A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 3–7.
When a samsaran dies, he is reborn again with few memories of his past lives. The cycle continues until he has earned a righteous place in the afterlife. After years of service and lifetimes of accomplishment, Venture-Captain Bakten nears the end of his noble existence and has begun investigating his past lives as a means of understanding Tian Xia's rich history. However, he cannot complete his research alone, and only with the PCs' assistance can they decipher the region's past.
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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tough outsiders. A CR10 encounter for six level 6 players where they're forced to wait literally hours to be ambushed, so no buffing and a potential surprise round.
And then an earthen dam cracks due to electricity damage....what?
Maybe it was because I was tired, but this scenario failed to leave big impression on me. The premise is interesting, but it fails to deliver on it. The opening act is interesting and the mission you're sent out to do is intriguing. But then it sort of falls apart for me.
The scenario becomes nonlinear, with a social encounter and a fight encounter. The setting for the fight encounter is interesting and you learn a lot of backstory for what you're sent out to do. The villain here is a bit cliched, but overall pretty fun. The social encounter was on the iffy side. We were thrust in a clan cold war and tasked to sort of solve it, but for me it all came too sudden and without much explanation, even after asking the GM out of character for more information. It wasn't that we didn't ask the right questions, it's just that it's all very bland and failed to leave an impression on me. Again, that might have been due to me not being at full brain capacity, but introducing three clans in the span of a few minutes, all with similar-sounding names caused me to confuse a lot of NPCs with each other. I brought my social potato, so I wasn't a lot of use to my party, but I won't hold that against the scenario. We did have a great time talking to these people (although we were getting slightly frustrated by the lack of cooperation), but what ruined this part for me was how scripted a certain event felt. It's sort of out of nowhere and it felt as if it'd happen regardless of our presence there. Pathfinder is great for empowering players: I play because I want to feel like I've made a difference in the world. That particular scene felt completely unnecessary and could've achieved the same thing by letting your players be more involved in the story.
In the end, it's not a deal-breaker, but I've certainly played better scenarios.
I forgot on which tier we played this, but it was a highly amusing adventure. I think it was high tier, with me playing out of tier. We are already planning when to do the followup scenario with the same wacky party.
The location is interesting, though some bits felt a bit railroaded.
Railroads:
The fight against the extremely stealthy large demons on the dam. It seemed like no matter what you do, the dam is supposed to break.
The breaking of the mirror and the alliance of the elves. We managed to avert most of the crisis, and thanks to a casting of Make Whole the mirror was repaired, yet they still want to break the alliance? Elves are supposed to be less rash in their dealings imho, unless I'm missing a large piece of information, which is quite possible ofcourse.
fun stuff:
Our vexing dodger rogue, in mithral breastplate used his polished armor to reflect the moonlight.
As an arcane trickster I managed to steal the melee weapon of one of the attackers in the first combat, when she was still busy with ranged attacks
When I played this is it didn't go so well. I think part of that was end-of-Con fatigue or something. Later I got the impression that what we played resembled the published text only vaguely. On inspection of the scenario, that proved true. However, the most serious irritations during our play actually come from the scenario, and are due to it being a multi-parter.
For part II to happen, some stuff needs to happen in part I. This is stuff that most normal PCs will want to prevent, and anyone with a bit of genre savvy will see coming from a mile off, so you can bet players will be taking steps to prevent it. However, the scenario is dead-set on railroading these mishaps into happening anyway.
That said, it's not a bad scenario. The background story is interesting and you'll find out some of it in part I; and it does a good job of getting you interested in part II.
"The" fight is pretty spicy, and unfortunately actually nullifies a lot of the abilities of Occult classes, which is awkward because this scenario draws rather heavily on Occult Adventures. A conventional, balanced/diversified party should be able to handle it though.
UPDATE: I've since replayed this to fill out a table. I had a good time, but I stand by my earlier verdict. Too often the GM had to say stuff like "there's no IC reason why you would know this, but you can't fix this in part 1, that's for part 2".
As such, I would recommend running these back to back, not with a few weeks in between.
I would also recommend playing this with a well-rounded party, perhaps leaning a bit to the combat side. You get challenged on arcane knowledge, social skill and/or stealth, but the combat is particularly deadly. I'm glad I picked pregen Kyra and Seelah to fill out the table. With a swashbuckler and a hard-hitting UnMonk/UnRogue that gave us quite a frontline and we needed it, because this scenario puts most of the hurt in one combat.
I played this game with a good mix of old and new players. It was going great. We beat the first fight handily, while getting to know our somewhat quirky party members. We got through the social aspects with relative ease, though I felt that plot line had a lot of loose ends and ended with a strange off-the-wall ending that we didn't have any clue about (there was no real dialogue path or method for gaining information to understand the end result, so that seems like an issue).
The real problem came when we got to this big fight. If you play, especially in high tier, you'll know the one I'm talking about. My rogue got lucky with evasion to survive the onslaught, but our newest player, who was also the lowest level, was not so lucky. We retreated to safety and ended with a failure, which really stunk.
The worst part was that, unlike the one other time I've seen PCs die and a mission end in failure, this defeat was not a matter of poor optimization or a lack of appropriate gear or weapons. This fight, even as I look back on it, seems just plain mean. You're expected to handle these enemies who are set up specifically to wreck your day,with little to no info to go on to help you prepare and not a lot you can use to improvise if you have a bad time. All in all, this scenario was fine until that point, if a little confusing and long-winded at points. But that fight...
Scenarios usually release on the last Wednesday of the month, at close of business. If it gets pushed back, the availability date should update. I personally hope it is released today, as Tucson has a convention starting Friday with both of this months scenarios.
I am confused by a part of the timeline - Player Handout #2. For all of the incarnations but Malikeen, it shows more than a hundred years for each incarnation, but for Malikeen, it shows "6963 - 6961 IC", or effectively negative two years. What should the corrected numbers be?
