A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for 1st- through 4th-level characters.
The Pathfinder Society has heard reports of a ship sighted over and over, apparently following the same path before vanishing each week. This unfortunate ship is stuck in time, repeating the same week over and over. The crew has tried everything to escape this fate, and gave up years of the same week ago. The PCs must find a way to return things to normal and save the crew from an eternity of this single week.
Written by William Fischer
Scenario tags: Faction (Horizon Hunters)
[Scenario Maps spoiler - click to reveal]
The following maps used in this scenario are also available for purchase here on paizo.com:
Product - Pathfinder Society Scenario #5-17: Stranded on Yesterday's Tide
System - Pathfinder 2nd Ed
Producer[/b]- Paizo
Price- $8.99 here https://paizo.com/products/btq03tyu?Pathfinder-Society-Scenario-517-Strande d-on-Yesterdays-Tide TL; DR- Solid story with a divisive 1st act. 93%
Basics- TIME LOOP! When the god died, time ran in a circle. What happens to those stuck in it? Can you get them out?
Mechanics or Crunch- The adventure is a good one, but influence is a dividing factor. Influence encounters are something that divides players. It's a mechanical way to make social encounters work, but some players absolutely hate them. This starts with one. That will either make you love this adventure or start off weak. From there it gets better and enters surprising levels of Cthulhu mythos. And that's always fun. 4/5
Theme or Fluff- Mystery, into combat, and then Cthulhu. That's the ingredients of a solid four hours of fun. I love the story and enjoy everything it has to offer.5/5
Execution- It’s Paizo. They know this. they know how to lay out an adventure. 5/5
Summary - I enjoyed this one but not everyone will. The influence-focused encounters will make some players mad, but others will find their stride. Then it's combat and skills to win the day. Those are always fun, so all players will enjoy everything after the first act. Fun, but something to keep in mind. 93%
I like the general idea of this scenario, though it could definitely be creepier (looking back at S1 mosquito witch). Also the investigation / talking to the crew sub-system is quite mechanical and not really fun. I wonder if I can find a way to run it smoothier.
Edit: I ran this again and the subsystem portion went much better after some preparation. If you leave room for people to roleplay instead of just roll skill 1/2/3, it can be pretty fun.
I really enjoyed running this for my group who really enjoyed it by the end!
The concept is real strong and throws the heroes into a truly unique situation. Furthermore, the NPCs have a variety of perspectives that reinforce the tableaux. The captain's situation made my players' eyes go wide. My players had no trouble walking into this adventure and interacting with it.
The combats were pretty quick and my players had little trouble with them. My group is pretty experienced but the creatures introduced were pretty unique and my players and I enjoyed fighting them.
For a low-level adventure the DCs for some skills seemed a bit high, My players managed well, befriending all NPCs and earning all treasure bundles when I thought they might miss a few.
As a concept, this scenario sets up an interesting mystery to be investigated and solved (I echo may other reviewers that its a mystery perhaps better suited for more experienced Pathfinders, but let's set that aside).
The problem is that you don't actually investigate anything. Instead, it's yet another Influence scenario to convince the trapped crew to tell you who's responsible for the problem - something they all seem to already know and suspect, yet have not bothered to do anything about.
Plenty has been said in reviews this season about the Influence mechanic and its use/overuse in frequency. The core issue of its presence here is that Influencing represents the entirety of solving the mystery. Instead of looking for clues or piecing together suspicious movements or items that appear amiss, the PCs just beg four NPCs to 'like me!' again and again. And it is not even that NPC gives you a clue once Influence: they give you the answer. This is profoundly unsatisfying for something that was presented as a 'strange mystery' scenario.
This misapplied subsystem makes the scenario stumble from the start and it never recovers. I do appreciate the final encounter design - the use of different 'victory' conditions beyond just 'kill all enemies' is a nice change of pace and the PCs' prior actions affecting it tie in nicely - but the other combats and encounters are fairly average and the scaling throughout the scenario appear badly skewed on the Developer side.
Clarifications/corrections for this scenario have been added to the Foundry modules. I've posted those in the GM discussion thread.
I have to say, it's doubly frustrating that the devs/writers seem to have stopped answering questions here and the GM Discussion forum, but they are giving info to the Foundry team which the users of the PDF are never likely to see.
The scaling on this adventure feels off in multiple ways.
As was stated in the review that was posted, the influence encounter to rouse the crew has a very high degree of difficulty and is harder the more PCs are involved; especially with the captain, whose thresholds are incredibly high.
Probably more seriously, though, even at the 1-2 tier you have to deal with a Rank 3 spell, Slow, a lot, also with a really high DC, which means with average proficiencies for level, the party is very likely to have at least one crit fail. If that crit fail falls on a sorcerer or other spell caster, expect to have a very frustrated player on your hands. I rolled a 1 and I was like, "Welp. I'm going outside. I'll shield every turn because there's literally nothing else I can do unless a monster wanders into melee range."
I get what the designer was going for, but I feel like this should have been a tier 3-6 scenario because of the number of monsters with Rank 3 spell slots, and having the possibility for a player's first experience with Pathfinder (tier 1-4 is open to beginning players, after all) be having 2/3 of their actions stripped from them for one or more fights could be seriously damaging to the game and PFS.
I just played this scenario at level 3-4 range on a bard.
The flavor and narrative was fun and enjoyable. The story is well crafted, and the storybeats keep it interesting. Creating a seafaring adventure/mystery and keeping it interesting throughout is difficult to do well, and I think this adventure succeeded on all points there. I _loved_ the detail for the hounds and the room shape requirements, I look forward to hearing about someone's creativity for taking advantage of that.
Despite purchasing as a part of the whole season, this scenario is a skip from me for GMing for PFS (where the scenario must be run as printed) unless/until its significantly reworked.
Captain Fidero's DCs are too difficult for the level range for the influence encounter, it seems like as configured it is in the 3-6 or 5-8 level range for most of the DCs. Some of the other DCs also seem to be too high for this level of play, especially with how critical they are for succeeding.
Definitely agree with the points that Stormwarden has pointed out that need to be addressed.
