RSS RSS Facebook Twitter Email
Pathfinder / Pathfinder Society / Season 1: Year of the Open Road

Pathfinder Society Scenario #1-11: Flames of Rebellion

3.90/5 (based on 14 ratings)
Pathfinder Society Scenario #1-11: Flames of Rebellion

Our Price: $8.99

Add to Cart
Facebook Twitter Email

A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for levels 1–4 (subtiers 1–2 and 3–4).

Following the trail of one of the first Pathfinders, the PCs travel to the town of Sauerton where an old ally helps them find important clues. These clues lead the PCs into a dangerous wilderness to an old tower whose history goes back even farther than the Pathfinder Society itself. As the PCs navigate numerous threats with opposing interests, will they find the hidden keys to unlock the secrets of the Open Road Pact, or just another trail obscured by the passage of centuries?

Written by: Michael Sayre

Scenario tags: None

[Scenario Maps spoiler - click to reveal]

The following maps used in this scenario are also available for purchase here on paizo.com:

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop

Note: This product is part of the Pathfinder Society Scenario Subscription.

Product Availability

Fulfilled immediately.

Are there errors or omissions in this product information? Got corrections? Let us know at store@paizo.com.

PZOPFS0111E

See Also:

<< Pathfinder Society Scenario #1-08: Revolution on the Riverside
<< Pathfinder Society Scenario #1-09: Star-Crossed Voyages
Pathfinder Society Scenario #1-12: The Burden of Envy Pathfinder Society Scenario #1-13: Devil at the Crossroads >>
6 to 10 of 15 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | next > last >>

Average product rating:

3.90/5 (based on 14 ratings)

Sign in to create or edit a product review.

It's a dungeon crawl

3/5 —

This module is a dungeon crawl. Not much to say really. You go in, fight, fight, fight, and try to survive. The combats are enjoyable with a sprinkling of traps. The right gear choices can really make or break you in this. For players that love combat and traps, this is right up your alley.

Amazing Scenario!

5/5 —

There's so much here to love! It delves deep into the metaplot in a way that interested my players more than any other meta scenario they've played thus so far this season. The NPCs were a joy to act out and had incredible impact on my players. The fights themselves were a challenge for the players and gave a breadth of fun options for the GM. The hazards were relevant without slowing down the adventure or feeling unfair, and the final fight is one we will remember for a long time. The boon is absolutely epic and one of the most slotted and used boons in my lodge since.

Meta-and tough Boss fight... great scenario

5/5 —

This has been my favorite scenario so far. The plot is fun, there are several interesting combats, and the boss fight is challenging.

Great fights!

4/5 —

The scenario has a number a good story points.

There are a variety of fights that are differently challenging to different groups. While it's possible, I guess, for “just the right party” to breeze through every fight, or to be in danger of party wipe in every fight, it seems to me likeliest that most parties will have a good mix of “oh-my-G-d-we're-all-going-to-die" moments, and fights in which they can feel their characters to be “in control” of the situation. The scaling of the fights seemed right – they nicely avoided the boring old “add some more X” methods.

The fights also encourage/permit innovation in movement and terrain use. A real swashbuckling element, usually missing in “indoor” fights.

The adversaries and others are interesting, with interesting motivations.

Unfortunately, the physical layout of the maps seemed poor. Out of game the tiles are so obnoxious to assemble that we end up laying out other terrain pieces “close enough.” I am glad that the battle areas/maps were “compact” – it gave a claustrophobic sense of the encounters, and kept the table from being too crowded!

In-game, the history/design of layouts makes no sense. Who the Heck would plan the design of a building to leave X in that space, a Y in that space, and/or a Z in that space? Places need to make sense for suspension of disbelief, just as NPCs and adversaries do.

I'm not usually a huge fan of dungeon crawls, but this was exceptional. Definitely worthwhile, but not everything that it could have been with more careful editing.

3/5 —

I played the scenario recently and then read through the encounters afterwards to find out what exactly went on there. We had four players and about of them liked the scenario, the others didn’t very much.

The Good

The introduction was pretty fun, even if there is a lot of travelling and talking to people that doesn’t give you any real information. I think the dungeon layout was nice and there was a reasonable amount of encounters for a dungeon crawl. The encounters and traps in a vacuum were interesting and creative too.

The Bad

A few encounters were not very challenging and felt like filler in comparison to the overtuned other encounters and there is no good way for players to know when difficulty spikes will happen and how to avoid them. More in spoilers. May run pretty long depending on how encounters play out.

The Ugly

Challenge point system doesn’t see to adjust to the power of the group well. Certain challenge point ranges seem way more difficult than others.

Spoiler:

We were 4 players: Level 4 Rogue (2x), Fighter 4, Druid 2 (21 challenge points)
The druid was a normal mix of ranged damage with spells and healing, all others primarily melee without striking ranged weapons.
Encounters were very easy until the kobolds at the barricade. It ended up being a very long, dragged out encounter that we barely won with the level 2 druid dying. We checked the boss and after rolling a knowledge check that revealed the infernal wounds we decided not to attempt fighting him.
I read through the encounters to find out what went wrong and was pretty horrified about the amount of HP, enemy types and adjustment by challenge points.
Or group of three level 4s and a level 2 was up against two level 4.5s, three level 2s and two weak level 0.5 enemies. Thar is already a pretty severe difficulty and with the terrain the players don’t know and will waste their turns on (not very enjoyable btw) this becomes very deadly. Even though the GM played the enemies very intelligently (maybe a bit too much), an almost tpk is an expected result with this kind of difficulty. A group of six or seven low tier characters in the same difficulty might just tpk without much of a chance right then. The next higher challenge rating bracket is quite a bit easier since there is one less caster that is very high hp and very dangerous with this kind of terrain. Of course groups with many ranged fighters and casters will have an easier time with this encounter but it is still overtunded.
The last encounter is overtunded as well. Again with challenge points 19-22 being more dangerous than the next bracket. The amount of damage the boss does combined with his damage reduction, high to hit chances and high saves will pretty much guarantee that one or several players will go down and not unlikely die of the infernal wound. A low tier group in the 19-22 bracket has at best a 25% chance to hit him with the first attack getting their damage reduced by his DR but he will have about a 90% chance to hit them (for a potential one shot) and a 45% to crit them for a 100% one shot all including infernal wound.
These unbalances in difficulty are not acceptable in a normal scenario in my opinion.

6 to 10 of 15 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | next > last >>
Search Thread

Search this Thread:

Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber; Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

Good to see this coming and I love having the links for the maps. Unfortunately, these links are going to the maps for 1-10 and need to be fixed.
Dark Archive
Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Also huh, this is unrelated to Revolution on the Riverside I think, but funny there are two rebellion/revolution adventures in two months row :D
Scarab Sages Organized Play Developer
1 person marked this as a favorite.
CorvusMask wrote:
Also huh, this is unrelated to Revolution on the Riverside I think, but funny there are two rebellion/revolution adventures in two months row :D

They're related in that they're both part of the season's metaplot rediscovering the adventures of the founding Pathfinders, though they don't directly interlink in a way that requires you to play one in order to get the full value from the other.

Michael Sayre wrote:
They're related in that they're both part of the season's metaplot rediscovering the adventures of the founding Pathfinders, though they don't directly interlink in a way that requires you to play one in order to get the full value from the other.

Is there any way to find out which adventures are a part of the metaplot?

Scarab Sages Organized Play Developer
2 people marked this as a favorite.
Yrrej86 wrote:
Michael Sayre wrote:
They're related in that they're both part of the season's metaplot rediscovering the adventures of the founding Pathfinders, though they don't directly interlink in a way that requires you to play one in order to get the full value from the other.
Is there any way to find out which adventures are a part of the metaplot?

So far that's-

1-00: Origin of the Open Road
1-08: Revolution on the Riverside
1-11: Flames of Rebellion

The next entries should be a two-parter currently scheduled for March.
Scarab Sages Organized Play Developer
1 person marked this as a favorite.
numbat1 wrote:

Good to see this coming and I love having the links for the maps. Unfortunately, these links are going to the maps for 1-10 and need to be fixed.

I'll let tech know so we can get those pointing to the right pages.

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Michael Sayre wrote:
Yrrej86 wrote:
Michael Sayre wrote:
They're related in that they're both part of the season's metaplot rediscovering the adventures of the founding Pathfinders, though they don't directly interlink in a way that requires you to play one in order to get the full value from the other.
Is there any way to find out which adventures are a part of the metaplot?

So far that's-

1-00: Origin of the Open Road
1-08: Revolution on the Riverside
1-11: Flames of Rebellion

The next entries should be a two-parter currently scheduled for March.

I appreciate this!

Thank you very much!
Paizo Employee Webstore Coordinator
3 people marked this as a favorite.
Michael Sayre wrote:
numbat1 wrote:

Good to see this coming and I love having the links for the maps. Unfortunately, these links are going to the maps for 1-10 and need to be fixed.

I'll let tech know so we can get those pointing to the right pages.

Whoopsie! This was a copy/paste error on my part, thanks for pointing it out! Those links should be going to the right places now :)

Grand Lodge

Not sure if it's just me, but this keeps downloading empty zip files instead of the scenario?

Have tried an incognito window & tried the "problems downloading" button to refresh the personalization & blocking caching locally, and also tried another browser.
Scarab Sages Organized Play Developer
Tim Schneider 908 wrote:

Not sure if it's just me, but this keeps downloading empty zip files instead of the scenario?

Have tried an incognito window & tried the "problems downloading" button to refresh the personalization & blocking caching locally, and also tried another browser.

I was able to download it, but I have no idea if my being on an employee account would affect the results we're each seeing. I'll ping tech so they can see if there's anything visibly wrong on the back end.

Sovereign Court

I was able to download mine without issue.

Mine worked fine also.
Grand Lodge
2 people marked this as a favorite.

Retried again now & it's worked :D Probably something went wrong & got stuck in a cache somewhere along the way.

EDIT: To throw in something useful, 10/10 for the new GM synopsis's, Another great little addition added to the list of reasons I'm loving the new 2E scenario layouts!
Liberty's Edge
1 person marked this as a favorite.

Can we please get updated reporting sheets on the 2e adventures? The one that is included in the scenarios do not have enough room for players to write a 7 digit number followed by a four digit number. Under "Org Play #". The easiest solution is to swap "Class" and "Org Play #". Class is something we don't need when reporting.

There has been sufficient time to get this fixed. The community has produced half-page sheets that are better.

Please. Update the reporting sheets. They are not sufficient to be used.

I plan to post this message in all future releases until this gets fixed.

Thank you.
Dark Archive

Michael Sayre,
I would like to make a suggestion or two in regards to flip-tiles

Since these appear to all be numbered/labeled, would it be possible to have those labels on future maps using them? Would make it way faster to find the correct map tile.

Also, please try and be cognizant of the price of these... each pack is twice the price of a flip-mat... so the investment to get three different packs is pretty extreme for one scenario (at about $90, retail)

Thank you.
Scarab Sages Organized Play Developer
3 people marked this as a favorite.
Silbeg wrote:

Michael Sayre,

I would like to make a suggestion or two in regards to flip-tiles

Since these appear to all be numbered/labeled, would it be possible to have those labels on future maps using them? Would make it way faster to find the correct map tile.

Unfortunately, putting the tags directly on the maps in the scenario is either illegible or unsightly to the point of interfering with necessary tags on the map. This is why we include a list of all the tile numbers for each map at the beginning of the associated encounter area with instructions for how to assemble them.

Quote:


Also, please try and be cognizant of the price of these... each pack is twice the price of a flip-mat... so the investment to get three different packs is pretty extreme for one scenario (at about $90, retail)

Thank you.

We're very cognizant of the cost of flip-tiles, which is one of the reasons we make a point of ensuring that if we use a flip-tile set during a season, we use it across multiple adventures. Two of the three flip-tile packs used in this adventure have been / will be used on at least one other occasion this season and season 10 of the PF1 campaign (numerous times in the case of Forest Starter Set).

For the folks who pay to print out custom maps, we've already saved them enough money this season to pay for the entire set of flip-tiles used in this adventure (at least based on local rates for flip-mat sized color printouts). For the folks who buy our products for every adventure they run, we can keep things a lot fresher with the flip-tiles than we were able to with just the map packs and flip-mats, and using the same tile set across multiple adventures doesn't mean we're recycling the same map(s).
Grand Lodge
Michael Sayre wrote:
CorvusMask wrote:
Also huh, this is unrelated to Revolution on the Riverside I think, but funny there are two rebellion/revolution adventures in two months row :D
They're related in that they're both part of the season's metaplot rediscovering the adventures of the founding Pathfinders, though they don't directly interlink in a way that requires you to play one in order to get the full value from the other.

Can "metaplot" be added to the scenario tag, please?

Community / Forums / Paizo / Product Discussion / Pathfinder Society Scenario #1-11: Flames of Rebellion All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Product Discussion
Pathfinder Lost Omens: Rival Academies
Last post: by Terevalis Unctio of House Mysti
Pathfinder GM Core
Last post: by The Raven Black