Fan Scenario: Pillbug's Revenge

[Ron Lundeen]

The Pillbug's Revenge scenario is intended for characters who have completed The Poisoned Pill (and may have completed all of the Perils of the Lost Coast and even some or all of Burnt Offerings). Plentiful poison damage makes this scenario challenging.

Freshly escaped from prison, the notorious poison-merchant Aliver "Pillbug" Podiker has vowed revenge upon Sandpoint! Pillbug Podiker has equipped a cadre of ne'er-do-wells with powerful poisons. Furthermore, he has tainted potions all over town with his vile toxins. Someone must bring Pillbug Podiker to justice--again!

Players: Location
1: Farmhouse
1: General Store
1: Waterfront
2: Junk Beach
3: Apothecary
4: City Gate
5: Prison
6: Guard Tower

Villain: Pillbug Podiker

Henchmen: Bandits

During This Scenario: If you encounter a boon with the Alchemical and Liquid traits, you take 1 point of poison damage. (You then encounter the boon normally.)

All damage dealt by Bandit henchmen is poison damage that may not be reduced.

Reward: Each character gains a random ally from the box.

Comments are welcome! Also, my previous fan scenario is here.

[Mike Selinker]

Love this. I'd put an "or" where you have an "and," so that the Holy Water is poisoned too. :)

I'd run this after the players have banished all their potions in favor of other items, of course.

[Ron Lundeen]

Mike Selinker wrote:

Love this. I'd put an "or" where you have an "and," so that the Holy Water is poisoned too. :)

I'd run this after the players have banished all their potions in favor of other items, of course.

Oh, no! That villainous Pillbug has gotten to the Holy Water, too! :)

Better even to take out "and Alchemical" entirely then; otherwise, he's tainted the Blast Stones as well!

[Fromper]

Tried this last night because my group that had finished Burnt Offerings was out of scenarios to play. It was too easy for that group, despite constantly finding potions and taking the poison damage, but I'm not surprised by that.

We're starting a new group of characters from the beginning, so we'll probably insert this after The Poisoned Pill this time around, to face it when the characters are much less advanced. I expect it will be more of a challenge without all those extra feats and good equipment.

[Polyphemus]

Fromper wrote:

Tried this last night because my group that had finished Burnt Offerings was out of scenarios to play. It was too easy for that group...

In case you haven't seen them, there are at least two fan adventures and a few standalone scenarios posted on the boards meant for characters that have finished Burnt Offerings.

[HolmesandWatson]

Take this adventure and Run Amok! Looking forward to more, Ron.

[Ron Lundeen]

Fromper wrote:

We're starting a new group of characters from the beginning, so we'll probably insert this after The Poisoned Pill this time around, to face it when the characters are much less advanced. I expect it will be more of a challenge without all those extra feats and good equipment.

You'll probably find this to be a more appropriate difficulty then. This scenario shoots for a middle ground: it's perhaps not great for starting-deck characters, because many of the damage-dealing potions are in their decks and not in the items pile; the potions in the items pile ramps up once the players have banished theirs in place of better items.

Because this scenario is a bit more difficult than The Poisoned Pill, very advanced characters will have less of a problem unless you apply some of the difficulty increases floating around out there (the simplest of which, I think, is to add one more location than the number of players requires).

[OberonViking]

Ron Lundeen wrote:

Because this scenario is a bit more difficult than The Poisoned Pill, very advanced characters will have less of a problem unless you apply some of the difficulty increases floating around out there (the simplest of which, I think, is to add one more location than the number of players requires).

Now that's a good idea - that will breath life into replaying many scenarios as the group advances.

[Fromper]

Fromper wrote:

Tried this last night because my group that had finished Burnt Offerings was out of scenarios to play. It was too easy for that group, despite constantly finding potions and taking the poison damage, but I'm not surprised by that.

We're starting a new group of characters from the beginning, so we'll probably insert this after The Poisoned Pill this time around, to face it when the characters are much less advanced. I expect it will be more of a challenge without all those extra feats and good equipment.

Just ran this for my group of 3 (Seelah, Ezren, and Merisiel) that had only played Brigandoom and The Poison Pill so far. So no feats and not that many gear upgrades, compared to my earlier group that I'd run it with.

Oddly, it was still pretty easy, though we did lose a couple of fights along the way. We got lucky in only running into 2 liquid items, though, which is weird considering the sheer quantity of items we saw while exploring. You've actually got 3 "shopping" locations in the first 5, and we managed to get lucky in finding a bandit right on top of one of one location. So we intentionally didn't close down the Apothecary and General Store when we had the chance, so we could go shopping.

We also got lucky in fighting Pillbug early to send him running, then killing a henchman at the Waterfront to find that's where Pillbug had run to. Having a location with just the villain makes planning easy. And we still had plenty of turns left, so we kept shopping instead of going for the win right away.

We rolled a 6 and a 3 to restock Junk Beach and the General Store after closing them, so Merisiel went nuts going after new items. Just playing this one scenario, she managed to pick up a Spyglass, Holy Candle, and Masterwork Tools. And she immediately used the Holy Candle to give us more turns to go shopping. :P Seelah managed to get a Glaive, Magic Shield, and Half Plate in this one, which are upgrades from what she had. Oddly, Ezren's didn't pick up anything new and special this adventure.

Overall, a fun little scenario, but I'm surprised neither of my groups had any trouble with it.

[Ron Lundeen]

Dropping a comment about the game generally, rather than this scenario specifically:

Fromper wrote:

We also got lucky in fighting Pillbug early to send him running, then killing a henchman at the Waterfront to find that's where Pillbug had run to. Having a location with just the villain makes planning easy.

This setup can happen as early as turn 2 (and we've had it happen a couple of times in turn 3 or 4), and it puts the scenario pretty much on a win condition immediately. This makes it pretty much the opposite of being in the last couple of cards and still frantically searching for the villain for the first time. Part of the randomness of the game, I suppose.

[Fromper]

My groups of 3 and 4 have never had a hard time finding the villain any time I've played, unlike when I play solo with 1 or 2. In the larger groups, we always use scouting cards to hunt around, like Detect Magic, Detect Evil, Augury, and Spyglass, besides the scouting powers of characters like Harsk, Merisiel, and Seelah. If we scout often enough, and make sure to explore more than once per turn whenever reasonably possible, we never run into problems finding the villain before the blessings deck runs down.

I'm actually starting to think that "scout" is the most important role in any group for this game, though our group of Seelah, Merisiel, and Ezren keeps wishing they'd brought a healer. We have no problem running through the location decks to find the villain, so the blessings deck has never been a problem for this party. But we've had characters decks run dangerously low on a few occasions, which never happened in my group of 4 with Lem and Lini each carrying a Cure. Seelah has a Cure spell, but she just doesn't cycle through her deck very fast, so she's never gotten it into hand in 4 sessions.

In this case, we happened to get lucky with finding two bandits near the tops of their decks, so we were able to get away with spending extra time shopping. Like I said, I'm just really surprised we didn't run into more of the poison damage from potions, given how many items we came across. I guess we just had a really lucky session all around.

[Akasma]

We played this scenario and enjoyed it. Thank you. The poisoned items only came into play a few times for us but it was an interesting twist we liked. =)