One shot #2 Dinner at Lionlodge


GM Discussion

Silver Crusade 5/5 5/5 **

Ran this at Paizocon and thought I'd post a few observations

It ran over 5 hours and I ended with a TPK

A significant portion of that TPK was bad dice luck and somewhat suboptimal character tactics but the last encounter was a beast and it comes after several encounters hard enough to drain limited resources. And that TPK came after I somewhat softballed things. Due to time pressures and the fact that things were already going south I totally ignored the bad guys reactive ability. And I had the servant acting as an active ally.

The pregens were effective enough in general but, from my perspective, didn't overflow with roleplaying character. Obviously that could be players as much as characters. The players did have access to the characters before the game but I think all my players were also GMs at the con so they probably didn't have much time before hand :-(

I suspect this plays VERY differently depending on player choices and dice rolls. I may well end up running it again just to find out. When I ran this they managed to befriend the one servant, they also completely avoided the battle with the statues (saw no reason to go down there) and it still ran long and ended in a TPK.

A few GM suggestions
1) I screwed up at the dinner. One character got the clue, I should definitely have given the information secretly. I foolishly did it openly.
2) I hinted to the players that they were on a timer. There is enough going on that I shouldn't have and just arm waved out of combat healing. Both for speed of play and to reduce resource consumption.
3) the final encounter is a beast. Allow at least an hour for it.

Sczarni 5/5 5/55/5 ***

Yeah I watched the Livestream. They skipped the Imps, and skipped the Statues, and called the Boss fight at the SIX hour mark.

I initially scheduled to GM it yesterday but a player dropped last minute, so I rescheduled for tomorrow. I'm actually a bit grateful because the background is golden and I really want to present it flawlessly.

The character backgrounds are pretty light. I think it almost requires prompting from the GM.

Typos were pretty minimal. I wish Scenarios had this level of proof-reading ^_^

Oh, and I decided to go with the generic 4-way-cross Forest flipmat in case Auldegrund escapes and they wish to give chase. But I think that's probably a long shot.

Dark Archive 4/5 *** Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Turku

The pregens are very ill-equipped to deal with this adventure.

There are a few creatures that have DR or hardness. The pregens are level 4. The enemies are balanced against lvl 4 PC's having striking weapons. None of the pregens have striking weapons.

Give all the pregens a striking weapon.

3 out of the 4 pregens take extra damage from the Barbazu. That's already a very, very deadly enemy at level 4. Combined with high AB, high damage, infernal wounds that have 50% chance to prevent healing and make it practically speaking impossible for unconscious characters to recover on their own, that fight is nearly guaranteed TPK on it's own, -even- if the GM attempts to somewhat softball it.
I would either change the kobolds deity to something that's Good, or just handwave it and let him deal good dmg with the divine lance to give them some kind of a fighting chance.

The boss is also a monster, having more than 50% chance to just drop a PC down (+17 ab, AC's are 18-21, boss gets to roll twice and pick better, deals on average 43,5 dmg on a crit (which is about every other attack with this, pregen HPs are 38, 42, 44, and 56)... Not to mention the bleed he also deals.

This isn't a bad scenario - I liked the theme, I like the idea that PC's get to set up traps and prepare for the cultist's arrival and take them on on their own terms.
Problem is that this is a long adventure - it took us 5 hours and the group TPK'd before they got to the final 2 fights. It's also a deadly adventure. It -feels- like you're supposed to run it on a 4 hour slot in a con to introduce PF2e to new people, but it runs like a challenge dungeon that's intended to be cleared by maybe 10% of the time.

Also, if you run this from the roll20 module, the sheets are wrong - cleric has wrong skill feats, sorcerer and cleric have wrong tradition on their spells, rogue has int 12 (should be 10), the dwarves at the beginning are lacking art and their character sheet is named simulacrum (and the host is called "[name] simulacrum") so you gotta fix those if you plan to run it there.

Remove the statue fight, remove the imp fight, Maybe use the weakened version of the barbazu from the 1-2 tier of Flames of Redemption scenario instead, and if the PC's have set up a lot of traps, let the cultist just get removed by those so that the PC's don't have to spend time fighting them and instead get quicker to the boss.

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