petrea_mitchell (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
petrea_mitchell) wrote2020-09-11 06:41 pm
petrea_mitchell) wrote2020-09-11 06:41 pm
Adventure log: Overleveled Edition
In which a scenario has A Reputation, and there is a detour into art criticism...
PFS2 #1-18: Lodge of the Living God (Zuzzak): The Pathfinders have been banned from Razmiran, the land of the Living God, for 50 years, but suddenly they're invited in to establish a new lodge. The site just needs a little fixing up. And it also happens to sit on the border between Razmiran and the kingdom which was just reclaimed by a powerful necromancer.
The GM announced at the start of the game that this scenario has "a bit of a reputation" and that he was giving it a try as a challenge to himself. The reputation is for running very long, and yeah, I can see how. There is a section with the sort of skill challenge where the party members have to distribute themselves onto different tasks, which always takes about three times as long as you'd expect, plus in this case some of the tasks have dependencies on each other.
We managed to complete the scenario in just under 4 hours (the typical time allotted for one of these scenarios being 4-5 hours). This may have been partly due to the GM, but the party managed to work together on the tasks better than most I've been in. We were helped a lot by the fact that in Roll20 you can scribble on the screen, so we were able to start adding our own annotations about what was getting unlocked and what still needed to be done.
As Zuzzak's first outing, not quite as thrilling as I'd hoped, since she came ready to strike her enemies down with plague and most of the enemies were resistant to disease.
PFS2 #1-25: Grim Symphony (Losseyel): The Grand Archive faction has heard of a priceless ancient library buried in an abandoned keep in Ustalav. Having traded a few favors for the deed to the place, the Society sends a party in to reconnoiter the library and clear out any squatters the keep may have attracted. Of course there are squatters.
This was a fun one. It leans hard into horror tropes, to the point where someone commented early on that now all we needed was the voice of Vincent Price providing narration. It posed creative problems, including a clever trap that made us glad we had no heavy fighter types in the party (frontline duties were split between a monk and my increasingly tanky wizard).
This also has my favorite cover art of any 2e adventure yet. Mostly you get a random monster or a character just standing there looking at you, but this one says that you are up for an interesting time with this dude. I asked the GM who was credited with it, but there are just boilerplate credits which don't tell you who exactly drew what. Oh well.
I'd been wondering if it might have been the same artist who did the portrait of the final boss in Flames of Rebellion, because that was another one which was... well, "dynamic" isn't the word, since the final boss is extremely bored. But the portrait communicates that boredom very well.
PFS2 #1-03: Escaping the Grave (Yara): When the necromancer mentioned above returned, his forces overran an area where some Pathfinder agents were known to be working. The party is sent to find those agents... or their remains... and get out before the undead army starts noticing.
This one has a time limit enforced by something really, extraordinarily bad happening if the party chooses to dawdle too long. Luckily we did not.
PFS2 #1-13: Devil at the Crossroads (Losseyel): Old allies of the Society ask for help, so the party is sent to meet their representative at a trading post, where things rapidly become more complicated.
I was very excited for this one since it's tagged for the Vigilant Seal, Losseyel's faction, and because any appearance of devils means a possible opportunity for fantasy lawyering. Alas, it turned into more of a murder mystery for a while, and it overall felt like a long grind. Partly that was the structure of the scenario, but partly also that we had a slow GM (who, to be fair, seemed to be dealing with some distractions at home). It took almost 6 hours to get through.
PFS2 #2-02: Mountain of Sea and Sky (Losseyel): Again looking for opportunities to expand, the Society has found an opportunity through an ex-Pathfinder to build a new lodge in Tian Xia (fantasy eastern Asia). This site also needs some fixing up, but in a rather more magical way.
Great use of non-Western mythology here, and also excellent graphical aids for doing the skill encounters. Back in July, Paizo ran a survey about skill check encounters on VTTs, looking for feedback on what was working and what wasn't. I'm not sure if the turnaround time for scenario art means this could have been influenced by the results of the survey, but I'd like to think it was and that we'll be seeing more like this in the future.
And with that, Losseyel is up to 7th level. I've already played the three scenarios that allow for 7th-level characters, so she has to wait until another 5th-8th level scenario turns up.
I never managed to get a character up to a level where they ran out of adventures in 1st edition, so this is a weird feeling.
PFS2 #1-18: Lodge of the Living God (Zuzzak): The Pathfinders have been banned from Razmiran, the land of the Living God, for 50 years, but suddenly they're invited in to establish a new lodge. The site just needs a little fixing up. And it also happens to sit on the border between Razmiran and the kingdom which was just reclaimed by a powerful necromancer.
The GM announced at the start of the game that this scenario has "a bit of a reputation" and that he was giving it a try as a challenge to himself. The reputation is for running very long, and yeah, I can see how. There is a section with the sort of skill challenge where the party members have to distribute themselves onto different tasks, which always takes about three times as long as you'd expect, plus in this case some of the tasks have dependencies on each other.
We managed to complete the scenario in just under 4 hours (the typical time allotted for one of these scenarios being 4-5 hours). This may have been partly due to the GM, but the party managed to work together on the tasks better than most I've been in. We were helped a lot by the fact that in Roll20 you can scribble on the screen, so we were able to start adding our own annotations about what was getting unlocked and what still needed to be done.
As Zuzzak's first outing, not quite as thrilling as I'd hoped, since she came ready to strike her enemies down with plague and most of the enemies were resistant to disease.
PFS2 #1-25: Grim Symphony (Losseyel): The Grand Archive faction has heard of a priceless ancient library buried in an abandoned keep in Ustalav. Having traded a few favors for the deed to the place, the Society sends a party in to reconnoiter the library and clear out any squatters the keep may have attracted. Of course there are squatters.
This was a fun one. It leans hard into horror tropes, to the point where someone commented early on that now all we needed was the voice of Vincent Price providing narration. It posed creative problems, including a clever trap that made us glad we had no heavy fighter types in the party (frontline duties were split between a monk and my increasingly tanky wizard).
This also has my favorite cover art of any 2e adventure yet. Mostly you get a random monster or a character just standing there looking at you, but this one says that you are up for an interesting time with this dude. I asked the GM who was credited with it, but there are just boilerplate credits which don't tell you who exactly drew what. Oh well.
I'd been wondering if it might have been the same artist who did the portrait of the final boss in Flames of Rebellion, because that was another one which was... well, "dynamic" isn't the word, since the final boss is extremely bored. But the portrait communicates that boredom very well.
PFS2 #1-03: Escaping the Grave (Yara): When the necromancer mentioned above returned, his forces overran an area where some Pathfinder agents were known to be working. The party is sent to find those agents... or their remains... and get out before the undead army starts noticing.
This one has a time limit enforced by something really, extraordinarily bad happening if the party chooses to dawdle too long. Luckily we did not.
PFS2 #1-13: Devil at the Crossroads (Losseyel): Old allies of the Society ask for help, so the party is sent to meet their representative at a trading post, where things rapidly become more complicated.
I was very excited for this one since it's tagged for the Vigilant Seal, Losseyel's faction, and because any appearance of devils means a possible opportunity for fantasy lawyering. Alas, it turned into more of a murder mystery for a while, and it overall felt like a long grind. Partly that was the structure of the scenario, but partly also that we had a slow GM (who, to be fair, seemed to be dealing with some distractions at home). It took almost 6 hours to get through.
PFS2 #2-02: Mountain of Sea and Sky (Losseyel): Again looking for opportunities to expand, the Society has found an opportunity through an ex-Pathfinder to build a new lodge in Tian Xia (fantasy eastern Asia). This site also needs some fixing up, but in a rather more magical way.
Great use of non-Western mythology here, and also excellent graphical aids for doing the skill encounters. Back in July, Paizo ran a survey about skill check encounters on VTTs, looking for feedback on what was working and what wasn't. I'm not sure if the turnaround time for scenario art means this could have been influenced by the results of the survey, but I'd like to think it was and that we'll be seeing more like this in the future.
And with that, Losseyel is up to 7th level. I've already played the three scenarios that allow for 7th-level characters, so she has to wait until another 5th-8th level scenario turns up.
I never managed to get a character up to a level where they ran out of adventures in 1st edition, so this is a weird feeling.