A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for 1st- through 4th-level characters.
With permission secured and access granted, a team of Pathfinder agents must escort an ancient star gun to one of the last remaining star gunsmiths, a mysterious figure that hasn’t been seen in several years. The Pathfinders must convince the gunsmith to emerge from hiding and repair the weapon, allowing them to return it to its original home and make connections with a town on the inside of Arcadia.
A villain watches from afar, angered at having been tricked by the Society, and plots to attack the team and the gunsmith, endangering innocent lives in the process. It’s up to the Pathfinders to defeat her and her forces, ensuring peace within the prairies of Arcadia!
This one has kinda weird feature of featuring mostly being mechanically forgettable(hazards, weaker animals and elementals/fey) with most of interesting parts being lore regarding star guns and the retconning with syrinx.(still not sure I like philosopher owl badguys being kinda whitewashed to beloved cousins of strix since that is kinda opposite of what they started out as, but I do get why they got severe rewrite) It is always fun to face off another of bad guy group's members though.
This is a weird scenario. It does a whole lot of scene setting and environment building, but has very little payoff. The GM talks a lot, and the players actually do very little. Combats are almost a joke, with woefully unchallenging enemies that stand no chance of surviving, or even putting a dent in the players.
The actual story is pretty cool, but things just seemingly happen without the players's input and it feels more like the players are being talked at than talked to. It feels a bit like a necessary bit to move the Arcadia plot forward without making it a satisfying story on its own.
Would be two stars, maybe even one, but the cool lore is a good read that makes it entertaining enough to be worth playing.
Lore wise, this scenario is an excellent follow-up on part 1. From the get-go, it's clear that Arcadia is supposed to be near-alien for us Avistani people in a way that is highly evocative.
Other reviewers mention the scenario is very short: This will definitely be the case if you solve every social encounter with only a dice roll, which completely ignores the point of each encounter. The GM [b]should[b] play this out and encourage players to think about what their character is thinking/ feeling, and only then require the checks.
The combats feel a bit like a joke, with numbers that are far too low for most Challenge Point levels. It's not necessarily a bad thing for an introduction, but there's not really any threat if the players are somewhat more experienced.
The main peeves is the poor editing. Information is missing in some cases and not in the right place in others. And in the Reporting Conditions, there is also something funky going on.
I really like some of the descriptions of stuff in this scenario. The forest in particular is really evocative. There's some interesting lore in the sidebars that I really hope gets expanded on with a proper Lost Omens: Arcadia book.
I will agree the scenario overall feels very tame after both playing and running it at high tier. The final encounter does have an interesting twist applied to it that I think is engaging, but I had to re-read the map and section multiple times to try and parse it (and I'm still not sure I got it the way it was intended, but it worked out).
Into more spoilery bits:
Spoiler:
I liked some of the use of skill checks to drop bits of lore to PCs, especially at the river crossing. I think there were a few too many random perception to notice interesting details? Probably could have dropped one or two.
I'd have liked an explicit way to avoid the combat for the second Verdant Wheel sample? Though I liked my players just knocking one out and running off with it thanks to high initiative rolls.
Runt and Suhko's monologues were fun.
Overall, I think my biggest issue is just the confusion on the last encounter, and I generally enjoyed both playing and running this one.
Help, it keeps downloading empty file for me x'D I'm not sure how to fix this bug since the "attempt reloading this" usually just reloads same file multiple times for me
Help, it keeps downloading empty file for me x'D I'm not sure how to fix this bug since the "attempt reloading this" usually just reloads same file multiple times for me
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Hmm incognito mode solved my problem and I'm not sure I really like this retcon because it feels like white washing syrinx.
Like, originally they were evil philosophers who were super racist towards non avians and modified humans to have wings hence strix. Sure we never really had chance to see syrinx on screen, but them:
being essentially same species as strix just makes me ask "why does one of them look like humans with wings and other look like owl people?"
It's also kinda missing out that them being from nasty evil "enlightened imperialist" culture WAS an interesting part of them.
Hmm incognito mode solved my problem and I'm not sure I really like this retcon because it feels like white washing syrinx.
** spoiler omitted **
It's also kinda missing out that them being from nasty evil "enlightened imperialist" culture WAS an interesting part of them.
I imagine the role of terrible, awful Syrinx falls to specific cultures like the Halana Theocracy. There's just not a lot of interest in 2e of saying "this entire Ancestry are racist jerks," and especially not where canon for Arcadia was already so nebulous - it's easy enough to claim those were nasty colonizer rumors. If the writers want it, a Syrinx nation with supremacist attitudes could certainly exist... but I don't blame them for dodging that as the baseline.
Chalk them up as a likely player option in an Arcadia book, alongside Klinkois (if they aren't in Howl) and Wyrwoods.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I don't think they ALL should be like that, but it kinda feels weird if there really isn't bunch of mountain living philosopher owls believing they are uplifting humans by grafting them wings when that was the sell of the concept in first place and now all syrinx are in good relations with strix x'D Especially since they fit the concept of Halana Theocracy.
Like that would imply to me that writers moved concept of evil avian government to Halana Theocracy entirely and left syrinx behind as just owl people (instead of philosopher imperialist syrinxes being part of Halana Theocracy or such)
There almost certainly probably are syrinx doing that in the Halana Theocracy, but it isn't exactly surprising that it isn't an entire species of mad scientists (mad philosophy majors?)
Reading through this and the final encounter setup is confusing me.
Spoiler:
The map indicates starting positions for the travelers and the enemies, but not the PCs. The text is... contradictory to that? It suggests starting positions for some of the enemies, and those don't really match up with the map.
Is the "enemies start here" box on the map intended to be the PCs?
