A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for 3rd- through 6th-level characters.
Exam time has always been stressful for the students of the Dacilane Academy, so J Dacilane has come up with a plan: have a group of Pathfinders help them pull off the first ever Dacilane Academy Great Prank War! Surely nothing can go wrong! However, once a caravan of fey traveling nearby catch a whiff of the chaos, they're more than willing to come and join the prank war—with or without an invitation! It's up to the Pathfinders to calm down the friendly fey, defeat the evil fey that infiltrated the caravan, and ensure that the students have the best prank war ever! Should be easy as pie! (Quick, duck that pie!)
Written by John Curtin
Scenario tags: None
[Scenario Maps spoiler - click to reveal]
The following maps used in this scenario are also available for purchase here on paizo.com:
There's an official prank war, and we need to both judge and help with the pranks as if that isn't an enormous conflict of interest. And we're expected to convince a particular NPC from joining the prank war even though that wasn't one of our objectives? And also we need to stop the pranks from going too far, but it's completely subjective what counts as "going too far." We're Pathfinders. Couldn't we be stopping a human trafficking ring right now? Do we really need to be here?
Prank is a skill and roleplay-based scenario with a challenging combat.
You are a chaperone to children at the Dacilane school, as they run around playing pranks on each other for the day. Your job... is to help them make pranks, keep the peace, and judge the pranks. How did we go from defeating dragons and trolls to helping children make spooky animatronics, whoopy cushions, and stopping children from disturbing animals??
Prank runs for far too long before anything eventful happens, which is too common in PFS scenarios lately.
The stupidity in this scenario breaks my sense of disbelief. Concerning the narrative, it’s stupid and irresponsible to have a prank war when Dacilane knew that a fey caravan was inside Absalom, which also contained dark fey. When this... incompetent is informed, he refuses to stop the prank war.
The combats would have TPKed us (twice), but our GM called both of them (for time). Having said that my table had some players who didn't know how to play Pathfinder, so it's hard to say.
Prank has the potential to run long (5 hours).
Overall: Another silly scenario that takes too long to get to the action and feels... meaningless. (5/10)
I really enjoyed the flavor of this scenario: It's nice to see the students growing up, but that school really must be built on some ancient chaos themed burial ground or something.
Positive sides:
The flavor of the scenario is great
The encounters are very well themed and challenging
Lots of skill checks
Negative bits:
I like scenario's where you're in a hurry, but this was a bit much, especially with regards to how hard things hit. This is not an easy scenario
This one runs long, oddly despite a clearly hinted at time crunch: When writing or prepping, please consider that some hazards can easily take as long as regular combat encounters. Because of that, this felt like too many combat encounters
Rather rough combat clashes with the intended whimsical tone
I think at heart this is a great scenario. It has a lot of really fun NPC interaction, both with the students and the fae. However, there are also a couple of points that hold it back from perfection.
- It's long. There's a lot of encounters in this scenario, and each of them takes a fair amount of time to resolve. They're all interesting encounters and it would be a shame to skip any. But overall it's hard to run this in a normal time slot.
- It's actually a fairly challenging scenario, with enemies and hazards that hit pretty hard and with not a lot of time to recovery. And some also require specific countermeasures, which you might not have, or not have enough of. This kinda clashes with the theme of fun and whimsy the scenario is trying to push. I feel like for this scenario it would have been fine if it had been a lot easier on the combat side. Especially the nominally "trivial" hazards hit very hard due to a rather generous avoiding of MAP when attacking the whole party.
Also, considering how hard the various hazards hit and that it could have been a kid instead of a level 3+ PC who is the first to encounter them, it is kinda unbelievable that you don't decide to blow the whole thing off and evacuate the kids before there's a mass tragedy. Especially when you find out about some of the bad stuff that you can be sure is still to come.
The scenario does somewhat handle those points, but not really fully to my satisfaction. Overall it's really a fun scenario but these things do hold it back from being a full five stars.
Announced for July! Cover and product description are not final and are subject to change.
Hi,
Checking the GenCon Catalog it's tag as For 1st-4th level characters. So what it's the right Tier ?
Regards
Came here to ask this. Also noticed that it had 10 people signed up to play. Haven't played a society game at Gen Con before, but thats too many players right?
Generally the developer assigned to the scenario writes the product descriptions, so in this case it was Shay (or Josh, but I'm pretty sure it was Shay).
Played this last weekend after not playing the other sessions at this academy, not knowing what to expect- playing low with my monk. The other players [a cleric, a fighter, a war priest, and a psychic] were glad to have me around for reasons to avoid spoilers. There were some encounters and a "trivial hazard" that made the scenario.
As we were wrapping up, apparently the artist of the final map was at the store, he was happy we were playing on his map.
I'd be cautiously curious to see this scenario at the high teir