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!
The influence subsystem DOES NOT WORK in the PFS context. Most people do not come to PFS to actually do anything involving heavy roleplay. As such, my table absolutely loathed this scenario. I GMed it as quickly as I could, but it just drags and drags and drags. It was interesting, don't get me wrong, but this kind of play does not work in this context. Especially in the setting of a busy convention center, like I ran mine.
The combats afterwards aren't half bad, but they felt entirely underwhelming. After all of this deep role-play, I expected some more complex mechanics in the combat. But no.
The twist is fine. It works fine. It would land better if it came sooner and actually meant something more dangerous for the characters. I understand it's a low level adventure, but the scaling was just all out of balance here and my table walked away feeling entirely underwhelmed.
I felt the first half of the scenario was really well written. These social encounters are often not very strong, but the five NPCs the PCs are trying to influence are really interesting and well-developed. The Influence system really shined in this scenario. My group and I had a wonderful time with it and the RP with the NPCs. This was a PFS social encounter at its very best.
As that portion of the scenario came to an end, the rest kinda fell apart for us. It was drab, boring, and poorly constructed. There is a thing that happens that drives the PCs to go after someone. There is a real sense of urgency coming out of the social encounter. But the scenario was written like they were in a slow, plodding dungeon crawl where a lot of things need to be slowly investigated. We were in a chase scene kind of moment, not a dungeon crawl. Poorly executed and each combat encounter was overly easy. After the enjoyment of the first half of the scenario, everyone was bored by the second half or frustrated by the poor quality.
The scenario also had a lot of editing issues. Some sentences didn't make sense, making prep difficult but this was mostly in the second half. Some descriptions of certain features in certain rooms matched features on the map in different rooms. Kinda looked like cut-and-paste mistakes accidentally put descriptions in the wrong place.
Was it worth playing? Yes, maybe... The first half of the scenario was brilliant! The second half is rough. Those 2 Stars fall solely on the quality of the first half of the scenario.
So as many have said the influence subsystem engagement just took way too long. It was too many rounds, and there wasn’t enough information to find out who to really engage with.
The combats were a complete fail from what I could see. My group had 5 players playing in high tier, and I think we spent about 30-40mins total of the whole scenario on combat. The second to last fight was 1 round.
Pros: The influence NPCs have nice art and their backgrounds and motivations are well fleshed out.
Cons: The Influence subsystem, combats are too easy, there's no motivation to follow the plot.
The influence subsystem is never fun, especially when there's 5 NPCs across 8 rounds. The only scenario I've experienced where it worked was The Blakros Deception, where there was only one NPC to focus on.
There are too many low level enemies, rather than increasing the power of the boss. This isn't to say we should have a APL+3 boss, but fighting 3 +0 enemies is less interesting than a +1 and two -1s. Incapacitate is a trait for a reason, and having bosses at the same level as the PCs make it too easy for them to finish the boss in a single spell. Please consider increasing the difficulty on bosses to make fights more interesting, like they were back in season 2.
The motivation for the party to snoop in the manor just doesn't exist. When a new friend is injured, the party is expected to sneak into a restricted area... why? There's just no reason! The person who's missing isn't suspicious, and there's nothing to signify that they went into the manor. For all the party knows, they could have left the grounds completely. Also, please stop having us loot innocent people. Stealing from the servants should give infamy, not treasure bundles.
Finally, the title of this scenario makes no sense. We go to an auction and stop a heist, the fact that there are crocodiles has absolutely no bearing on the plot. They could have been literally any other creature and the story would have been exactly the same. If the title mentions a creature, I would expect them to be at least somewhat important to the plot.
There are times when a subsystem, despite seeming appropriate, is actually a very poor fit for a scenario. This has to be the most extreme version of that I have seen.
The NPCs this time are actually decently well differentiated, an improvement on previous influence based scenarios. But there are significant problems. First, this scenario is structured in such a way that you don't actually learn anything valuable from anyone. Its all light rumors that are largely inconsequential. Also each NPC needs 6-8 points of influence to close out. Given that there are only 5 real rounds of influence and 2 of those get eaten up by discovery, that is essentially requiring pcs to critically succeed on a reliable basis to learn everything. Its just bad design and thats before you realize most NPCs top 2 influence skills are typically Lores, which are effectively useless meaning it takes 3 discoveries to get anything useful.
This is actually to the detriment of the writing of the npcs which is fairly good but whose actions might seem completely incomprehensible if your dice were cold. The scenario also boldly states thst it should be clear who the person who is off is at the end of influence rounds is and I have to declare it was not.
The transition from this scene to the little mini exploration section was clunky and the mystery not especially engaging. The fact that this scenario has one combat and a 2nd combat you have in character reasons to avoid is also unacceptable. This is still a rpg system that is primarily about fighting things. Please let us fight. The motives of the npcs involved in the climax are pretty incomprehensible from the outside and form a sour taste for the ending.
Just...messy messy messy.
It also needs atated - the art orders in this scenario were truly atrocious, especislly the new Safa art and the Tisbah art.
