Hazard Rules Are A Mess

[ClanPsi]

My group ran In Pale Mountain's Shadow yesterday and my god, the quicksand encounter was an absolute slog. Here are some of the problems we encountered:

1) It says the Ankhrav nest is next to the quicksand, but the area is insanely big with tons of sinkholes. Is there an Ankhrav next to each one? If not, why does it just to happen to be right next to the one a PC falls into? Pretty unrealistic situation.

2) The PC who fell in was riding a camel. Is he just unaffected by the quicksand for the first 2-3 turns while the camel sinks?

3) The first thing the party did was throw a rope. There are no rules for how that interacts with the encounter. Can the party pull? Does it give the trapped PC a bonus? If so, what is the bonus? Is there a cumulative bonus for having more party members hold the rope? What if they tie it to a camel to help?

4) Does the Ankhrav even need to appear? Can't he just murder everyone from below in the sand? Is there a limit to how many times he can f*ck up everyone's armour? If no, why not?

Are other hazards this poorly thought out and written? If the rules are going to be this vague I highly suggest Paizo actually finish the rules before they release them to the public for testing. The more I read and play of the Playtest the more clear it becomes that Paizo has no idea what they're doing with PF2 with no clear vision.

[kpulv]

Yeah, the quicksand encounter is rough. Did not go very well for my group, hah.

I can just answer how I ran it.

1) I put the quicksand just in the center of the map and had the ankhrav waiting in a mound of sand a few tiles from the edge of it.

2) The PC in my game was also on a camel in the sand. I ruled that the camel would panic and lose its mind (as they would when combat starts) and threw the rider off, resulting in them both being in the quicksand. (The PCs actually managed to save the camel as well.)

3) My PCs also used a rope, so I had them use the Aid action to give the sinking character a bonus if they made the DC 15 check. A character holding the rope from solid ground would ready the Aid reaction for when it was the sinking character's turn.

4) I totally forgot about the ankhrav's burrow speed in the encounter, so I had it fight the other PCs that were on the surface and try to stop them from helping the sinking character. I'm not sure if the ankhrav having a burrow speed gives it immunity to the effects of the quicksand though?

I think there are cooler hazards for sure... the quicksand is just super rough for a lot of reasons.

In regards to the last line... I feel like that's a little bit of an overreaction for the results of a single hazard/encounter. The playtest is testing *a lot* of things, some of them will work, some of them wont, it's a necessary part of testing.

[Scythia]

The Summon Rune hazard as written is harmless. It specifies that the summoned creature gets three actions and a reaction, unlike regular summoned creatures (limited to two actions). It does not specify that the rune summoned creature acts independently, so just like any summoned creature now does it will do absolutely nothing unless commanded by the summoner (the rune in this case I suppose).