A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 1–5.
When a ship that Venture-Captain Calisro Benarry hired to ferry Pathfinders to the Gloomspires vanished, she called upon diviners to speak to the sailors, only to learn that they had met a watery grave. Benarry has narrowed down the ship’s location to the shoals off the coast of the pirate island of Tempest Cay. While the venture-captain asks some questions on shore and searches for survivors, the PCs must travel out to the shipwreck, uncover the reason why a crew of experienced sailors met their doom, and discover why the nearby ocean has been growing increasingly perilous.
Contents in “Grotto of the Deluged God” also contribute directly to the ongoing storyline of the Concordance faction.
This scenario is basically a sequence of random unrelated events, and that makes it unsatisfying to play.
The Eye of Abendego is this huge storm that has been causing shipwrecks for decades. But something has changed, and now it's... a huge storm that's causing shipwrecks! What a shocking development! And it turns out there's a cult that worships this storm (but not e.g. Gozreh or Hshurha, because that would make sense). The Pathfinders are sent to a shipwreck to investigate. From here it gets weird.
Spoiler:
First there are two encounters with aquatic animals that don't do anything unless you're a murderhobo. Then, searching the ship reveals it sank because of a mutiny, and this has nothing to do with the "new" storm. At this point the party has completed the mission and it's a dud, and they should go home and report. But, for no apparent reason their boat gets magically pulled to a small cave.
The cave contains a triton here who's drowning (how?), and a large dragon. Shocking reveal #1: this dragon is actually the "deluged god" worshipped by those cultists! Shocking reveal #2: it's actually a small dragon covered by an illusion! This would be a nice surprise except I know at least three other PFS scenarios with the exact same trick. Shocking reveal #3: the dragon is researching the "new" storm, and has found that it's caused by something random and will go away by itself. So yeah, the investigation is still a dud, but you get to cow or bribe a small dragon.
Final plot twist: as you sail back home, a ship of cultists just happens to be sailing in the same direction. The scenario assumes that the PCs claim to be their new gods. This is frankly rather silly and most PCs wouldn't even come up with this, but you get penalized with less treasure if you don't.
Finally, the scenario runs very short unless you want to murderhobo the animals or the triton. The dragon sounds like it would be a cool fight, but he's actually a pushover.
I mean seriously what is this? The sequence of events is random to the point of incoherence, and it has enough nonsensical plot twists that M. Night Shyamalan would be proud.
A fun little adventure - but it NEEDS a follow up.
The combats were for the most part pretty uninteresting (which is the only reason i knocked it down to 4 stars).
The story was very fun and interesting - the reveal of both the problem and the haughty dragon guardian were excellent and offered up lots of excellent opportunities for role play but the end game resulting in what was basically a binary choice was a bit of a downer but ended up resulting in a hilarious combat where half the party was swearing fealty and refusing to fight while the rest of the party tried in vain to fight the Dragon!
Excellent scenario well deserving of a follow up - the "boon" is sort of a lame conclusion to the story if there is never going to be more!
Nice adventure but some questionable design choices
Im played this in high tier with a full group.
Overall it was pretty fun and the challenges were unusual and worked pretty well.
I have some major issues with design choices though.
See more in spoilers:
Spoiler:
The "reward" for not fighting the dragon is a bad joke. Especially in hier tier when you identify the brine dragon and see its size it's downright madness to just fight it. It is very hard to exactly identify that it's not exactly a large dragon you have there, unless the GM helps you along a lot. The negative boon is way too punishing and both getting a teleport scroll on a chronicle till level 6 and the fact that a brine dragon can ruin your reputation is pretty ridiculous.
Much worse though is that players who thought "We should not be facing a large dragon in this subtier and were not warned about it, I bet we can kill it somehow" get rewarded by metagaming like this. The boon also invites players to metagame for that teleport scroll chronicle.
Very bad choices that will neither make players nor GMs or developers happy in the end.
I played this scenario in the low-tier and enjoyed it so much I had to log-in to write up a review.
I really appreciated how the author included a number of solutions for what can otherwise be highly annoying encounters for low-level characters and there were a great mix of sections that could be handled by roleplay as well as those that had to be dealt with head-on in combat.
The boss fight was also one of the most memorable encounters I've ever played in PFS.
Played this with a group of mostly experienced players... A very diverse group, not all min-maxed, and at low tier. We had a BALL! We also had the advantage of playing with the author of the scenario as our GM, so we didn't have to worry about an unprepared GM running cold. I was impressed with both the story and the GMing style. The challenges were frequently (but not always) capable of being worked around with a little ingenuity. Those that had to be fought were not overly challenging, but it was still fun to play. I will be watching for more from this author and make sure I don't miss any scenarios or modules she might write in the future! Sign me up!
It did use Warship at the time of that posting, but it was changed last minute to Ship to better serve some encounter needs we caught during copyfitting.
I believe that there was also an issue with the placement of B3 during that conversion. The description of the entrance to B3 is in a different area than the map shows the entrance.
A fun adventure, but yet another scenario that punishes you for not just being a murder hobo. Is there even a scenario out there below the 7-11 tier that has a Scroll of Teleport on the Chronicle sheet? Meh.
A fun adventure, but yet another scenario that punishes you for not just being a murder hobo. Is there even a scenario out there below the 7-11 tier that has a Scroll of Teleport on the Chronicle sheet? Meh.
THIS!
One of the only times my group decided NOT to be murder hobos and we were penalized for it? WTF?!?!?
The wording of that 'boon' is also strange. It seems like the players at the table should be given the option of dividing the cost of a single Scroll of Teleport amongst all of the players at the table, but the way it's worded, everyone is getting charged the full amount (each). Anyway, if anyone does know of a scenario that has a Scroll of Teleport on the Chronicle sheet (that can be played by a 6th-level character or lower), please let me know so that I can look at running that next. Thanks.
I have to bring up that the tan texturing on the bottom quarter or so of the page makes portions of the text almost unreadable when printing in greyscale, which I normally do to save on ink costs.
A fun adventure, but yet another scenario that punishes you for not just being a murder hobo. Is there even a scenario out there below the 7-11 tier that has a Scroll of Teleport on the Chronicle sheet? Meh.
THIS!
One of the only times my group decided NOT to be murder hobos and we were penalized for it? WTF?!?!?
You're not punished for not killing it, you're punished for swearing fealty to it, above your vows to your gods and the pathfinder society. You can not-kill it all you want. You just can't bend the knee to it without consequences.
As I mentioned in the GM thread for the scenario, I laughed really hard when I saw that "boon"...after I picked my jaw up off the floor. It's so harsh, but loyalty matters.
I believe that there was also an issue with the placement of B3 during that conversion. The description of the entrance to B3 is in a different area than the map shows the entrance.
Yes. I've tried running the published scenario with both maps and I think both ships work fine. Really, B3 can be on whichever deck you want it on as long as the physical description in the encounter text is moved to the right place.
I think 17 months is not too impatient to chase my Pathfinder Wiki colleague's request. Seems this and 9-23 are still missing their final covers here that we want to scoop up and add to the wiki.