat, but when I ran it as written, the players saw no choice but combat. A couple of parts ran better than I anticipated, though. I was concerned about the large underwater dungeon being frustrating, but my players managed it fine. My newest player said she enjoyed it quite a bit. I was also concerned that the party would not have enough time to get the rebellion to a higher level, but the events stretched through more weeks than I anticipated. My players were rebellion rank 9 by the end.
All in all, this second installment of the AP has made the players more interested and invested in their characters in the story. I cannot recommend this AP highly enough.
Motto, fortress, leader, symbol (armored fish), armor (guess what the theme is:-D), favored weapons, reckoning, and disciplines (for the prestige class) as well as a description of their purpose and what not.
I should also mention the Cordulegaster also has an elder form that's CR 7, as well as an awesome picture at the front fighting Seelah and Imrijka on the banks of the River Styx.
The Cordulegaster is actually based on a dragonfly nymph with the same genus name (since I am an aquatic entomologist). I threw in variant types based on what Stygian waterway they are in, plus the elder version is one that "leveled up" to become a fully fledged daemon. Hope that everyone likes it....I'd love to hear your feedback.
Thanks to Adam for letting me have this one. And I'm super pleased to get TWO illustrations of it as well. Awesome artwork.
Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
captain yesterday wrote:
The whole shebang!
Motto, fortress, leader, symbol (armored fish), armor (guess what the theme is:-D), favored weapons, reckoning, and disciplines (for the prestige class) as well as a description of their purpose and what not.
Hope that helps :-)
Could I get answers for these in spoilers,
What is the Motto?
What is the Favored Weapon?
What is their Reckoning?
What are the Disciplines they can receive?
Motto: "Breathe deeply before the plunge" (which is f#!~ing awesome IMO:-D)
Favored Weapon: Halberd or Longbow
Armor: Aquatic themes with fin shaped flourishes
Reckoning: Allowing oneself to be nearly drowned and then revived
Discipline: 3rd Level: Seek the taken, enables the Hellknight to cast an enlarged Locate Creature as a spell like ability with the caster level equal to his total character level.
9th level, he cannot choose the Summon Devil Discipline.
all of that is found on page 67
The adventure in this book ran a bit long, so we essentially have an additional 6 or so pages of adventure content and only one support article. It's not something we do often, but in this case, the adventure simply needed that extra space to do what it needed to do.
Speaking for myself, I honestly don't mind more content at the expense of additional support articles. The support articles are usually great, of course, but I'm just as happy to have additional adventure content.
Same here... but the amount of extra time it took me to develop the adventure is part of the reason WHY we rarely do this, frankly. If we did this for every volume, then the AP would quickly turn into a once every other month product instead of a monthly product.
So did James send you back to the basement until you finished the extra pages then :-)
Heh; nope. This is a case where I ended up writing a lot of extra content for the adventure. The format of these adventures is pretty different than the standard more linear plot advancement, and as such, there's a LOT of extra material that needs to be put in, particularly to tie the adventures to the overall storyline, the ones before and after, and the rebellion system.
So did James send you back to the basement until you finished the extra pages then :-)
Heh; nope. This is a case where I ended up writing a lot of extra content for the adventure. The format of these adventures is pretty different than the standard more linear plot advancement, and as such, there's a LOT of extra material that needs to be put in, particularly to tie the adventures to the overall storyline, the ones before and after, and the rebellion system.
So you're saying he's still in the basement then ;-D
There's minimal info re: the Order of the Torrent in currently available publications. For instance, they're historically centered in Kintargo and have dwindled to a rather small sect in more recent years. Turn of the Torrent fleshes them out a bit more.
Also: you'll become acquainted with the Silver Ravens over the course of the Hell's Rebels AP. Intimately acquainted.
I'd love to play this AP with an Order of the Torrent Hellknight PC
Insome is listed as commoner 2 on page 8 and commoner 1 on the inside rear cover.
Elia Nones:
Elia claims to be born to a naval family from Corentyn on page 25, but Cassius Sargaeta's bio says she's from Katapesh; inconsequential and not necessarily exclusive, but something of an unexplained jump.
Nurla Botve:
Nurla is listed as commoner 5 on page 33 and commoner 4 on the inside rear cover.
Apocrisarius kyton:
References to the kyton on pages 21, 23, and 24 should point to page 84 instead of page 72.
Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber; Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber
Question - I just got an email that the pdf has been updated to correct a couple of mistakes in the original printing of the adventure. No problem, Paizo does that once and awhile and I appreciate them correcting the pdf even if they aren't going to ever do a reprint. I have never saved those little emails, I've just redownloaded the pdf. But it now occurs to me that I ought to have been printing them and slipping them into my print adventures to track the corrections. Does anyone know if there is an archive of those kind of things anywhere, like an official list of AP Errata? Or do I need to go back and see how many of those emails I can undelete? Thanks!
Question - I just got an email that the pdf has been updated to correct a couple of mistakes in the original printing of the adventure. No problem, Paizo does that once and awhile and I appreciate them correcting the pdf even if they aren't going to ever do a reprint. I have never saved those little emails, I've just redownloaded the pdf. But it now occurs to me that I ought to have been printing them and slipping them into my print adventures to track the corrections. Does anyone know if there is an archive of those kind of things anywhere, like an official list of AP Errata? Or do I need to go back and see how many of those emails I can undelete? Thanks!
There's no official AP errata list, since we don't normally do AP errata. In this case, we found the page number errors almost quickly enough to fix in the print version but didn't make it quite in time, so we adjusted the PDF instead. It's unlikely to be a regular thing though since we don't really have time or resources to do heavy post print proofing passes on the AP.
One thing I haven't seen people comment on that I thought was pretty awesome was the teacup scene. That took me from being neutral-ish on the Captain to really liking the guy.
I also am a fan of one of the Kytons basically being able to use redtext from Umineko.
Regarding the Apocrisiarius:
Was the intention for them to be unable to utter anything untrue, regardless of its own interpretation of the matter, or is it more dependent on the its beliefs?
If an Apocrisiarius has never met Lee before in its life, could it try to tell someone, "Lee hates you."? And then, whether it is able to or not, thereby determine Lee's feeling towards that person?
Was the intention for them to be unable to utter anything untrue, regardless of its own interpretation of the matter, or is it more dependent on the its beliefs?
If an Apocrisiarius has never met Lee before in its life, could it try to tell someone, "Lee hates you."? And then, whether it is able to or not, thereby determine Lee's feeling towards that person?
They can't speak untruths. If they'd never met Lee, it wouldn't say "Lee hates you" because the apocrisiarius doesn't even know about Lee. Likewise, they can't make up entirely fictitious things, since fiction is a lie by definition. If someone were to ask a apocrisiarius "Does Lee hate me?" then the apocrisiarius would reply with the truth, which would likely be "I don't know."
Was the intention for them to be unable to utter anything untrue, regardless of its own interpretation of the matter, or is it more dependent on the its beliefs?
If an Apocrisiarius has never met Lee before in its life, could it try to tell someone, "Lee hates you."? And then, whether it is able to or not, thereby determine Lee's feeling towards that person?
They can't speak untruths. If they'd never met Lee, it wouldn't say "Lee hates you" because the apocrisiarius doesn't even know about Lee. Likewise, they can't make up entirely fictitious things, since fiction is a lie by definition. If someone were to ask a apocrisiarius "Does Lee hate me?" then the apocrisiarius would reply with the truth, which would likely be "I don't know."
As described, it seems like it can try to speak something it doesn't know, and fails if the statement is false... given examples of repeating the confessions of the people they torture, to determine the veracity thereof.
"I don't know" is the most obvious answer, but suppose it wanted to know about Lee's feelings, or was magically compelled to try to say such, or thought it would a great way to psychologically torture someone. (If the Kyton says it, then they know that Lee really does hate them.)