Pathfinder Adventure Path #190: The Choosing (Stolen Fate 1 of 3)

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Pathfinder Adventure Path #190: The Choosing (Stolen Fate 1 of 3)
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A vision of a strange shop in the Grand Bazaar of Absalom accompanies the unexpected arrival of powerful magic cards that mysteriously manifest in the possession of a band of adventurers. But when an investigation of this vision reveals murder, treachery, and fiendish machinations, the adventurers are thrown into a race to control the very future of all things to come, tied to the ubiquitous fortune-telling cards known as the Harrow! Who has chosen your characters for this deadly quest, and what might become of your destinies should you fail?

The Choosing is a Pathfinder adventure for four 11th-level characters. This adventure begins the Stolen Fate Adventure Path, a three-part monthly campaign in which a group of adventurers race against time to gather the scattered parts of a powerful deck of magical fortune-telling cards. This adventure also includes a detailed look at a brand new demiplane tied to the Harrow deck, new rules options to explore these magical cards, and several new monsters ready to test your characters' mettle!

Each monthly full-color softcover Pathfinder Adventure Path volume contains an in-depth adventure scenario, stats for several new monsters, and support articles meant to give Game Masters additional material to expand their campaign. Pathfinder Adventure Path volumes use the Open Game License and work with both the Pathfinder RPG and the world’s oldest fantasy RPG.

Written by: Ron Lundeen

ISBN-13: 978-1-64078-511-3

The Stolen Fate Adventure Path is sanctioned for use in Pathfinder Society Organized Play. The rules for running this Adventure Path and Chronicle Sheets are available as a free download (774 KB PDF).

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop
Foundry Virtual Tabletop
Pathfinder Nexus on Demiplane
Roll20 Virtual Tabletop
Archives of Nethys

Note: This product is part of the Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscription.

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5/5


2/5

Impressions before running the adventure which may still take several months to get to. Consider it a WIP review

Background. There was a lot of inconsistencies trying to explain the factions and the characters. The Band of Blades faction was not mentioned in the campaign background and only dropped in Chapter 1 without context. It was a very frustrating experience to ctrl+f throughout the .pdf, going back and forth to piece together what the heck is going on.

Chapter 1. I like the idea of the investigation, but do not like the influence subsystem at all. It seems to grind gameplay to a halt, and I hate systems that feel like rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice and this was one of them. It makes little narrative sense to halt all progress and action for conversational dice rolls where you could potentially spend hours or days harassing three NPC's for information you need. I probably would go with a node-based design to obtain the three clues needed to solve the mystery.

Chapter 2. I love the idea of portal fantasies like Kingdom Hearts and Tsubasa Chronicles where you get sent to different worlds, it is peak adventure. However, in many of the Harrowing Realm adventures it feels like the players are participating in very minor parts to larger narratives. I hated reading "this is beyond the scope of this adventure", or some quests even invalidating the players' efforts like certain NPC's not needing the key that the players were sent to retrieve. I also disliked how the adventures do not reflect the deeper meaning of the Harrow cards, some being only superficially related to the card’s imagery. Too many things are hand-waved for my liking, especially with how willing some NPC’s part with the Harrow Cards that saved their lives.

I love the concept of the adventure path, but I feel like I may have to majorly rip this apart to get something more cohesive and have more narrative significance.

Chapter 3. There is a pretty significant NPC where their fate is left up to the GM and PCs without any suggestions on what role they could serve in assisting the PCs if they remain an ally. Despite being a pretty significant character, they're completely dropped never to be seen in the next two books. The final encounter feels strange, as the boss hasn't been very much directly involved nor do any of the other NPC's talk about him much. The build up seems to come almost exclusively in background note for the GM, with very little, if at all, present in the actual content the players will see.




5/5




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Paizo Employee Creative Director

5 people marked this as a favorite.

None of this is actually about "The Choosing" so please... let's just let this thing drop and continue to talk about this adventure.

If anyone feels a post is off-topic or harrasing... flag it and don't reply to it, please. Thanks!

Community and Social Media Specialist

4 people marked this as a favorite.

Removed a TON of off topic comments. The original comment was considered personal taste and feedback. If you have questions and/or comments, feel free to email community@paizo.com.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Returned to home from work and now I'm wondering if conversation did continue past point I started complaining about it ._.; Probably better to not know. Either way only few more days until I can read this book myself yay


Dammit, I came here planning to pick this up and start prepping it as it looks excellent and totally failed to realise its only Tuesday today!


I love the player content from the Stolen Fate player's guide, but I have some misgivings about the power level. Rewrite Possibility, the level 5 focus spell for the Harrow Bloodline Sorcerer, seems weirdly powerful. The ability to use a reaction to reroll any failed check with a +2, keeping the highest so you can't make things worse, every round for a minute, PLUS a +1 to initiative (That part's not a big deal, but it adds even more value to what already seems like a huge amount of value)? Is it just me or is that overpowered compared to other similar level focus spells, even considering you can only have one active at a time and it eats your reaction?


4 people marked this as a favorite.
CULTxicycalm wrote:

I would ideally like a screenshot of the thread pre-cleansing.

[snip]
A great forum moderation technique is to not delete anything but spin off off-topic posts into a separate thread in a separate subforum.

Paizo has rules about what can and cannot be posted in these forums. At least a few of those removed posts violated those rules (sharing private medical information, baiting, hate speech, personal harassment, illegal activity, copyright violations, etc) Those are topics that are not allowed to be discussed in these forums, so there's zero chance that those posts will be spun off into another thread.

I sincerely hope that no one shares that private information or any other of the rules-violating material that the moderators removed.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

lmao why would anyone share medical information in an Adventure Path topic?!

Anyway, let me try to contribute something on-topic.

I’ve always looked at the Harrow with misgivings as an overcomplicated version of the Ravenloft system. In the original Ravenloft adventure, the card reading wasn’t supposed to predict the future, it just pointed out the locations of some items. Fast forward a few decades and we’re supposed to predict the future in a game where the protagonists can die in any given encounter? How’s that supposed to work?

“You are the great heroes fated to save Korvosa!”, but oh you died in a common random encounter, too bad. Is the game supposed to be comedy? The GM has to do something to rescue the campaign’s seriousness from this.

It’s yet another common elephant in the room that the RPG industry refuses to discuss and do something about, or even just advise GMs on how to deal with it.

That said, when it works, it’s beautiful. Just have to make the adventure very easy, and be lucky I guess.

That’s my advice to anything related to fortune-telling: make it easy, so that the reading can come true.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens Subscriber

Just wanted to bump the size of the PDF at 192MB, was Paizo able to look into why it's so much larger than standard?


3 people marked this as a favorite.
CULTxicycalm wrote:

lmao why would anyone share medical information in an Adventure Path topic?!

Anyway, let me try to contribute something on-topic.

I’ve always looked at the Harrow with misgivings as an overcomplicated version of the Ravenloft system. In the original Ravenloft adventure, the card reading wasn’t supposed to predict the future, it just pointed out the locations of some items. Fast forward a few decades and we’re supposed to predict the future in a game where the protagonists can die in any given encounter? How’s that supposed to work?

“You are the great heroes fated to save Korvosa!”, but oh you died in a common random encounter, too bad. Is the game supposed to be comedy? The GM has to do something to rescue the campaign’s seriousness from this.

It’s yet another common elephant in the room that the RPG industry refuses to discuss and do something about, or even just advise GMs on how to deal with it.

That said, when it works, it’s beautiful. Just have to make the adventure very easy, and be lucky I guess.

That’s my advice to anything related to fortune-telling: make it easy, so that the reading can come true.

This post is a non sequitur; Stolen Fate is about a deck of specific magic cards, each individual one with specific mechanics, and a group of people trying to use them for [plot reasons].

You aren't doing any fortune-telling in this, it's not like tarokka from Ravenloft at all.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

There have been several cases where the pdf seems to be a lot larger than it should be. My understanding, in those cases where Paizo has looked into this, is that it has something to do with the tools and/or methods used to create the pdf. As far as I remember, Paizo has been able to "re-do" the pdfs to reduce the size.

If all that is true, apparently there are some folks making pdfs at Paizo that aren't getting the word about what they're doing "wrong" and how to avoid it.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Man this adventure is so cool, it has so much stuff that is up to my personal tastes and I love seeing new lore already explored :'D Great start to the ap

The Exchange

I'm trying to purchase the PDF along with the foundry VTT code but when I try to add the Foundry VTT code for this AP to the cart it just errors out. Will I still be able to purchase the Foundry VTT part if I just get the PDF until the foundry VTT code part is no longer erroring?


I have nearly finished my first read through and am loving the call back to previous events. I had totally not twigged just who Arodeth was until I got to her background at the end and realised we met her previously in one of the 1E PFS specials.

The set up for this looks excellent. The development of Harrowheart is lovely although I do wonder how much downtime people will actually take to make use of the various benefits.

I do think it could have done with another editing pass. There are a few grammatical errors scattered throughout and one or two mechanical issues, for example, how long does the stupefied effect from the Carnival critical failure effect last.

However, this looks like an excellent introduction to the AP. Once I have prepped it I will be leaving a fuller review.

The Exchange

Erin Harris 235 wrote:
I'm trying to purchase the PDF along with the foundry VTT code but when I try to add the Foundry VTT code for this AP to the cart it just errors out. Will I still be able to purchase the Foundry VTT part if I just get the PDF until the foundry VTT code part is no longer erroring?

looks like the link to the foundry code is now working.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

With the removal of alignment in the upcoming revision, will this adventure receive an errata for the Harrow Deck?


Fanthir wrote:
With the removal of alignment in the upcoming revision, will this adventure receive an errata for the Harrow Deck?

Erik said it cosmetically remains. What omitted is from mechanical side.


Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

Removal of alignment? Say what?


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Ed Reppert wrote:
Removal of alignment? Say what?

Check the blog for the news on the upcoming Pathfinder 2e Remaster.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

7 people marked this as a favorite.
Fanthir wrote:
With the removal of alignment in the upcoming revision, will this adventure receive an errata for the Harrow Deck?

This adventure is an OGL adventure and, like the Harrow Deck, uses alignment, so no errata is needed.

The Harrow itself is specifically built around the alignment system, though, and if we decide to reprint it, we'll have to come up with nine different words for those 9 elements, probably. Or we might not. Those nine alignments are pretty cosmetic as far as the Harrow is concerned, and even if those words don't have rules definitions in the game 20 years from now, they'll continue to have English language definitions that do all the work needed to contextualize things for the deck.

In any case... it won't impact Stolen Fate at all, nor will changing those words change how the Harrow works.

By the time the remastered books come out later this year, we'll be 2 Adventure Paths into the future from Stolen Fate, after all.

If Stolen Fate proves to be popular enough that we'll decide to compile it into a hardcover... well, I see that as a good problem to have!

Dark Archive

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

If outer planes still work on alignment basis though, I don't see why harrow would remove them since makes sense to me that fortune telling implement would be based on the cosmic forces


2 people marked this as a favorite.
RicoTheBold wrote:

For some reason, the PDF for this is enormous - it's 192 MB. By contrast, the core rulebook is about 80 MB. The entire Kingmaker AP + the Companion Guide together weigh in at about 160 MB.

Most individual AP volumes weigh in between about 20-50 MB.

Can someone please fix the PDF? It's large enough that it's actually inconvenient - it looks like Gatewalkers 3 has a similar (but not as bad) issue, as does the new Starfinder Drift Hackers volume (109 MB). Starfinder Adventure Path PDFs have had similar issues in the past, too.

I would also like to note this issue. At the very least it hasn't crashed my PDF reader yet.


Thebazilly wrote:
RicoTheBold wrote:

For some reason, the PDF for this is enormous - it's 192 MB. By contrast, the core rulebook is about 80 MB. The entire Kingmaker AP + the Companion Guide together weigh in at about 160 MB.

Most individual AP volumes weigh in between about 20-50 MB.

Can someone please fix the PDF? It's large enough that it's actually inconvenient - it looks like Gatewalkers 3 has a similar (but not as bad) issue, as does the new Starfinder Drift Hackers volume (109 MB). Starfinder Adventure Path PDFs have had similar issues in the past, too.

I would also like to note this issue. At the very least it hasn't crashed my PDF reader yet.

File size is also rough for the Foundary add-ons too, since I use a 3rd party to host the server and get charged on data usage basis. About to get to book 3 of Alkenstar and it would put me into the next tier of monthly payments. I looked into the files in the folder that gets uploaded and instead of the final map file itself, there's that and a lot of work in progress stuff too (as well as the old unused maps from the PDFs).


Bumping PDF size issue. 192 MB for me.

I stuck it in here (free site) and now it's a far more palatable 9 MB

https://www.ilovepdf.com/compress_pdf


I am pretty much finished prepping this and it is excellent. I am very excited to run it. There are a couple of small snagging issues which are easily fixed but people should probably be aware of.

These will spoil elements if you are playing this:

Mivanian Soldier Beak Damage is weirdly high, using d10’s rather than d4’s

Zashuvins tactics have her casting divine lance, a spell she does not know

The Bhanyada scavengers have an effect if their bite attack deals piercing damage. They have no way to deal piercing damage.

Vampire Siege is inconsistent on the number of giant flytraps, it says both 3 and 4

Kannij is medium, his creature type is normally large.

Critically failing the check at the Carnival makes you stupefied 3 but with no listed duration. Likewise at the Big Sky but with enfeebled. Critically failing the Rabbit Prince makes you Clumsy 3 for a week, I assume these should be the same.

I just wanted to add that I love the Oppali, I can wait to see how my players react to them.

Adding a few extra comments as they occur to me:

I like that all of the NPC's in part 3 have names, it personalises them are reinforces that other ways may exist to deal with the issues.

Part 1 does feel likely to be much shorter than parts 2 and 3. Part 2 feels like it could be significantly longer. It does feel like the encounters there could have been tougher given how likely they are to be spaced out.

I love some of the call backs to previous PFS scenarios in Part 3. I also very much appreciate the open set up where the PCs can come at the situation from many different directions with the opposition reacting depending on their approach.

More spoiler, read at your own risk:
Mukradi are eeeeevil, especially when they outlevel the PCs.

Finally, Ndede is brilliant, I am very much looking forward to playing hm.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

5 people marked this as a favorite.
andreww wrote:

I am pretty much finished prepping this and it is excellent. I am very excited to run it. There are a couple of small snagging issues which are easily fixed but people should probably be aware of.

** spoiler omitted **

I just wanted to add that I love the Oppali, I can wait to see how my players react to them.

Answers to the spoilers below:

Spoiler:
Mivanian Soldier Beak Damage is weirdly high, using d10’s rather than d4’s
This is correct; these are bespoke 8th level monsters and are built as such; they're not built using the PC creation rules. As such, their beaks do damage in a range that's appropriate for a level 8 creature using a non-agile attack. To get to this range using d4s, you'd need to do 5d4+10 and that's a lot of d4s. For our bespoke NPCs and monsters, we try to minimize those dice in keeping with our own internal monster design philosophies (aka, for level 8 creatures, we try to keep them to rolling 2 dice for their Strikes).

Zashuvins tactics have her casting divine lance, a spell she does not know
Not sure why divine lance was cut from this new monster's stats, but that apparently happened for the monster and didn't get adjusted in the encounter text. Sorry about that. Either give the hurlilu divine lance, or ignore that tactic.

The Bhanyada scavengers have an effect if their bite attack deals piercing damage. They have no way to deal piercing damage.
Their jaws Strikes have the versatile piercing trait, so if they want to do piercing damage with their jaws, they can. Gnashing Bite has different effects depending on what kind of teeth they bite with, basically.

Vampire Siege is inconsistent on the number of giant flytraps, it says both 3 and 4
3 is the correct number here.

Kannij is medium, his creature type is normally large.
Kannijo's size is correct for him; he's smaler than the normal spirit naga. Some times for monsters we alter their size. In this case, Kannijo is a smaller-than-normal spirit naga. Size in 2nd edition doesn't really have much impact on a creature's stats like it did in 1st edition.

Critically failing the check at the Carnival makes you stupefied 3 but with no listed duration. Likewise at the Big Sky but with enfeebled. Critically failing the Rabbit Prince makes you Clumsy 3 for a week, I assume these should be the same.
When we don't list a duration for something that makes you stupefied or enfeebled or the like, that effect is permanent until it is removed via magic or other methods. This is for high level characters, so they will be facing some high-level effects that require them to use spells or their resources to recover from. If your group is struggling with effects like this that are permanent, feel free to give them time limits. Also keep in mind that condition values don't stack, so if someone is permanently stupefied 3, then is affected by something that makes them stupefied 1, they don't become stupefied 4 (unless that effect specifically says it increases a condition's value).


Thanks for those James, much appreciated.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

I have now finished prepping this. There are two small issues with the maps.

Spoiler:

For Snakebite there are no F3 markings for where the plants start, either in the module or the interactive map pack. I assume they converge from three different directions.

For the theatre map there is no marking for the starting point for the fire. It does say it rings the stage but that's a little vague given the size of the place.

One very small pet peeve, the Stairs map in the interactive map pack doesnt turn off all of the map markers when you turn off the tags. It keeps the...

Spoiler:
starting point for the Mukradi which is a bit of a giveaway.

Silver Crusade

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Paizo maps don't typically give monster placements.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

The adventure specifically notes these placements in the text. The maps lack the notes the AP says are there.


Just looking through the Players Guide.

The Vengeful Spirit Deck feat of the Harrower archetype seems to have some typos. It is listed as a Metamagic Feat but doesnt affect spellcasting in any way. Its text says you can sustain it but it doesnt have the sustain tag. Should Metamagic be Sustain? Is it one action to Sustain and two to continue to throw cards in subsequent rounds?

Paizo Employee Creative Director

2 people marked this as a favorite.
andreww wrote:

Just looking through the Players Guide.

The Vengeful Spirit Deck feat of the Harrower archetype seems to have some typos. It is listed as a Metamagic Feat but doesnt affect spellcasting in any way. Its text says you can sustain it but it doesnt have the sustain tag. Should Metamagic be Sustain? Is it one action to Sustain and two to continue to throw cards in subsequent rounds?

Metamagic is a typo. That trait should be Manipulate.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

2 people marked this as a favorite.
andreww wrote:

I have now finished prepping this. There are two small issues with the maps.

** spoiler omitted **

Answers to theses spoilers below:

Spoiler:

For Snakebite there are no F3 markings for where the plants start, either in the module or the interactive map pack. I assume they converge from three different directions.
The plants can start at three points you decide upon from different directions.

For the theatre map there is no marking for the starting point for the fire. It does say it rings the stage but that's a little vague given the size of the place.
Alas, I can't share an image of the map here with my correction to it, but the text itself is a bit misleading. The initial fire shouldn't "ring the stage" but should be more or less a five-foot-wide arc along the stage, so that the fire is basically burning in a "U" shape along the bottom of the stage and then it grows from there.

Paizo Employee Creative Director

2 people marked this as a favorite.
andreww wrote:
The adventure specifically notes these placements in the text. The maps lack the notes the AP says are there.

I gave advice in the previous reply, but yes, we normally don't place monsters on maps with specific tags. This is intentional; it helps empower the GM to make their own decisions for monster starting spots since the PCs can adjust the starting positions by being sneaky or distracting or unlucky or all that.

In this case, I suspect the problem arose from me forgetting to develop that bit of text away from having monster locations shown on the maps and it ended up getting missed during edit.

Again, the monsters can start anywhere you want them to start, but converging from 3 directions is best.


Thanks very much for that James. I have just offered to run this in PbP as my regular AP groups wont get to it for a while.

The Exchange

I'm very confused... I ordered this product in PDF form but it is not in my downloads... anywhere?

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