A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for 5th- through 8th-level characters.
Rahadoum is a land that abhors the gods, and while the death of Gorum was cause for celebration there, the Godsrain that followed brought only uncertainty. Kassi Azaril, one of the most outspoken opponents of divine magic and reknowned medical researcher, found several of her apprentices empowered after the Godsrain, and they now face growing prejudice from other citizens, stoked by a radical element within the city guards of Manaket.
Kassi does not want to abandon these students. She knows the Pathfinder Society would love to get their hands on some of her finest trainees, and so has called upon them to get her students out of Manaket and to safety. But some higher ups in the Manaket guard have decided to take matters into their own hands.
Written by Solomon St. John
Content note: This scenario contains a depiction of suicide. Before you begin, understand that player
consent (including that of the Game Master) is vital to a safe and fun play experience for
everyone. You should talk with your players before beginning the adventure and modify
descriptions of the narrative as appropriate.
Scenario tags: Repeatable, Godsrain
[Scenario Maps spoiler - click to reveal]
The following maps used in this scenario are also available for purchase here on paizo.com:
I'm going to join in what most of the other reviewers have said. The number of skill challenges in this was just ridiculous and the difficulties were totally off the wall absurd.
Played at low tier with a fairly well built PFS character. Given I'm only level 5 obviously I concentrated on a couple of skills but I'd invested in both some Charisma and social skills. Not my focus but I also hadn't just ignored things.
Given that, failing with a 16 on the roll is just really, really, really demotivating. Why the heck should I even bother to build a well rounded character? One of the skills had a difficulty of at least 30 (I crit failed on a 20) which is a Level 12 task DC. At level 5.
To make things worse, most of the skill challenge failures seemed to have little actual effect. So we're just wasting time for a +1 to something?
Some of the story beats made absolutely 0 sense. You get hit by an apple turnover and are clumsy 1 for the rest of the scenario? You have to go through a 5 round influence subsystem with 5 or 6 NPCs to get them to cooperate when you're literally risking your lives to save theirs?
And killing people will lead to infamy? And, presumably, failing the scenario. The GM was nice enough to let us change things around a bit after the briefing but spellcasters have fairly few options to deal with this. As an Animist I threw exactly 0 non focus spells the entire scenario.
I'm not sure but it seemed to me that the scenario did NOT give guidance on what dying rules the GM should use for NPCs. This would mean that there will be significant table variation
That said, the actual combats were pretty trivial even though we generally failed the skill checks and so presumably things were worse for us.
I actually enjoyed the scenario but that was because I was just laughing at how silly the whole thing was.
Good lore, some serious issues that need to be addressed
Perspective: I ran this in low tier for 5 players at 18 CP.
Lore & Flavor
First off, I really like the flavor pesented in the scenario. The whole Godsrain messes up peoples and cultures everywhere, but the impact in Rahadoum was always going to cause a powderkeg situation.
Skills
Perspecive: I love both running and playing skill challanges.
In this case I like the way everything is setup, and I've mostly managed to convey what is requested. Yet I think this part is what's mostly going wrong in the scenario, and it has to do with the expectations that players have of skill challenges. The skill DC's seem to generally be on the high side (with a few extreme+++ DCs out there), which means odds are that players are going to fail the skill challenges. The players don't know anything about the impact of failing such challenges, so as a result I'm afraid this will cause unnecessary stress and maybe even resentment towards the scenario. To be totally honest: This scenario needs some assistance from OPM in the GM Discussion thread.
Subsystems
I think it's conceptually one of the simpeler and more elegant implementations of the
Spoiler:
Influence
subsystem I've seen, and the rewards for it are a more interesting than the standard your subtier potions that you often get. But as has been pointed out by others, the system is substantially harder with 5 players due to the amount of required vs available checks. I was also missing some DC's for the 'standard' skills within the stat blocks of some of the NPC's.
The other subsystem was interesting, but I felt it was badly phrased, leading to some confusion. The way it was written leads me to think the scenario (or at least this part?) was originally not intended to be a replayable one.
Combats
The way the encounters are setup rather interestingly, but the enemy stat blocks are missing some crucial information. I like the concept of the enemies, but what makes them cool is also their main drawback: Due to the way they are built, the combats can be a slog-fest without a heavy hitter. At the same time, religiously inclined classes get punished extremely harshly for playing. I like resilient enemies as much as the next person, but this is a bit too much, and because of this the scenario may run long.
Content warning
I understand the content warning, and I agree with other posters: This has nothing to do in a repeatable scenario. I also feel like the action that leads to it does not match the lore-wise explanation that is given in the briefing, so the whole action also feels unnecessary to me.
Humour
I had a really good laugh about the salutation part in Handout #1: It nearly beats Zarta's old PF1 letters.
Summary
All in all I'm neither negative nor entirely positive about the scenario. It has a lot of potential, but it also has some serious issues that are not being addressed, which I find a shame for what we pay for scenario's nowadays. I would only trust this scenario in the hands of an experienced PF2 GM.
Insane DCs, enemies with annoying abilities, not much replayability
(I played this scenario with a six person party in High Tier and read it afterwards)
Disclaimer: In earlier seasons (1-4), I would have given this one one star. But the fifth season has lowered the floor so low that this scenario is at least not as bad as some other recent ones, earning it a second star.
The good
The scenario presents an interesting situation in one of the areas we haven't visited in a while. Though after playing it, I am not sure I want to return there anytime soon.
The bad
Influence Subsystem - not as bad as some other incarnations of the system. The influence skills are mostly "real" skills and not random lores. One of the weaknesses are kind of insane, though
Scaling for player number - NEVER play this with 5 players! You have less total actions in the influence section and the same successes are needed in the skill challenges as with 6 people!
With more than 4 players you also have way more enemies to gain a certain type of point from, and the adventure doesn't seem to account for that
Repeatability - Influence is never a good system. Even less so in a repeatable adventure, since the players potentially already know the skills, resistances and weaknesses and it is very hard to decide if you would have guessed some of that information from the brief dossier you get or if you are metagaming.
There also are no meaningfull differences between runs of this scenario. There are two variants of the least challenging fight, as well as some different skill challenges
Nonlethal Attacks - Not everybody has the option to do nonlethal damage. And even buying Merciful Balm, since there is a lot of stuff happening between combats, you probably have to apply it at the beginning of combat. Most people will also have to draw their weapons, so you are kind of wasting a whole turn (or more) getting ready to even fight - if you have the option of using that balm at all.
The trigger - A repeatable with a serious trigger situation? Why? Was that really necessary?
The ugly
Talking about skill challenges... WTF is up with those DCs? The highest I found was 32 in Low Tier, 35 in High Tier. That is 10+ points higher than the level based DC of the characters playing the scenario! And there is more than one with a DC at 30+. Even many of the other DCs are a couple of points higher than the level based DCs would suggest.
I get that the adventure wants the players to fail (and critically fail) a few of those to acrue some Awareness Points. But there are a couple of issues with that:
1. While there is SOME hints that you are supposed to make a bit of noise (but not too much!), there is no way of knowing how much noise is OK
2. It just feels bad to fail / critically fail so many skill checks
3. Since in most instances, every character has to roll, you WILL get more Awareness Points with more players - Crit Fails automatically generate them. The thresholds in the adventure don't account for that!
4. Many previous scenarios have taught the players that you should try to avoid failing skill challenges too much, since you often lose out on secondard success conditions or treasure bundles this way. Thus a LOT of hero points will be used to try to mitigate the bad rolls until the party realizes that doing that is a waste (or is out of hero points), making the final combat even harder then it already is.
Retributive Strike - There are multiple combats with 4-8 enemies, all of which have Retributive Strike and are primarily melee damage dealers. Not only is that a pain for any GM to keep track of (who has used their reaction already?), it also has huge potential to bog the combat down and give the enemies a LOT of free attacks. RS is fine if one character hast it - it gives you an incentive to attack them instead of their allies. But if everyone has it, it becomes a problem!
"Kassi Azaril, one of the most outspoken opponents of divine magic and reknowned medical researcher, found several of her apprentices empowered, and now facing" is a strange place for that sentence to end. What are they facing?
Haven't played PFS in years due to my local shutting down during the pandemic and online games drying up after quarantine ended, but I've been waiting a long time for Rahadoum content, so if I can't find anyone to run this I'll do it myself.
This is effectively what I expected would happen after the Godsrain. There's no way it wouldn't make Rahadoum uneasy. I'm curious about some of the details and context we're lacking, though.
Another 2 questions since I'm preparing this scenario right now
Final combat spoiler:
Tier 7-8, with high scaling, Hateful Capitan Nanaeil has the same stats as Resolved Capitan Nanaeil. Should I run it as is, or will there be some guidance on how to fix it?
Moreover, final combat gives some fancy loot, including an uncommon item, yet the chronicle doesn't seem to grant access to them. Is this right?
Edit:
The tables at the end of the scenario are also tables for levels 1-4 instead of levels 5-8 (Treasure table and CP table).
1. The Perception and Will modifiers in all the NPC sheets are the same for both levels 5-6 and levels 7-8, except for Talha (higher in the levels 5-6 than in the levels 7-8) and for Yezza (they seem correct);
2. For Yezza, the DC for Influence with Deception and Diplomacy are inverted:
(DC 24 Deception, DC 27 Diplomacy) for levels 5-6
(DC 27 Diplomacy, DC 30 Deception) for levels 7-8
Travel phase 1:
3. First paragraph of page 6:
"To overcome each obstacle without detection, at
least half of the party (rounded up) must succeed
on the associated skill check, with a critical success
counting as 2 successes. If the PCs accrue a number
of successes equal to or less than half of the number
of PCs (rounded up), they accrue 1 AP per obstacle
that they fail in this manner."
What happens if the successes are exactly half of the party (rounded up)?
The following content note has been added to the store page (it was already contained in the PDF):
Quote:
This scenario contains a depiction of suicide. Before you begin, understand that player consent (including that of the Game Master) is vital to a safe and fun play experience for everyone. You should talk with your players before beginning the adventure and modify descriptions of the narrative as appropriate.
Please accept my sincere apologies for failing to publish this prior to the scenario's release.
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Society Subscriber
A couple editing issues I noticed:
1) Captain Nanaeil is listed as having the Twin Riposte reaction, but does not have Twin Parry, which is required in order to use Twin Riposte.
2) For the Organized Play information on page 39, the treasure bundle chart gives the treasure bundles for levels 1-4, and the challenge point calculation section lists the challenge points for levels 7-10. Both of these are incorrect as this scenario is for levels 5-8.
Organized Play Coordinator
