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.
Unfortunately this scenario leaves much to be desired.
Story: extremely uncohesive, with random events happening for no good reason.
NPCs: Npcs show up out of nowhere and after the scene disappear. The main NPC doesn't really feel present until the final scene
Encounters: extremely easy which I guess is fine for 1-4
Repeatable elements: Little to none. Mostly just cosmetic variations.
Ease of running: Medium. Lots of poorly explained design choices (water in final encounter for example is largely a GM fiat), maps that are either barely used or are used with no content. Npcs with questionable motivations.
Overall I cannot recommend this scenario, and definitely don't feel like repeating it. Please take cues from 99-1 that was one of the best imo.
This was an adventure that was significantly more unwieldy than it had to be because of the sheer number of people the scenario is asking us to introduce and make both memorable and different for the players.
NPC Identities:
You have the traveling Venture Captain, who should as the person being escorted be the star of the bunch. You have a rabdom NPC from the past reprising their role - this is fine since its just a reprise but all of the reprisals are characters these pcs could not have possibly met, you have the dryad familiar babysitter who competes with the VC for attention and virtually guarantees that neither ends up especially memorable. You then have a wood genie and talos to negotiate with. Its just...a lot. Its a lot to keep straight as a gm, its a lot to keep straight for players unless theyre taking good notes. Its messy. Its upoing the degree of difficulty on a scenario that, as an intro, should be simple enough that newer gms can execute it well. These missions have created memorable and beloved NPCs in the past when the focus was properly on the new npcs and maybe an antagonist. Thinking here of J Dacilane and Envar Tamm. This tried to do way too much and did not succeed. I did not really have enough material to make any of these NPCs really sing and I really wanted them to.
Also this is a more minor quibble but introducing supposedly powerful npcs and making them useless without providing a good narrative reason is something players dunk on pretty viciously.
The rest of the adventure was good enough though parts of it were a bit more opaque than they had to be, for example the variable portion of the maze and what differences the different lodges actually made to the story.
The final battle was very creative but in my experience
Combat spoilers:
This was a lot of this adventures wordcount, which could have been used elsewhere, on this gimmick of the two different NPCs offering hints on how to beat the baby brine shark. All well and good except the shark was dead before any information could be imparted, which rendered a lot of this potentially memorable set piece moot.
There were a lot of good ideas here but the execution was messy and left a lot to be desired. I would look elsewhere for a memorable first scenario for a new gm or player.
PS PLEASE do not make us use elements from 3 different tile sets again for the same map. That really sucked.
Standard Intro to a season that could have some fun flavor
It's your standard intro adventure. If you've done one then you will have done this one. Intro's have to get out a lot of information in a short amount of time that will set up a year of play. It can feel a little odd, disjointed, confusing, and all over the player. But that's not a negative, just a standard for Intro scenarios.
Overall, very standard feeling so that's a good thing. It means consistancy in writing and planning, which is a good thing from a overall aspect.
Combat is standard, except for the last one. I have to really question a choice in wording. The last combat we are fighting Brine Sharks. Okay, very thematic to the flavor of this season. I like it. But why Baby Brine Sharks? Why put Baby there? That can lead to some uncomfortable collar tugging, baby seal jokes, and other thinks. Just be aware of that if you run it. Maybe change the word to Young, Juvenile, etc.
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.
