How do Research Points in the Mirrored Moon actually work?


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My party has reached Ramlock's tower in The Mirrored Moon, ending the session there. They currently have 2 Research Points from a successful scouting, and they have yet to return to the base and organize their measly 3 Ally Points. For for the life of me, I cannot figure out how Research Points are supposed to work.

"Research Points are also gained by encountering people who have seen the tower, or by the PCs personally scouting the tower once they’ve found its location (area M). 
The PCs’ Research Point total decreases as time goes by and the Night Heralds become more entrenched in their position at Ramlock’s Tower. Once every 7 days, reduce the party’s total Research Points earned by 1."

Therefore, the 1 Research Point the party gains from the slain reinforcements will almost certainly have deteriorated by then. I have rationalized that this cannot lead to negative research points.

But... the only other way to gain Research Points is this: "Any PC who wants to scout the camp attempts a DC 31 [as of errata] Perception check. If at least one of them succeeds, the group gains 2 Research Points, or 3 Research Points if anyone critically succeeded."

How does this work? If the party gains 2 Research Points from scouting, returns to the base camp to organize their Ally Points, and then returns to the tower, then all of those Research Points will be gone.

Is the party supposed to be able to spam this scouting action to build up an arbitrary amount of Research Points since there is no penalty for failure, return to the base camp with a fat stack of dozens of Research Points, and then return to the tower? That seems very weird, but then, so is any party being destined to have only 0 Research Poitns.


It appears that there is only a maximum of 4 research points available. 1 from the slain reinforcements and 2 or 3 (on a critical success from scouting the tower). In order to act quickly, the party could use some quick message delivery to activate the mercenaries / allies: dream message or sending. In which case the mercenaries would arrive in 5 days. Quick enough to not have any research points decay. Alternatively they could use animal messengers, or travel themselves or send their quickest member. It's a 96 mile journey and will probably get the mercenaries there in less than 2 weeks meaning only a single research point will be lost.

That's my take on it anyway. Its not very clear.

I don't see any other references to assessing scouting reports which are supposed to also give research points.

I'm not sure why your party would need to return to base to organize their Ally points. All they need to do is contact their allies to have them show up.


The party ultimately accrued only 3 Ally Points, between the rocs and the treants (the gnomes were a metaphorical burnt bridge to appease the rocs due to how Diplomacy failed to pan out), so it is impossible for them to get mercenaries sent.

You are right about sending, but for my party, it could only really work for Tulaeth. It is not as though Tulaeth could send a treant over to the rocs; the rocs do not have the raw intelligence to know that a treant is a friend of the PCs.

The PCs would have to trek over to the rocs' tor themselves, which would take six days. Even if the party somehow gets the rocs to carry them and fly, the rocs could fly only four hexes per day, which would cause the party's Research Points to deteriorate by 1.


They would definitely need mounts and a little bit of luck. A Horse has a speed of 40 meaning they can move 32 miles a day. That's almost 3 hexes a day. But if they find the slain mercenaries way before they find Ramlocks tower then they'll just lose out on that point. But yeah if they're walking it seems there's no way to be able to get it. They'll need mounts.


One PC is a bear companion druid, but unfortunately, the rest of the party did not pony up for the Ride feat, which is all but necessary to viably use a mount for overland travel.


Colette Brunel wrote:
One PC is a bear companion druid, but unfortunately, the rest of the party did not pony up for the Ride feat, which is all but necessary to viably use a mount for overland travel.

Why is that? Command an Animal and Handle Animal are both untrained Survival checks with very low DCs. Ride seems to be a feat specifically for encounters. What rule says you can't ride a horse for overland travel?


I ruled the perception was once per day, and the PCs ended the module with ~16 reseach points (but had completed the module with exceptional luck in finding the right spots, and were generally time-efficient people who all had at least 30ft base speed, going up to 45ft for the one PC sent to fetch the allies).


Rameth wrote:
Why is that? Command an Animal and Handle Animal are both untrained Survival checks with very low DCs. Ride seems to be a feat specifically for encounters. What rule says you can't ride a horse for overland travel?

See point #8 in this thread.

While I am plugging my own threads, I might as well show an update of my hardcore campaign journal describing the events of the first part of The Mirrored Moon, here. It is not a long update, but it is an update.


Colette Brunel wrote:
Rameth wrote:
Why is that? Command an Animal and Handle Animal are both untrained Survival checks with very low DCs. Ride seems to be a feat specifically for encounters. What rule says you can't ride a horse for overland travel?

See point #8 in this thread.

While I am plugging my own threads, I might as well show an update of my hardcore campaign journal describing the events of the first part of The Mirrored Moon, here. It is not a long update, but it is an update.

Except that wandering is a single tactic so if you order the horse to wander it will just move at its travel speed. I highly doubt a horse wouldn't be able to wander. Again I'm sure that Ride and Command and Handle Animal are for Encounters not Exploration.


Rameth wrote:
Except that wandering is a single tactic so if you order the horse to wander it will just move at its travel speed. I highly doubt a horse wouldn't be able to wander. Again I'm sure that Ride and Command and Handle Animal are for Encounters not Exploration.

I am not seeing the rule where a character can use Command an Animal to set an animal on a single tactic and leave it on that tactic indefinitely. Could you please point it out?

Now, it looks like my party does have a solution, namely, the druid using a phantom steed spell to fetch the rocs. So it looks like the party can go into the final showdown with 2 Research Points after all.


Well other then common sense says so if you want a specific rules answer I guess I'll give it a go. Under Command an Animal it says,

"you might be able to instruct your animal to move to a certain square"

Now it doesn't say how far away that square is so you could theoretically tell it to move to a square 300ft away and it would go there within the best of its ability, which if it doesn't want to fatigue itself it will wander on its own. So the only time you would need to use Command an Animal again is if you need to change directions, which makes sense.


Rameth wrote:

Well other then common sense says so if you want a specific rules answer I guess I'll give it a go. Under Command an Animal it says,

"you might be able to instruct your animal to move to a certain square"

Now it doesn't say how far away that square is so you could theoretically tell it to move to a square 300ft away and it would go there within the best of its ability, which if it doesn't want to fatigue itself it will wander on its own. So the only time you would need to use Command an Animal again is if you need to change directions, which makes sense.

Command an Animal lets you dictate an animal to use an action or activity, singular. Otherwise, you could Command an Animal to set an animal to attack an enemy, and then have it continue attacking that enemy even without you dedicating the action economy to it.


Which one could argue that Wandering is an activity that an animal knows. So you could command the animal to wander "that way" and it would do it.


If you rule that traveling with a mount is fatiguing because RAW reasons, then a party could use 5 minutes travel / 5 minutes rest. After 8 hours of this they have traveled for 4 hours and rested for 4 hours. Since you are allowed to travel for 8 hours a day before becoming fatigued, they could do another 8 hours of 5 minute travel / 5 minute rest without suffering.

At the end of the day, the party still travels the same distance as if they traveled for 8 hours. Overland travel is annoying but it still works.


Wandering is an exploration tactic, not an activity.

Grand Lodge

Yeah, I was confused by the lack of Research Points and the difficulty involved with getting 4. If my PCs ally with the cyclops, I will let them use them for Ally Points or have the cyclops use their Flash of Insight ability to gain Research Points instead (or 1 Ally and 1 Research). This makes gives the PCs more tactical options and makes the final battle more interesting.


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Colette Brunel wrote:
Wandering is an exploration tactic, not an activity.

Well now you're connecting one thing, exploration and encounter modes (and the actions used in encounter) but not going the other way around. If Exploration Mode HAS to use the same game rules as Encounter Mode (which I would argue it doesn't but you seem to think it does) then that means everything in Exploration Mode HAS to have a corresponding action compared to Encounter Mode.

So that means the Tactics take 1 or more actions. While Activities are simply things that take take more then 1 action.

So it would make sense that wandering, which is about 1 1/2 stride actions would be an activity (as it's more then one action).

Now, it says you can order the Animal to do an Activity that it knows. As I just explained through reasoning a tactic has to be an activity, which the animal has to know cause it can wander itself. So you can order it to do so.

Now if you try and say "Well no they don't have to be the same cause they are listed differently" I would say well yes exactly. Cause they are different they don't work the same. So none of the Encounter Rules apply to Exploration because they are different modes.


I also was a little confused on Ally Points.

You need 4 to get the Palatine Eye moving, and then you get additional benefits based on the points, which cap at... 4?

Is this points total (meaning if the Eye moves, you also gain maximum benefit in part2) or points in excess of 4 (meaning part2 depends on how many allies you can get)?


Nvm I realised reading Colette’s posts that the players only need a combined value of 4 Ally and Research points, not 4 of each.


We're about ready to start this one up and I'm concerned about there only being 4 Research Points available, plus deterioration, while the chart specifically lists a 4+ being possible. Are there other points available that I've missed? Is it possible to scout upon first finding the camp and then scout again right before the final battle (resulting in 2-3 additional points being available)?


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

They should really be called something else, such as Scouting Points. Research Points sounds like they are, you know, actually researching things in a library or some such.


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Personally, I plan on ignoring the "Once every 7 days, reduce the party’s total Research Points earned by 1." line. If you do that, then everything works out perfectly fine.


PhoenixSunrise wrote:
We're about ready to start this one up and I'm concerned about there only being 4 Research Points available, plus deterioration, while the chart specifically lists a 4+ being possible. Are there other points available that I've missed? Is it possible to scout upon first finding the camp and then scout again right before the final battle (resulting in 2-3 additional points being available)?

My players scouted 11 times, so go for it.


I decided that the PCs could scout as much as they want but I had the Research Points from each source overlap instead of stack. So they could get up to 3 from scouting and 1 from the corpses. And I kept the point decay.

I felt like that was the best way to represent the benefit from scouting without letting them go overboard by doing the same thing over and over again to get silly numbers of RP.

I think it worked well. The PCs found the tower pretty early, scouted it, and went back to base. But then they decided to continue exploring the sandbox, so they lost their 2 RP. I didn’t want it to be a waste.

The reasoning behind the point decay was that the defenses and situation changes overtime. That makes perfect sense but it also make sense that you can scout again, to get newer info. So I wanted scouting multiple times to be an option but I didn’t want them to be able to “spam” scouting.

So when it was time for the real assault, they got there 3 days before their allies and spent 3 days scouting. No one got a crit in those three days so they started the assault with 2 RP. Seemed fair and reasonable to me (they never found the corpses)

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