Spore War End of campaign review.

[Mark Reyes]

Being not as bad as Wardens of Wildwood isn't really were I would want to be. I'm writing this so the rest of our group can put in their two cents. I personally would have likes some war in my spore war. Choices for my triumph points. Either spend them or lose more TP kind of remove the choice. We had fun but it sounded like my GM had to do some serious heavy lifting to make this make sense let alone work. This AP likely could use a single vision when it comes to the writing.

[ScottDestro8]

Pretty standard Paizo adventure, though nothing big and special to make it feel unique from any other high level game. The themes of being a big conflict never really felt present, just background noise to be mentioned here and there. The war interludes didn’t really change that feeling, they were just reminders that other interesting stuff was happening elsewhere, though without much ingrained ways to interact with that stuff. Not a bad adventure, fun for learning about all the nations and big enemies around the lake, though I think the campaign specific mechanics could have been done a bit better to make it more unique.

[shroudb]

Overall I did enjoy the campaign.

The most important thing imo to enjoy the campaign is to throw away the "war" part of the title from your mind.

As long as you accept that you are just a cov.ops team and not directly involved with the war combats that are happening, it's better.

To that effect, it plays and feels more as a standard "do missions to thwart the evil bbeg plan" rather than "fight and win a war".

There were some plotholes, but not as egregious as Wardens, and for some of them you could find "solutions" without too much suspension of disbelief.

As per usual, there were more "research subsystems" that there should be, and more importantly a lot of them broke the pacing or required you to do them when other stuff were of much more "urgent" priority. BUT, some of them (like the infiltration) were ok.

The worst system in the campaign were the Victory points. War interludes had so massive downsides that at no point "not spending a point" was to be considered as an actual option.

RP wise, I know our GM, alongside other GMs, had a heavy hand in giving personality to the various representatives, but it was a great success and I enjoyed my time interacting with them throughout the campaign.

Combats were enjoyable and varied, even though the type of enemies was restricted due to the theme, it didn't feel stale at all.

I enjoyed the relics, and the opportunity to interact with them as NPCs lead to some funny instances. Power wise, they did help a lot with the feeling of power you would expect from a level 20 campaign, but they weren't really balanced against each other, with some of them having much more powerful abilities compared to some of the others.

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Overall, I'd give the campaign a solid 7/10

[Nisviik]

I enjoyed my time playing in Spore War however this was in spite of all the flaws and problems the AP (Adventure Path) had.

It has some of the worst implementation of subsystems I've ever seen in APs. All of the research subsystems were terrible. There was either too much time constrains that it didn't make sense for you to stop fighting to research for an hour, or you had limitless time so it was meaningless to require rolls since you could retry over and over.
The War Interludes is the worst offender of this in my opinion. It is supposed to be a system where you choose to spend a Triumph Point or not and suffer the consequences of that, however all of the interludes were either spend 1 point then something good happens or don't spend the point but then you lost 1 or maybe even 2 points anyway. So there was never any reason to think about what you would choose.

On the other hand, the Infiltration subsystem implementations were actually quite good. I enjoyed them quite a lot.

The best part of Spore War was probably all the interactions we had with various other factions throughout the campaign, and it was nice to see that all the diplomacy in the beginning had some payouts near the end.

Sadly you're never a part of any war throughout the campaign, and you're more of a special forces that go deep into enemy territory to do stuff, and as long as you're fine with that and don't care about being in a massive war, you might enjoy these missions since they're kind of fun.

I had already ran some oneshots where PCs killed the Treerazer, and from those experiences I knew that Treerazer wasn't actually that hard of a fight. But for some reason the AP actually gives you a ton of buffs, some of them are passive and some of them that you can use by spending some points you get in the 3rd book, and these are quite broken, and I firmly believe a smart party could abuse these to oneshot or one-turn Treerazer.
We didn't actually get to use these even though I was shouting at them to use the points but they wanted to keep it for later, and the Treerazer died before my 2nd turn came up because the Fighter got a crit after the two casters dealt 200-ish dmg between them.

I enjoyed playing in this campaign, but I can't say it is one of the good APs of PF2e.

[UpliftedBearBramble]

So all in all, pretty much what I predicted. I made sure to do a 9 hour discussion alongside Mythkeeper and Podfinder alongside Ironbear and LonewolfMCQuade so that we had a solid understanding of the Campaign. Everything was slated out ahead of time and people who had a better grasp of the triumph point system and tally were showing the completely optimized results in discord, as I did for the initial book 1 delegation which is also posted here in the GM prep threads. We touched on every NPC and decision the players could meet and make, and collectively made the experience for these four players above me. Full playthrough on the channel.

About a total of 100 hours of play(26 Sessions), and 30 worth of prep in all. Some sessions were just Subsystem play where I had to make visual elements to go alongside the narrative otherwise I’d risk loosing the players to a second monitor, or a phone.

This is where the real problem of Sporewars is, falsely advertised as the war with the demon lord and ends up being a boring logistical war with nothing before the climatic moment of the final battle which is over too soon. Killing the Spore Queen was a better battle, and kept the players engrossed more than Treerazer. There were too many buffs, too many bonuses, the legendary weapons made them better than even a mythic character that needs to spend points to that effect.

I don’t think the developer actually understood what they wanted from this other than commissioned artwork for a character they made, and that’s the best thing that came out of this AP in the end. It’s a huge cliffhanger for the Whispering Tyrant- only to give a teaser artwork at the end of it all.

I don’t have the same nostalgia glasses as many pf1e fans, I only came to pf2e because of the WOTC issues- and I can see this isn’t a story the players make and shape- it’s simply a list of missions on behalf of an already written narrative that they cannot fail unless they refuse to engage the subsystems or war interludes at all. At that point, they fight Treerazer like many players have done before this AP as level 20 characters, and still win.

The set dressing is nice, but you end up lacking a huge part of the action that is promised with the bad choice of title.

I hope this shows that you do not need to play through a module to give constructive feedback. Experienced DMs can smell the page filler a mile away. Requiring a complete playthrough to review an AP is ridiculous when people can read for themselves and determine what will work, and what’s there to pad out the page space.

[Nisviik]

Nisviik wrote:

I enjoyed my time playing in Spore War however this was in spite of all the flaws and problems the AP (Adventure Path) had.

It has some of the worst implementation of subsystems I've ever seen in APs. All of the research subsystems were terrible. There was either too much time constrains that it didn't make sense for you to stop fighting to research for an hour, or you had limitless time so it was meaningless to require rolls since you could retry over and over.
The War Interludes is the worst offender of this in my opinion. It is supposed to be a system where you choose to spend a Triumph Point or not and suffer the consequences of that, however all of the interludes were either spend 1 point then something good happens or don't spend the point but then you lost 1 or maybe even 2 points anyway. So there was never any reason to think about what you would choose.

On the other hand, the Infiltration subsystem implementations were actually quite good. I enjoyed them quite a lot.

The best part of Spore War was probably all the interactions we had with various other factions throughout the campaign, and it was nice to see that all the diplomacy in the beginning had some payouts near the end.

Sadly you're never a part of any war throughout the campaign, and you're more of a special forces that go deep into enemy territory to do stuff, and as long as you're fine with that and don't care about being in a massive war, you might enjoy these missions since they're kind of fun.

I had already ran some oneshots where PCs killed the Treerazer, and from those experiences I knew that Treerazer wasn't actually that hard of a fight. But for some reason the AP actually gives you a ton of buffs, some of them are passive and some of them that you can use by spending some points you get in the 3rd book, and these are quite broken, and I firmly believe a smart party could abuse these to oneshot or one-turn Treerazer.
We didn't actually get to use these even though I was shouting at them to use the points but they...

I did forget to mention one important thing that is nice about the campaign. The artifacts you get are really powerful and made me feel like a mythical hero, better than any 2e mythic game I've played or ran. I used the soulcutter and while most of its activations are okay, Shame Demon was always fun to use, and the passive bonuses you get from Heroic Artifacts are just amazing. So well done on that part.