Contributor
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I recommend running #3-04 Devil Wrought Disappearance and #3-07 Locked Lodge before running #6-12 Burning of Greensteeples. There are lots of links between #3-04 DWD and #6-12 BoG.
This is more difficult than normal to prep.
I recommend reading through the whole infiltration chapter of GM Core and printing out page 199 (200 in the PDF) of GM Core as a player (and GM) handout to assist with the infiltration sequence. This infiltration sequence will be challenging / quite difficult for parties without a good skills person to provide the Follow the Expert exploration activity.
(If your party includes Rogues and Investigators, remind them of 'Follow the Expert' and let them shine!)
★ --- ★ --- ★ --- ★
Remember that some obstacles are Group and others are Individual. The Overcome entry lists whether the PCs need to overcome an object individually or as a group.
For individual obstacles, each PC needs to earn the required number of Infiltration Points themself.
For group obstacles, all PCs working toward that obstacle pool their Infiltration Points toward it together.
★ --- ★ --- ★ --- ★
Also, the official handouts include the DCs of the Infiltration, which I thought that perhaps the players should not see. So I've redone the Burning of Greensteeples Player Handouts with the intent that handouts 1 and handouts 2 + 3 can be printed on one double-sided page with no spoilers for players from handout 4.
★ --- ★ --- ★ --- ★
Seriously, don't read this spoiler unless you are GMing the scenario or have already played it.
There is talk within the scenario of the 'True Queen of Cheliax' and a surprise sapphire bracelet for Zarta. Since the context of this involves a storyline from before Pathfinder 2nd Edition, I prepared a deep lore dossier on Zarta that might answer some player questions.
Treat this as a post-credits Easter Egg!
TOP SECRET Closing Credits Zarta handout -- Do not use until after the final scene!
I cannot tell you how excited I am to see the return of this plotline from Season 7 of Pathfinder Society 1E.
All hail the true Queen of Cheliax!
Enjoy!
Hmm
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I am a bit fuzzy on how infiltration works. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Points Each PC needs to achieve 10 infiltration points. They can choose different obstacles, and they do not need to be at the same obstacle at the same time. Group obstacles (Roaming Patrol 2, Pit Trap 2, and Library Puzzle Door 3) grant their IP to every PC when someone completes the obstacle, regardless of where a PC might be. Individual obstacles (Winding Sewers 1, Arnisant Alarm 2, and Imp 1) only accumulate IP for that character. A character cannot gain 2 IP by critically succeeding against an obstacle that is only ranked for 1 IP.
Actions Each character has one action per infiltration turn, whether that action is an obstacle, complication, or an opportunity. Follow the Expert action becomes available only to a PC who has already passed the obstacle (Smooth the Path opportunity).
Obstacles Obstacle descriptions and the relative difficulties of skills used to bypass an obstacle are known to players once they become accessible, but the exact DCs are not known. Accessing the Library Puzzle Door before the sewers next would feel nonsensical, so I’ll deploy the obstacles in the following order: Roaming Patrol/Winding Sewer (someone can slip into sewers while others are distracting guards) → Pit Trap → Arnisant Alarm/Library Puzzle Door/Imp.
I have no feel for how difficult or easy this is going to be. My gut reaction is that because of the individual obstacles the number of dice rolls is going to be very high, and it’s those individual obstacles that are going to generate most of the awareness points. I’m especially worried about Arnisant Alarm, which is bad for non-intelligence-based PCs. The total number of IP available is 11, so each character can miss one point. This means each PC needs to gain at least one success towards Arnisant Alarm.
After reading that at 15 AP the infiltration fails, my first thought was that the scenario ends, but instead the PCs just fight an easy battle and lose the chance to access the library and the secret room where half the story is.
Finally, the Gossip preparation activity: by the book it cannot help the PCs. The only use I can think for it is to grant the players foreknowledge of all the obstacles and possible complications. Any other ideas?
Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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Well, they did this infiltration MUCH better than the last one. But it’s still sorely lacking detail and coherence.
Preparations would normally provide one or more edge points, which could be spent to succeed on a failure or critical failure on an a roll to overcome an obstacle or complication (GM Core 198-199). Simplest thing is probably to give the party one EP for succeeding on a preparation, but only allow it to be spent on something that makes sense given the specific preparation.
As for completing the infiltration, the scenario says it takes 10 IP. But the subsystem, as written in GM Core, doesn’t call for a certain number of IPs, but rather a number of objectives. These two things are convertible one to the other, but more on that in a moment.
Later on pg 5 under Objective, the scenario says “The PCs' objective is to enter Greensteples without being noticed and make it to the second floor (area B). To fulfill this, they'll need to overcome the following obstacles.” This is more consistent with how GM Core defines success in an Infiltration, with a certain set of obstacles. However, the listed obstacles come to a total of 23 IPs (7 IPs worth of group obstacles + 4 IPs worth of individual obstacles x 4 PCs). Obtaining 23 IPs without accruing 15 APs should be very very difficult, given that the recommended APs (in GM Core) is 150% of the needed IPs (I.e. ~34-35 APs).
As for how I plan to actually run this abomination of an encounter…I’ll have to think on it a bit.
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I'm noticing that there is an individual challenge Winding Sewers, that everyone needs to succeed at, that is Lore checks or one of two Hard skill checks. That's going to be basically impossible unless either everyone is Trained or someone is an Expert in one of those two skills. If there are no Experts (for follow the leader) then some or most will be making untrained skill checks, and are likely to crash out the entire infiltration before it even really gets going.
Also, you can only do one Preparation activity. An option is Gossip, which grants a bonus only to further Preparation activities, of which there are none.
So, does this require the party to overcome all obstacles? Or does the GM look at their approach and pick obstacles for them until they reach 10 IP?
Thoughts?
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Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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I think the easiest way to set up this infiltration and come the closest to what seems to be intended and also stick to the Infiltration guidelines is to define a “map” of the obstacles such that each path to the end comprises approximately 10 IPs. This keeps us at (or near anyway) the stated 10 IPs and also takes advantage of the feature of the infiltration system which allows for different PCs to take different paths to complete an objective. Given that the entire set of obstacles is 23 IPs (for 4 players), means that we’re going to have to be ok with going over 10, especially for parties of 5 (27 IPs) or 6 (31 IPs). With only 6 total obstacles, there can’t be too much variation in the paths.
Looking at the obstacles, two of them jump out at me for different reasons. The Library Puzzle Door is notable because the party should be able to try it no matter which path they choose, and I think it should, for narrative reasons, be at or near the end of the sequence of obstacles. The Arnisant Alarm stands out as well, because as an individual obstacle with 2 IPs, it will account for 8 to 12 IPs by itself (for 4 to 6 players respectively). However, a PC can completely bypass that one by playing 3-04. That puts a wrinkle into things that I’m not at all sure how to analyze.
If I’m putting the Arnisant Alarm on a separate path, I should probably put the 2 other 1 IP Individual obstacles on the other path. That accounts for 4 of the 6 obstacles, leaving 2 group obstacles of 2 IPs each. So I split them between the two paths and I’m done.
The two paths are then:
1) Roaming Patrol 2 IP (group)—>Arnisant Alarm 2 IP (individual)—>Library Puzzle Door 3 IP (group)
2) Winding Sewers 1 IP (individual)—>Pit Trap 2 IP (group)—>Imp 1 IP (individual)—>Library Puzzle Door 3 IP (group)
Anyway, those are my thoughts for now. I’ll ruminate about them.
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Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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I'm noticing that there is an individual challenge Winding Sewers, that everyone needs to succeed at, that is Lore checks or one of two Hard skill checks. That's going to be basically impossible unless either everyone is Trained or someone is an Expert in one of those two skills. If there are no Experts (for follow the leader) then some or most will be making untrained skill checks, and are likely to crash out the entire infiltration before it even really gets going.
Also, you can only do one Preparation activity. An option is Gossip, which grants a bonus only to further Preparation activities, of which there are none.
So, does this require the party to overcome all obstacles? Or does the GM look at their approach and pick obstacles for them until they reach 10 IP?
Thoughts?
I’m not seeing where the Gossip preparation is stated to help with other preparations. Did I miss it somewhere?
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Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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Oh, I see. You’re pulling that from GM Core. That’s just an example provided there. It’s not necessarily the same as the one in this scenario. That said, this scenario doesn’t list ANY of the effects of succeeding or failing at the given preparations, so that’s a major failing of the writing/editing. As I suggested above, the simplest thing to do is to award an Edge Point for a successful preparation and leave it at that.
Venture-Captain, California—San Francisco Bay Area North & East
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I ran this last night for 6 players for 34 CR, and the infiltration was a pain. Everybody started the game with 2 hero points. By the end, there was one left on the whole table.
Starting with Preparation: We get to do one activity. Is that the party gets one point for one edge point? Does everyone get to make an attempt for up to 6 edge points? Neither the scenario nor GM core answer this one. I let my party do one attempt (forge documents), which they succeeded at.
Roaming patrol. The group as a whole needs 2 successes. No problem.
Winding Sewers. Every player needs one success. First pass had 3 success and a crit success (which I forgot to apply when we got to B2). One of the others got it on the second try, but the last didn't until their 4th. Still, that's 6 success before 5 failures, so they get the bonus room and knock off 1 AP.
Pit Trap. First guy crit succeeded to spot it. I assume they still need to disarm it to get past, so I had them do that too, no problem.
Arnisant alarm. WOOO BOY! Need 2 successes from every player, using only Arcana or PFS Lore. 2 players had done 3-04, so they're done. One player got success on his first two tries - fine. The last three... Got it on 5th try, 6th try, and 9th try. That's 14 fails JUST on this obstacle. And at 5 and 10 fails, it gets harder. So my last player needed to roll a 16 for each success.
Complication. Doesn't say if this is group or individual. How many successes are needed? Just one for the whole group is all I asked for. - No problem. Back to Anisant.
I ran the A1 fight once they finished Arnisant. Technically they failed the infiltration, but the threat's also gone now. Do they still do the Library Door and the Imps? I decided yes, because you're assumed to have the sword later. They immediately got the 3 party successes with no failures on the door. Imp had most succeed on the first go. One guy on the second, the last on the 4th.
Important takeaway? Don't make kineticists do skill checks.
The rest flowed ok. 4 of the 6 players were intimidate builds, so that got interesting. The CR meant we got real hellknights instead of animated armors, so I didn't even get to be immune to it.
The last fight was rough even if Marious couldn't use his cool trick. We had ZERO casters in the party. But 4 hellknights and 2 named knights is still a lot.
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I do note that if you make every challenge a Group challenge, then suddenly the whole thing is 11 points, which is about right.
Edit: Also, it tells you to use the Preparation activities from GM Core, it doesn't even list skills needed. If it was going to give different results for the checks it should say so.
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Here's what I think are the minimum possible changes to make it make sense and flow, and make the math works:
All individual challenges are now group challenges.
Each character can do one preparation activity. That makes Gossip do something, and doesn't take any more in-world time.
This fixes Gossip doing nothing, and it also means that 10 (or 11) successes gets you through, as it says it should.
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Venture-Agent, Ohio—Columbus
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I do note that if you make every challenge a Group challenge, then suddenly the whole thing is 11 points, which is about right.
Edit: Also, it tells you to use the Preparation activities from GM Core, it doesn't even list skills needed. If it was going to give different results for the checks it should say so.
Ah, yeah, I missed that bit. It’s such a mess. Your solution isn’t bad either, I like it. Though with no individual obstacles you’ll lose any inherent scaling for number of players. I have another week before I’m slated to run it, so I have some time to ponder still.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Played this yesterday, and the infiltration was definitely the low point of the adventure. We made it through okay, but an obviously broken piece of scenario design really sets a bad tone.
For anyone GMing this, I'd really recommend doing what you can to fix it up and showing the players an infiltration that feels like fair tough challenge, not a broken mess.
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Just to point out why it's so broken, if you take it at face value:
- It basically says you need to do all obstacles.
- By GM Core p. 197, Awareness goes up by 1 every round, and on every failed check (2 on crit fail).
- There are six obstacles. One of the individual obstacles needs two successes. It's likely that you need at least 7 rounds even if people mostly succeed at checks.
- It's actually likely that quite a few checks will fail, because there's the checks ask for only a few skills, and at standard or higher DCs. That means that even if someone else passes the obstacle and can Smooth the path, if you were untrained in that skill, you probably also don't have a big ability modifier for it, and your general odds of success are gonna be something like 40% or worse.
- The Arnisant Alarm obstacle is completely bonkers. If you're a level 3 character with 10 int and trained in PFS lore, you have a +5 on that, to hit a DC 20. And you need 2 successes individually. This is crazy.
All in all, the most probable outcome is that people burn a lot of hero points and still fail the infiltration.
The consequence for failing the infiltration is also obscure. You're reasonably likely to accrue 5 IP before 10 AP, because that's basically the case when you've cleared the second obstacle. And that enabled the Pontia's Portrait opportunity. 5 IP is weirdly early since you're nowhere near the library by then.
So if you've gotten as far as that before failing, the only downside to failing the infiltration is fighting a Low difficulty encounter with armigers.
You have to wonder if you're not better off telling the players not to spend hero points on this since it's not worth it...
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So in conclusion: the as-written version of the infiltration is awful. You take a long time to suffer a fairly inconsequential failure.
I agree with the suggestions given by others: just change all the individual obstacles to group obstacles. If you look at what the obstacles represent, this makes sense:
* If one person can find their way through the winding sewers, they can also guide the person next to them.
* If one person can calm down the dog, the dog is calmed down.
* That one random imp roaming the halls? That one you just stuff in a sack and lock it in a closet. It's the complication with the whole group of imps that you need to hide from.
Making these changes, the infiltration does go from ridiculous to kind of easy. But that's not the worst thing. It gives you a bit more time to talk about backstory (check out Hillary's notes), because there is a lot of significant story here. Also, the fights can take a while because the enemies have generous HP and reactive strikes to restrict the party's tactics with.
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Venture-Agent, Netherlands—Leiden
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I ran this on Sunday for Ascalaphus (24 CP). I tried to keep the infiltration somewhat light and fast to try to get to the good parts of the scenario, but there are not really many ways around the poor information you get for it.
The bad
- The theme of the infiltration is clear, but the way it's presented in the scenario is completely crazy. As was mentioned previously, the party has to pass all the obstacles, but at the same time 10 infiltration points is enough? What is the idea here? I ended up doing all the obstacles to give a good impression of what is going on in the manor, and what types of defenses the manor has. Also the libary is somewhat of a mandatory location, since the story can otherwise not progress?
- The high numbers just don't add up: The requested DC and success requirements for the individual challenges are way too high: Having high DCs to achieve as a group is fine, but having them for individual challenges makes no sense. This means that as written, the infiltration is near guaranteed to fail, especially for larger parties for which there doesn't seem to be any modification.
- I really disliked the maps as they don't make sense and are utterly incoherent. I recommend just drawing the outline of the rooms that you need on a blank mat for it to be easier and prettier. As for the final fight, just use almost any cavern map that has a big room. This felt like having to use a map pack for the sake of using one.
The good
- The story itself is cool
- The descriptions of the manor are evocative of how huge it is
- The fights are nice: Especially the final battle had interesting set pieces. From my side it felt like the party was actually fighting soldiers, and that forced them to think a bit differently
Despite my opinion about the infiltration part, I cannot overstate that this is a good scenario, and I figure this is an important one with the Season 7 metaplot coming up. The amount of lore and callbacks in this one are excellent, even though I haven't read the Jagare novels.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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Yeah I did enjoy the scenario a lot. The story requires some background but has really interesting implications.
The fights were pretty spicy. Unlike most scenarios that give you a bunch of enemies to fight, this one didn't feel like the enemies got diluted into irrelevance. Although if you check the numbers on the hellknights, they are High or near Extreme in a lot of key stats, so that's a fit iffy as monster design goes. So count on them being harder than a "Moderate" or "Severe" would normally be.
(I rather enjoyed the fights, felt a lot of other scenarios were not spicy enough.)