Pathfinder Society Scenario #6-06: Rotten Apples

"Grains..."
- Moaned like zombies from Return of the Living Dead

This scenario is best played by embracing Comedy Horror and allowing that to shine through. All the right ingredients are mixed here with equal parts of terror and levity. The Pathfinders are called to a remote country, suspiciously close to the Gravelands, and are charged to investigate potential problems at an even more remote location where leshy go to pass on when their time comes. Spooky! The trio sending you on the mission are two arguing, bumbling leshy and their ghoran partner. They're pure comedy!

The scenario definitely had its rails, but the players are afforded agency to decide how they want to approach the task: "Quick but Loud" or "Quiet but Slow." This does require the GM to do some extra prep, as they have no idea how the players will decide to play the scenario until it is already in progress. Additional encounters occur if the PCs don't handle their tasks well and the composition of upcoming encounters is altered dramatically. Each scene was distinct and had a purpose and each step in this story had significant and interesting impacts on the story that followed. It was a well-constructed scenario all around.

I am concerned the chase scene was easier than it should have been. Each obstacle had a large selection of skills to choose from (which is a good thing), but the DCs were lower than what they should have been on many of those skills. We were playing at the 5-6 tier. Some of those skills had DCs appropriate for characters of level 3. I did not tell my players the DCs but by choosing skills appropriate to their characters, they rolled a lot of critical successes (with average base rolls before their modifiers). They are allowed 2 rounds of actions before the "bad thing" enters the first obstacle. The bad thing can only move one obstacle per round. But the PCs were already at obstacle 6 of 8 when it arrived. They easily cleared the chase which was a little disappointing to everyone.

I think the monsters needed to be tuned up to be more difficult. Again, we were playing tier 5-6, and some of the enemies they were facing had ACs as low as 14. Not all were that low but many were. Again, my players rolled A LOT of crits with pretty low rolls. With ACs that low, a couple of the characters could hit on a 2 or higher and crit on a 10 or higher. Maybe there were typos in the stat blocks?

Did we have fun? Heck yes! The scenario was a lot of fun and had many great elements. Please don't let my two concerns above dissuade you from thinking we did not enjoy ourselves. Everyone liked the narrative and the players got to feel like superheroes for a bit. Nothing wrong with that. Embrace the quirkiness of this adventure and I think you will have a lot of fun with it.

Rotten Apples' USP is that the players are offered a choice of two approaches at the very beginning; quick but load or quiet but slow. I liked that it gives players agency and the resulting obstacles they face make sense. It does require extra prep work on the GM's part.

I'm indifferent to the new NPCs. They seem facetious or goofy, like many other NPCs from small ancestries.

Storywise, the monsters are various undead leshies. The metaplot seems to be fighting the Whispering Way, and it could be interesting to see how that storyline develops.

I played this Scenario in (very) high Tier with 6 Players and read it afterwards.

Overall the adventure is very middle of the road. The premise is OK, the new NPC are a bit cutesy for the kind of adventure the rest is. It was fun playing it, but it didn't have anything to write home about.
The adventure has multiple (lenghty? see below) skill challenges and (usually) four combats, so it can run a bit long.

The good:

The scenario tries something new with skill challenges. Instead of one or two rolls, you get four rolls per Character for some of the challenges. That leads to a more average distribution for successes.

It is interesting that the scenario has two different ways to tackle the mission. One of the few instances where a decision has to be made by the players that actually impacts how the adventure runs.

Many of the combats use the same enemies, which have weaknesses and abilities you can try to work around. That leads to an interesting dynamic of the knowledge from earlier fights making the later ones potentially easier.

The bad:

The scenario tries something new with skill challenges. Instead of one or two rolls, you get four rolls per Character for some of the challenges. That makes every single roll less impactful, diminishing the value of hero points and leading to either very long challenges or them being just a bunch of rolls with little to no description of what you actually do.

It is interesting that the scenario has two different ways to tackle the mission. Why is it not repeatable? And since the GM has no way to know beforehand which option will be chosen, both ways have to be prepared, leading to a siginificant portion of preparation being superflous - and since it isn't repeatable, the average GM won't even use it for a second run.

Many of the combats use the same enemies, which have weaknesses and abilities you can try to work around. But that also leads to them feeling a bit samey. And since there is no way to go shopping or rest between the fights, many people will have little to no way to make use of the additional information they have.

Has the compost thingie ever been mentioned before? I like playing Leshy characters and have never heard of it before. It even feels off that a Leshy would care about what happens to its remains after the spirit leaves the body.

The ugly:

The BBEG has a VERY nasty ability that can not only lead to one (or more) players not being able to really participate in the fight, it can also lead to very swingy combats. Please don't every use that ability on a low level adventure with no way to counteract it!

6-06 Player review, I have not read the scenario at this point in time.

Score is pretty 2.5, I might find good arguments to boost the score when I prep it, as a player review, I am sort of dragged down by my class with the core concept of leshy mortality.

This review feels is essentially just me dumping the notes I wrote during the adventure, I might update it at some point.

The introduction of the new characters is absolutely not my cup of tea, it is very cute, distractingly so. Replacing one VC with presumably 3 just feels like watering down the Society NPCs.

Briefing and questions are a bit vague, but that feels like that is the general tone of the mission.

The two leshy NPCs are not as bad as some similar NPCs but...

That Leshy graveyard feels like a new piece of canon and honestly, it's weird that leshy have such a strong connection to their bodies.

Undead Leshy feels less like a fresh concept, and more like reusing the concept of the abyss-infused leshy.The explosion is less dangerous, though the artwork feels a bit odd. Turning the entire area into difficult terrain just slows things down or no good reason, not in love with the rotten burst.

After the healing we moved on, finding the problem and now forcing the binary choice. Personally, I am not really sold on the options presented, feels very forced, and I worry that the GM has to prepare both paths, similar to one of the quests developed by the author. Too much of this kind of thing can annoy the GMs and also wastes a lot of word count

We go for brute force, the author does not seem to have accounted for the quick identification skill feat, despite using an identify magic keywording that does not quite work. The GM mentioned that any bonus to that action would apply but I think those are pretty rare.

A Skill challenge leading into a chase is unexpected, but I am not sure if the proportions are correct, 4 skill checks per person (too many I would argue in most situations) to slightly adjust the DCs a bit feels like a kind of trap to sap players hero points early.

Following the chase with yet another series of skills to convince the Leshy that the players are there to help... or at least claim to do so, also involves a fair bit of rolling, but I am so very happy that it resisted the urge to use a heavier clunky system like the influence system.

Following that, the players are essentially asked to clean up so they can get to the area, player characters are essentially used as pest control.

I struggle with the emotional components of the adventure, and

And now we are beating up ghoul leshies, I already felt like the concept of a leshy graveyard was already clashing with my expectations, but undead/negatively charged leshy with skull faces, or ghoulish leshy are... weird, I would have thought that plants would not be something that can be corrupted like that.

The Ghoul leshys are also making everything difficult terrain when they pop, not ideal, but even worse the combat difficulty we encountered felt it was severely under-tuned.

Now we get a skill bonus because we influenced the PC pretty well... and yet another skill challenge with 4 (FOUR) rolls per person, I understand that 4 rolls average things out a bit but it feels excessive.

And yet another bonus earned.

The various paths feel so confusing in a non-repeatable and the GM seems to be negatively affected as it can be hard to find the right page with such a scenario construction.

Generally, I like seeing troops, but the flip mat chosen feels more like a run-down part of a significantly bigger city, though admittedly I am not sure how attuned with nature that settlement is supposed to be, since it and the entire concept for the graveyard seem to have been created for this adventure (and it is causing some major issues for me, it really feels backwards - as if someone wanted to have undead leshy as a major element and then looked for a justification. That could absolutely just be my perception, but I am really struggling with that feeling.

I like seeing the troup rules used though our group might have been a bit too good at fighting them.

Our GM mentioned the zombies trying to get inside the house, but we could not see them in the first round due to our starting location.
The fight really is a joke, the enemies did not even get to really attack, and the starting locations and map are major contributors here. It really feels underwhelming, the difficult terrain is annoying again but not something that can do much more than slow us down.

I appreciate that the adventure is not distracted by the godsrain, or the current metaplot, but what is there is not a particularly appealing story. It might just be me, but I feel the similarities with blooming catastrophe "at least in the concept" are not really doing it a lot of favors).

4 encounters, at least in this run, are a lot... in theory, but so many of them are... similar to the easy encounters in PF1 APs. Somewhere between a desperate attempt to drain some party resources and a massive waste of time.
One of my bigger problems is that spellcasters tend to conserve resources, and thus the combats take longer and are less exciting as nobody seems to cast non-cantrips because it does not feel necessary.
Maybe it is not obvious to the authors and developers but easy encounters are just a drag, particularly in org play.

The final encounter, honestly, the enemy is not super interesting, at least considering what we learned, and while it sounded like a vampire with that super complicated dominate effect. Not sure if using 3 different flavors of undead "templates", helps or hinders the concept, as someone who was not already on board with the "undead leshy" concept, likely not a huge help.
Dominate really is a nasty ability as it is hard to interact with due to the counteract rules.

The martial thrown weapons given out at the start are, unfortunately, not a particularly great fit for most groups.

I guess it is a win for inclusivity as the Whispering Tyrant is now starting to recruit among the fruit and vegetable section of the graveyard, but due to their semi-spirit nature, I feel like this really limits the gravitas of the situation.

It ends with some more focus on the new NPCs which, after clearing the undead menace is also a tonal whiplash as these types of cute characters tend to be (and I get the worst "this feels like someone's character/familiar that was snuck into the scenario" feeling from NPCs like that). Maybe I as slightly more annoyed by how things went, and how our inventor was dominated, but "annoyed" unfortunately describes my feelings here.

Likely not on the shortlist for me to GM, preparing separate paths to the same scenario seems overly completed and a bit like a waste of time.

Including a chase and an infiltration system, is just one aspect where I feel like this adventure wastes a fair bit of word count.
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