A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 3–7.
When the necromancer-king Tar-Baphon rose as a lich and threatened to conquer all of Avistan, Taldor rallied its neighbors and led the Shining Crusade, a glorious campaign that defeated the Whispering Tyrant’s armies and sealed him away. For the better part of a millennium, Lastwall has guarded Tar-Baphon’s prison and fended off the orc tribes to the north, rarely sparing a second thought to the rich archaeological secrets that lie just below the soil. A local venture-captain has found a lost chapter to the Tome of Righteous Repose, which chronicles the demise of countless heroes of the Shining Crusade. At long last, this has earned the Society Lastwall’s blessing to uncover these lost sites, lay to rest the fallen crusaders, and repatriate the family heirlooms they carried to battle.
"From the Tome of Righteous Repose" is an evergreen, replayable scenario designed to provide a flexible adventure that confronts the PCs with a variety of threats more common to higher-level characters—all while uncovering the history of one of Avistan’s greatest conflicts. Depending on which lead the PCs take, they might explore the proud crusader nation of Lastwall, travel into the gloom-shrouded mountains of Ustalav, or risk an expedition into the orc-ruled wastes of Belkzen in pursuit of lost history.
This scenario is designed for play in Pathfinder Society Roleplaying Guild 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.
I have had the pleasure of running this twice in two different cities so far and it has been fun and exciting both times.
This scenario is a choose your own adventure book for GM's with a massive amount of personal alterations you can make in the form of enemies, traps, and story line. The extra large map and the fact that it isnt just a boring dungeon slog make this product well worth the time and money.
Some words of advice for those wishing to run this: you may think you can prep this 2 hours before go time, you cannot. well you can. but you shouldn't. this is a scenario that feels much more rewarding and enjoyable when you know exactly what rooms your monsters are in and what loot is where. take the time to prep this. I recommend roughly a full day in advance. putting monsters down is easy. making it mesh with the story and work with your players is the more difficult part.
all said, this evergreen is amazing. i give it a 5/7.
I had heard rumors this was both a good scenario and also a potentially lethal one. Rarely have been rumors been this true.
Let’s start with the storyline. First of all, it’s an evergreen. It, however, is not a standard evergreen as it’s for a higher level range. That itself means it has big shoes to fill. It has to be different every single in order to be replayable, but also challenging. Let me just say that it succeeded in almost spectacular fashion.
There are four different overarching themes, each with its distinct creatures and opponents for a GM to choose from. Even better is the fact that GMs get to decide where in the ‘dungeon’ they place the creatures, and together with the fact the ‘dungeon’ itself can be different as well, makes this scenario unique experience every single time.
I’ve only played the ‘bones’ path and I enjoyed immensely. The kind of creatures you face were perfect for my psychic funerary priest of Pharasma, so might be biased. Still, some of the creatures we fought were unlike anything I’ve ever faced. Just like the eidolon variety, unfettered phantoms are a huge pool of opportunity. The fact they now officially exist, makes me want to give this scenario bonuspoints.
I do have to say that the encounters are brutal. I can easily see people die here and even the occasional TPK. Not only is this an evergreen, but it’s also a showcase of how dangerous tier 3-7 can be. When I played it, our party only barely avoided a TPK and miraculously didn’t suffer a casualty. I can understand why people somewhat complain about the difficulty. I can only say that the path of bones with Michiko as the final boss was very, very lethal. Our GM guesses this might be the roughest potential fight to face, but the dice had decided to throw it at us anyway.
If the other potential BBEG’s and paths are similar, this is an amazing dungeoncrawl that’s really challenging in terms of combat. Even though we nearly died, I’m very curious as to what the other paths have to offer. This scenario really good and deserves the four stars I gave it. I just wish there were more role-play and investigation portions.
Great evergreen. Maybe not the best, but certainly a contender.
Evergreens are hard to design. They need to be interesting enough to hold up over multiple plays, but still remain accessible. I think this scenario definitely succeeded at the first one, but maybe slightly at the cost of the second one. I adore The Wounded Wisp for its narrative quality: you really get to discover something cool. The only downside is, you can do it only once. Once you know the story beats, you can sort of rush through it for easy XP. In this evergreen, however, story is almost an excuse for a good adventure. It of course depends on whether you prefer a roleplay-intensive or a fighty scenario, but I think this one holds up well over time better than the previous evergreens, and that's even excluding the different maps and storylines you can follow.
One thing I have to note, though, is its difficulty. While The Wounded Wisp's combat were almost all snooze-fests, this one might have dialled the difficulty up too high. I thought it was just the type of encounters selected, but I see from other reviews I wasn't alone in this. I asked several times "are you sure we're playing the low tier?" as some combats were pretty scary.
Aside from that, I feel this is a great scenario. Maybe a bit bland for a regular scenario, with no real storyline or interesting mechanics, but as an evergreen, I love it. Tier 3-7 also means you're a little bit sturdier so you can take more hits, and the modularity of everything seems great to me. While there might be some more optimal places to have a battle, a GM basically gets to build his own dungeon.
All in all, a great scenario. Maybe a bit light on fluff, but maybe that's what a good evergreen needs.
OK, this is far and away the best evergreen out there, and there's a big astounding reason why: it really and truly embraces of what makes an evergreen an evergreen. Huge amount of replayability and a unique experience every time on the GM's end.
From the Tome of Righteous Repose:
As well, with so much freedom on the GM, it's an enjoyable experience creating your own unique dungeons. I've already made a "ready to go" version in case I need to pull it out and run it. Thinking about making some more so I can pull out a different theme if I'm feeling like it that day.
The fact that the GM can basically build a dungeon within the confines of the scenario and have it be an appropriate challenge while being able to create reasons for why certain monsters are in certain places is just awesome.
If I had one criticism, I believe it may be a little too challenging on the players for an evergreen. But even so, it might be just a tad.
I played this scenario 3 times (two times high tier, one time low) and it was a blast every time.
We had always different challenges and some of them were pleasantly nasty. I love this kind of concept for a replayable and the fact that we now have a 3-7 replayable (and that this is the first replayable with no “noob protection”)
The challenge can be customized for the group present and ranges from relatively easy to “Do your worst” All kind of PC should feel necessary because skill and combat oriented characters can contribute (more or less depending on the chosen arc.)
The only warning I can give: NEVER run it cold or try to roll everything at the table because you WILL miss some important parts.
Played this last night with 4 on the upper sub-tier. It has a nice story arc and integrates well with some of the early Pathfinder AP/Campaign content (Carrion Crown, especially), further developing an important storyline. We played a variant with exceptionally creepy monsters for Halloween that kept us on our toes! There are definitely some nasties in there! :-) We had fun, and it was a 4 hr. delve. I am looking forward to the next random run!
Just going to ask... why not just make three cool scenarios that can be played in any order rather than try fit so much cool sounding content between two covers?
Because an evergreen is meant to be replayed by the same players multiple times. Three separate scenarios would have less variance between playthroughs and be less useful as replayable scenarios, if they were even classified as such.
Also, the experimental part of this scenario is giving GMs more freedom in assigning encounters and tactics, since a major complaint about organized play is that there is no recourse to adjust the scenario on the fly.
Pathfinder LO Special Edition, PF Special Edition Subscriber
Shifty wrote:
Just going to ask... why not just make three cool scenarios that can be played in any order rather than try fit so much cool sounding content between two covers?
The way the story is structured, it could probably just be one non-evergreen scenario. Imagine that during the writing process an author brainstorms several possibilities, then chooses the best one. This scenario chooses the best dozen or so and leaves it in the hands of the GM to randomly select or choose what is best for their gaming group.
Essentially, GMs get access to all the crazy ideas the author has, instead of just one idea.
I have a question about GMing this scenario multiple times. I've GMed this scenario twice. Both have been reported, but in my sessions list for the second session it says
"Player has already run scenario at session # 138 of event # 63471 A Muse N Games on November 08, 2016."
And the prestige for this session is reported as 0.
To me this implies that I DON'T receive credit for the second session. Could somebody clear this up for me? I've already run this scenario 2 additional times and applied the credit to future GM blobs so I'd like to know if I can keep applying the credit! Thanks.
How are we GMs supposed to handle the chronicle sheets? I take it we need to cross out all of the items not listed in the specific encounter arc treasure package?
I have a couple questions about applying credit from running this scenario as a GM:
1. Do I still have to cross off all the items that were not from the encounter arc I chose to run, or can I access all of these items because none of my characters were there?
2. Do PCs only receive the Worthy Foe boon affecting one of the four groups of enemies, based on which encounter arc they went through? How do you apply this boon to GM characters?
Aside from that, I'd just like to make the comment that this scenario was my first time GMing a table of PFS, and I think this scenario is really nice to have as a GM that doesn't have access to any other scenarios yet. Having one book that I can run forever is pretty cool.
