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I have been running this darn AP for a couple of years now. We're finally in book 6. I've understood some of the complaints I've read here and there about various parts of the AP but on the whole our group is really invested & having a great time.
But a couple of times in books 5 and 6 my sense of in-game reality has gotten a bruising and I wanted to whine about it to people who might know what I'm whining about.
At the end of book 4 / start of book 5 the PCs learn that the sixth Aeon Orb is just... gone. Nobody knows where it went. Some of the Empty Stone group took it and left and literally nobody knows where it is. I am not told as a GM where it went. But there's a sixth stone! And we know where that one is! So go get it! Well... why bother having a stone that's gone missing at all? What is added there? Why not just have there be five stones, and the fifth one is in the Vault of the Black Desert and that's that? I'm sure that the missing stone is important somewhere in Golarion lore somewhere but I'll be damned if I know where and I'll be damned if I care. So I'm left breaking character to say to my players, "guys, the other stone is not available to be found, stop trying," which stinks.
Yeah, this was a problem I had too, especially since the Druids in the Tower of Empty Stones likely do know where it went originally (if not where it is now). They were part of the organization that took it, after all.
This is a rough transition and feels very much like a case of "we needed a 5th book so we're putting a detour in." Book 5 itself was pretty fun for my players once they accepted it, but they really didn't like the idea that this organization views this as super important but won't actually help them by just getting the orb it already has.
At the start of book 5 the PCs travel to the Vault of the Black Desert, where teleportation magic doesn't work well. So they'll have to go overland and can't easily retreat to somewhere safe. No. Dangit. A fundamental tenet of high-level adventure design is that you don't design high-level adventures to deprive high-level characters of their coolest abilities. You design them so that they can't be done without those cool abilities. A group with a high-level wizard is excited to have access to Teleport. Why take it away? Let them teleport in and out of the Vault of the Black Desert. Make sure that enemies are aware of this as a risk and are set up to deal with it.
At the end of book 5, the PCs are told that they have free reign to go after the big bad of the book, who lives (unlives) in a dire black tower in the Forbidden Zone or whatever the hell it's called. PCs are told not to destroy or rend the tower apart, because that would be naughty, and if they do the guards will get 'em. Seriously? We're supposed to be afraid of town guards, and worried about being naughty and damaging a tower set among the ruins of a millenia-dead city? Instead, how about having the big bad be prepared for the possibility that PCs will rip the roof off the tower, and prepared to respond accordingly? Or, hell, make it such that there's literally no door into the tower. You must use teleportation magic or rend the walls to get in. That would be much more satisfying.
And now we're in book 6 and what do you know, the Kortos Mounts have a weird Aroden-created anti-teleportation field all around them, too! Once again something that might have been super-satisfying (a race against time as Sarvel Ever-Hunger is performing the Extinction Curse ritual and you have to use teleportation to get there before the isles are laid waste) is instead "oh we have to slog through these encounters that the author thought would be cool."
Anyway, I haven't read a lot of the higher-level books in other 2e APs. I hope they're more sensible about this kind of thing.
Teleport isn't a common spell in PF2. No official adventure requires it or assumes you have it. One of the ways things have changed is that you don't need an arcane caster with these spells to actually do APs. Many groups won't actually have someone that can cast it even if it was available to them.
Some APs don't lock it down this tightly, but generally "we can simply use magic to teleport past every obstacle" is not a thing in PF2 the way it was in PF1. Which, if you think magic should be able to simply bypass everything is going to be a problem.
On the other hand, it lets the skill based characters get to keep using their skills all the time, instead of only needing them until the Wizard just solves everything.
The whole system went through something of a philosophy shift on this stuff, and magic's narrative power was dialed back significantly.
Besides - Aroden of course is more than capable of doing that being a deity who probably doesn't want mortals teleporting in and out of his base on Kortos.
That's certainly agreed - and the fact that you can take specific actions during chapter 2 of that book to counter that problem is good. It just sticks in my craw after having most of book 5 deny this sort of ability.
Yeah I hear you. Book 5 is a weird fit in this adventure and this "you must do it roughly in this order because we wont let you get around that easily" applies.
Book 6 doesn't feel as bad, especially when the PCs get control of it and then can deny the ability to others (who may not realize they can't do it anymore). My group managed to do that and turning that power against the demons was very satisfying, which is a payoff that book 5 lacks.
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Fwiw- Lost Omens: Absalom definitely mentions the missing orb and gives kind of rumors regarding what it might be being used for. A somewhat interesting read.
I must admit, my party was far more interested in trying to recover that orb than going into the darklands to try and snag that one.
I just didn't have the energy/motivation to fully rework book 5 when, by then, I wasn't even really looking forward to book 6 anymore.
That's certainly agreed - and the fact that you can take specific actions during chapter 2 of that book to counter that problem is good. It just sticks in my craw after having most of book 5 deny this sort of ability.Yeah I hear you. Book 5 is a weird fit in this adventure and this "you must do it roughly in this order because we wont let you get around that easily" applies.
In this quote, Jim Kiley, you say that most of book 5 denies this ability, which isn’t true. In fact, your first post makes it clear that teleportation is harder, not impossible. My group recently discovered this when the gnome tried using his Life Leap ability. The crystals tried to counteract the ability but were unsuccessful so the gnome popped out on the other side of his opponent. The possibility of the transportation trait being counteracted allowed me as a GM to emphasize the radiation from the blightburn sickness does more than just give people a deadly sickness.
In my mind, this serves to underscore why there aren’t a ton of adventurers who have already looted the Black Desert and surrounding environs: it is both a deadly location and very hard to get in and out of, even by high level characters in the world (of which there are not many). I must say that me and my group are really enjoying the layers of this adventure, and the more opportunities that I as a GM get to expose those nuances to them, all the better!