I’m having issues with uploading images to the blog’s server. That’s why this one actually points to Paizo’s site…
I’m going to take a different approach with this series of review. While I’ll still list what’s in the adventure, I’ll add more of a review element to it.
Paizo started publishing their own 3.5 OGL compatible (they can’t say D&D anymore) Adventure Path when Wizards of the Coast revoked the Dungeon Magazine license last year.
Pathfinder #7 marks the start of the second campaign arc. This one is set in the Varisian city of Korsova. The adventure is called Edge of Anarchy and is designed for a party of 4 level 1 PC that should take them to level 4.
Adventure Synopsis (SPOILER ALERT SKIP TO NEXT SECTION):
The players are brought together to bring to justice an old nemesis shared by all. In the nemesis lair they find an object that belongs to the city’s young Queen mourning her dead husband.
After returning the Mac Guffin, the PCs are invited to join the Royal City Guards to help prevent the shocked city from falling into anarchy. Many adventures ensue and PCs get mixed with more and more trouble like chasing the king’s presumed assassin, trying to avoid a war with the regions’ barbarians and dealing with an infamous masked outlaw hero.
High level critique (Oops slight spoilers here too)
I haven’t read the whole adventure yet, writen by Nicolas Logue, author of the Hook Mountain Massacre (the one with the depraved Hillbilly Ogres), but I started reading the first few encounters.
The style is very engaging and this is one of those adventures that reads almost like a novel. It alternates Event based encounters with short (5 to 10 room) site-based ones like many good city-based adventures do.
Now I know that all adventure paths are somewhat railroady (it’s a path after all). Regardless, I am worried that this one might be a bit much for freedom-loving players and I find it that it assumes a lot of things.
First assumption is that players will accept to take the traits that the Player’s Guide propose to link them with a common nemesis… if they don’t the 1st encounter fails and the DM must rework the whole introduction…
In fact, I’m a bit disappointed that such a great idea (the traits and background presented in the guide) gets used up completely in the adventure’s 1st scene. Unless I’m in for a surprise later in the adventure or the series, that nemesis never comes back. Pity.
The second assumption is that after dealing with the nemesis in whatever way the PCs decided upon and playing around in a city gone mad with it’s monarch’s death, they will naturally all band around the stolen Mac Guffin and return it to the queen…
I don’t know about you but that’s a risky bet. And there the adventure uses a few classic techniques that more or less results in all of the city’s fences closing up as the PCs approach and putting up signs saying ‘this way to the Castle’.
One element of this adventure may however smooth out the things that worry me here. The whole adventure path is flavoured (yes mr. spell checker… we use the ‘ou’ in Canuck land) with the concept of the Harrow deck (available at Paizo, but with a free alternative presented in the current issue) which is a fantasy adaptation of the Tarot deck.
The deck has 6 suits representing D&D’s core abilities (Str, Dex, Wis, etc) and the 9 alignments. Each adventures of this path assume (again) that the party (as a single entity) will get a Harrow reading that will foreshadow the upcoming challenges they will meet.
The reading consists of picking a ‘chosen’ card (like the figures in tarot) and then get a nine card spreads based on the alignment grid that represents concepts like Positive Past (Lawful good) to Unclear Present (True Neutral) to Negative Future (Chaotic Evil)
The harrow rules seem to be another set of those good fluff/crunch combos that Tommi has talked about before (like life paths in some games). A skillful DM can use Harrow to weave a believable divinatory reading (being both vague and accurate) much more easily than with any other tools offered in the Players Hanbook’s descriptions of divination magic.
That’s not all, each adventure has a suit associated to it (Edge of Anarchy is Dex) and each player gets a set of ‘harrow points’ equal to the number of cards of that suit played in the spread. These points can be used to reroll Dex related rolls (like initiative, Dex-based Skills, Dex modified attacks… etc) or get dodge bonuses to AC for a full encounter.
That’s very very cool!
So I think that if played correctly by a creative DM and if the players buy-in the Harrow playing scene the adventure can work really well.
Still that’s a lot of ‘if’s.
Phonetics aside: Are Harrow and Tarot pronounced the same in English? In French Tarot is actually pronounced Tah-row.
All in all, the adventure seems to be a great read and the background it is built around makes for a classic Heroes vs political Mastermind villain campaign. I’m no fan of published city-based adventures and this one has caught my interest in the 1st paragraph of it’s background.
Breakdown of Issue #7:
- Foreword: Where editor James Jacob talks about Nicolas Logue’s mad writing skillz, the challenge of setting an adventure in a large city (buy the city guide he says!) and then points out a few of the changes the Pathfinder magazine has seen (It’s freaking RED!!!).
- The Edge of Anarchy: A 52 page adventure that throws some heroic native of a royal city in the chaos caused by the death of a heirless king.
- Harrow: A 6 page essay that explains how to play Harrow without the deck published by Paizo (good call, but awkward unless a very creative DM crafts his own deck with Photoshop!)
- People of the Road: An 8 page gazeteer essay on the Nomadic Varisians.
- Pathfinder’s journal: A 6 page fiction-like journal of a legendary Pathfinder
- Beastiary: 14 pages of monsters by Nicolas Logue featuring:
- Sewer Random encounter chart (BTW anyone still uses those in general? I’m curious)
- The Carrion Golem: A cheap, CR 4 disease-ridden Flesh Golem. Way Cool
- The Devil Fish: A CR 4 Horse-sized squid-like mass of teeth and hooks complete with Fishing stories!
- Dream Spider: A CR 1/2 critter. The web cause hallucination. I love spiders, you can never have too many spiders in that game! Heck, I’d call my version of 3.5 OGL fantasy “Sewers & Spiders”!
- Soulbound Doll: A tiny very cute manga-like doll animated with a fragment of a creature’s soul… freaky!
- Raktavarna: A surprise monster (I won’t spoil it)…. very clever.
- Reefclaw: a CR 1 child-sized Lobster-eel! Again with Fishing stories about some reaching the size of a Giant!
There you have it… All within 2 days of delivery!
Have a great weekend all!
Good review, and that sounds like a 100% freakin’ rockin’ hella cool adventure. Paizo do D&D better than WoTC right now; it’s official. Wizards are turning into the Microsoft by-the-numbers-and-marketing dark side, with Paizo the imaginitive rough and tumble look-ma-free-rulez Linux crowd. Gotta love it.
Yes, Harrow and Tarot rhyme with sparrow and marrow. Make up your own poem. Go wild.
Me, I’d run this adventure like a tale straight from the Three Musketeers. A dying king, a queen in mourning, a nemesis and the City Guards. Pure rapiers at dawn, fluffy cuffs and all 😀
And that, my friend, is my kinda D&D.
Thanks oh Grey one.
It does have a Dumasesque feel to it…
When the king dies, the streets of Korsova ring with fighting cries of ‘long live the Queen’ and ‘Death to the Whore!’
So expect beaucoup de twists in the plot department of that series.
My players love random encounters. They like some plot exposition, a bit of NPC talk, and soon enough a player will say: “Hey, how about a random encounter!! Haven’t we been down here long enough!? I hope I didn’t bring my dice in vain… Hey! Roll for initiative already!!”
Anyway, at least that’s what they do in my weekly game.
In that case I can totally see the utility of Published adventures providing random encounter tables adjusted to the local setting and stories.
I never use them because I like a tighter control on the story… While my players love fighting a lot, they prefer that fights ‘unlock’ the next cut-scene so to speak…
I’m a great fan of the Random Encounter, especially during prep-time when I can pull the required stats together in advance. It keeps the players guessing if they don’t know which encounters are planned, and which are just dungeon dressing. Random encounters help to break down even the most linear of plotline, and can take the game in wonderfully unexpected directions. That’s cool, provided they don’t derail the game too much – I remember one session where I had the players spot a (random) young black dragon passing high overhead. It took a LOT of persuasion to stop the players head off on a dragonhunt there and then! 😀 In the end they agreed to continue their designated quest, and follow the dragonflight another time. That gave me time to plan, and it became another session later in the campaign.
Give me the Mother of All Encounter Tables (http://www.trolllord.com/newsite/d20/ngu1.html) and I’m a happy bunny. I’ve used that book to pre-populate entire regions, and it’s fun explaining why a small Cloud Giant tribe is settling right next to a zombi infested swamp……..
During a game, I’ll roll for random encounters during breaks in play where possible and fold them into the game. Sometimes it’s just a case of grabbing a handful of stats from another encounter (all goblins look the same, right?) and tossing ’em at the players once more. Hey, anything to keep the action going 🙂