Pathfinder Society Season #0 Part 1

I borrowed from a friend a bunch of Pathfinder Society scenarios.  These are the scenarios used in their official Living Golarion campaign, or whatever it is that they call it.  (Actually, I think they just call it the Pathfinder Society.  But it's like the RPGA and Living Greyhawk in structure, more or less.)  There are ten seasons in play already, and another that's partly through (I believe) and each season has somewhere around 25-30 or so scenarios.  I've read, as of this posting, only a few of the scenarios, and I'm not going to specifically "deconstruct" them as I had been doing with the other scenarios and adventure paths; largely because they're too short anyway.  Instead, I'll talk about them briefly.

In general, what I'm finding is that that the scenarios may have an intriguing and interesting high concept, but that they are largely too brief and truncated to really explore it adequately.  With each of them, though, I find my mind wandering while reading them to how this could be fleshed out to a small novella or shorter novel; y'know, like the earlier fantasy novels before the invention of the doorstopper novels that were about 50-80,000 words (200 printed pages or less, most often.)  They have titles that remind me of these kind of lurid neo-pulp novels too.  It's really quite a good idea.  Most of them would work quite well as that kind of thing.  Or, yeah, yeah, I know that they're written to be played in a very strict and controlled format for Society convention play, but for a more loose and normal gaming group attempting to use these, they could stand to be beefed up a bit with more details, more role-playing opportunities, and honestly, more action and adventure; they tend to have only two or three real combat encounters after a little bit of investigation, an extremely brief set-up (like a paragraph or two of expository "box text") and that's it.

And that box text is often quite silly.  Check out this brief sample: "You wonder how you ended up here, standing at the precipice of unknown terrors, and instantly Venture-Captain Adril Hestram’s wide looming face is conjured into your minds’ eye. His booming words ring out from memory as clearly as he spoke them only one hour ago." Worst infodump excuse I've ever read.

One interesting thing that they all do, though, is that the players are expected to belong to a "faction"; i.e., they are meant to be not only newly minted junior Pathfinder Society members (in game, not the Pathfinder Society RPGA organization), but also agents of sorts of their respective nationalities, and there is a separate mini-mission for each faction that PCs from that faction are expected to do as well.  By and large, while I think this idea is actually kind of brilliant, the actual mini-missions are kind of silly and poorly thought out. Some are even embarrassingly stupid (especially the Andoran ones, because Andoran is a stupid idea as a concept in a fantasy setting anyway.) However, I think the idea of each member of an ensemble cast having their own agenda besides just the "group" agenda makes for a much richer experience.

So yeah—in all, an interesting experiment for a person who just has normal gaming rather than Society play, but just a bit inadequate for that purpose.  Anyway, the ones I've read so far include:

1. Silent Tide—there's an old bit of history at work here; a Taldan armada had attempted to attack Absalom, but it ended in disaster, and the the armada was sunk.  However, the oaths that the sailors and marines of the armada took mean that with the right stimulus, they can return from the dead to complete their work.  A guy has accidentally kicked off exactly that, and then a crime lord took control of the artifacts that cause it and is attempting to use it himself.  The PCs have to run around town a bit to stop the undead army from invading the city.
2. The Hydra's Fang Incident—the wastrel third son of a Chelish noble has become a notorious pirate and now he's an embarrassment to his family and his nation, and is on the verge of sparking a war between Cheliax and Andoran.  Luckily, he's in port on Diobel, the smaller town on the other side of the island from Absalom notorious as a smuggling town. so you can go kill the guy and stop the war before it happens.
3. Murder on the Silken Caravan—just when I thought that the whole point of the season was to be agents in and around Absalom, you're meant to accompany the funeral procession of a dead Pathfinder deep into Qadira with a caravan.  Turns out that there's a guy who's using goblin and harpy bandits to harass and rob these caravans, and you're supposed to get to the bottom of it.  And the lady running the caravan turns out to be a janni and the dead Pathfinder's companion.
4. Frozen Fingers of Midnight—A Varangian guard type guy is also secretly a Pathfinder.  He's been cursed with some kind of freezing curse, and it turns out that an old enemy has done this to him.  He's entreated for help from the Pathfinders, but was unable to warn them that his personal retinue has been replaced by imposters.  Anyway, he's "rescued", his enemy, who's in town, is tracked down and killed, and then a magical portal takes the PCs to the frozen ship of his kinda sorta common law wife, who can remove the curse.  She didn't put it on him; in fact, she seems to actually kinda like him, but she needed the artifact you recovered from his enemy to end all this.
5. Mists of Mwangi—Some demonic monkey idols brought back from the jungles of Mwangi to a museum in Absalom have unleashed a curse on the museum.  Mists which cause madness have affected the museum staff, turning them violently insane.  Also, the Ape God has called monkeys, apes, baboons and more from the menageries's throughout Absalom, who are here under it's thrall.  And, it's even animated some mummies and other undead in the museum's collection.  Infiltrate the museum, destroy the idols, rescue any survivors, and end the curse.