A Pathfinder Society Quest designed for 1st- through 4th-level characters, playable in 2-3 hours.
The enigmatic being known simply as the Thane, one of the more powerful denizens of the First World, on rare occasions grows weary of solitude and holds a grand party. Invitations are scattered throughout the planes, and simply interacting with one in any manner will suddenly see a “guest” whisked away to the feast. Further, the Thane warps time in their realm, making each day last a decade. The celebration continues for a week of these decades. Mortals taken find themselves seventy years older with only a week having passed outside, if they even survive decades of partying.
Recently, the Thane has again become bored and sent out invitations. Some citizens of Jol unfortunate enough to have stumbled upon these were whisked away. It’s up to the PCs to free them—and likely the PCs themselves— before even more years pass in the twisted time of the Thane's realm.
Written by Mark Malcolm
Scenario tags: Repeatable
[Scenario Maps spoiler - click to reveal]
The following maps used in this scenario are also available for purchase here on paizo.com:
I both played and ran this one via play-by-post, so I cannot speak to timing issues experienced when playing it live. However, I did not find it to be overly long (with a skippable combat at the beginning, there is only one required combat, and it is very easy).
The main part of the Quest is a combination of talking to people and sneaking around and such followed by a subsystem skill challenge. A key point that might have influenced at least one other review is, it is not expected that the players complete everything. So check your completionist impulses at the door, is my recommendation.
Overall, I thought this Quest has an interesting setting, some neat characters to meet, and mechanics that are appropriate for what they are trying to accomplish in the story. I'll probably run this one again in the future, the story and setting are worthy of revisiting from time to time.
Cool NPCs and setting, but does require some extra prep time.
I GM'd this one in about two hours and twenty minutes. I enjoyed the new NPCS much more than I normally do and hopefully we'll see more of the Thane. The dialogue of the NPCS was especially memorable. I also appreciated the call-backs to Qxal and the Year of the Open Road.
The inflitration-or-chase decision that I've seen in a PFS scenario is also present here. I like encouraging player agency, even at the cost of extra prep time.
The quest contains 4 encounters, so each of them is supposed to last less than one hour.
The one I remember the most asked us to convince 5 NPCs and distract another one, perform 5 duels, find 5 people to exfiltrate and find an exfiltration route. How is the GM supposed to handle that in less than an hour?
Our GM made the only thing he could do: He layed down the thing like a Monopoly boardgame without much explanation and we then proceeded to a pointless stream of dicerolls (40ish) without any roleplay of any sort (both because we had nearly no clue what was happening and because we didn't care at all about the thing as you can't build engagement for such a big thing in a couple of minutes).
That's not a roleplaying game. Or not for humans. For sure that's not what I came for.
By the way, the adventure can be made into something nice. But you'll need countless hours to rewrite it and 4-5 hours to then run it. As is, it's just a summary.
Perspective: player, GMed by Sebastian (see review).
I really enjoyed this quest. It's a take on a classic folktale and it's done well. Some folk tales work better as "passive" stories where the characters do as the author tells them to, and can be a bit poor when you shift them to "active" player characters. This one does it well, it's fun as a player.
The one thing I'm not fond of design-wise is having double subsystems. They serve a purpose in the story, but it does double up on GM prep for a quest which doesn't seem ideal. I like quests to be relatively simple for the GM (no more than one substantial minigame ruleset) so that they're also good for beginner GMs to practice with.
Short temp review - lots of potential, but likely to run long
I have run this yesterday for a group 3 of my players that happen to also be in the same AP... so very close to the best-case scenarios as far as friction and delays are concerned.
We took about 2.5 hours, if you have a bigger group or one that enjoy more RP there is absolutely space for it here, but I could absolutely see a group like that needed and filling 4 hours of gameplay here.
As usual for this product line, and at this point I am likely praising/blaming the developer for the ways they experiment with established subsystems, this one experiments with a variant of the influence system (while also including 2 more subsystems which need more word count and time to talk about that I have right now) and I feel like the experiment is a success in this case.
TLDR: For players, this is absolutely worth your time, though I can see players who want to solve everything with combat experience some friction here.
For GMs, this has a lot of potential for RP, the setting is brutal in some ways, and I could see that some players would absolutely embrace some of the worse endings for character development and art updates.
Having just run the Quest 18 - this is a similar experience, but earns a higher rating as the previous quest as some issues, mostly in the GM facing material (as I mentioned in a way too long review).
(based on 5 ratings)
