Pale Mountain question: How does the party know how much time they have?

[Balsamic Dragon]

I have searched and I can't seem to figure this out. The PCs know that the Night Heralds are after the same item that they are. However, they have no idea how long it will take for the Night Heralds to reach the tomb and the traverse the labyrinth. The PCs just know that they have an advantage, since they know the back way inside.

However, the adventure states: "Remind the PCs how long they have left when they enter the tomb so they know whether they'll have any time to rest before or during their explorations."

How do the PCs get this information? Doesn't it make it more difficult to set up tension when the party has no idea whether they are ahead or behind schedule?

[Ediwir]

They don't have it. I went around it by having Lady Vord tell them that they doubt it'll take the Heralds more than a week to travel the Tomb and to hurry.

Fun fact, they wasted a ton of time and are now on dawn of the sixth day. It's making them nervous.

[DerNils]

I think Mark Seifter piped up in a similar thread and said something about it making the most dramatic sense if the Players have approximately one day left when they start exploring, and to either metagame the Knowledge to the Players or have Lady Vord do a Sending with some info like that.

[Zi Mishkal]

I told the party that the bad guys would retrieve the MacGuffin somewhere between 7-10 days from now. Which is funny because now the party is avoiding all those encounters along the way. Which, I think, is a problem with the playtest (not running encounters). They got more or less forced into two so far, and one of those was because they misunderstood how long it would take to go around (it was late at that point and people were tired).

Looking ahead at the next two sections, we do slightly better with time. The next one takes place over the course of one evening, I think (with a few hours beforehand to investigate) and the one after that is a slow exploration over the course of a month. That's the one in the stolen lands, and to make it fit in with our overall campaign backstory I need to make some changes.

[Tamago]

According to James Jacobs in this thread, the PCs should have one rest period after they get to the dungeon and before the Night Heralds arrive.

Someone suggested that Lady Vord should give them a Sending with that information; I think that's the best approach that doesn't break verisimilitude too much.

[Zi Mishkal]

Tamago wrote:

According to James Jacobs in this thread, the PCs should have one rest period after they get to the dungeon and before the Night Heralds arrive.

Someone suggested that Lady Vord should give them a Sending with that information; I think that's the best approach that doesn't break verisimilitude too much.

Interesting. However, we made an agreement at the start that we would playtest strictly by the material given and the errata. The date of that posting indicates that Paizo was aware of the problem with sufficient time to address it officially but chose not to and to leave it ambiguous. The unreliability of the website only further strengthens my conviction to take that route. I literally can't be online 24/7 checking every thread for dev feedback. They've established a procedure - they need to follow it or this playtest will be even more a fiasco than it already is.

Hopefully your link helps others decide :)