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 scenario runs a bit on the short side (2-3 hours) which can be good if your group has limited time but I really feel like some more content in it would have been better. Overall there just isn't much in it.
The combats are far too easy and sadly there are not many extensive skill challenges either. There are at most 3 NPCs you can interact with for any roleplay so this is not much either. Overall it just feels that this could either have been cut down to a 2 hours quest by reducing the long descriptions of the area the players are traveling through or just add some more meat for a full blown scenario.
But now for my big complaint.
There are multiple instances of missing information in the scenario which I as a GM consider extreme annoying.
In the beginning the PCs get some gifts that they are supposed to use to make some friends, those gifts never get mentioned again and there is 0 information about what they do.
The final encounter is seriously lacking some information about where the party and the enemies are supposed to be on the map and the text description is contradicting and confusing.
I ran this in high tier for 4 PCs. Runtime was under 2.5 hours.
To me, the main attractions of this scenario are the novelty of meeting (a) the gunsmith (b) the villain's familiar. The journey to get to the gunsmith presents no real challenge and is of little interest beyond needing to satisfy the Verdant Wheel faction mission. The skill checks that affected success conditions were logically set up but not especially engaging. Combat encounters are entirely trivial in high tier, including the combat with the villain of the scenario. The players spent some time reminescing about PFS2 #1-19 which had a combat using the same flip-mat that was apparently memorable enough to recall over 3 years later. I doubt that will be the case for this one.
The stat block for the guide was, as might be expected, never used. The heavy-handed justification included in the scenario for why she does not help the party during encounters seemed unnecessary.
This scenario could easily be run at a store with early closing hours and is benign enough not to be a danger to new players.
The scenario is a continuation of 4-12. Unlike 4-12 it does not focus on influence as much, instead providing a way for PCs to experience the setting in more detail.
I liked the inclusion of nonlinear options, and glad the party didn't have to worry about resources too much.
The scenario includes several interesting npcs, one of them is quite surprising.
The only con is that in high tier the combat was still not challenging at all. That said, I appreciate that the scenario tried to shake things up for the final encounter.
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?
