Pathfinder Scarwall
Jul. 3rd, 2020 08:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI just finished reading the section of Curse of the Crimson Throne set in Scarwall, and I've got to say I'm not impressed.
The writers didnt seem sure of its place either, there's a whole section at the end about how to make it quicker, easier, and less annoying.
They just plonked a dungeon crawl in the middle of the adventure. It doesnt have seperate sections and goals and missions, like you've been doing so far. It has a whole castle of things to kill, and it says something like it tries to reward a room by room search with something to find everywhere, but what that means is it's difficult to speed run without the GM changing things.
And there arent many characters here you can talk to. If the GM likes doing the voices and interacting with PCs as characters then even the GM will get bored as it all gets game mechanical.
Plus it keeps doing the thing where you're supposed to get PCs to roll a d then either nothing happens or a 'phantasm' happens, that being a hallucination only one PC experiences. It does specify they snap out of it before using up any spells or consumables but that's just bloody annoying. It's there to wind the *players* up, not just their characters.
There are a couple of different libraries and several rooms with scrolls, but the only way you can find things out about the history of the castle is to walk into phantasms and haunts. Books often just crumble away. And there's things where I don't see how the characters learn them anyway.
There are encounters that are super easy, but only if you do things in a very specific order, and I feel that's just frustrating. How are the pcs going to divine that? I mean they have spells but are they really going to be so specific as to tell them which door or room number goes first? So then there's these clever bits built in that the pcs are only going to see if they're incredibly lucky *players*, and again, that dont seem the right way around.
Obviously if you the gm want to get that specific with divined advice you can.
But I dont see this castle as being maximum fun without being maximum cheat sheet, and that's a problem.
I do see how they were trying for and achieving a particular spooky atmosphere. A lot of grisly things happened and the characters walk into the undead consequences. Very thematic.
I dont see how it ties in with Korvosa real well, and indeed the last section has advice on how to handle it if your PCs wonder what is happening in Korvosa. But that advice is to run bits of the chapters before and after out of sequence, and use high level travel magic to get back and forth. The game does hand the pcs teleport options, and potential shadow walk allies, but it's still not the most obvious thing. Here's a castle very far away, here's an adventure that will get very repetitive unless you ignore it intermittently to go do something else. That seems a bit not good.
There's probably ways to play the undead that makes the whole thing just as interactive as the other bits. Probably.
But another thing that bothered me was there's times the pcs are either in a bad corner of very difficult things to do, or they're assumed to have teamed up with Evil. Like there's times that things will work a lot easier for them if they work with evil priests of evil gods. Which is not a set of choices that I personally want to reward.
BUT it is the only way to set one of them on a path to redemption. There's a possibility of converting them. Which is grand. Good stuff. If you think of it, you could recruit them.
So I guess it's only the way it's presented that bothers me. Of course trying to turn evil people into good people is a good set of choices.
... it's just if it works too early they're going to have all the aame problems as if they had just killed everyone and got on with things.
... which is why the game doesnt give that option early.
Having read Scarwall it seems like a different adventure. It's full of lore and presents one corner of the Inner Sea vividly, and you really get a sense of what the Big Bad was like, just from what he left in his wake. But there's no diplomacy to be done and any friends to be made are Evil.
So having a section of options to make it shorter seems pretty handy.
Which isnt exactly exciting.
Oh well. If I liked fiddly maps and lots of different undead I'd like it better. As is I got annoyed trying to make the maps go together in my head.
Any one section of it was proper spooky challenges
but all in a row I wanted to get back to the story.
The writers didnt seem sure of its place either, there's a whole section at the end about how to make it quicker, easier, and less annoying.
They just plonked a dungeon crawl in the middle of the adventure. It doesnt have seperate sections and goals and missions, like you've been doing so far. It has a whole castle of things to kill, and it says something like it tries to reward a room by room search with something to find everywhere, but what that means is it's difficult to speed run without the GM changing things.
And there arent many characters here you can talk to. If the GM likes doing the voices and interacting with PCs as characters then even the GM will get bored as it all gets game mechanical.
Plus it keeps doing the thing where you're supposed to get PCs to roll a d then either nothing happens or a 'phantasm' happens, that being a hallucination only one PC experiences. It does specify they snap out of it before using up any spells or consumables but that's just bloody annoying. It's there to wind the *players* up, not just their characters.
There are a couple of different libraries and several rooms with scrolls, but the only way you can find things out about the history of the castle is to walk into phantasms and haunts. Books often just crumble away. And there's things where I don't see how the characters learn them anyway.
There are encounters that are super easy, but only if you do things in a very specific order, and I feel that's just frustrating. How are the pcs going to divine that? I mean they have spells but are they really going to be so specific as to tell them which door or room number goes first? So then there's these clever bits built in that the pcs are only going to see if they're incredibly lucky *players*, and again, that dont seem the right way around.
Obviously if you the gm want to get that specific with divined advice you can.
But I dont see this castle as being maximum fun without being maximum cheat sheet, and that's a problem.
I do see how they were trying for and achieving a particular spooky atmosphere. A lot of grisly things happened and the characters walk into the undead consequences. Very thematic.
I dont see how it ties in with Korvosa real well, and indeed the last section has advice on how to handle it if your PCs wonder what is happening in Korvosa. But that advice is to run bits of the chapters before and after out of sequence, and use high level travel magic to get back and forth. The game does hand the pcs teleport options, and potential shadow walk allies, but it's still not the most obvious thing. Here's a castle very far away, here's an adventure that will get very repetitive unless you ignore it intermittently to go do something else. That seems a bit not good.
There's probably ways to play the undead that makes the whole thing just as interactive as the other bits. Probably.
But another thing that bothered me was there's times the pcs are either in a bad corner of very difficult things to do, or they're assumed to have teamed up with Evil. Like there's times that things will work a lot easier for them if they work with evil priests of evil gods. Which is not a set of choices that I personally want to reward.
BUT it is the only way to set one of them on a path to redemption. There's a possibility of converting them. Which is grand. Good stuff. If you think of it, you could recruit them.
So I guess it's only the way it's presented that bothers me. Of course trying to turn evil people into good people is a good set of choices.
... it's just if it works too early they're going to have all the aame problems as if they had just killed everyone and got on with things.
... which is why the game doesnt give that option early.
Having read Scarwall it seems like a different adventure. It's full of lore and presents one corner of the Inner Sea vividly, and you really get a sense of what the Big Bad was like, just from what he left in his wake. But there's no diplomacy to be done and any friends to be made are Evil.
So having a section of options to make it shorter seems pretty handy.
Which isnt exactly exciting.
Oh well. If I liked fiddly maps and lots of different undead I'd like it better. As is I got annoyed trying to make the maps go together in my head.
Any one section of it was proper spooky challenges
but all in a row I wanted to get back to the story.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-03 11:22 am (UTC)but it's not about recruiting them, they try and recruit you.
It's not an opportunity to use your mighty diplomacy to sway someone to the cause of good, it's an opportunity to decide that working with torturers isnt really such a bad thing if you all want to kill the same people
which is a very different moral starting point.