Pathfinder Society Scenario #4-03: Linnorm's Legacy

"Oh no! I hate these sheep that I am currently eating and will continue to eat unless someone suggests eating wild goats instead!

"Oh no! I can't Fly or Swim because I'm afraid of everything!

"Oh no! I've Flown onto a boat, and now I'm trapped here because, as I just mentioned, I CAN'T FLY OR SWIM!

"Oh cool! This stranger has candy in her van! I guess I'll go in because I'm definitely not afraid of anything."

This entire stupid plotline depends on the everyone completely forgetting then occasionally remembering extremely important things. I usually focus on the combat aspects, but this story is just awful.

Also, I'll put a specific encounter in a spoiler below because it sums up the quality of the storyline.

Year ago I was like "Eh its not my thing, other people like it decently" but this year I'm like "time to actually give feedback"...

...So uh... I just found the children to not be that memorable? I mean, their art is kinda ugly cute like pugs, their personalities are various form of children character archetypes. Aka... They don't really feel like linnorms?

Like idea of babysitting young dragons is perfectly up to my alley. But this adventure could have went for more xenofiction kind of approach where they could have treated children less like human children but large reptiles. As they are written, you could give exact characterization to giant toddlers and nothing would change about the characters. That really bothers me because it feels like good premise isn't used to its best to make something fascinating.

Linnorm was a skill and roleplay-based scenario with trivial combat.

Being a chaperone and servant of a bunch of psycho entitled brats, isn’t my idea of a good time. Next time, leave the option open where we just kill them all and fail the mission (like Frostfur Captives). I would have taken it. There are enough entitled brats with no accountability in the real world already, we don’t need to waste our fantasy time about it.

In addition to the obnoxious roleplay, it felt like a never-ending gauntlet of skill checks. The scenario ran long, more than 4 hours.

It was also annoying that Linnorms, who only have animal intelligence (which distinguishes them from dragons), had Linnorm CHILDREN that were often smarter than most NPCs!

Another annoyance is with Paizo overall. Why is everything that was evil, now being turned into something cute? Are we in some 1984 experiment? The list could go on and on for pages, but Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Kolbolds and now Linnorms were all evil, but are now the good guys. There are no bad guys left. Oh, I guess there are the Duergar, because, you know, slavery.

Overall: A never-ending skill check gauntlet while taking care of a group of psychopathic entitled brats, without the agency to correct them, was horrible. (1/10)

As player: 6 players, 28 CP, 4h. As GM: 6 players, 23 CP, 3h45.

The good: The storyline. Mind you, this is personal preference. My tables (on both sides of the screen) loved the storyline. So did I. A few others I know, despised it. I enjoy a more lightheartened plot for a change and something a little different that stands alone and not tied to a metaplot; meanwhile others I know felt that escorting them throughout town is dull. I did my best to roleplay the linnorms as best as possible and heavy roleplaying is what will bring this to life. My GM, at the time I played it, did a terrific job playing the linnorms as well and he’s not much of a roleplayer either. Some minimal effort by the GM will go a long way here. I’m not close to being the best voice actor in the world, but my players seemed entertained and happy by it. And I had fun roleplaying them.

I would also like to see these linnorms in a future adventure. Maybe when they are older.

I give the storyline a 9/10.

The bad: The combats were almost too easy. As players, we had a balanced team and we steamrolled through the combats. Almost too quickly, which is surprising for high tier, on both sides of the screen. When I ran this table, the players also steamrolled the combats. A number of them appeared bored.

The ugly: The mechanical design of the skill check challenges. This is what I felt torpedoed the scenario despite extensive work on presentation in Foundry and trying to roleplay as best as possible. If your team didn’t have at least two social characters, you were going to struggle, not just through one skill challenge but ALL of them. This scenario was heavily weighted towards skill challenges, which is one thing in of itself. But, only a pool of repetitive 1-3 hard social checks over multiple skill check challenges made my players felt like they were banging their head against a wall for the better part of three hours (to literally quote one of them).

I will openly admit that I tried to pull some creative GMing, I allowed additional skills as long as they were germane to the action going on, but it just owes to how flawed the design was. I’m aware that these challenges should be quite difficult to achieve, and yes I’m aware that storyline wise, the Pathfinder Society needed to demonstrate poise, but mechanically, it was proving (for lack of a better word) one-dimensional. Since the scenario was pushing social skills and poise, I tried to incentive my players to roleplay what they were doing if they could get creative with a non-face check, but Foundry didn’t cooperate. Ah well, this is a dice game after all. But at least fewer people were on the sidelines and non-face characters (in this case, the whole table, although I think someone had a 14 cha) felt like they could have a chance.

In the end, the narrowness of the challenge was not a problem because of missing some of the 10 treasure bundles, but it was the feeling of the repetitive checks across three challenges (and a good chunk of time compared to nearly any other scenario I have played in PFS 2e) that is the problem. If it was just ONE challenge, this wouldn’t have been as big deal to me.

I give the mechanical design (at most) a 3/10. GMs can try to get creative here to get around this, but again it’s more work for the GM.

Additional notes: Lesser experienced GMs may struggle as there is a lot to keep track of, so more extensive prep is required. I did not have issue with this, but others may well.

Final verdict: Great storyline, subpar mechanical design. As a player it was beyond frustrating. As a GM, I felt I bent over backwards to keep my players happy whilst staying true to what the scenario appeared to be pushing but it had to be said.

I love everything about the linnorm children and it was a blast to run this scenario. There's a lot of bookeeping for the GM to track however, which is a pain, especially in the third event.

There's also a couple pain points from the GM side of the table:

That said, my complaints are basically entirely under the hood/behind the screen. I think this is a wonderful scenario and I look forward to further antics of these kids. (Clearly they're going to accompany the expedition, right? Right?)