A Pathfinder Society Scenario designed for 3rd- through 6th-level characters.
Within the heart of devil-cursed Cheliax, Greensteeples Manor, home of the illustrious Jeggare line, secretly stands as the only stronghold of the Pathfinder Society. However, among the fallout of handling the scandal of her cousin within the past few years, the queen of Cheliax has learned of the manor's true nature. With tensions rising in the nation, an order has been placed to her two most loyal Hellknight orders to capture any beings within the manor and burn the traitorous home to the ground in the name of Asmodeus. While Varian's safe in Korvosa, the Pathfinders in the area must act swiftly to rescue the innocents within and ensure that what few secrets can be saved are moved to a safer location, lest they fall into the hands of Queen Abrogail!
I don't want to be a broken record too much here. I suggest you read the review by Ascalaphus which covers a lot of my observations in much greater detail.
All I'll say is that the infiltration seemed designed for failure, which is either bad/punitive design or some really bad math errors. But then later the monsters are (as pointed out in the other review) also designed with only hard DCs/stats for their levels, leading me to believe that this was all intentional.
This makes me wonder if the author just doesn't like players having fun in their games? If so, why write RPG adventures? Hard encounters are fine, and not everything has to be a cake walk, but as another author once said during a roundtable, if everything uses the high/hard DC for its level range, than you're writing for the wrong level range and need to re-examine your priorities.
There's great story here if you're a fan of the Pathfinder Tales novels, but for people who aren't, this was just a slog that wasn't very fun. Unfortunately our table was mostly full people in the latter category, which made it really drag. Would not want to run this again.
A bad infiltration starts the adventure on a sour note
The rest of the adventure is okay. The fights were fairly challenging, although there could have been a bit more variety in the choice of enemies. Looking at their stats, they really are as strong as they felt playing against them. Fortunately, scaling for challenge points is mostly horizontal by adding more enemies instead of making them individually stronger. As someone who often feels fights lack a bit of spice, these were actually pretty spicy.
monster design quibble:
These monsters don't really follow the advice to "push and pull" from the monster design guidelines. Pretty much all their stats are around the High value for their level: AC, saves, to hit, damage and HP. There's no opportunity to play well here by figuring out their weak spot to take advantage of. You just need to pull out all the stops and roll high.
The backstory of the scenario is really interesting, but the scenario doesn't tell much of it. If you've got a lot of PFS1 under your belt this is exciting, and more page count could have been spent on getting that information in the hands of the GM and players.
So, about that infiltration.
Spoiler:
The actual obstacles are good flavor and interesting, but it seems like almost at random some were chosen to be individual obstacles instead of group. There's no particular reason why they'd be individual obstacles, based on what the actual obstacle is. But mechanically they're terrible choices to be individual obstacles, because they require hard checks with only few possible skills. No, lore skills don't count because the chances of having that correct lore skill are too small to matter.
We spent a fair heap of hero points on this infiltration, and from what I read that's a common case. But as it turns out the consequences of failing it are pretty small, since the thing that you need to get story/mechanical rewards already kicks in very early on. And if you fail, all that happens is that you have one more easy fight against the same kind of enemies you'll face later on. So you're spending a lot of game time and hero points and frustration on something that has been made to matter rather little.
Overall I did enjoy the adventure, because the story felt significant and I enjoy challenging fights.
I played this at High Tier and read parts of it afterwards to confirm some things.
TL;DR: Individual Obstacles are a BAD idea! Other than that: Very basic adventure with not enough explanation of the background.
The good:
- I struggle to find anything about this adventure that I would consider to be actually "good". Some parts were OK or decent, but nothing positive stood out. Well, maybe that this one actually had some challenging fights that didn't feel off or unfair?
The bad:
- What is Greensteeples? Why is it important? Is this one of those adventures where you need to have played other adventures to actually make sense of the setting?
- Who is the guy in the wheelchair at the end? Why would we want to talk to him or even give him those items? That scene didn't make any sense!
The ugly:
- The infiltration in the beginning has several serious issues:
1. The whole group only gets ONE preparation roll? Ooph. So you hardly have any ways to mitigate failures or missing skills
2. There is no scaling for higher numbers of PCs. Since you have to make more rolls (individual obstacles, see next point), you WILL acrue more awareness
3. There are multiple "individual" obstacles in the infiltration. One of them has only two possible skills: Arcana and PFS Lore. While all NEW characters will have PFS Lore, there is a substantial chance that a not-remastered character will play this adventure - especially since having played a specific adventure from an earlier season links to this one. And you need TWO successes on that obstacle. That obstacle alone can lead to a single character amassing a LOT of awareness points!
When we played this adventure, we were six players, all of them experienced and many people with 3-5 GM glyphs among them. The infiltration cost us 10 of our 12 hero points. It was NOT fun!
- WTF is with the art in this adventure? The pictures of Dame Sabina Malatesta and that of the two Maralictors just looks BAD! Especially Marius Salutio!
Conclusion: This is so far one of the worst scenarios in season 6. Not quite as bad as the Godless one, but still not a good experience overall.
Infiltration rules at their full potential, enemy abilities that had the whole table excited, one of the best-written fail states I've seen in PFS in the past decade, and some truly difficult combats.
I recommend reading through the whole infiltration chapter of GM Core and printing out page 199 (200 in the PDF) of GM Core as a player (and GM) handout to assist with the infiltration sequence. This infiltration sequence will be challenging / quite difficult for parties without a good skills person to provide the Follow the Expert exploration activity.
(If your party includes Rogues and Investigators, remind them of 'Follow the Expert' and let them shine!)
★ --- ★ --- ★ --- ★
Remember that some obstacles are Group and others are Individual. The Overcome entry lists whether the PCs need to overcome an object individually or as a group.
For individual obstacles,each PC needs to earn the required number of Infiltration Points themself.
For group obstacles, all PCs working toward that obstacle pool their Infiltration Points toward it together.
★ --- ★ --- ★ --- ★
Also, the official handouts include the DCs of the Infiltration, which I thought that perhaps the players should not see. So I've redone the Burning of Greensteeples Player Handouts with the intent that handouts 1 and handouts 2 + 3 can be printed on one double-sided page with no spoilers for players from handout 4.
I am adding an original handout, this one for the very end / conclusion of the scenario.
Conclusion BIG Spoilers + Handout:
Seriously, don't read this spoiler unless you are GMing the scenario or have already played it.
Spoiler:
There is talk within the scenario of the 'True Queen of Cheliax' and a surprise sapphire bracelet for Zarta. Since the context of this involves a storyline from before Pathfinder 2nd Edition, I prepared a deep lore dossier on Zarta that might answer some player questions.
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