Pathfinder Adventure Path #178: Punks in a Powderkeg (Outlaws of Alkenstar 1 of 3) (Foundry VTT) Bundle

creating discussion thread

Why isn't there a neat bundle of the whole Adventure Path like Abomination Vaults?

If I compare the two especially price wise for the whole of Outlaws of Alkenstar I have to pay 60% more than for the whole Abomination Vaults.

I don't understand why one short AP costs 60$ and another 100$ could anyone help me with that?

Why isn't there a neat bundle of the whole Adventure Path like Abomination Vaults?

If I compare the two especially price wise for the whole of Outlaws of Alkenstar I have to pay 60% more than for the whole Abomination Vaults.

I don't understand why one short AP costs 60$ and another 100$ could anyone help me with that?

Probably because there Abomination Vaults can be purchased as 1 book and not 3. Outlaws is only available in parts 1, 2, and 3. (Just my guess)

Why isn't there a neat bundle of the whole Adventure Path like Abomination Vaults?

If I compare the two especially price wise for the whole of Outlaws of Alkenstar I have to pay 60% more than for the whole Abomination Vaults.

I don't understand why one short AP costs 60$ and another 100$ could anyone help me with that?

Hey there, so this is an interesting question and I'll try to break this down into different parts because I'm not sure how much you know or don't know.

First off, Abomination Vaults is a 3 book adventure path just like Outlaws. Both of these adventure paths have single book PDF's available for $20 each.

Additionally, Abomination Vaults had a hardcover release that combined all three books (And cut out a lot of backmatter) into a single purchase of $39 for the PDF.

Next, we have the FoundryVTT modules. These modules need to be tied to a PDF purchase so the compilation of Abomination Vaults has a FoundryVTT module for $60 (PDF included). Outlaws does not have a compilation so each book's module is sold at $35 (PDF included) each.

So if we were to look at this and subtract the PDF from the purchase cost then Abomination Vaults comes to (60-39) $21 or $7 per book, and Outlaws comes out to (35-20) $15 per book. Separately, the VTT Code product (if you already own the PDF) for Outlaws is being sold at $14/book

A missing piece of the puzzle here is that the pricing structure has changed a few times to reflect the cost of producing these modules. When Abomination Vaults and Outlaws first had their modules come out, the pricing was still being figured out. Outlaws was originally around that same cost per book as the Abomination Vault module, but the price later increased to maintain quality.

Now what does all of this mean? Well, having looked at this more closely now, I think that it turns out that Abomination Vaults foundryVTT module never had the pricing updated when the other modules had their price increase. Maybe it was forgotten, or maybe it is an intentional loss leader. I'm not sure. I am not a paizo employee and have no insight behind the pricing decisions of their products.

What I can say is that the FoundryVTT modules are worth the full price of the bundle. The modules save me so much time and gives some of that "wow" factor for my players. It is much better quality than I could produce myself. Like high quality maps made for foundry (background layers/foreground layers), macros to toggle tiles and ambient sounds, sound effects and sound tracks, and killer tokens just to name a few points. It's the kind of thing I wish I could spend my time building something so well polished for my players, but I'm time crunched so it is better for me to use the module (I run Abomination Vaults), and now I can focus on the the rest of things like knowing the story/ interactions/etc.

Obligatory, I'm extremely biased in that I am on the team that produces some of this content but I think I can safely say all of the developers are committed to delivering high quality content that we hope others are happy with the quality.

TLDR - Abomination Vaults module doesn't seem to have increased in price when the rest of the books were updated. I'm unsure if that was intentional or not.

Journal entries are not working for me when installing this pack. I have it isolated to the "Outlaws of Alkenstar - Basis Pack". This modifies the CSS/HTML in some way that makes it impossible to edit journal entries. the Alkenstar journal format is the default format and I have no way of changing this that I know off. I'm running Foundry version 10.291. Not sure where else to post this.

Journal entries are not working for me when installing this pack. I have it isolated to the "Outlaws of Alkenstar - Basis Pack". This modifies the CSS/HTML in some way that makes it impossible to edit journal entries. the Alkenstar journal format is the default format and I have no way of changing this that I know off. I'm running Foundry version 10.291. Not sure where else to post this.

Searching in the PF2E Foundry Discord, I found a note that they're working on fixing that issue (assuming it's the same one), and you can fix it by deleting the old journals and actors and re-importing them again. (Also make sure your system and module are updated as well!)

If you want some more intense assistance, you can join either the general Foundry discord (linked directly on their website), or the Pathfinder 2e Foundry-specific Discord, at [url]https://discord.gg/pf2e[/url]. If you don't already have one and are not interested in making a Discord account, I can probably point someone in this thread's direction to get you more precise help..

While many of the developers linger in the pf2e foundry community discord, the AP threads arent an official support forum. The best place to go is the service portal linked in your landing pages, or can be found directly here: https://support.sigil-services.com/

I believe for this specific issue you need to do the following:
1. disable the basis pack
2. change the default journal style for your journals. Also if you changed the journal style for any specific entries, you may need to change them back to the default.
3. turn the basis pack back on. the module journal entries will use the basis theme, and the rest of your journal entries should remain on foundry default.

The basis pack stylings aren't intended to be used for other journal entries and that is why we have them so they cannot be edited. With v11 on the horizon, one possible thing may be to hide the style altogether so that it can't accidently be selected. Alternatively there has also been some discussion about making a style that can be edited.

Anyway, if you're still having trouble and my steps don't resolve the issue then please open up a service ticket so we can make sure to follow-up and get this resolved. Thanks!

I am currently running this on the heels of having finished Abomination Vaults, both in Foundry VTT. I mention that because there are some issues I have when comparing the quality of the two. Abomination Vaults was amazing, good sound, all the scenes, NPCs etc that might be needed, zero issues. However, Outlaws: Punks in a Powederkeg is a bit on the scant side with all three of those. Very little music provided outside of some piano stings, several scenes are missing that would have been useful to have (Longhorn Lounge, Hotfoot Hippodrome, Ryka's Reagents, something for the chase sequence in chapter 2) I had to find or make scenes for all of those. Also, several NPCs just aren't there and have to be theatre of the minded. To be perfectly honest in a VTT setting, everything should be there, no theatre of the mind, or very very little. It defeats the purpose of using the VTT and having to do alot of theatre of the mind. It also defeats the purpose of buying he AP from Paizo if I have to still build a bunch of scenes, download music, and build out NPCs defeats especially for $35 per entry. So not only is this a more expensive AP than Abomination Vaults, but its lacking as mentioned above. Please do better, or I may stop buying these. AV impressed the hell out of me as my first AP from Paizo with Foundry support, but Outlaws has done the opposite and now has me on the fence about the quality and worthiness of other APs because of it. I won't say I wouldn't recommend it, because its likely easier than building it all out on your own, but its a sharp decline from the price, quality, and content of Abomination Vaults, and absolutely will need additional work from the DM to flesh out what is missing.

AV and the monthly modules are two different teams working on them. There are going to be differences.

AV impressed the hell out of me as my first AP from Paizo with Foundry support, but Outlaws has done the opposite and now has me on the fence about the quality and worthiness of other APs because of it.

Hello, I'm part of the team that worked on AV! I'm glad you liked our adventure. I wanted to speak up here to clarify on some points of misunderstanding that I noticed in your post and (hopefully) encourage you to continue making use of this content in the places where it can improve your game or save you some time on prep. I certainly don't mean to imply that your review was wrong, unhelpful, or rude- I actually find reading feedback on these modules very helpful when making decisions about how to approach future projects. What I'd like to do is shed some light on aspects of our development that might help to explain the differences you identified and "defend" the work of the Outlaws team a little. At the end of the day, people worked very hard to bring this content to light, and put in far more hard work and love than would have been necessary if they only wanted to bring a "bare minimum" product to market.

The main clarification I want to make here is that the team that made this module is different from the team that made the AV module. That's why you've noticed several procedural and stylistic differences- the teams comprise different people, working with different resources and different priorities.

On the specific points, there were two other things I wanted to raise:

Also, several NPCs just aren't there and have to be theatre of the minded.

Both AV and OoA pull from the system compendium for actors, so there should not be a meaningful gap between the two adventures in this regard. It may be that there are small differences due to the personal style of the person responsible, though.

Several scenes are missing that would have been useful to have (Longhorn Lounge, Hotfoot Hippodrome, Ryka's Reagents, something for the chase sequence in chapter 2) I had to find or make scenes for all of those.

I do understand why you feel this way, but I'd also like to raise some thoughts that might help you to see behind the curtain on this.

Firstly, with regards to scenes, AV has an obvious edge here- as a megadungeon, almost all of the events of the adventure are going to take place within the same ~13 maps. That resulted in an unusually low number of maps for us to remake, and it meant that- even if they are also unusually large- they always had a source to base our remake on. It's easier to remake a map than to create a new one from scratch, after all. While we did include a new map in one single instance, the graveyard, it's hardly something that AV did in spades- it occurred once across three books.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the graveyard was a combat encounter. In comparison, all of the scenes that you list are non-combat roleplay locations, no different from any of the locations of interest within the town of Otari. We didn't include maps for Wrin's Wonders or Odd Stories, for example, both of which are more appropriate comparisons. We never had a "chase" sequence to convert in AV, but if we did, I don't think that I would have chosen to do it by recreating the entire thing at battlemap scale. The needs of the challenge are not best suited by adding a 5-foot scale gridded map of several city blocks, since it's not a type of gameplay where precise locations are important.

We always need to consider that remaking the maps (and even moreso creating new maps) constitutes a considerable portion of a module's budget. Short of charging more or paying artists less, neither of which are attractive choices, there is a limit to how much artwork can be included. Sometimes, difficult decisions need to be made about which scenes to add and which to leave out. However, in all cases, these are still *extra* scenes- content being added in the conversion that was not present in the original adventure. Even remaking the maps at all is "extra" content.

To be perfectly honest in a VTT setting, everything should be there, no theatre of the mind, or very very little. It defeats the purpose of using the VTT and having to do alot of theatre of the mind. It also defeats the purpose of buying he AP from Paizo if I have to still build a bunch of scenes, download music, and build out NPCs defeats especially for $35 per entry. So not only is this a more expensive AP than Abomination Vaults, but its lacking as mentioned above.

I quite strongly disagree with this position, and I'd like to raise some counterpoints. Firstly, I don't agree with the premise- no VTT will completely remove the need for theatre of the mind. Even a CRPG will use abstraction- the Kingmaker video game has an overworld map rather than showing you exploring the world at 1:1 scale, for example. Even if it were possible to completely negate the need for imagination in an RPG, though, I don't think that a VTT that failed to do so would have defeated its purpose. In my opinion, the purpose of a VTT is not to attempt to replace the human imagination. Not even video games or cinema attempt that, after all. I could argue for several other potential uses of a VTT- allowing a game group to continue to play and interact remotely even after they are no longer geographically close to one another, or streamlining the process of playing a mechanically complex system- and I'm sure you would get the idea.

Again, I'm glad that you enjoyed your experience with Abomination Vaults so much, and I'm sorry that you had a negative experience with Outlaws of Alkenstar. Just to close off, I would like to again reiterate that these products were developed by different teams, both of which worked very hard on their modules and which have a lot of varied (and different) talents and specialisations. It may be that what you're identifying as discrepancies could more fairly be ascribed to a personal stylistic preference for the work of one group of individuals over another, rather than an objective difference in quality. Just as an example, I have seen AV be critiqued for not including the nifty "landing page macro" that many of the Sigil APs include. Perhaps to some people, that feature is more important than having some extra music, because they'll just use their own audio from Youtube anyway!

I am getting this error when trying to import the module in foundry

"Cannot read properties of undefined reading "0" error.

I am using foundry version 11.315 and pf2e version 5.14.4

Any tips on how to resolve this?