A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 1–5.
Decades ago, the merchant nation of Druma anticipated a wave of migrants and built the city Alabastrine to accommodate them. The mass migration never happened. Always seeking a return on investment, Druma recently began auctioning off control of the city to the highest bidders and wealthiest entrepreneurs for five years at a time. The next auction begins soon, and the powerful Aspis Consortium gold agent Myrosype—an enemy of the Society responsible for countless Pathfinders’ deaths—is poised to take control of the whole city for her own nefarious ends. The Society has secured a few invitations for the PCs to attend the auction. Can they disrupt the event’s delicate politics in order to stop their rival, or will the Aspis Consortium gain an unassailable stronghold?
Content in “Bid for Alabastrine” also contributes directly to the ongoing storyline of the Exchange Faction. Content in this scenario also ties into a special metaplot element from Pathfinder Society Special #6–98: "Serpents Rise". Players who have completed that special event are encouraged to bring its Chronicle sheet when playing this adventure.
Written by Thurston Hillman.
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Reading through and playing this scenario reveal a couple of contradictions within. The prose descriptions of things and the combat felt hastily scraped together to me.
The combat is a joke. Not a funny one, but a joke none the less. A single combat encounter scenario (which despite being written as 2 combats this is) should be difficult (and to me I'd prefer it at the end). An APL -1 or APL encounter just doesn't cut it. If you have a combat, have a combat, if you don't (and there are great scenarios without combat) then don't, but the super-generic speed bump doesn't cut it.
The NPC development/backstory is actually quite good.
The prose/descriptions are ok, but highly repetitive and often feel like copy/paste or basic thesaurus changes. There is something Dickensian about the descriptions (but not really in a good way) as it felt like the author was trying to puff up his word count by using repetition.
The Intrigue mechanic is pretty good, but for a social scenario (as it seems to be) it doesn't really use social mechanics much, and if your party doesn't have some of the 5 needed skills you're gonna have a bad time. The social interactions at a certain point just felt too much. Had there been more characters to interact with, or some more flip-flopping or something built in it would have complicated an already complex situation but wouldn't have felt quite so blase by the end.
Overall, I think the author had some shining moments and made use of a nice mechanic, but I felt that those moments were more hidden from the players and GM dependent while the not-so-great was more obvious.
Overcomplicated and good evidence that Ultiimate Intrigue is NOT good for PFS
There are many aspects to this scenario that I like but it really is overcomplicated.
Even with the GM thread and the pfsprep site it took several hours to prepare and I was still searching for particular information while actually running the scenario. There is a LOT that the GM has to do and keep track of while running this. I am not at all surprised that there seems to have been much greater than usual table variation with this one.
I was chatting to some other GMs before a different game and 2 of them (both 4 or 5 star GMs) said they don't plan to ever run it due to the complexity.
I think that the new mechanics focus too heavily on knowledge checks. The most valuable character at this social scenario was probably the wizard.
I also found some of the mechanics forced a quite mechanical approach at times. Discoveries, especially, just became a quick exercise in dice rolling.
Even with the Influence checks there were difficulties, even after they knew what skill to roll. They talked fairly naturally, and were surprised when I had to take what they were telling me and basically go : That is diplomacy you're rolling, right? Not the Knowledge Planes that you know is the best skill? Heavy handed questions like that got them to adjust what they were saying. But asking a player with 0 knowledge planes to improvise a speech involving knowledge planes that the other guy would approve of didn't work well with all players.
The strong focus on specific skills sonetimes detracted from the roleplaying that can happen in more free form social encounters
But the players had a good time. And I strongly approve of the social interaction and the attempt to let people without diplomacy also contribute.
I hope that there are further scenarios using rules similar to this. But perhaps they could be a lesser part of the scenario, and not quite so scripted?
Edit: I ran it a second time and saw much the same things happening. The players get so involved in the mechanical aspects of maximimizing their influence that the roleplaying got severely truncated. I hate to use rollplaying vs roleplaying but it seems to fit what happened.
Despite the attempt to widen the set of useful skills one player at the second table was essentially useless. At tier 4-5 trying to make the Sense Motive DCs with just his raw wisdom was almost useless.
And the most valuable character was, once again, the wizard. Given that wizards who care are already good at diplomacy (Student of Philosophy) having the knowledge skills be so incredibly valuable just seems like a bit of overkill to me.
In particular, I think that the Discovery skills should have been far more varied. Three skills, all fairly rare for many characters.
Yesterday I played in Hellknights Feast (which has a precursor of the social interaction rules) and I found it better than this. More free form, more roleplaying, and the interaction was part of and not the entire adventure.
I should note that in both runs the players seemed to enjoy it more than I did.
There's been a lot of discussion on this scenario on the boards, so I feel it's important for me to review it here. To me, this is an excellent social intrigue scenario. It makes good use of the new Influence mechanic from Ultimate Intrigue, which has been evolving since Season 4.
The users who've expressed having a bad experience seem to have done so for one of a few reasons. Either the GM wasn't properly prepared to run the new mechanic, the GM missed something important in the scenario (like the 4-player adjustment), or it just isn't a style of scenario that those particular players enjoy. On each topic:
It is a complicated scenario from a GM perspective. It is beneficial for the GM to spend time prepping it, especially if they have little experience with the Intrigue mechanic from previous scenarios. There are lots of potential bonuses and penalties throughout, as well as several phases of the social interaction, and if the GM doesn't properly understand it all, it's easy for the players to get lost, too. Now, some GMs may look at this and think it's too complicated. To me, it's more complex than the average tier 1-5, but when I compare it to prepping a 5-9 or a 7-11 with a lot of unique monster abilities or NPC builds, I don't think it really takes any more time than that.
Similarly, it's easy for the GM to miss things that can greatly alter the player's experience. Giving a table of 4 the 4-player adjustment is very important. Tracking successes correctly is very important. And explaining the mechanic and the process to the players is very important.
As for the players perspective, if the GM does make mistakes, it's easy for the players to feel like the scenario is not fairly constructed or that the deck is stacked against them. That should not be the case. This scenario awards some benefits for more obscure skills and abilities, but it does not require them to succeed. The average group should not have a problem, as long as they pay attention to how the scenario works.
Also, I understand that a primarily social scenario (with somewhat tacked on combat) is not going to appeal to everyone, in the same way that a brutal combat filled scenario that requires a heavy mastery of the rules to beat isn't going to appeal to everyone. I would stop short of saying this is the social/roleplaying equivalent of Bonekeep, but it is a roleplaying heavy scenario if done right.
As a GM, I love the depth of the information provided, and I found it very easy to create threads that spanned the whole scenario. Based on feedback from the table of 3 players and a pregen that I ran, they enjoyed it as well. And they completed their primary and secondary goals with no problems.
I do have a few complaints...
About the combat...:
The difficulty (or lack thereof) or the combat doesn't bother me. It's a social scenario, so there's no real reason for the combat to be overwhelming. A couple of the past Influence mechanic scenarios have included a brutal combat finale, and that is sometimes difficult for people who bring their social characters.
What bothers me more about the combat in the scenario is that it is not linked to the rest of the scenario in any appreciable way. It is, for all intents and purposes, a random encounter on the way to the scenario. My suggestion for the future would be that any combat in a scenario such as this be more closely linked to the story of the scenario. For example, here, the combat could have involved saving someone or something of value to one of the bidders, resulting in a small bonus for having done so during the bidding/influence rounds.
About those obscure skills...:
There is one set of rolls that is limited to a single skill, which is trained only, and not that common. I don't have a problem with this, as most of the information gained is not crucial to success. But in one instance, making the roll provides a piece of information that results in a circumstance bonus during the later interactions. The problem is that the piece of information gained is something that the PCs contact tells them freely before the event. Without making the roll, though, there's no bonus for knowing the information. It seems like an oversight to me, but it doesn't cause a minor potential problem.
About that Faction Mission...:
The specifics of what a member of the Exchange needs to do are a little complicated. It requires some guidance through the process by the GM, I think, in order for the player to have a chance to be successful. I like that, like the rest of the scenario, it is not just a single roll to succeed, but the reality is we've been made to be used to faction missions that are like that, so some players will struggle with the idea that they need to do more. Providing the right subtle nudges in the right direction can make a huge difference.
Other than those two small things, this scenario was amazingly fun to GM. I wish that I'd had the opportunity to play it before running it, both so that I could have had the experience, and because I think having played through it once would help with understanding the mechanics and the complexity of the story. But I would gladly run this one again, and likely multiple times, without it getting boring.
Final thoughts: If you're looking for a social scenario where a single skill will let you dominate, this is likely not that. Though, a single skill and good planning can result in success, characters with varied skills can be rewarded with a much easier path through the scenario.
I played this together with Quentin under Magabeus.
Due to circumstances I went with my most antisocial character I have (an 8 charisma psychic without points in any of the social skills bluff/diplomacy/intimidate), yet due to my high knowledge skills I managed to be a fairly valuable asset.
Like Quentin and Magabeus I felt the opening scene had little to nothing to do with the rest of the scenario.
The repetitiveness (coupled with it being bloody hot and humid at the location) along with the need to 'divide' the party made the attention of everyone wander on occasion. A break between part 3 and 4 in which something different happened (a training event against some rookie cityguards or something) would have been welcome.
Magabeus had a very good grip on the time for every piece though, and it was nicely spaced, and his preperation was superb with lots of handouts for us to get a better grip at the NPCs involved.
Spoiler:
Exchange faction gets an extra mission, which made me feel like I had to waste a round in order to complete it, because part of it it was a seperate part of the discovery round.
Despite the repetitiveness, it was quite a nice scenario.
Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Maps Subscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber
Please tell me Temel Passad makes an appearance. For reason I cannot fully explain, my players have spent the last 2 years believing him to be an enemy of the society, and at the end of Season 5 even tried pulling the face of one of their real enemies off believing it was Passad in a rubber mask... Which makes him one of my favorite "Villains" to use even if he isn't a villain.
It was a rallying cry that arose from my first rendition of #6-98: Serpents Rise, based on the [not necessarily true] supposition that there is no Pathfinder Lodge in Druma, and therefore pretending to be from the Druma Lodge would mean that nobody would be able to call the PCs' bluff. There's a lot more to it than that, but going into it involves a lot of spoilers.
Ooookay ._. Maybe I'll be less confused when I get chance to play Serpent's Rise :'D
I remember watching the tail end of that table while we were relocating my Serpents Rise group to the Syrinscape table at PaizoCon last year.
Let's see, I remember Thursty and Liz both on there... The Pratts... I think Jessica was as well, but I *was* rather juggling my players' needs at the time as well.
Hearing the rallying cry of Druma Lodge and John's grin rather told me we'd be seeing this sometime this year...
I am a little surprised it's a tier 1-5, though... perhaps better stated that "I am concerned about the team that'll be going on this venture, Captain...."
Ooookay ._. Maybe I'll be less confused when I get chance to play Serpent's Rise :'D
I think it'll make a lot more sense then, and I hope you get a chance to play it soon! Once it's been out for a while longer, I might write up a blog about the experience along the lines of "Let me tell you about a time my game went completely sideways."
Ooookay ._. Maybe I'll be less confused when I get chance to play Serpent's Rise :'D
I think it'll make a lot more sense then, and I hope you get a chance to play it soon! Once it's been out for a while longer, I might write up a blog about the experience along the lines of "Let me tell you about a time my game went completely sideways."
Reminds of me the time when my character and a Halfling in our party dressed up as Pure Legion in a bath house and proceeded to frame the "Pure" Legion for a number of sins. :) Sideways can be fun
He ... hands the PCs a map of Alabastrine. He points to each of the map’s districts and relays the information on each of them presented in the Alabastrine, City of Heathens section on the right.
That side panel doesn't exist on that page in the scenario. The larger section doesn't say which section is which color. Some are self explanatory but confirmation would be awesome.
He ... hands the PCs a map of Alabastrine. He points to each of the map’s districts and relays the information on each of them presented in the Alabastrine, City of Heathens section on the right.
That side panel doesn't exist on that page in the scenario. The larger section doesn't say which section is which color. Some are self explanatory but confirmation would be awesome.
We'll be sure to clear that up in the finished release for PaizoCon. Here are the locations:
Locations:
From left to right:
Green - Scriptum
Red - Courts of Abstinence
Yellow - Prophet's Burg
Blue - Luminous Harbor
Purple - Working End
I very much disliked this adventure. Pathfinder Society is a pick-up game- you never know what your players will enjoy. This is not a problem when there are things for everyone (combat, puzzle, social interaction). Everybody get what they like and enjoy as other claim the spotlight temporarily.
This adventure was almost all one mode. After a short fight at the start it became all about social and knowledge rolls. While interesting in itself, it contained almost nothing that I come to play Society games for. Frankly, I like the fights, I only make combat oriented characters, and am not interested in other types. This was fine... until this one.
The writer could have put some combat in... perhaps between events as a rival tries to stop us from completing our goal, such as assassins at night. This could have also been a good for the right players, just not me.
Anyway, after three hours of this and two more rounds of bids/influence to come, I left the game.
I ran the scenario and really enjoyed it. It was my first experience with the Influence rules and I was concerned about timing, going too fast or too slow. As it happened paying attention to time and giving each player a chance to describe their actions at each phase as well as a bit of RPing for those who wanted to, worked out just about perfect.
I very much disliked this adventure. Pathfinder Society is a pick-up game- you never know what your players will enjoy. This is not a problem when there are things for everyone (combat, puzzle, social interaction). Everybody get what they like and enjoy as other claim the spotlight temporarily.
This adventure was almost all one mode. After a short fight at the start it became all about social and knowledge rolls. While interesting in itself, it contained almost nothing that I come to play Society games for. Frankly, I like the fights, I only make combat oriented characters, and am not interested in other types. This was fine... until this one.
The writer could have put some combat in... perhaps between events as a rival tries to stop us from completing our goal, such as assassins at night. This could have also been a good for the right players, just not me.
Anyway, after three hours of this and two more rounds of bids/influence to come, I left the game.
I have played several adventures without a single combat and enjoyed them, but not this one, even though it had one big combat in the beginning, mostly just to say, "Hey, we had a combat." As it was in no way relevant to the plot of the story. One of the reason I did enjoy the others was that combat was an option we could have taken, but we choose a different route. There was no different route to choose here. My not-all-that-skilled character rolled poorly on those skills she was good at and the DCs were too high for her to succeed with her good rolls on the skills she wasn't that good with.
Spoiler:
I was expecting/hoping for a fight in the last round of schmoozing. It was hosted by the Aspis bidder and featured gladiatorial games for entertainment. Seemed like a perfect place for the Aspis to spring an attack with us unarmed and her gladiators armed. Too bad that never happened
I really enjoyed the scenario, but have some caveats.
1) I'd already heard rumor that it was 90+% non-combat and encouraged to NOT play a martial character.
2) I chose a skill monkey character, and more importantly a character that I enjoy roleplaying with one of my more well developed personalities.
3) Even then I found myself... constrained... the mechanics were so involved that we lost quite a bit of time understanding the mechanics and thus unable to spend the maximum amount of time rping. :)
4) I guess that may have been because it was designed for as few as 3 or so of the players actively participating in the skill checks, and thus when all 6 players participated it bogged down a bit.
My constructive criticism is that someone should create a quick chart that can be laid out on the table to explain the mechanics of the influence process.. ideally in 5 minutes or less. :)
I found this a delight to run and my players seemed to really enjoy it; it took a fair bit of time for the first couple of events but by the 4th or fifth everyone was comfortable enough that they were already planning their actions ahead and ready with their choices when it was there turn.
And then when
Spoiler:
they had the meeting in Myrosope's office I loved, LOVED the looks on their faces when they heard what she had to say. They really gave it some considerable thought.
Thanks, Thursty...this was really awesome.
If I had to give feedback:
Spoiler:
1. The combat at the start felt like it was included for the sake of having a combat; it made no contribution to the plot at all.
2. Overly heavy use of the same 3 skills. I like that there were alternative skills that could be applied in most situations, but there was nothing those 3 were useless for.
I found this a delight to run and my players seemed to really enjoy it; it took a fair bit of time for the first couple of events but by the 4th or fifth everyone was comfortable enough that they were already planning their actions ahead and ready with their choices when it was there turn.
And then when ** spoiler omitted **
Thanks, Thursty...this was really awesome.
If I had to give feedback:
** spoiler omitted **
Nice review! Consider leaving the same post in the review section as well to increase visibility for others planning on running it.
I think that first combat is important if only for the EPIC map. :)
AS long as you get the EPIC map and not some squiggles that seem to indicate something that might be something maybe on a map that's much like any other hand-drawn map you've ever seen.
No offense to the GM, the areas were clearly delineated and aligned, it just lacked a certain... feel?
I like the story, however, there are many things I think that need to be worked on for this scenario. My comments are based on playing it, and not GMing it or reading it.
First of all, organization of the social mechanic needs to be clearly organized. Many GMs reorganize it on their own--which is additional work on their part, which make it a bit better. Writing the rules is different than teaching it, explaining it, or playing it. One should look at the top board games and see how they organize their sequence of play. Chase mechanics have this problem as well. While I agree that these mechanics ATTEMPT to make characters more diverse, I think it makes playing more difficult and more frustrating...which overall is bad for the game (email me if you want to debate this, because I'm sure there is a lot of incorrect rationalizations).
Second, the ways to influence the participants are quite limited. Most of them skills are trained only, and may not be ones that people have as a class skill. Some of the skills are secondary tier skill such as knowledge nobility, history, or engineering. These are secondary things like spellcraft, knowledge arcana, or knowledge local. In previous scenarios that were similar, one could always use a charisma check. This was not offered, and based on the GM, it was either absent or difficult to find in the scenario.
There are two scenarios that I despise. One is the Bid for Alabastrine and the other is the Blackrose Matrimony. I have played the Blackrose Matrimony and the table I was with despised it. I have run the Bid for Alabastrine and the table despised it. Amazing that both were written by the same person. Not going to give away too much but the social aspect of both just seemed to drone on forever and ever. The combat encounter in one was trivial and the combat encounter in the other for low tier was a tpk if the party had not run away.
Played this one with a group of 5, relatively under leveled, but just pushed into high tier. The party had the majority of skills needed, but just decent bonuses on the rolls. Going around the table and watching roll after roll of single digit numbers, compounded by being locked out of the skills we were good at to bad rolls, led to a pretty poor play experience. The GM was awesome, so he was able to bring the characters to life at least, but I don't think anyone at the table enjoyed outright failing a scenario by repeatedly failing skill checks.
Maybe there are some sort of tactics to employ in the intrigue system to push things in your favor, but I didn't see them. It didn't really seem like there were many choices to be made. This scenario made my "never going to play again" list.
Not everyone likes the things that I like, and that's ok.
Without wanting to sound like I'm being a jerk, because I'm really not snarking here, I'm going to take the negative comparisons to Blackros Matrimony as a suggestion that I should play or run that.
Pathfinder Society Lead Developer
