A really late thread.

[eyelessgame]

I have a few problems with the Serpents Skull AP that... are making it really hard for me to set up and continue the story.

Spoiler:

The buildup of Smuggler's Shiv is to what seems like an earthshaking mythic catastrophe you're trying to avert (and, in reality, it is, though the payoff isn't till Part VI) but the apparent payoff is really just "And we found a clue that leads us to Fantasy El Dorado." My players felt like this was quite a letdown. It's just a treasure hunt after all.

But they rolled with it and... then we had a problem.

The sequence of "who knows what" is really, in my opinion, badly handled throughout the AP. You reach Sargava with the translations from the serpentfolk... but according to the AP's premise, it doesn't matter what is done to keep secrets or plan your adventure, the news spreads to five different organizations that We Must Each Travel To Tazion And Thence To Savith-Yhi.

It felt like what the PCs did or didn't say or do didn't matter.

There is a disconnect at the very center of this. All that the module says you learn from the writings of Yarzoth was ...

"Details on how the carvings and discoveries in the Azlanti temple can lead the PCs to the legendary city of Saventh-Yhi ... are detailed in the next adventure in the Serpent’s Skull Adventure Path."

But in the next Adventure Path, it says this.

"Once deciphered, Yarzoth’s notes prove quite complete. They detail the Zura cult’s birth in the fabled city of Saventh-Yhi, their exile to Smuggler’s Shiv, and their planned return to the lost city. According to the notes, however, Saventh-Yhi was hidden behind powerful magical wards, preventing the banished cultists from simply returning home. Instead, they planned to journey to a smaller Azlanti outpost called Tazion, wherein they could use something called “the pillars of light” to finally make their way into Saventh-Yhi.Thus, while the notes do not reveal the location of Saventh-Yhi itself, they do accurately describe the site of Tazion. A successful DC 25 Knowledge (geography) check places Tazion in the southernmost reaches of the Mwangi Jungle, north of the Bandu Hills, between the Upper Korir and Ocota Rivers."

The sum total of the "clue" the PCs are following is "go to Tazion (which a DC 25 roll tells you how to find) and look for the pillars of light". That's it.

I mean, that's okay, I guess. Except no matter what you do, five different groups all get this same clue. They all know about the pillars of light - otherwise why are they going? And there is no other information - when we reached Tazion, the players reviewed "okay, what are we looking for?" and that one phrase was it.

And if you go to the ziggurat - either the one defined in RtR or the (much better) one fan-written by dwtempest, you do get pillars of light and they show what they show (and it's quite Indiana Jones - even though the room description doesn't make any sense.) So that's okay.

But there's a disconnect here that isn't really addressed.

We are assuming, as near as I can tell, that all five groups are trying to "access the pillars of light" in Tazion. They all got this one-sentence clue, I guess, because there's no way to keep it a secret - remember, without this one clue there is no other reason to think there's a path to Savith-Yhi - but whatever, five large expeditions are all heading to Tazion just to find the pillars of light.

And that's the thing that made no sense and still makes no sense.

Whoever gets there first finds the four stones and activates the Pillars, right? Then what do they do with the stones?

The Red Mantis gets there first unless the PCs are really good at what they do. What happens if they get to Tazion first?

Page 43. "Red Mantis: The Red Mantis are the first to arrive, on the 56th day. They stealthily infiltrate the ruins, find the information they need without disturbing the status quo, and leave again as quickly as they came."

What information? Are they there to access the Pillars of Light, or not? If they activate the Pillars, did they take the stones? Where did they leave them afterwards, if so?

Repeat this four more times. Five groups get to Tazion specifically to access the Pillars of Light. Which requires finding and using the four stones. Nobody's going to leave them behind for the next group, right?

How does everyone then get to Savith-Yhi?

It rather unconvincingly says, right at the end:

"If the PCs were unable to activate the pillars of light, they may still be able to find the way to Saventh-Yhi. They could set their own ambush for a rival faction, or attempt to track one of the other factions through the jungle to the lost city. If none of these options are successful, it’s
possible that Issilar was able to activate the pillars to relocate the city. In this case, he might have left behind a map or copious notes that, when deciphered, can lead the PCs to their destination."

Sure, maybe the GM can carve out a way for the PCs to get there.

But does it work for all five factions?

I have read this a couple times - I started the campaign a year ago (we can only play irregularly until recently), trusting that Paizo's adventures were well-done campaigns that made sense. This doesn't seem to.

There's also the buildup of Savith-Yhi as this Huge Secret Place No One Has Been To In Ten Thousand Years. Unless you count all of the inhabitants, including among several other intelligent, semi-civilized groups (including a bunch of humans), the closest thing to a monarch that the Mwangi Expanse has (the Gorilla King), whose followers seem to come and go to Savith-Yhi without much difficulty. And of course there's the Pathfinder you find in the city's basement, and his companion who's wandering around on the surface.

It seems like no one stitched the seams together here. Each adventure finds clues or paths or solutions, promising something that the PCs will exert utmost effort to find first, discover or conquer in some special way - only to have the next adventure simply say "so lots of other people manage to get the same information you did so it doesn't really matter that you were first/successful, you're just one among a bunch of people who did it."

I am having a lot of trouble selling these transitions to my players. Do people have some hints on how to make it seem less like these are simply ... bad writing?

[YogoZuno]

I suspect the whole sandboxy nature of the first book can make figuring this stuff out a little different to the norm?

I haven't really read through the books after Shiv, but it seems to me the other castaways from Smuggler's Shiv provide the primary method of getting information from the players into the hand of the factions. They were on the island with the party, and likely were rescued with them. Perhaps depending on their relationship with the party, they may also have had a chance to see, steal, memorise or copy the notes from Yarzoth? Aerys speaks Aklo, and Gellik and Jask have Comprehend Languages available, and all but Gellik are trained in Linguistics. The information could then potentially be passed on to their respective faction leaders.

Additionally, there are also such things as scrying magic or intrigue...factions could have been told by the castaways the PCs recovered some potentially valuable information, and the factions could then use those to discover what the party are working on?

As for Tazion - looking at the page you referenced about the Red Mantis, they seem to get in and out without leaving a trace, meaning they seem to steal the required items, and put them back without the owners noticing. Not sure about other factions.

[Gark the Goblin]

Honestly, you can run the whole AP without the factional competition. There's only a few encounters actually based on it (scrap Omagru in Eleder, Rival Faction Agents in Kalabuto, and the intellect devourer subplot in Vaults). Or maybe just include one of the more evil factions as a foil to the party's faction; there's no need for all five, and the "race to ruin" part can be rebranded as a race against time to get to the city in time to find a way to stop Ydersius. Be clear with the party in the second book, ideally even in the first book, that they have stumbled into a situation where they're the only ones who have a chance of finding that information - it's up to them to wheedle a faction into helping them get to Saventh-Yhi and survive while they're there.

The fact that other people have found their way into Saventh-Yhi is not as jarring as it seems, if you give a better explanation for why people haven't left to report about it. I added a repulsion effect stopping people from leaving the city, which can be lifted by drinking from one of the fountains in the Military District.

I've also noticed the weird gaps in information and struggled to make stuff up. As you might have read elsewhere on this forum, book 3 was actually essentially written by two editors when the original author didn't finish in time. The general issues with a monthly release schedule also apply to the transitions between books.

But yeah you've accurately identified some of the structural problems with the AP. It's also got big thematic problems - forcing the party to fight abolitionists, making the indigenous nation of Mzali out to be more evil than the occupying nationalists of Sargava (the leader of Sargava worships a LG deity and allows slavery to go on right under his nose! They could've contented themselves with making both sides evil so parties at least wouldn't feel obliged to support the Sargavan side), and the whole reptoid antisemitism thing.

[zimmerwald1915]

Gark the Goblin wrote:

forcing the party to fight abolitionists

*uproarious laughter at the fruits of editorial laissez-faire and mismanagement*

EDIT: Oh, wow, upon reading the volume, it's even worse than I thought! This is precious!

[eyelessgame]

Thanks for the responses!

I do have a sense that my PCs would have rather remained in Sargava and joined the abolitionists.

My players rather enjoyed the "moral dilemma" that Gelik was so obnoxious that he turned them off to joining with the obviously-mostly-good-guys Pathfinders; they've come here with Kassata.

But when I introduce Mzali as a real force, yeah, it's going to be a very different experience for us. I've been thinking ahead to that a bit.

Knowing that the editors had to slap together the unfinished document explains a lot, and actually makes me feel better about the adventure - because I've been on both sides of looming deadlines and the all-nighters pulled to get a product together. It puts the things that don't quite make sense into context and makes me feel better about saying "yeah, this doesn't work, I'm changing it, this is probably what they'd have done if they had editing time" instead of making a change and then realizing it is attached to too many other threads down the line.

I found someone's "Changes to the City of Seven Spears" PDF, and just as an outline of additional things to do with the city it's a great resource. I'm trying to catch up on some of the decade of threads of information here, and we're starting to enjoy exploring the city a bit. I feel less like I"m letting my players down.

[Gark the Goblin]

Good, I'm glad it's working out for you. We also are really enjoying Saventh-Yhi in my game - the players really chafed during Railroad to Ruin, and are having fun exploring the city on their own time and finding out what the other factions and monster groups are doing. It just takes a willingness to depart from the source material, I think.

[Lanathar]

What real world parallel (or parallels) is Sargava supposed to have?

I mistakenly remembered it as an island so thought Cuba - considering the Shackles as the Caribbean

Or is it supposed to just be a generic colony where the natives are oppressed?

[Sunderstone]

Great topic eyelessgame.

I read through the entire campaign years ago and I agree totally. I also don't like the retread of finding Saventh-Yi, a lost city only to use it to find THE lost city.
I still love this AP with the exception of Book 4 for a few reasons. Other than that my fix to the logic of it all was fairly simple.

1) Five factions is too much. If I ran this, I'd use the Red Mantis and possibly one other faction, the Pathfinder Society. The rest of the castaways would be unaffiliated passengers.
2) The quest for Saventh-Yi would already be in motion before the PCs were ever involved. The Red Mantis Guild have been searching for Ilmurea for years and Pathfinder Society spies have discovered that the Red Mantis have recently found clues to it's location. This could be flip flopped to the Society searching for Ilmurea (well within their charter), with Red Mantis Assassins finding out about it. In the both cases, PF Society enlists the aid of the PCs to go on ahead as they round up a larger force/expedition to meet there.
3) All this speeds up Yarzoth and the serpentfolk plans of course. To go a step further, Yarzoth could have been masquerading as a Red Mantis Assassin for numerous reasons, one of which being greater resources put into finding Saventh-Yi and/or Ilmurea while sabotaging their plans and findings, giving her a head start etc.
4) If you like factions, you can easily add another by having someone overhear the party's conversations at a tavern/inn. Sort of like the Biker with the eyepatch and his monkey from the Indiana Jones movies. It becomes a hard to keep secret locally when the PFS begins hiring out locals for a full expedition into the jungle regardless. More people means more chances for the purpose of this expedition to be discovered.

YMMV though, but those are my logic fixes if I ever decide to run it.

[zimmerwald1915]

Lanathar wrote:

What real world parallel (or parallels) is Sargava supposed to have?

Bear in mind that analogies are drawn as much or more by the audience as by the author. That said, geographically the territory reminds me of Angola, and historically it's something of a mashup between Angola and South Africa (the postcolonial histories of which were intertwined anyway by the latter's intervention in the former's politics). Cuba intervened in the war between Angola and South Africa, so the association is not entirely misplaced.

Culturally. . . yeah, not touching that with a standard-issue 10-foot pole.