A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for 1st- through 4th-level characters.
After ensuring that Fasiel ibn Sazadin saw Qadiran justice for his crimes, the Pathfinder Society received a mysterious letter from his benefactor detailing that she now sees the Society as a formidable opponent. After receiving this, Venture-Captain Safa spent quite some time traveling and researching across Qadira and Nex, only to find that the benefactor resides in Jalmeray and is a rakshasa with fine tastes. In order to find out more information about her, Safa and Rashmivati are sending a small crew of Pathfinders to attend a local auction in order to do some reconnaissance. However, while attending the formal event, the Pathfinders can't help but notice that it looks like one of the guests might have some sticky fingers!
I loved the setting for this scenario and the general structure. The absurdity of throwing a bunch of hardened agents into a garden party begs for some hijinx, and roleplaying opportunities abound. However, I can't give it top marks for these reasons:
This scenario is missing a key component, which is the general description of the situation for the scenario. The GM must reconstruct what the scenario is about by reading from cover to cover, uncovering clues much the way a player would. Some of those clues even require you to dip into the encounter stat blocks! This made prep much more time-consuming than usual, particularly given the complexity of the plot.
The scenario is layered and full of misdirection. I agree with other reviewers that this risks making the scenario's choices seem arbitrary and strange. I mitigated by emphasizing how the info the party gathers pertains to the plot and choosing details to highlight. The scenario gives little guidance here, though, which also made prep challenging.
For us, the auction could have been a whole 4-hour session in and of itself! Even trying to step on the gas a few rounds in, we came nowhere close to our scheduled time. There was intense time pressure on the back end of the adventure, and we didn't finish. I think the auction needed to be half the size to fit into a traditional scenario time slot.
I ran it online using the official Foundry adventure. The setup and automation were great as usual.
The scenario consists of 2 parts: influence and heist.
I liked the influence very much. It depends on your gm and player sand how much you like to roleplay. I would maybe possibly add a combat in the middle. If you don't roleplay, it will end with 2 hours of mindless rolling and tracking points. 4/5
The second part, the heist, was OK. Short, felt like 1st-series quest. One combat is skippable, but it felt good after all the influence. A bit boring though, and I didn't like the map. 4/5
The real problem is how those parts are connected. The change felt forced. The scenario claims it is foreshadowed and players should have clues, but I (knowing what the maxed influence gives you as a gm) didn't have a clue. Since we were playing an official game, all players were pathfinders, and they felt that starting this heist "is not something Pathfinders should do", and they did it only because I emphasized that this is what the scenario expects them to do next. We feel that it would be better to make influence and finding the real "bad" person longer, adding some battles in the middle, and creating a separate quest for the heist part.
This, combined with how the second map was handled (excluding parts of the map, missing detailed descriptions) and the whole (possible mild spoiler) crocodile-password that was there I guess only to give a fun name for the scenario makes me rate it as 3/5 overall.
Story wise, this scenario continues where we left off in the Safa storyline. It leads us to the magical island of Jalmeray, which is portrayed really well, and the NPC's are evocative. I think the combats could have been interesting but we could talk our way out of them (which is good and makes sense story wise).
Unfortunately that's kind of where the positive feedback ends for me:
1) The Influence mechanics implementation is better than some previous instances I've experienced, but they feel so useless here. Please Paizo, stop shoehorning subsystems when they're not really adding anything to the story: It only manages to reduce their value.
2) We're basically getting to puzzle our way to new information about a specific target (revealed at the end of the previous story), yet we're somehow expected to (without cause) dive head first into a side-plot that reveals itself halfway-through to be the main plot of the scenario, that not even barely manages to announce itself at all.
I'm a bit disappointed in this one: The whole Safa storyline was really cool up to now. Sadly this scenario comes over as filler content just so you can kind of dramatically reveal at the end who was actually our quarry. Just... Meh... :(
Many other reviewers, both here and in the reviews of other scenarios, have noted that this Season of PFS seems to have an overabundance of subsystems cropping up too frequently. While I overall agree, I try to approach each scenario use of those subsystems on their own merits. Unfortunately, The Crocodile's Smile didn't hold up well for me.
Interestingly, the Influence mechanic of the first half is the more interesting part of the scenario. Schmoozing guests at a grand party can be quite fun, and the multiple 'events' between many of the rounds was a good way to not only break up the pacing but add a bit more strategy or refocusing of the PC's efforts round to round. But too much of a good thing can lead to problems, as it does here. Players are presented with 5 NPCs they've never heard of before nor, vitally, has the GM and given eight rounds to interact with them. This ends up feeling quite a bit too long, as without much detail or established characterization to draw on all but the most improv-loving players are going to run out of topics to discuss and RP long before the end, reducing the later rounds to just rolling away at your best skills.
The events and encounters after the Influence portion feels a bit choppy, both in PC motivation and the encounters themselves. Players are meant to conduct an investigation, but the prompt as to why they are doing so doesn't come through as clearly as it seems meant to.
Spoiler:
"By this time the PCs should be thoroughly suspicious of Tisbah and want to track her whereabouts as the rest of the guests are distracted." Our party definitely was not at this point, and needed some heavy nudging from the GM. All that is assuredly clear is one of the six+ named NPCs seems to have slipped out; for our party - and I suspect many others - this alone is not a strong enough motivation for us to jeopardize the Society's rep by breaking into an influential noble's home to poke around. The only other clues I could find that let the PCs think Tisbah may be up to something are if they have reached the highest and second-highest of Nazreiha's thresholds; this is far from guaranteed for a party to do, and if Tisbah is meant to be suspected and thus her vanishing implying something's amiss then those bits of info should likely have been revealed at lower thresholds or spread out across multiple NPCs to increase the chances of a party knowing those 'intrigue load-bearing' clues.
And the combat encounters themselves were both on the easier side and were not that interesting (played low tier). combat difficulty isn't the be-all, end-all by itself, but easy fights can be made memorable by interesting environments or opponents. Neither of those were present here.
The overall plot of the scenario also came across as a bit muddled. Our GM mentionned afterwards they found themselves needing to pause or scramble about the pdf frequently to re-check the story beats, and having read through the scenario after playing I can understand why. The way the information about the story is laid out in the scenario does it no favors: motivations as to why an antagonist is doing what they're doing is found only in an appendix statblock, and even the fact that a
Spoiler:
heist
has happened at all is mentioned pages after the characters are meant to be reacting to it and investigating. The overall plot is comprehensible to a GM, but it feels like the scenario needs to be at times read backwards in order for the pieces to line up. Further, the two halves of the scenario - the influence and the second part - do not really impact each other. Nor really end with the PCs feeling they've made any progress in learning anything about the enemy they're supposed to.
I can see what the mission was trying to accomplish. But the execution and editing felt underbaked, and much of the time we spent playing it was doing things because that's what the scenario said we were supposed to do with us players not understanding the 'why' of it.
