A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for 1st- through 4th-level characters.
It's time to explore! With the Society coming off of their recent victory in finally defeating an old enemy, they choose to turn to refocus on the goals of the Pathfinder Society: Explore! Report! Cooperate! As a celebration for such a successful year, there's a party being hosted with all sorts of friends both new and old in attendance. However, when one of Fola Barun's dear friends needs to be entertained in order to prepare a surprise, it's up to the Pathfinders to show him around the famous Maze of the Open Road. When he starts to encourage exploration, new doors appear and new adventures await!
Intro: Year of Unfettered Exploration is the introduction to the plot of the Year of Unfettered Exploration. This scenario presents characters and themes that will feature in Year 5's metaplot, and so it is is a natural starting point for players looking to jump into the action.
This session opening scenario is okay at best. It hard to setup because of all the different sets of tiles and the maps for the final encounter needs to be drawn. The story is not that great and it is not the best scenario for new GMs to run. If done right (and you have a piece of plexiglass to put over the tiles), the players should enjoy it
You'd think an intro scenario would be a great place to jump in for a new GM. Nope! There were SO MANY characters in this and I knew exactly none of them. Thus, I started off this adventure feeling very confused, and kept feeling that way until I'd finished running it.
The pacing is also... weird? It seems like the greatest, most intense danger happens at the beginning, and then it's kind of just goofing off from there? The module also goes out of its way to have the party pick up new friends as they adventure, and then very obviously finds ways to have those friends not participate in encounters. It felt very artificial.
I'm glad my players had fun, but this just wasn't for me.
Confusing (in multiple ways), overloaded with NPCs encounters in a way that doesn't make a lot of sense & a somewhat questionable premise (for low-tier).
I ran this adventure in the high tier first, and we had a memorable session!
There's a huge cast of characters in this adventure, some new and some familiar ones sneaked in for folks who have been paying attention for the last few seasons! The adventure brings us back to the Maze of the Open road and gives us an eventful tour as the elemental planes are shifting and adjusting suddenly.
This an excellent little romp for players who enjoy exploration and making some friends!
We had one player playing up who almost died but the heroes pulled them out before it was too late!
There is a LOT of GM prep to turn this scenario into something fun for the players, and memorable. The kitchen sink approach for an introductory scenario was nearly overwhelming to prep.
Some changes I made:
- built 3 additional maps (maps in the foundry module are...not great)
- essentially made the NPCs into dolts so the players could shine
- handwaved the importance/impact of the followers and minions in section 5 and just focused on Gedun
- ran the whole thing like a scoobydoo mystery to inject some fun into an otherwise incoherent starting session
I would run this again, with other major modifications/rewrites for the purpose of cohesion.
