PFS2 2-03 ~ Catastrophe's Spark


GM Discussion

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Scarab Sages 5/5 5/5 *** Venture-Captain, Netherlands

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I'm not able to give a lot of feedback on the chase, as it got changed significantly.

Grand Lodge 4/5 5/55/5 ***

I think part of the problem with the puzzle is that the little handouts are not formatted very well. Certainly we don’t want to give the solution away, but the way they are written does not visually show the word play. I think you could do your players a solid if you create your own handouts better depicting how the answer is the way the words are positioned. As it is, our GM had to give us a couple hints, otherwise we never would have solved it. That makes it feel like less of a win.

Alternately, you could describe some of the books in library as a collection of word-games, like crosswords and word searches. Something that clues the players in on the cyclops liking word play.

YMMV

Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden

Actually I would say the choice of font, slightly "off" kerning of some of the letters, and the typos all do a lot to call attention to the hidden code without giving it away for free immediately.

Now, if the GM tries to be helpful and provides the text in a more normal font like say Arial, you actually lose a lot of those hints. So I would say unless one of your players specifically needs that (accessibility concern) I think for this puzzle you're best off not doing that.

Grand Lodge 4/5 5/55/5 ***

Except the slightly “off” font is so slight that you don’t know if it’s intentional or just a feature of the font. IME, it is just a bit too subtle. Based on descriptions here and on Discord, I’m not alone. YMMV

Scarab Sages 4/5

I think the main issues with the chase are that it's very ambiguous about when the PCs take damage. The paragraph reads:

Chase wrote:

After one round, the collapse affects

one or more of the rooms, starting at the throne room
and continuing to the entrance. If the PCs fail to gain
enough Chase Points to overcome a room, collapsing
rocks deal 6 bludgeoning damage to all PCs, with a DC
20 basic Reflex save (10 damage and DC 23 in Levels
3–4) as they move into the next room.

So does "after one round" mean at the end of the 1st round, or at the end of the 2nd round?

Does "starting in the throne room" mean that the collapse is one room behind the PCs to start?

But then there's the direct "If the PCs fail to gain enough chase points to overcome a room, collapsing rocks deal..." which doesn't seem to care about where the collapse is or if it has reached the PCs yet. This was the way my GM ran it, with us failing to get enough points on the 1st round and taking damage.

Something else that seems to be confusing is whether or not you progress to the next room after taking damage or if you are still stuck in the room where you failed. Our GM had us advance after the collapse, so even though we didn't achieve enough points, we took some damage and moved on. Reading it, it doesn't seem like we should have moved on and could have been stuck in the same room multiple rounds.

As is, we barely made it out. We had two people go unconscious in the 2nd room (including my witch) due to crit fails on the very high DC 20 check for level 1 characters. One character used battle medicine and was able to get me back conscious, but failed their roll for the other character. We carried that character out, but it meant we had fewer characters to roll checks.

Things would make a lot more sense if the collapse starts 1 room behind the PCs. Then not achieving 1 success for every PC doesn't immediately result in damage. With a 2nd round in the room, you should get through, and any PCs who are left when you do could start rolling on the next room. That would make it possible to get through without taking damage if someone happens to fail their roll.

For example, assume a group of 6 that gets 4 successes/round.

hypothetical chase:

Round 1: Throne room collapses, PCs are in D1. Group of 6 PCs gets 4 successes, doesn't move on.

Round 2: D1 collapses. 1st 2 PCs succeed on their rolls, and the party moves on to Facility Depths. The other 4 members roll, say 2 succeed, leaving 4 successes needed to move past that room.

Round 3: Facility Depths collapses. 4 of 6 PCs succeed and they move on from the room to the Library.

Round 4: Library collapses. This room need 7 successes, so sticking with our average of 4, the PCs don't make it out of the room and take damage. 1 round of damage, even with a crit fail, shouldn't drop any but the lowest HP characters.

Round 5: This is where it gets confusing again. Does the laboratory collapse now, giving the PCs a reprieve while they move into the statue corridor? Let's go with that. 4 successes would get the PCs out of the library and into the corridor, with 1 success on the corridor.

Round 6: Statue Corridor collapses. 4 successes gives the PCs 5 total on the statue corridor, which is not enough to move on. They take damage again. Someone is potentially going to be unconscious here if they crit failed one of the 2 saves they've had to make so far. Very possible rolling potentially as low as +3 against a DC 20 (trained no DEX bonus). So now 5 PCs remain conscious.

Round 7: PCs start in the corridor. The tunnel and wine cellar collapse. 4 successes gets the PCs our of the corridor and 3 successes against the 6 they need to get past the cellar. Someone else is likely to drop, if not the entire party at this point. For the sake of continuing, let's say 3 of the 6 PCs are left up.

Round 8: Does the cellar collapse again? At this point, all 3 PCs need to succeed (or a someone get a crit success and no one crit fail). If that doesn't happen, there's a very good chance everyone fails and is trapped.

So even giving a head start, it still looks like a group is likely to fail. Even if every character has a skill that they are +7 with, against DC 15s, they've still got a 35% chance to fail (30% fail 5% crit fail) with a 15% chance to crit succeed. So in a best case situation for a level 1 group, they're slightly better than that 4 out of 6 successes. (Edit: Some of the checks are lower than DC 15, so that could help, but not everyone is going to be +7 at every skill, either).

If the PCs don't get a head start or get automatically advanced like our group was, I don't see how anyone would make it out of the chase.

Scarab Sages 4/5

The other thing people could help me with is understanding exactly what you're seeing in the puzzle that is meant to help players figure it out. (I get that the numbers are spelled out, but apparently there are clues to point people toward that which I'm not seeing)

People have mentioned the misspellings. In the correct translations, I see Throne misspelled Trone. I don't see a misspelling in handout #1, 3, or 7. The only misspelling in #5 that I see is a missing apostrophe, and I don't think that would necessarily stand out to anyone.

As for the typeset, only handout 3 seems to have a spacing issue that matters. Possibly #9, again with Trone. Otherwise the font/letters all look to be consistent throughout.

On the puzzle in general, I really think the only fair thing to do is to explain to the players that what's in the handouts is representative of how it appears in the original Cyclops on the fingers, and not of their translation. Translated puzzles are always awkward, and things like rhyming in a translated text make that even more problematic. On top of that, the rhyming appears to have nothing to do with the solution, so it comes across as a trick being pulled outside of the game to make the puzzle harder for the players, not the characters.

The same is true of the spacing in the words. It should be clear that any issues with the spacing or the spelling or words are in the original text, not the translation. Trone definitely came across as a Paizo editing mistake for our table and not something that was misspelled in the original cyclops.

If there are things I'm missing that could help players, it would be great to know about them.

Grand Lodge 4/5 **** Venture-Captain, California—Sacramento

TwilightKnight wrote:
Except the slightly “off” font is so slight that you don’t know if it’s intentional or just a feature of the font. IME, it is just a bit too subtle. Based on descriptions here and on Discord, I’m not alone. YMMV

Amusingly, the GM was copy and pasting the translations straight from the book at our table. The "slightly off" font became a very glaring kerning...

Scarab Sages 4/5

Jared Thaler wrote:
TwilightKnight wrote:
Except the slightly “off” font is so slight that you don’t know if it’s intentional or just a feature of the font. IME, it is just a bit too subtle. Based on descriptions here and on Discord, I’m not alone. YMMV
Amusingly, the GM was copy and pasting the translations straight from the book at our table. The "slightly off" font became a very glaring kerning...

I did copy and paste things over into text edit/uniform font before I posted. In the correctly translated lines, the only actual place where there is additional spacing is in unsealed, which has a space between each letter. But that word doesn't factor into the solution.

Handout 4 jams whaatwould together, but that's an incorrect translation, so if that's being relied on to solve the puzzle, then it's easier for a group that failed some of the translations to solve than one that got them all right.

Handout 2 is similarly an incorrect translation and has an extra space between ego and gone. Again, I just really don't see how those are helpful.

Grand Lodge 4/5 5/55/5 ***

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Jared Thaler wrote:
Amusingly, the GM was copy and pasting the translations straight from the book at our table. The "slightly off" font became a very glaring kerning...

Interesting. I’m looking at the handouts right now, straight out of the scenario. My group was successful in all translations so we never saw any of the false translations. Of the correct ones I see nothing unusual about handouts #1 or 3. #5 is missing the apostrophe, but as said up thread it did not stand out to us. #7 has an ever so smaller gap between the last two words but I see it because I’m looking for it. It’s so subtle we did not pick it out until we we were given some hints. #9 has the spelling error which was the most obvious of the “errors” but like up thread we didn’t know if that was an editing error or intentional until the GM told us. Scenarios don’t have a lot of editing errors, but there are enough to make you question the accuracy of text.

Maybe it would be more clear if there was no gap between the combined words. IMO this is one case where it should be a plain font. The translated words are not what is written, it’s what the character would be writing down when they translated it. So it would be written in plain text, not something special. Anyone that has even done translation knows text doesn’t change word for word. It doesn’t make sense that a phrase written in one language would have the same spacing, punctuation, and letter/word arrangement.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the puzzle. I just don’t think it was executed as well as it have. It needs a bit more in the way of hints likely gleaned from the books in the library or the translation document. Maybe telling the player doing the translation that there is something odd about the word combinations in the original. Dunno, but I’ll get a better feel for it after running it a few times. Maybe y’all are just smarter than my party. :-)

Liberty's Edge 3/5 5/5 **** Venture-Captain, Nebraska—Omaha

What I did was after the party failed once with the figures, I said one of characters took a second look at the translations and noted some odd things. I then bolded the numbers on the correctly translated figures (they only had two). This resulted in one more missed attempt before they got it moved into the throne (thone) room.

Shadow Lodge 4/5 5/55/55/55/5 ****

Jared Thaler wrote:
TwilightKnight wrote:
Except the slightly “off” font is so slight that you don’t know if it’s intentional or just a feature of the font. IME, it is just a bit too subtle. Based on descriptions here and on Discord, I’m not alone. YMMV
Amusingly, the GM was copy and pasting the translations straight from the book at our table. The "slightly off" font became a very glaring kerning...

Slightly amusingly in turn, at one of our local tables (100% correct translations), at least one player wrote things looking off in the handouts as "typical Paizo typos" - note that this is not a criticism of the scenario, but rather a comment about proof-reading in the body of work that makes up Pathfinder and Starfinder.

The GM fortunately heard that comment and noted the handouts were 100% correct as-is...but at that point one of the players discovered the word trone in the dictionary and everyone (myself included) started fishing for red herrings to the point that we wished an investigator with the eponymous feat was present to reel everybody back in.

...needless to say, combat ensued shortly thereafter!

9 out of 10 Duergar Soliders from the Advanced Class Guide Adventure Path may or may not agree?

...the 10th one drowned while trying to swim through a door :P

Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden

TwilightKnight wrote:
The translated words are not what is written, it’s what the character would be writing down when they translated it.

This is something people keep saying in reviews as well, when they complain that it makes no sense that the puzzle only has a solution in translation but not in the original Cyclops. But I would say that's the wrong take on it.

Just tell your players: everything in weird font is Cyclops that you're able to read because you have a phrasebook. It's not Common. So when you see an error, that's an error in the Cyclops, not in Common.

And when you get smartypants players like Mike did that assume the errors are Paizo errors, make sure to correct them that no, the mistakes are really there in the original Cyclops. To give players an honest shot at the puzzle we shouldn't confuse them about that.

---

I'm surprised to hear that people had this much difficulty with it. When I ran it I'd described the door as having five holes in it, hey, there's another finger in it and they translated it. A minute later one of the players said "hey, there's the word Five in here". After that they quickly found the rest of the solution.

In general, when you get some kind of text puzzle, there are multiple kinds of puzzles that it could be - it could be about the meaning of the text, about rhyming, about some kind of cypher. So you start looking for clues.

One thing to start with is looking for anything that's odd or wrong. A word in a strange place, a typo, or an extraordinarily strained sentence.

You might assume that a typo is just Paizo editing, but when you're looking for clues, I don't think you should make that assumption so early.

Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden

Ferious Thune wrote:

So does "after one round" mean at the end of the 1st round, or at the end of the 2nd round?

Does "starting in the throne room" mean that the collapse is one room behind the PCs to start?

Tineke said the chase got changed significantly in editing. I think at this point it's simply ambiguous, there's no one obviously correct interpretation of the text because it seems to be a bit "in between" the original text and what the edit was intended to turn it into.

So the most important question IMO is: what works best, within the limits of what we can do while running what's written?

My take on it was: there are five chase zones. At the end of the second round, the first zone collapses, damaging the PCs if they're still there. And the end of the third round, zone two collapses, and so on. If the PCs are in a zone when it collapses, they take damage and get shunted to the next zone.

So for example, say we have an unlucky party:

Round 1: they don't get enough successes. Stay in room 1.
Round 2: they accumulate more successes and move to room 2. Room 1 collapses, but they're not there anymore, so no damage.
Round 3: they're unlucky and don't manage to clear room 2. Room 2 collapses, deals damage, and the party is pushed to room 3.
Round 4: the party doesn't get enough successes to leave room 3. Room 3 collapses, the party takes damage and is pushed to room 4.
Round 5: the party doesn't get enough successes to leave room 4. Room 4 collapses, deals damage, and now the party has been hit three times so they fail the chase. A few hours later, they get dug out but they've failed their secondary mission.

Now let's consider a slightly luckier party:

Round 1: they roll well and move to room 2.
Round 2: they don't roll so well and stay in room 2. Room 1 collapses.
Round 3: they manage to get to room 3, barely. Room 2 collapses.
Round 4: they don't manage to get to room 4. Room 3 collapses, they take damage, get pushed to room 4.
Round 5: they manage to get to room 5. Room 4 collapses but they're not there anymore.
Round 6: their luck has run out. Room 5 collapses, deals damage, and they're pushed out of the dungeon. NPCs run up with stretchers. Because they didn't get hit by the ceiling three times, they didn't need to be dug out, so they haven't failed their secondary success condition.

I can see other interpretations of the ambiguous text also being valid, but I think this take on it makes it a tough but doable chase, so I'm happy to stick with my interpretation.

Grand Lodge 4/5 5/55/5 ***

Lau Bannenberg wrote:
Just tell your players...

That’s essentially what I meant originally. The GM has to guide the players to the solution. Not everyone is going to enunciate their efforts to work it out. I didn’t. Playing online often means people try not to talk over each other so the party isn’t focused on the same thing I am, they may not know I’m working on the puzzle. Unless the GM over hears the wrong assumptions being made (like in Mike’s description) they cannot correct them. It’s hard to make evaluations going from one group to another because the player’s life experiences can have a huge impact on their ability to parse a puzzle. I can say that either your group is smarter than mine or maybe someone was exposed to a similar puzzle earlier in their life and their mind was “trained” to look for the solution. Dunno. I can only report based on the experience of my table and we found the puzzle to be unsolvable until the GM gave us a hint. I intend to be hyper sensitive to that when I run it. YMMV

Sovereign Court 4/5 5/5 ** Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden

Prior experience is definitely a factor - the puzzle is modeled after one in a PFS1 scenario;

Spoiler:
7-18 The Infernal Inheritance

And I think there's some general puzzle-wrangling experience that you can pick up over the years.

I wouldn't want to make spoon-feed players the solution but you're right, not everyone enunciates their thinking process. There's a couple of things I'll pretty much say outright:

- What they're reading in strange font is Cyclops that they're able to interpret using the phrasebook; it's not Common.
- The holes in the vine lattice are arranged in a line.

Those are things that they should be plainly aware of, because their characters can see them plainly.

The scenario doesn't explicitly say whether the holes are in a vertical or horizontal line, so I described it as holes from top to bottom, with the finger that was already in there at the top. That subtly implies that there is a linear order to them.

If the players seem stuck and I want to give a big hint to them, I can point out that "anything weird you see in the handouts is weird in the original Cyclops".

I will also do this if one of the players starts talking about how Paizo must be up to making typos again, then I'll tell them that it's not a Paizo error, that it's really weird in what they're seeing in-game.

If I have several non-native English speakers I'll also be extra forthcoming because the language puzzle can be harder for them. I might point out one of the specific words that contains an error, especially "trone".

---

Finally, if the players can't figure out the puzzle, it's not a huge deal. You get several tries, and you get feedback on your partial solution, because the barrier spits out the fingers as soon as you put in a wrong one. So you know which ones you got right and can narrow down the remainder.

And if even that doesn't work, you can fight yourself through. It'll cost you one of the "X out of Y" secondary success points, but there are enough of them remaining that you can still get secondary success. Also, if you've fought the mandragoras, it should be easy to collect the fingers before going further (which you could hint at) which will then make the escape chase slightly easier.

Scarab Sages 4/5

The main reason that the puzzle would affect my rating of the scenario is that none of the things that people are pointing out here are mentioned in the scenario. It does not say anything about the PCs being able to get a clue from the misspelling. It does not say anything about the spacing on the words being off being a clue and not just an artifact of the weird font. It does not say that it should be treated as the cyclopean that they are looking at and not the translation. It's great that this thread exists and a GM can get the additional advice/information needed, but the scenario shouldn't require coming to the forum to get that information.

The other issue is that while I think that telling the PCs that it's the original cyclopean is the better way to go, that still doesn't make the puzzle make sense, because the mistranslations don't make sense then. Mistranslating something doesn't make the actual characters that are on the fingers different, so having the word "five" (or the cyclopean equivalent) hidden in the characters that the PCs are looking at doesn't change if there's a translation error. They might not translate the word five correctly, but it's not going to function the way it's represented here.

It's just a really awkward puzzle to try to represent in this way, because it requires so many caveats to make any sense. Given that a single failed attempt has a chance (a small chance, but a chance) of TPKing a party, I think that these things are issues worth noting. (1d6+3 DC20 means 4 level 1 characters could potentially all crit fail and be taken to dying 2 on a max damage roll. Hopefully someone would have a hero point left, but after that fight with the hand that's not a given. It's unlikely, but possible).

On the chase, it does say they take the damage "as they move into the next room," so it does seem that advancing them even when they fail is correct. That helps considerably.

Liberty's Edge 3/5 5/5 **** Venture-Captain, Nebraska—Omaha

In all fairness, the temple was designed by a people long gone and had a different viewpoint to their world.

How Lau laid out the chase is how I ran it. It makes the most sense by giving the party some chance to make it out without damage. In fact, when I ran it, once the party took the gem, I told them that the grounds started to shake and small rocks started to rain down on them. They understood that it was time to move.

As of letting the party know the DCs, I am generally opposed to that. I prefer to keep that information to myself as GM. If time is short than I will just tell them the DCs to speed up the process.

Liberty's Edge 5/5 ****

I appreciate all comments regarding this one. I know when I played it I had no idea how to solve the puzzle and we failed and then the rooms were collapsing on us in the chase but our GM had forgotten about one thing as we were leaving with the gem. I am happy to be reading all this feedback from others as I will be running this this weekend for PaizoCon Online 2021 and got some great pointers. Thank you all!

1/5 5/55/5 *** Venture-Agent, Online—VTT

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Having played this once, and run it more than once, I've actually seen groups pit the fingers in with the correct order three different ways.

One group argued about rhyme scheme and poem structure and tried to put the (correctly translated) fingers into a coherent verse. They got it on the second try.

One group started the same way, but someone latched onto the "Trone" misspelling, and solved the puzzle in the "normal" way, eventually.

The last group tried to put the fingers in their guess of order by value, and ended up correct. (This group had mistranslations, but they didn't matter).

Scarab Sages 5/5 5/5 *** Venture-Captain, Netherlands

Also, if your players arrange the handouts by length, so that it represents a hand (shortest one is the thumb, ect.) you almost solve it, and with the three ties most likely will be able to :)

1/5 5/55/5 *** Venture-Agent, Online—VTT

Have you seen people actually do that? I really hope that's what some group did.

Silver Crusade 5/5 5/55/5 **** Venture-Captain, Germany—Bavaria

The way you extract the handout and upload it to your VTT can also help your players to deal with this riddle.

Scarab Sages 5/5 5/5 *** Venture-Captain, Netherlands

HammerJack wrote:
Have you seen people actually do that? I really hope that's what some group did.

yes! that is how I found out! It was something I hadnt even thought off, as handouts get the visual treatment by paizo (I just supply text)

1/5 5/5 **

Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path Subscriber

Got a question about the 'Pull Filament' of the Cave Fisher, does it incur multi-attack penalties like the Gecko 'Tongue Pull' action. I am playing it so that it does, but hoped for some clarification.

2/5 5/5 *****

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

It doesn't have the attack trait, so strictly speaking it doesn't interact with MAP. (It probably _should_ have the attack trait, IMO.)

Dark Archive 4/5 5/5 ****

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HammerJack wrote:
Have you seen people actually do that? I really hope that's what some group did.

Heh, that's actually what we did when Tineke ran if for us at SkålCon.

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