Venture-Captain, California—San Francisco Bay Area North & East
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Pretty sure it says the ritual takes an hour.It doesn't list how long the ritual takes, so our GM called it as a few minutes. At this level, anything minute per level or more can be cast before the ritual and should still be up during and after. It's only rounds/level or instantaneous stuff you'd need to cast during it.
I feel like we got an 'Easy Mode' when I played through. The TeleKineticist put an oil with Silence on a rock, then used it to chase Teheri around. Mixed in with a pile of other rocks. And the first sage we freed was luckily Sinuhotep, so she didn't have silent spell. This flustered the GM some, so he didn't handle her non-casting abilities well and she spent most of the fight trying to figure out what was happening then getting away from the silent rock.
It calls out that searching the room for books takes an hour. It says nothing on the ritual.
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I thought it took an hour as well, since Amenopheus ends the exploration 3 hours in, leaving 1 hour until his safe side estimate of the ruins collapse. But it actually does not call anything out about the length of the ritual, and thinking about it, unless the ritual would stop the collapse, there should be time between the end of the ritual and the estimated collapse to allow escape.
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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 4
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I am not sure how a rock with silence really helps. It only lasts 3 rounds, Tahari doesn't require verbal or somatic components until you remove the relevant gem and it doesn't stop her from possessing people or using her corrupting or draining touch. Kineticists generally have terrible will saves and make great choices to possess.
It's a complex encounter and understandable a GM might get a bit flustered if faced with an unexpected twist. I hope that the PCs still had fun :-)
I posted my GM cheat sheet and extra materials on pfsprep. If there's any other info I can offer to help make the GM'ing easier, like a more robust combat guide for the NPCs, please don't hesitate to post or PM.
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Venture-Captain, California—San Francisco Bay Area North & East
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Yeah, nobody caught duration on the Silence until a few days after the game. And as I said, the first round we got the gem for the components. Wasn't my department - I was just handing out buffs and a bit of damage to the knight.
We still had a lot of fun.
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I don't think the scenario specifies the duration of the ritual; I believe it was estimated as an hour further up the thread, based on Amenopheus's overall timeline.
For buffing before and during the ritual, I advised the players that to cast safely they'd essentially have to leave the level, and Amenopheus asked for them not to do that since they had brought the PCs to protect and assist them with the mission, so if something were to attack while the PCs were away, they wouldn't be able to help. In short, I used NPC fiat to keep them in the area.
That said, the text says interference comes from "casting spells, activating items, or even consuming magical draughts." It does not mention supernatural abilities like channeling energy. The text where it discusses damage does include an "or does something similar" clause, so I can see a GM reasonably ruling that the activation of any supernatural abilities would also serve as a trigger.
For the mindscapes, I treated the successful checks as cumulative (which it states in the text), so a PC could try repeatedly over several rounds to amass enough successes. I did not have it "reset" each round.
@andreww, I could tell your party was in trouble when you mentioned all the single-digit saves. Also, from your summary, it sounds like they made a number of mistakes in their investigation--particularly, fireballing the lab and not searching the archives.
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I was playing the fox in the game that Andrew ran.
Despite the TPK I mostly enjoyed the scenario. My biggest beef by far is that it seems exceptionally harsh to both have a scenario that is very definitely very difficult (pretty much ALL of the reviews agree with this) combine with a "You are automatically permadead if you fail a Fort save at the wrong time and the group fails".
Note - It was NOT my character that permadied.
We had a reasonable party going in but not the best. We lost one player in the final battle and that hurt. And we got unlucky in a couple of key situations (things would have gone quite differently if Andrew hadn't rolled a 4 on the con damage from the cloudkill, for example). As it was, my character died because he was too brave for his own good (paladin :-(). Many of my characters would have fled :-).
But that final battle IS brutal. And luck is going to play a HUGE part in it. As far as I can tell, there are virtually no clues as to which skills are likely to work on which sages and which jewels are giving which buffs. Absent some particular builds NOTHING is going to get through fast heal 100 on an incorporeal so that one buff just HAS to go down to win.
The difficulties for freeing the sages are such that even characters who get the right sage AND are quite good at their skills are going to have to roll somewhere between very well and not too badly to succeed. Somebody with only mediocre skills (ie, most characters :-( ) is going to have next to zero or actually zero chance of succeeding.
Some groups aren't going to have any chance. The all martial group fails. No chance at all really. Mediocre skills are just not going to cut it.
I think I have to go write a review :-)
Edit: Review written :-)
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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 4
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Some groups aren't going to have any chance. The all martial group fails. No chance at all really. Mediocre skills are just not going to cut it.
It's hinted at in the beginning of the scenario and a GM could emphasize to a group struggling to free the sages that breaking the gems also removes the buffs, so a martial group can still win the day, and even still get the second prestige if they only get rid of the particularly difficult ones for them.
Thanks for the feedback!
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Some groups aren't going to have any chance. The all martial group fails. No chance at all really. Mediocre skills are just not going to cut it.
It's hinted at in the beginning of the scenario and a GM could emphasize to a group struggling to free the sages that breaking the gems also removes the buffs, so a martial group can still win the day, and even still get the second prestige if they only get rid of the particularly difficult ones for them.
Thanks for the feedback!
It honestly never even occurred to me that was an option :-). That "feels" like almost being PVP (I think 1/2 the group were Scarab Sages which isn't at all unexpected).
Don't take that as criticism of Andrew, by the way.
1) We DID have the skills to make the checks, at least if the right character went into the right jewel.
2) By the time things were going seriously south it was 1am for him. Way too late to expect nuanced GMing even from as excellent a GM as Andrew is :-) :-)
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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 4
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It honestly never even occurred to me that was an option :-). That "feels" like almost being PVP (I think 1/2 the group were Scarab Sages which isn't at all unexpected).
If people feel they'd be letting their teammates down and choose to take the risk of death, that's sweet RP. There's a lot of stuff going on in this one, and I'm just trying to help point out possible solutions for GMs who might run into a similar situation so the party can make an informed choice. :)
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RPG Superstar 2013 Top 4
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I'm GMing this on Monday, and after reading this thread, I'm most concerned about keeping pacing good enough to finish on time. Our store lets us run up to 5 hours and it seems like it could be tight (sign ups have the table as 6 players high tier). Given that I'm going to need to take a little time to gather info about everyone's boons and such prior to starting, how much time would everyone recommend fencing off roughly for each phase (particularly the ritual and the end?)-- accepting that players may extend or shorten any given part through their actions?
In my experience the intro + first encounter is about 60-90 minutes, and the final encounter is about 90 minutes. It's easy for the middle section to get relaxed and bloat up in time as the players explore, but you need to keep in mind that the final encounter is almost certainly going to take at least an hour.
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I will say Paul, while it is not always going to shape out that way, my group actually was getting so frustrated with the skill checks when I first played it that we went straight for brute force.
But that said, we had my kineticist who could go nova, our barbarian had a ghost touch weapon, and our archer had ghost salt arrows on hand. So we delayed till just after Tahari's turn and did an obscene amount of damage in one round with everyone just throwing whatever they had. And it worked, in a large part because of that archer just being an archer.
The skill checks without knowing where to get the skill checks at was my biggest concern with running it. I've run it live once and it went well enough. And my PbP is getting close to the second combat so I'm going to do my best with them to make it really obvious what effects are flashing off of which jewels. I'm probably going to give them an entire post just to lay out what's going on in the combat and mechanics for the mindscape, etc.
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...how much time would everyone recommend fencing off roughly for each phase (particularly the ritual and the end?)-- accepting that players may extend or shorten any given part through their actions?
If you're not at the ritual by the 2.5/3 hour mark, you are probably going to run out of time.
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I will say Paul, while it is not always going to shape out that way, my group actually was getting so frustrated with the skill checks when I first played it that we went straight for brute force.
Fair enough. As I say, our group was far better at skill checks than raw damage anyway,
I did mention above that the right group could manage to take her down with her buffs up :-). Sounds like you had the right group :-).
One problem that Paizo has is that, especially at level 10-11, the difference in capability between different characters is SO huge that it is probably literally impossible to create a scenario that is challenging for all. It is pretty much guaranteed to be too easy for some and too hard for others.
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@Mista - I am pretty sure she shunts into their body yes.
Here are some time saving tips. When i played, GM ran about 4+ hrs with 7 players, and when i ran it at low tier for 4 players it was comfortably 3.5 hrs. This is just a post off the top of my head, Ive deleted the pdf from my phone, need to get home to view it.
The first encounter its good (imho) to have players start out of the hazardous terrain, and dont forget to remind them of Tahonikepsu's instruction about the stone.
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About the lab part. Keeping it away from the flipmat will help speed stuff up. We did following and cleared comfortably in 1 hour.
1) Marching Order. establish a single line marching order for party
2) Directions. The scenario indicates theres a pillar with directions to rooms with label in Ancient Osiriani. If none of the players know it, have the sage with them translate (if they ask for help). Then give players the map printed on A4 size black and white, if they know Ancient Osiriani then with labels (your own, dont spoil contents by using the default room names). Run it semi point and click style (if you need to go through 4 to get to 5, make sure they have to go to 4 first).
3) Time. Roll time taken to explore a room if not stated, usually 2d6 min seems about right. If they take too long debating just roll 1d3 mins, it should be enough to give a hint to move on without beating up their time.
4) Skill Checks. After describing whats involved, dont make them guess the skill checks - just tell them. Especially the Profession one. If you feel the DCs are high (hell yeah they are) tell them they can assist the main attemptor (perhaps at cost of 1d3 mins? Up to you). At your discretion if a character knows Ancient Osiriani, you can also give some bonus.
5) Sage Advice. The Sage is a GM device to direct the pace, without giving help (since that comes with a price). In character remarks like "You know, you guys might want to speed up" or "Having a sample of the solution would be good" or "Ah, it seems one of my esteemed colleagues has found a suitable site! Shall we proceed / are we ready to go?"
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For the actual 1 hour (for 1st check) and 1 "moment" (for 2nd check) ritual, have a briefing by say Amenopheus and then spell out the skill checks. This hour also seems natural time to search for books, especially given the impending collapse.
Ask the PCs to position themselves prior to rolling the 2nd check. 2 squares from a sage seems reasonable, but take note that none should be within 1 square of the currently-human Tahonikepsu.
For the final encounter, the melee guy is easy to run if you just follow tactics. Just look up his aura and thats about it.
The desecrated area is pretty vague, so me and my GM (the one who ran it for me) agreed it would be a fixed radius from the BBEGs starting position. The next simple alternative is have it be the whole map.
The mindscapes can be run as cutscenes with some skill checks
The BBEG is complex, but a GM just needs to prep.
1) Sage Jewels. Know the jewels and what they do. If you follow what Matt Duval posted earlier (to my enquiry in fact), having them flash when their ability is used, helps. Imho only a few jewels are critical, especially the one that grants THP and the one that grants cast as a move action.
2) Position. The BBEGs abilities allow good use of the move action, but starting her on the ground makes it a "should I move or not" decision. Start her 10' or 15' in the air so she can always 5' step and carry on casting
3) AI Script. The two spells that BBEG opens with are pretty much spelt out. The GM should prep spells to be cast for at least the first 3 rounds. After that, its just trying to cast as many spells as possible per round.
Personally, maybe because I GMed low tier 4 player adjustment, malevolence felt manageable. It is also one of the most powerful abilities in her arsenal, comprising a save or die/removed from encounter while simultaneously providing a literal meatshield. Whenever any PC starts next to the BBEG (and who is not already immune to malevolence), she should always use a standard action to use malevolence in place of a spell.
If you use above, she is fairly quick to run.
With above guidelines, final fight should be comfortably in the 90min range, unless players (understandably) hang the fight to make decisions due to the sheer difficulty of it. You know, when folks flip through their chronicle sheets hoping to have some maybe lifesaver.
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Separately, Im not sure what is the perma death Paul Jackson refers to. If it is disease, Remove Disease works even if you have not concocted a cure. If its the incurable one then yeah, probably perma dead (or miracle or wish. roll eyes) Other solution is to achieve the objective and the Sages clear the condition, or you guys have time to spare to head back up to the earlier level to concoct the mix. Either way would make sense but yes, probably not an option for a party that TPKed or fled the finale.
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Oh I see, yea that sucks. It is part of the monster profile and why I dont play melee characters. Theres also some swallow whole perma deaths in some early Season 1 or 2 multipart 7-11 scenarios, heck it even spawns at low tier 7-8 (Some huge plant thing).
That said, thanks to that, most of my characters have Lesser Talisman of Freedom.
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Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento
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2 out of 3 checks being higher thanndc 30 seems a bit rough. 10 ranks plus 5 int plus three trained and you re unlikely to get 2 out of three. You almost need some skill boosting shennanigans to make the check
Actually, you have ~65% to get 2 out of 3 successes. And if you accumulate successes across rounds (or have two people helping) it goes to a 95% chance.
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[Math geek mode]
At needing to roll a 12, the odds of getting 2 successes are 42.5 %
When needing to roll a 15, the odds of getting 2 successes are 21.6%
Assuming one reroll, the odds when needing a 15 go all the way up to 34.8%.
At least when we played it, almost everybody had blown their reroll by the time we got to the final fight.
[/Math geek mode]
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** spoiler omitted **I think that very few characters are going to have enough cash to afford that item. And the cost can't be split.
To Matt: no need to spoiler stuff in these threads, simply by existing in the GM forum, spoilers are assumed.
I just quickly checked two of my higher-level characters (the ones I have comprehensive digital records for) and at level 9, I'm seeing total GP earned of around 50k. By level 11 a character could buy the khopesh... if they hadn't purchased more than maybe 10,000 gp worth of gear. Remember that you only get 50% of the value of what you sell. If you follow the character wealth by level tables, a character who's spent all of their money on gear wouldn't be able to sell enough gear to cover the wishblade until 12.1 or 12.2.
It's just not viable in pre-Seeker play.
Not to mention that for those GMs who say you have to resolve all conditions before the end of the scenario, it just doesn't work at all, because it's not a wishblade until it's on the chronicle sheet.
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Not to mention that for those GMs who say you have to resolve all conditions before the end of the scenario, it just doesn't work at all, because it's not a wishblade until it's on the chronicle sheet.
Do direct those GMs to Page 20 of S9 PFS RPG Guide
"Characters can use the rewards from the Chronicle sheet they earned in order to resolve any conditions."Just checked the pdf - it says Fortune Moon is a +2 khopesh and can be restored as per chronicle sheet ; however, the chronicle sheet says nothing about restoring it, and just says it is a Luckblade with Wish [1].
Would that mean it is already charged with a Wish spell in the scenario? If so, the Wish could be usable without expending any gold to purchase.
Per Page 36 "You can use any item that you find during the adventure for free until the end of the adventure, ..."
Aside to Matt - was above your intention? Not sure if this might help get someone back from perma dead.
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I just left a 5 star review on this scenario. My area of focus as a GM is content in the upper ranges, so this scenario was perfect for me. I took 2 weeks to prep this puppy and it was worth every minute.
Party (high tier):
Muerticia, Cleric of Urgathoa (SS)
Bucket, Reach Fighter(ish)
Feargas, Not-Shocking-Grasp Magus (SS)
Regulus, Phantom Thief Rogue
Krush, Thunder and Fang Ranger/Slayer (SS)
Illyana, Dimensional Agility Rogue/Brawler/Horizon Walker
Spoilers are just to shorten walls of text.
Krush, in particular, was thrilled with the setup as he is devoted to protecting the Scarab Sage researches, but "Amenopheus always bought the wrong boat tickets for me and NEVER SENDS ME WITH SCARAB SAGES." Knowing that he would be directly aiding the Jeweled Sages was probably the high point of his career.
The party was well stocked with trapfinding, high perception mods, and such, so discovering things was generally limited only to whether they sufficiently looked around. The phantom thief entered the memory extractor after changing it to retrieval mode and ended up with 2 negative levels from the memories, but the players all loved the insight that the device provided. The waste disposal room was also highly entertaining as Krush dove in after the bead and took the submerge damage. Sinuhotep really provided next to nothing for this section and, in retrospect, I failed to have him pipe up as much as I should have. The PCs didn't have him use Speak with Dead, which was really odd to me given that they had it available.
The cleric animated the dragon corpse. So there was that.
Muerticia was saddened that her one casting of Ghostbane Dirge was before they figured out the sage jewel effects. Illyana plowed through the diamond temp HP in a full attack due to double ghost touch weapons and dimensional agility shenanigans, but was dismayed when the temp HP returned. The players started putting jewel guesses up on the wall tracker, but were mystified by a couple of them, particularly the onyx, when Tahari dropped the Sirocco and readied to malevolence Illyana on the next go-around. The players began panicking for a bit when they realized that they needed to deal with the Sirocco ASAP (it was on top of all of the sages + most PCs). Then Tahonikepsu used her breath weapon and knocked Regulus unconscious, leaving them down their primary resource for the mindscapes. Slowly, the PCs recovered with some in-combat healing and began taking down the mindscapes with fairly consistent success. Muerticia ended up afflicted with the bad version of Fading Light via Persistent Contagion, but they had concocted one cure and one Blood of Nethys. The disease never triggered.
The PCs successfully saved all of the sages and purged Tahari from all of the jewels, including strategically healing her with Channel Negative to buy time while allowing the party to try to interrupt her spellcasting.
This is one of my new favorite scenarios. It's absolutely exhausting to run and took us about 7.5 hours from briefing to chronicles. Probably the best-received thing from the players' perspective was that the behind-the-screen information was relatively accessible and wasn't hard-locked behind skill checks, but rather just delayed, affecting the clock by which they explored. This played extremely well and, as GM, I found it satisfying because I didn't feel like I was hiding information to the detriment of their enjoyment.
Contrary to what I've seen from some, my players really liked the possibility of permadeath in the context of this scenario. The general feeling was that this scenario was epic enough to warrant it - that even a failure here creates a great narrative. While I had players that enjoy that possibility, it may be reasonable to tell players in advance that this is, in effect, the Season 9 Waking Rune and that permadeath is a real possibility. It's certainly what my players called it.
Kudos to Matt and the PFS team on this one. It's a real winner.
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Correct me if I'm seeing something incorrectly here, but it appears to be impossible to switch to Scarab Sages in Season 9 and be able to obtain the Jeweled Sage vanity.
In order to purchase the vanity, you need 10 Scarab Sages faction goals fulfilled. By switching now you'd have to start with the Season 9 faction card, which only has 9 goals. The faction retires at the end of Season 9, so there will not be an opportunity to start another card. Am I missing anything?
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If its available to players it should be available to the enemy. It was enjoyable to have a scenario which felt genuinely dangerous.I have to say I was pleased to see an NPC finally usingCasts anthaul on themselves and still needs to drag over the appropriately sized ban-hammer.redactedI have no problem with that enemy having it.
players shouldn't have it, and as the new go to tactic for NPCs it would be annoying.
Plus, the spell only shows up in Tier 10-11, and the spell states "no creature of 9 or more HD can be affected...", so there's no PC danger from it unless you're the tag-along in a high tier party.
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I just left a 5 star review on this scenario. My area of focus as a GM is content in the upper ranges, so this scenario was perfect for me. I took 2 weeks to prep this puppy and it was worth every minute.
Party (high tier):
Muerticia, Cleric of Urgathoa (SS)
Bucket, Reach Fighter(ish)
Feargas, Not-Shocking-Grasp Magus (SS)
Regulus, Phantom Thief Rogue
Krush, Thunder and Fang Ranger/Slayer (SS)
Illyana, Dimensional Agility Rogue/Brawler/Horizon WalkerSpoilers are just to shorten walls of text.
** spoiler omitted **
** spoiler omitted **...
I played Illyana at this table. This was an awesome scenario. We were a well built group with a lot of bases covered, so it didn't feel impossible. It had some tough challenges though. Our GM's use of that diagram on the wall and stressing which gems flared with each cast really helped drive home what was going on. He did a great job running this.
I will admit, though, that our GM had to give us that, "Are you SURE you want to do that?" line when I was about to full attack Tahari after we'd freed Tahonikepsu. I had speculated what would happen if we took her down while the sages were still in the mindscapes, but it still hadn't fully dawned on us that it was that important. (I think having any freed sages speculate or explain her link to the gems and the need to break that would be a good way to emphasize this.) Once we got that hint, though, we put all of our efforts into freeing them--even to the point of teleporting other PCs next to sages in order to work the action economy.
We played this as a special event for a bunch of us organizers in the area, so we could coordinate a lot ahead of time and our GM could prep a lot before we showed up. Running this at a store in a typical slot would be rather tough, though. There is just so much going on with PCs and their abilities at this level that a complicated combat like this means everything moves REALLY slowly.
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Venture-Agent, Tennessee—Cookeville
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So, question about the jeweled sage boon. It says "If you have fulfilled at least 10 goals across these cards and have either earned the ...."
Is the only way you can get this by having more than one season card? If a character were to start with season 9's faction card, then how could they obtain this if there are only 9 goals on the season 9 faction card?
Correct me if I'm reading this wrong, but I've got a bunch of players and a few GMs wondering.
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So, question about the jeweled sage boon. It says "If you have fulfilled at least 10 goals across these cards and have either earned the ...."
Is the only way you can get this by having more than one season card? If a character were to start with season 9's faction card, then how could they obtain this if there are only 9 goals on the season 9 faction card?
Correct me if I'm reading this wrong, but I've got a bunch of players and a few GMs wondering.
I asked the same question 6 posts upthread. I see it the same way you do. A character who started with Scarab Sages in Season 9 (whether due to switching factions or simply being the character's first faction) cannot fulfill the 10 goals required to qualify for the boon.
This makes my lvl 10 arcanist that I played 9-07 with very sad. 20PP down the drain too.
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I ran it again yesterday and time with a bit more of an issue. 2 of my players were in an Unleashing the Untouchable game that ran over right beforehand (1 GM and 1 player), so we started about 30 minutes late and had a hard stop at 5.5 hours due to the place closing.
During the last fight I wound up flubbing a few tactics on the monsters, and was pretty loose with arguments for why intimidate would work on skill checks to free sages from their jewels to help get the fight done. They were playing well and controlling things, but dragging it out would have left them still with a solid win, but probably 3 deaths that wouldn't matter as the sages fix them all up for free.
So I wound up letting it slide a bit so we could finish on time, which we barely did. Still a fun scenario, but I found out this time how chaotic it can be to track stuff for the GM when there are 4 enemies and 4 ally NPCs to be controlling at once.
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So I wound up letting it slide a bit so we could finish on time, which we barely did. Still a fun scenario, but I found out this time how chaotic it can be to track stuff for the GM when there are 4 enemies and 4 ally NPCs to be controlling at once.
I strongly recommend doling out the sages to the players as they're freed.