Venture-Captain, Texas—Austin
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2 things came up for me in preparing this one.
First, here is how I am interpreting how subsist should work during this scenario.
Each day, you can attempt to subsist for yourself by making a Survival check with a -5 penalty since you are doing it as you go with the following results, modified for this scenario.
Critical Success You either provide a subsistence living for yourself and one additional member of the party for that day
Success You find enough food and shelter with basic protection from the elements to provide you a subsistence living for that day
Failure You gather no subsistence that day and must eat from your rations.
Critical Failure You attract trouble, eat something you shouldn’t, or otherwise worsen your situation. You take a –2 circumstance penalty to checks to Subsist for 1 week.
Second of all, I am confused as to what the dotted lines on the encounter F map are supposed to represent. As far as I can tell, there is just the monolith on top of a plinth that take up a 2x2 square area in the middle of the map, and I can't figure anything for the dotted lines.
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You are correct on the Subsist. The DC in forest hexes is 10, in hills 15, as defined in the sidebar.
The dotted lines in area F are meant to show the dividing lines between the three branches of the river. Each round, the monolith floods along one of the three branches of the river, affecting all PCs in the water along that branch (as divided by those lines).
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I'm generally pleased when there are call-backs to past material, but to expect the players to remember, with absolutely no warning, if they played a specific scenario two years ago and collected the boon associated with it in order to get the Conclusion's post script is a bit much. I'm fairly certain that virtually every GM is gonna read that passage regardless.
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I could not resist reading it. That is such a huge bit of lore.
I had one player who thought that had it but couldn't say with certainty so I figured that was good enough for me.
When I read that part while prepping, I literally said "Holy S*&T!" in my office.
When I play, I know I have played and GM that adventure so it will be a problem that way.
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That's a good point, though in none of the 3 times I've run it so far did anyone think to use that spell. I did hear about druids doing similar things with goodberry, though, which I like since I feel like that aspect of goodberry never gets used.Goodberry is OK'ish but it takes 6 berries to make one meal. That means a level 5 druid is generating one meal every 20 minutes, providing they arent doing anything else.
Create Food is on the Arcane, Divine and Primal spell lists.
I would say that a druid who foraging could reasonable refocus during that time as well.
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Even without forager feat, we did quite well. We all had some food, and bought some more.
In a party of 6, we had 3 with decent survival, and two that just rolled (and a lazy elf)
I don’t think we ever used more than 3 food in a day, and most only 2. That gave us plenty of leeway, and we finally counted to see we wouldn’t run out if we had to hit every hex and failed all the rolls.
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As a GM I always love when a player ability provides an advantage for the party. A lot of character abilities don't get used in PFS very often, so it's always nice when a player's choices get to feel useful.
In this particular case, if a cleric wants to spend a second level spell slot every day to feed the party, that doesn't bother me. If a druid gets to use that aspect of goodberry, that's cool too. If someone has Forager, even better, since setting up a chance to use it was an explicit goal in writing this scenario.
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The geography was confusing me a bit, and I think there's an error in the opening briefing that was throwing me off.
1) The Base Camp marked on the map, is the large scale PF encampment; likely the same one as featured on 2-01 and 2-03. Ie right on the outskirts of Min-Khadaim.
2) The PCs are actually assigned the south east not the northeast sector. This explains why the camp is at the northwest corner. Its also why the iconography of the city on the stone is back to the NW (after travelling SE). (Unless the assertion is that the basecamp is at the extreme northern end of the finadar forest, and while all sectors are south of the base camp, we're exploring the northern most one)
(I had been trying to come up with a map where the Base camp was the PCs temporary assigned base camp and not the large scale PFS encampment, and the PCs were then travelling North from off the map to reach their assigned base camp, before deciding that the base camp on the map was the main pfs encampment.)
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Also regarding the Subsist option for supplementing food. Subsist is normally a downtime activity. Normally these couldn't be used while also exploring. However there is "Unlike most downtime activities, you can Subsist after 8 hours or less of exploration, but if you do, you take a –5 penalty."
Is that -5 penalty already baked into the DCs listed in the scenario? How should we adjudicate the "8 hours or less" requirement?
Or is the sidebar meant to completely override those rules -- ie use the sidebar DCs -- allow subsist as a bonus/non-exclusive exploration mode activity, no limit on other activities/travel.
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The geography was confusing me a bit, and I think there's an error in the opening briefing that was throwing me off.
1) The Base Camp marked on the map, is the large scale PF encampment; likely the same one as featured on 2-01 and 2-03. Ie right on the outskirts of Min-Khadaim.
2) The PCs are actually assigned the south east not the northeast sector. This explains why the camp is at the northwest corner. Its also why the iconography of the city on the stone is back to the NW (after travelling SE). (Unless the assertion is that the basecamp is at the extreme northern end of the finadar forest, and while all sectors are south of the base camp, we're exploring the northern most one)
(I had been trying to come up with a map where the Base camp was the PCs temporary assigned base camp and not the large scale PFS encampment, and the PCs were then travelling North from off the map to reach their assigned base camp, before deciding that the base camp on the map was the main pfs encampment.)
I believe the Pathfinder encampment (and Min-Khadaim) are at the northwestern corner of the forest. The PCs, then, are exploring the northern end of the forest, beginning at the northwest corner and heading mostly eastward to the hills on the northeastern edge. That would put the northern border of the forest just off the map to the north, and the bulk of the forest off the southern edge of the map. That's how I was picturing it, anyway. It probably doesn't matter too much for the purposes of running the game.
Also regarding the Subsist option for supplementing food. Subsist is normally a downtime activity. Normally these couldn't be used while also exploring. However there is "Unlike most downtime activities, you can Subsist after 8 hours or less of exploration, but if you do, you take a –5 penalty."
Is that -5 penalty already baked into the DCs listed in the scenario? How should we adjudicate the "8 hours or less" requirement?
Or is the sidebar meant to completely override those rules -- ie use the sidebar DCs -- allow subsist as a bonus/non-exclusive exploration mode activity, no limit on other activities/travel.
Those penalties are not baked in to the DC, and the sidebar is not meant to override those rules. PCs take a -5 penalty to checks to subsist if they are doing so on a day in which they also travel or explore.
In running this so far, I've been keeping a tally of how many successes they get (counting two for each crit success, or more if they have forager), and every time they accumulate a number of successes equal to the number of players, I add one day to the number of days of rations they have left (so if there are 5 players, then every 5 accumulated subsist successes adds one day to their supplies).
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OK I think we're saying the same thing regarding the position -- the PCs are exploring the NE sector of the forest, which happens to be E/SE of the base camp.
Regarding the subsist, I ran it the same way as you describe, but it left a bad feeling that it also implies the party is doing less than 8 hours of travelling a day in order to use that option, without the short travel day impacting their effective speed. The group I was GMing was using spells to assit (Wanderer's Guide/Show the Way/etc) so they weren't too pressed for time, anyways
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I should have posted this a while back, but if you're curious what I was envisioning for the inscription at the camp site, I've uploaded a digital sketch to pfsprep.
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Venture-Agent, Online—VTT
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Voluntarily failing or crit-failing a save, outside of specific cases like drugs, is not a mechanic that's in PF2 at all so that would not be a thing you can legally expect to do. If they could, the monolith surge would, of course, still have to roll against the DC of the grab, as per the Immobilized condition.
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Just preparing this and the Explosive and Flooding Monoliths both have the same Flare and Disable failures, which seems strange how the flooding monolith is wreathed in flames rather than water as I would expect from the way the flooding monolith works. My changes in italics
Should the Flooding Monolith be something like Glint instead of Flare with:
Effect the water wreathing the monolith glints with incandescent rainbow of coloured light. The triggering creature must attempt a DC 18 Fortitude save. On a failure, the creature is dazzled for one round. On a critical failure, the creature is blinded for one round, then dazzled for one round. The hazard rolls initiative.
And
Disable DC 18 Arcana, Occultism, or Religion to magically alter the runes, or DC 21 Thievery to physically alter them. A PC that can read Abyssal or Cyclops is better able to identify key runes, gaining a +1 circumstance bonus to these check (+2 if they speak both). Each check requires two actions, and disabling the monolith requires three successful checks. A PC that critically succeeds earns two success. On a failed check, the attempting PC is exposed to the buffeting waves of water wreathing the monolith, taking 2d6 cold damage (DC 18 basic Reflex save).
To me the copy/paste was made without much thought and it perhaps should have changed as above?
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Just preparing this and the Explosive and Flooding Monoliths both have the same Flare and Disable failures, which seems strange how the flooding monolith is wreathed in flames rather than water as I would expect from the way the flooding monolith works. My changes in italics...
...To me the copy/paste was made without much thought and it perhaps should have changed as above?
*Puts on author hat*
As Jared says, the flames were an intentional decision. No correction needed.Disable DC 18 Arcana, Occultism, or Religion to magically alter the runes, or DC 21 Thievery to physically alter them. A PC that can read Abyssal or Cyclops is better able to identify key runes, gaining a +1 circumstance bonus to these check (+2 if they speak both). Each check requires two actions, and disabling the monolith requires three successful checks. A PC that critically succeeds earns two success. On a failed check, the attempting PC is exposed to the buffeting waves of water wreathing the monolith, taking 2d6 cold damage (DC 18 basic Reflex save).
*Takes off author hat, puts on Venture Captain hat*
Adding an additional damaging element to a hazard that was printed without one changes the encounter math. Making structural changes to an encounter like that is not appropriate for Pathfinder Society play.|
Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Utrecht
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Up above, Pirate Rob linked his travelogue, and says his party used mounts. Where can I find mounts and their gear? Is it just a simple horse?
Voluntarily failing or crit-failing a save, outside of specific cases like drugs, is not a mechanic that's in PF2 at all so that would not be a thing you can legally expect to do. If they could, the monolith surge would, of course, still have to roll against the DC of the grab, as per the Immobilized condition.
Way late of course, but I believe I read somewhere that in case of PCs forcing checks or saves on each other (such as a Shove or Reposition), you can voluntarily raise your degree of success by one step, though I'm not 100% sure on that.
