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My interpretation is that Karcau is largely New Orleans, combined with the more Victorian elements that Ustalav in general has. I don't know enough about Prague to know how they match up, sadly.
1. Music is very important to the local culture. There are performers on every street corner.
2. Opera clothing, including masks, are often incorporated into everyday clothing, a la Mardi Gras.
3. There is a racially and culturally segregated group that lives in the nearby bayou.
Sasandra Livgrace is basically Christine from Phantom of the Opera, the events of which apparently happened in her backstory.
There are a few things that I came up with on my own for getting across the flavor of the town. As mentioned above, Rule of Fear says there are performers on every street corner. I made up a few specific ones, like a half-orc pianist in a tailcoat that uses muleback cords to carry his piano to the street corner to play. I also added actors performing scenes from well-known plays (adjusted according to what I think the players might be familiar with, reflavored for Golarion, such as two Kalistrade Prophet missionaries in the Mwangi Expanse (The Book of Mormon), a comical elderly Taldan knight (and his gnome squire) charging at windmills (Man of La Mancha), and a melodramatic Chelishman giving an overwrought soliloquy to a skull (Hamlet, of course).
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 8
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I've always interpreted scrying with a fair bit of GM fiat. If they try to Scry Olivina early on in the adventure, they would be in the sewers. The scrying wizard may be able to identify the fact that they are in fact in sewers, but there's no way they would get enough information to know WHERE in the sewers they were. They could try teleport to their hearts content, and you apply a pretty heavy penalty to the percentile chance of whether they end up in the right place or not.
You don't have to do anything other than use the correct line on the teleport chart.
“Viewed once” is a place that you have seen once, possibly using magic such as scrying.
Viewed Once:
- On Target 01–76
- Off Target 77–88
- Similar Area 89–96
- Mishap 97–100
So, another reason to dissuade players, out of character, from using 'cheese' approaches like that.
IMO using standard spells from the CRB isn't cheese. It is, from an in-game perspective, very practical and how somebody with those resources would probably approach the problem. If you could cast scrying and teleport but don't because you know you will most likely miss out on gold, then IMO that would be metagaming.
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Edit: Ninja'd by Michael Eshleman who put it far better than me.
We choose not to teleport after scrying, but purely for meta game reasons. The stated goal was to rescue Olivina. Had we stayed in character we would have simply teleported and rescued her. The issue with GM fiat is that teleport has rules for just such an occasion specifically spelled out. If you have viewed the location through scrying it counts as viewed once or 76% chance of arriving on target. DM fiat is fine but directly contradicting the rules is not, at least in PFS. Worst yet the DM can't say that the scrying fails because it spells out in the side table what the scryer sees. Olivina's will save is so penalized from having her hairbrush that she is almost guaranteed to fail the save on scry.
All this leaves the party stepping back into the meta and saying, "we are going to ignore this simple and best solution in order to tromp around the swamp where we know she is not, in order to get a lead to where we know she is not, so we do not miss out on loot."
It just ruins any sense of verisimilitude and in the end you end up paying 3000 gold split between the party or losing out on PP for your troubles.
I love PFS and I would not care so much if I did not. But this scenario had a great deal of promise but resulted in a major let down. Scry and teleport is not splat book cheese. They are CRB and one of the "best" solution for most kidnappings. They should have been taken into account.
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Just a few things to think about:
For a PC caster, even 11th level, that is a total of 4 medium creatures able to be Teleported with a single spell.
For a Teleport scroll, that would still be 4 creatures, at a cost of 1,125 gp, and some way to use it.
Does being able to Teleport require a uniquely identifiable target destination? Other than intersections, and even those will tend to look like similar sewer intersections, most sewer tunnels will look almost identical.
Is a 10' sphere of "typical sewer" enough to identify it uniquely for Teleport?
So, needs two castings, minimum, if your party is larger than 4 PCs, or even has an AC, mount or eidolon. And that assumes two different casters, otherwise it bumps to three castings, for the caster to get back, and that uses a bunch of 5th level spell slots, or moves the cost past 3,000 gp.
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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 8
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Just a few things to think about:
For a PC caster, even 11th level, that is a total of 4 medium creatures able to be Teleported with a single spell.For a Teleport scroll, that would still be 4 creatures, at a cost of 1,125 gp, and some way to use it.
The viability of teleport does depend on party size and composition, or the willingness of some party members to be left behind.
Does being able to Teleport require a uniquely identifiable target destination? Other than intersections, and even those will tend to look like similar sewer intersections, most sewer tunnels will look almost identical.
That is what the "similar area" entry on the teleport chart is for.
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First, none of us were going to follow the advice of the ghost of a racist serial killer...So I just read the scenario, and I don't see anything in there about the ghost being racist. Did I miss something?
In our playthrough, she had some "interesting" comments about the swamp folk...
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More anecdotal than anything else.
When I played through we did our investigating due diligence and took the hairbrush from the dressing room, because, ya, scrying is a real thing. Then; because it is PFS, and we are good pathfinder agents that expect the unexpected, we continued the mundane investigation.
When we met the swamp folk and were faced with a gold penalty or and undisclosed cost, we tried to bargain for a more agreeable solution, and failed. At that point we flexed our adventuring muscles as near-seeker agents, found a pool of water in the swamp, scryed our missing abductee and the wizard had a brief conversation through message.
So the group sat down, weighted the risks, buffed up, and teleported in like the crack squad of experienced agents from one of Golarion's most recognized organizations. (oh, and someone may have flipped the swamp people the bird on the way out, the report is conflicted on that one.)
At the end of the scenario the DM said it fell under the creative solutions clause and rewarded full rewards (removing items from the chronicle sheet not recovered, and checking to see if we received the second prestige point, which we did through inaction...)
As a player, it felt great that the DM said: yes, that is a creative solution, way to go. It would be a huge downer if they instead penalized us for playing smart agents that used a well established rules mechanic to solve a problem that mechanic is particularly well suited for.
For some the scry/fry may feel like cheese, and in a home game it is very fair to establish an informal agreement with your players that if they don't, you wont. But that is not on option in PFS, as a player I have faced swarms and invisibility at lvl 1, flying and Hardness-10 at lvl 3, and I am fully expecting that one day someone will scry and fry my player as he sleeps. So we can not call out something that is well-defined in the rules as cheese, while as player's we suspect that one day it will happen to us without warning.
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Personally, I feel like the swamper thing is poorly handled in the scenario. The negative boon is really bad, and it sets a bad precedent for players going forward. The gold cost is ridiculous, and we arent really given a good reason why it has to be so high on either side of the table.
It almost feels like this scenario was written with the edict "let's knock players' PP and wealth-by-level down."
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Or beat them up and make them tell you.
in the end you end up paying 3000 gold split between the party or losing out on PP for your troubles.
So using violence is the best means of not losing gold or prestige. Between this and an older scenario in which players lose gold from Chronicle Sheets for not robbing a merchant's shop, I think we're getting closer to being allowed to play evil openly.