Pathfinder Society Scenario #4-09: Killer in the Golden Mask

I was very disappointed with this one. It's interesting story idea and direction are destroyed by someone really needing help understanding combats.

The balance of the enemies in both high and low play is terrible. I've ran and played this one and it's only reason for existing is to punish players and not in a fun way.

When I ran this high level, I had a near TPK in the first combat. I draining people so bad some died from drain. I doubt who ever did the combat design for this realized how grappling rules and drain combine to then add on the idea of the drain is cumulative. After that, people were not really having fun with this one at my table no matter how much I tried to get their spirits back up. And this was not just some new players. This is players that have played this since season one and a number of 4 and 5 glyph GMs I was running it for.

When I played this, the first combat was rather easy so I figured it must be a high level balance issue. Nope, I was so wrong. We got to the second combat and wiped. Once again not new players either, another group of players that have been playing for years with 2e and the GM was one of the players I ran for. He even commented to me that someone really had no idea how to balance out combat when writing this.

I would avoid this one. It's sad though. The story idea is one I love. I want to see more of and I do enough other things this author has done. Hopefully, he fires who ever he got helping with combat.

I have been eagerly waiting for the Society to return to Razmiran since the Lodge of the Living God.

I was hoping for an intrigue-centric scenario with Narsen and the townsfolk — something that followed up on the earlier scenario. Instead, we got a straightforward combat train in a misty forest.

Giving this 3 stars because I understand my wants are subjective; that said, I believe Paizo missed an opportunity to develop the Razmiran Lodge's setting.

This scenario demonstrates a number of flaws with the PF2 scenario design simply since some of the encounters ask whether you've got the right builds in your party, especially the second encounter which is not telegraphed at all. It very much seems like more of a PF1 style ethos where the things you do *before* the encounter (in character building) are far more relevant than the things you actually do in the encounter since the creatures in the second encounter put a lot of different types of characters in goldfish mode where they simply can't do anything.

I do appreciate what other players have said about Pathfinders can't always win every time and agree that there definitely need to be stakes to the missions so I'm OK with having situations where success isn't guaranteed. However, I feel like the scenarios I've played so far where this is the case tend to be really quite punitive in the sense of leveraging unfair or binary mechanics (PF1 ethos) rather than being due to the decisions players make on the field of battle (PF2 ethos).

I played on Superbibi table. 7-8

We were 3 player, a barbarian, a rogue and me a champion paladin of the shining oath. The gm decided to make shattermask a pregen.

First, characterisation of Narsen was like a Tyrant rather then the ambiguous character.

The fight were funs if on the easy side.

He changes the plot by an exploration of a mansion. Not a bad idea.

But at the end, those make me wonder if i actually played the adventure.

I have mastered 50 PFS games, and I feel bad to give a review only about this one as there are tons of adventures I had a lot of fun GMing. I've put 1 star because I can't put 0 stars. I have downloaded it twice, thinking I got some kind of draft version or joke version the first time. From the other reviews, it looks like we got the same adventure.

The best way to describe it is "the worst PFS adventure I ever got my hands on". By a large margin.

There are grammar errors here and there, even in the handout I'm supposed to give to my players. Also, it's not "formatted like a PFS adventure". I can't really describe that, but when reading it I was not having the feeling of reading a PFS adventure.

But the worst is the adventure itself. It just makes no sense from the beginning till the end. Suspension of disbelief is not enough, you need to entirely unplug your brain to play it as is.

Overall, it's the very first time I refuse to GM an adventure as is. I've GMed tons of PFS adventure that were not great, but this one is just a (bad) joke to me.

Still, I love PFS and Paizo, you should keep up the good work. I just wanted to express that this adventure is really subpar.