Venture-Captain, California—San Francisco Bay Area North & East
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Just played this tonight, and the entire table laughed at something quite odd. Eliza says that 'Lofton' was ignorant of his venture captain status, and seems to know nothing about the society.
Yet the sign on his office clearly states "Venture Captain" on it. We took the sign up to him as an extra piece of evidence.
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When I played it, my group asked him if he was a venture-captain, and his response was "That's what it says on the door, doesn't it?", but he obviously had no idea what it meant when we went into further detail. Which I think is the intent of the adventure, once we got further along and realized what was going on.
Already bought and downloaded this one, and looking forward to reading/GMing it, but I'll wait to start reading it until next week. Currently busy prepping 9-01 The Cost of Enlightenment to GM this weekend.
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The first 'real' combat in this scenario, with a little creative effort on the PC, can have a hilarious effect for the rest of the scenario.
Here's what happened -
** spoiler omitted **
Wow, never saw that one coming, very cool! I think one of my favorite things about RPGs in general are the crazy solutions players come up with. That's even more the case for organized play, because due to the various time constraints, things tend to generally be very streamlined.
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Also for the Prison break there seems to be no consequence for a brute force attack on the prison unless the party fails in the attempt. Is this do to it being a Gray Gardner Prison?
A party could slaughter the entire prison staff and at most I could see Almant and Ottavia refusing to help or maybe even warn the guards of their impending attack on the prison if the confide in them of their intention to straight up attack as Almat is friends with the guards and Ottavia is city guard.
Usually this is dealt with by prestige penalties and negative boons on a Chronicle sheet, correct? Even if the party isn't discreet about being Pathfinders and then decimates the prison there is no in scenario consequence for unless the are captured then a 5 pp cost to be released.
I could see a GM having Venture-Captain Eliza Petulengro chide them but there isn't even an option to report if this was the outcome. the scenario just assumes the part sneaks/bluffs their way past.
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The party all effectively voluntarily failed their will saves when we saw how cute the Gerbie was.
Thinking we were supposed to deal with the troll the way the gerbie wanted us to, we beat the snot out of it, and then upon finding that it cannot surrender to us, we "surrendered" to it, with one of the terms of "our surrender" being that he go seek signs of the troll god elsewhere.(probably leading to the deaths of some peasants elsewhere, but hey, thats what kindness gets you)
We broke him out of prison with a silent rodded reduce person, handed him the potion of invisibility, and walked out.
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Someone in our party had d-door or wizard shift or something similar. We used an animal scout to find what cell he was in, then the wizard stepped through the wall, grabbed him, and stepped back out.
We had a LV 5 Sorcerer and a LV 7 Shaman Pregen make their way in prentending to be a new guard and rowdy prisoner respectivley. They made all their checks and then just Dimensional Doored their way out.
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No kidding. Hard to feel sorry for just about any of the NPCs caught up in this cluster****. Maldris is going full chaotic neutral here.
Deciding that a government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers is about enslave a quarter of your country and nipping that in the bud V style? Totally a chaotic good move.
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Deciding that a government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers is about enslave a quarter of your country and nipping that in the bud ? Totally a chaotic good move.
No kidding. Hard to feel sorry for just about any of the NPCs caught up in this cluster****. Maldris is going full chaotic neutral here.
I guess it depends on how evil or neutral you interpret the act of kidnapping them and smuggling them across a border to be executed is! But you make a good point. It's totally something he or a CG person would consider. Just a matter of where the line is.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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When we were playing this and kept wondering "why would you go to so much trouble to drag these people to another country", I eventually realized.
These are people with enough money to have a resurrection plan in place for if they get assassinated. But Galt has the Final Blades.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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I have a question on the Troll Berserker: Its sole rage power is Improved Damage Reduction so shouldn't it have DR 1/-?I am prepping this at the moment and as far as I can tell the rage power is not legal for it. It has a requirement of Barbarian 8 which it doesn't meet and only increases existing DR which it doesn't have.
Looks like attack of the badly written monster codex NPCs, again.
It's quite probably exactly from the monster codex.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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You don't want to have half of the party get into a fight. It might get that half of the party in over their heads. Meanwhile, fights feel like they take forever if you're not part of them.
So if the party is about to split up and get into trouble, feel free to nudge them with a few comments like "so you guys sure you want to split the party?" - most players will take the hint.
When we were playing this and kept wondering "why would you go to so much trouble to drag these people to another country", I eventually realized.
These are people with enough money to have a resurrection plan in place for if they get assassinated. But Galt has the Final Blades.
I think your discovery is dead-on right. However, the follow-up to this scenario is 9-20, and it's up on Paizo now, and the overview text contradicts this:
Though the Gardeners promised Maldris that they would grant these individuals a fair trial and carry out any executions without the use of their infamous soul-trapping Final Blades...
So we're back to "Why bother going to Galt, again?"
Of course, it could be a typo or something. 9-20 doesn't release to the public for 3 weeks, so maybe they just had an editing problem and accidentally contradicted the logic of bringing the captives to Galt.
I suppose 9-20 could be fixed before it comes out. We'll see, very shortly.
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So... the timetable here was so confusing, even with the wonderful PDF time-tracker from pfsprep.com, that I didn't know what to do and sorta just abandoned the time tracking entirely. Why? Because if I understand this correctly, there is no way to do this without losing. Venza, if you follow the timeline, must be dead no matter how fast the PCs act. Here:
- First, "The adventure begins at 10 in the morning." That's page 8. It notes that moving to each location is 30 minutes, buying gear is 2 hours.
- Getting to "the real Lofton" is "a 5-hour walk from Woodsedge." Page 12. Note: not a 5 hour journey round-trip. It's 5 hours just to get to the location of Lofton. That means 5 more hours to get back, plus anywhere from 10-20 minutes to 3+ hours to recover Lofton.
This means, even if the players interview no one and instead magically know to immediately go recover Lofton, they will still return to town too late, at around 8 PM. At that point they get Eliza's sending message that Venza is kidnapped. And here's the trick: the kidnapping happens that day while the PCs are out getting Lofton, and it states this text: "He was tried rapidly, and fliers have been posted announcing his execution at sundown." Page 18.
Well, best case scenario is that they arrived in town an hour after sundown. Venza is dead. There is no rescue mission. He's dead.
Now, there is text about protecting Venza. IF the PCs gave Venza any advice about hiding or moved him to a safe location, then he's still caught but only gets killed the next day. My players made some goofy suggestions about pushing his desk against the door to hold off any enemies, but I didn't really deem that of any material help to Venza's predicament. Nonetheless, I had to give my players the benefit of this delay because otherwise it makes no sense.
I mean, why even bother to track time if the outcome is that Venza is dead anyway? If the module/scenario is forcing Venza to be dead, just do it. Say, "Don't bother to track time. Venza dies before the PCs can get back from their visit with the fey, UNLESS they helped Venza hide."
Apologies to PFS leadership if I was supposed to auto-fail the players and dock them some prestige points, but I just figured this MUST be a bug. It makes no sense. So I tried to do what the module author probably intended. Maybe?