Pathfinder Society Scenario #6-16: The Heart of the City

As others have mentioned the lore aspect was great. The encounters and playing through it - not so much. The hazards were literally a waste of encounter time given how trivial they were and felt disjointed.

Heart is a short narrative scenario where you learn about Embersplitter’s background and motivations. From that perspective in season 6, it’s a must play.

Read Vortexes review.

Mechanically, Heart is all about searching rooms and learning about Embersplitter through handouts. That’s it. Props to the author for the handouts, it’s much better than just having the GM narrate everything. It was kind of contrived that she would leave "Dear Diary" evidence lying around like that, if the story was more realistic, it would get her killed.

The hazards didn’t add anything to the story and felt out of place. The custom art was good.

I disagree with the reviewer that said Heart is too short. You WANT it to be short. The shorter it is, the better experience the players will have. Move through those empty rooms quickly. My session at subtier 5-6 lasted 3 hours, but it would have been a lot better if it only took 2 hours. This scenario could be a 3/4 star experience if expedited.

Overall: You learn about Embersplitter’s background and motivations.(5/10)

Let me be clear. This scenario is oozing with juicy story that is extremely well-written. It makes you feel things. This scenario explains stories that go back to scenario #5-19 and all the way through the season 6 metaplot. The story is good. It's hecking good. It's great.

But the suck is that we're not reading a story...we're playing an adventure. The story can be the best thing ever (and this one is hecking close), but the goal of RPGs is to let the players interact with that story. Show, don't tell, etc. This scenario does an amazing job at telling Hesla's story...but there's very little player agency or interaction.

I really don't care how many combats a scenario has or its RL length. It could have zero fights or it could have four (so long as it fits in the 3.0-4.5 hours that PFS has always told us that scenarios will fit in for sake of our scheduling). But this one just felt flat when it came to the adventure side. We infiltrated the manor, which was fine, then spent the rest of the adventure unlocking doors/boxes/things to find story snippets. As other reviewers have mentioned, this could have been a blog post / short story with spoiler tags instead of PCs rolling skill checks.

Mechanically, the map at the end was both brilliant and horrible. Using the big room on the map to show players the size-scale of the giant demon god corpse was nice, but again it was used for story, not interaction. It resulted in the map only having tiny rooms available for hazards (which were frustrating because only some PCs could even be in the room for the triggering and then had to run around for disabling), and the combat at the end was a mess and almost resulted in a TPK because the enemies appeared coming out of three different side locations surrounding us (because the GM explained that the enemies simply wouldn't fit in the rooms that the scenario told them to start in and their placement made the most sense at the time).

So despite the story, which was really awesome, the actual playing of this adventure was a let-down. I'd love to see the author's story elements put all together somewhere to read. They really gave depth to Hesla's story and the story of season 6...but I would never really want to play this adventure again, or GM it for other players, unfortunately.

I played this in low tier

TL;DR: This adventure is quite short and more or less just a lore dump for the Hesla Embersplitter part of the metaplot. If you are interested in that plot it might be interesting, though even then your character won't have all that much to do

The good:
- If you like the Hesla Embersplitter plot, you will find out much more about her story here

The bad:
- If you are not into the plot of Lady Hesla, this adventure will hold NOTHING of interest for you
- mechanical Content: 1 or 2 fights, a couple of hazards, two skill challenges, which consist of one roll each - So, not much at all!
- One of the fights can happen at a place on a map with EXTREMELY limited room. The other WILL happen in an area with VERY little room. Fortunately enough we could convice one player to NOT play his Minotaur here

The ugly:
- Whar has become of the Pathfinder Society?! We are (again!) breaking into houses of people. Not without reason, true. But it just feels wrong. Again.
- It has been a long time since I felt THIS railroaded by a scenario. The scene at the very end didn't allow for ANY deviation and didn't even use a subsystem, even though in this case it might have been much more appropriate then in many scenarios that actually do use it.

Since I never really liked the Hesla Embersplitter story - it always felt too heavy handed, too obvious from the very beginning - this adventure left me pretty unsatisfied, so I will give it two stars only. There have been worse, but this one just didn't spark any joy.