Pathfinder Society Scenario #9-25: Betrayal in the Bones PDF

When the blurb for this one was revealed it sounded very much to me like a second crack at the sort of epic conclusion to the Desimire/Thurl Demoniac threat.

Thankfully the 2nd attempt was a significant improvement on the infamously troubled first.

I had a great GM for this who managed to bring the roleplaying opportunities with the dwarven spirits and with the assassin to life, the latter resulting in the sort of Good The Bad and The Ugly standoff that these only these sorts of high level fully fleshed out characters are truly capable of.

Still in the end, this was a combat module, a chance to really flex your seekers (and flex we did all of which was quite fun).

So why just 3 stars?

So yeah fun scenario. Interesting in it's own right. Just disappointing in terms of what we have come to expect from seeker content and from the campaigns meta plot.

Betrayal is a combat scenario with a little bit of roleplay.

Your mission is to hunt down and exterminate two longtime foes of the Pathfinder Society who are trapped. This aspect of the scenario is really nice for those of us who have been around a while and provides some closure, which is great! Unfortunately, this is one of the only selling points of this scenario.

Each encounter, it felt like the GM opened the monster manual, placed an appropriate CR opponent on the map and said "Fight!". For seeker arc material, this just isn't good enough and was very disappointing.

Even the storyline was fairly mundane. There were no "Aha!" moments like we've had in previous seeker arcs.

The good part about this scenario, I guess, is that this scenario is fairly easy compared to the other level 12+ scenarios. We basically beat the scenario with 3 PCs (other two players were not very good) and except for the 1st encounter (when we realized they weren’t going to help), it was fairly easy.

The encounter with the assassin has the most potential to be memorable, but it highly depends on tactics and skills of the PCs, and the creativity of the GM. It also has the potential to be super boring, haha. Personally, although short lived, it was enjoyable and memorable (which is why this scenario is 3, not 2 stars).

The information and opinions expressed above are shared by our 6 player table, who really enjoyed this at FlatCon today in Bloomington, IL. Most of the PCs date back to when the Pasha Muhlia al-Jakri was our faction leader for the Qadiran faction, so my take on the social encounter moment was totally at odds with what the Decemvirate thinks. You have to be familiar with 2-21 The Dalsine Affair to fully understand this. I will be petitioning the Decemvirate to reconsider their position on my former faction leader. Brief though the "social moment" may be, it mattered a lot to some of us. Great scenario - we played it in just under 5 hours with highly experienced players who all have played together before.

I was very impressed by last year's Seeker scenario, and this year does not disappoint either. I also played at Monkhound's table.

I like the epic premise of the scenario. It lends itself well to playing with characters that had gone mostly into retirement a long time ago, coming back to settle a score with an old foe. This is a good difference with the S8 Seeker scenario, which you really should have played a lot of S8 for. But that's hard with Seeker characters, those often have a lot of their levels in much earlier content.

I think the difficulty in this scenario is decent; there were quite a few scary moments, even for our powerful group, but we never felt that the author resorted to cheap mean tricks. The Hard Mode made things a bit harder in clever ways. This is not "the AI cheats with higher numbers", it's odd wrinkles that make it a bit harder to rely on standard tactics.

I suppose there could have been more socialization, but you can't do everything in one scenario. I liked the ethical considerations put into the mission briefing too. Although it's a fighting mission, it's not a murderhobo mission.

I was one of Monkhound's players, see below.

This scenario is a great example of high level play. Some scary, unique monsters, cool challenges, everything. I wish I could be more descriptive, but it just works.

A fellow player lamented the fact that it was just mostly a dungeon crawl with one talky bit in between, she would've liked some more social stuff so actual roleplayers and skill monkeys would be rewarded. And while I agree, I think it's difficult to balance that at higher levels, while combats are just an easier way for players to show off their cool abilities, so I understand the decision. Still though, a bit more socialisation would've been nice, I think.

I have one small nitpick, which I'll put behind spoiler tags, as it's about the final boss.

I think this is a great scenario. It's properly challenging without being mean, combat-wise. I just wish non-combat-specialised (i.e. skill monkeys) people were rewarded a bit as well.