Pathfinder Society Scenario #5-06: Ukuja, The First Wall

Overall this is an intriguing scenario with some unique engagements.
There's way too many combats, but the one place that the players wanted to engage for Roleplay wasn't allowed by the weird unexplained railroading that you have to tell the players sorry you can't do that because I don't have a stat block and you are told to

Overall, I give the plot premise a 4 or 5. The execution is a 2-3. Too much combat, poor written assumptions that someone is going to read into what you said to mean something you quite simply didn't. No help for key issues. The end brings the original premise of the beginning into question as to why its unclear how the party should act in the first place. It would have been nice to seen a better establishment instead of a weird trope for a pointless scene that only acts as an irritant to the players because you have to force them to do something without any realistic options as a gm.

I appreciate the actual challenge of many of these high level combats. The enemies between encounters are a good mix  of re-used monsters from prior fights and new foes. This is a good thing to see in my opinion: it allows PCs to have learned about certain enemies' tactics and abilities from earlier battles and then be able to adapt while also mixing indifferent creatures with their own quirks. The fights can also be challenging,especially the final one: both times (running and playing) the group of Pathfinders really felt like their backs were up against the wall. 

The problem is that there are too many combats. At this tier 4 fights - none marked as optional - means this is never going to fit into a normal 4 hour slot.Playing it took 5.5 hours; running it took 5 and that was with me knowing how long it could go and trying to push forward as best possible. The 2nd and 3rdfight particularly come across as 'samey'; while the enemies are a bit different the overall feel and narrative importance of each is about the same and one could have easily been dropped. 

The amount of time the encounters take up also shortchanges opportunities for other types of RP.Ukuja as a setting is great and relatively unexplored in Pathfinder but the PCs don't have much opportunity to get to know it. An investigation component is(happily) left pretty open-ended and sandbox-like in terms of approaches but the scenario does not give that many hooks for a GM to build on to flesh out the city as the PCs move through it. I had to pull liberally from the LO:Mwangi Expanse book to flesh out the scenes but not all GMs have that resource. 

Also this scenario contains a too-common example of

This scenario does have its issues, but its challenging and pretty much what I've been wanting to happen in this season. Like I think we had too many months in row with varying degree of light heartedness, this one we have classic scenario of meeting up with new people and investigating a mystery and this one does have its fair amount of gore and gravitas. Good drama is nice, though admittedly the amount of combat means there isn't really that much roleplaying time(its bit obvious to me that out of only few detailed characters which one is the bad guy, but I do personalities of keycast at least comes across through well and fast)

My first issue is that there isn't really introduction to Ukuja or Matanji orcs in scenario itself, so considering I think this is first scenario where pathfinder society makes contact with them its very much likely that society only players have no idea who they are or what the first wall is like. Second, and the main issue, is that there are lot of small editing errors that make me think there were behind the scenes production problems, like its kinda weird that first flip mat has "ante chamber" be located on what is clearly a chapel of church while second one seems to assume route to be linear to the final room, but the map itself seems like the two encounter rooms are so close to each other that enemies should be hearing the fighting.

(there is also that having one low, two moderate and one severe encounter especially at these levels likely takes more than 6 hours unless party happens to be optimal for situation. Like I think one of encounters could easily have been cut or at least there should have been two low encounters instead.