Lost Star PCs Retreated… Now What?

[Shade325]

So the PCs explored up to A7 where they were ambushed do to setting off the alarm in A6. Near TPK but 3 of 5 PCs were able to retreat.

Now what?

...SPOILERS BELOW IF YOU HAVEN'T PLAY/FINISHED THE LOST STAR...

PCs plan to rest, spend a day healing, rest and then go back to finish goblins up.

The denizens of the dungeon know people came after them. What would they do? I feel the dungeon should adapt to this development but not sure how that would effect the playtest. Should the denizens put up more alarms? Should they set more traps? Should they move bases (probably the least useful for playtest and most work for GM)? Should they recruit more help (if they can)? Debating having Drakus kidnap Keleri during the PCs rest day in order to impersonate her?

Thoughts/brainstorming appreciated.

[AwkwardCrying]

Had this actually happen last night when redoing The Lost Star for a new player to the group. What I ended up doing that was the fastest was I had Drakus grab some extra Goblins as "bodyguards". I'm sure you could do something like "He grabs one per day they rest" or "Roll a 1d4-1 and Drakus grabs that many Goblins" but I just grabbed two at the time so they could hide right behind the statues while Drakus was behind the altar.

[Wowie]

I'm at about this point too with my group. I'm a chronic low-roller though, so my group actually defeated the ambush in its entirety before stopping to rest. Logically, I would have Drakus escape and become a recurring foe for later (taking the journal with him and knocking the entire campaign off the rails); but, nothing about the playtest is logical, so I plan on running it as if it were a videogame, which is to say nothing changes during rest. It disappoints me to have to run it this way, but PF2 reeks of videogame anyway every time I read it. I also generally dislike having NPCs (or even most animals) fight to the death either, but the module explicitly forbids any sort of negotiation, and doesn't even mention what you're supposed to do with goblins you've KO'd instead of killing.

The best I can think of is papering over the incongruity by making the goblins too afraid to actually report to Drakus that there's adventurers slowly cutting apart their number. I might also refluff the final encounter slightly without changing its mechanics, throwing in an "I've been wondering where all my minions went; I suppose you're to blame" before combat begins in earnest, playing the trope of "villain who thinks he's stronger than he actually is and doesn't take impending danger seriously". Alternatively, one could also make the excuse that Drakus has been keeping to his lair for the past couple days because it takes time to sort through all the trash he raids, or that he's been trying to decipher additional info from the journal and hasn't even noticed his minions going missing. These suggestions are all without context though, and don't factor in the specifics of how you've ran it. Feel free to season to taste or invent your own excuse.

For the sake of the playtest I would avoid changing mechanical details, so that the data Paizo receives aligns with what they expect. Even something like adding extra goblins to the final encounter would have a dramatic effect on encounter difficulty, and thus, on reports of "number of PCs downed/killed". GMs have already been advised elsewhere to remove the Dire Rat from the final encounter, as it was somehow added in as the result of an editing error and threw off the final encounter difficulty enough to cause TPKs to parties that didn't go in prepared (this can be verified by noticing that the xp budget of the final encounter is slightly off). There's also a section of the surveys that asks how the quality of the module's story was, so significantly editing even the fluff also ends up skewing the data. Overall as a GM you just have very little freedom while you're running this. :\

[Shaheer-El-Khatib]

Well the playtest is ... a play ... test.

For ... testing.

As you know a test is relevant only if run multiple time in the exact same conditions. If you start to let each GM change things the way he wants, your test is worth nothing because one will increase difficulty by adding monster while another one will add traps, and then you are not testing the same things anymore.

For me I was able to explain things like that :

- The PC killed the Goblins in A2 and the A3 monsters, then retrats.
- The Goblin in A2 are "inferiors" to the others, so they were not able to go to A7 and the Goblins in A7 doesn't care about the A2 so they don't go there (unless to go outside, but they just came back from a raid so they are waiting, and Drakus is taking is sweet time)
- The players came back, killed the Quasit in A6, then didn't trigger the trap, then killed the Golins in A7. Then retreat again.
- Drakus didn't noticed because he was busy trying to understand the notes of Nerecion to see if it is sufficient to earn the Red Bishop truce.
- The Pc came back and kill the Skeletons and Drakus.

The "plot hole" here is the goblin on the altar though.

[DerNils]

My PC's retreated twice as well. The first time the Goblins build up a new Alarm in the Well room made out of the corpses of the inferiors, the second time I had Drakus paint the walls with some creepy glyphs from the Journal to show he is getting deranged.
Therefore I showed that there was something happening, but there was no mechanical Impact.

[jdripley]

I agree with Shaheer's comments - This is a playtest first and a story second.

Yes, there are questions about "did this feel like Pathfinder" and "was this fun" in the surveys, so you can't completely toss fun-factor and story...

But I told my players straight away, this is a playtest, we're kicking the tires, we're trying out new things. I will play it all out as the book gives it to me, I won't be altering *anything* because that skews the data.

In short, if something sucks, I'll play it out in a sucky way during the playtest and then we'll all submit surveys indicating such so that Paizo can fix it... rather than trying to fix it at the table and softening the effect Paizo feels through the surveys.

So far it hasn't been a problem for our particular group