Pathfinder Society scenarios season 2 part 2

 Here we go again. After another delay.

6. The Heresy of Man Part 1: The First Heresy. This one is part one of three, and has to do with the godless (by strict law) nation of Rahadoum. Some plague or somesuch has hit the nation, and because they don't have clerics, it's a problem. None of that really matters, though—the point is that you're smuggling a guy into the country through the sea caves under a castle as the tide is rising. One of the Shadow Lodge traitors has tipped off the local authorities, so you have to avoid or fight them while going deeper into the coastal caves that are filling with water, to find that they are haunted. I dislike the set-up rationale for this adventure, but the adventure itself is a nice, brief smuggling action scenario.
7. The Heresy of Man Part 2: Where Dark Things Sleep. This is the direct follow-up, and it turns out that the plague was unleashed by the Pathfinders themselves when they stumbled into the tomb of some undead weirdo. You are immediately whisked away to the tomb to clean up the mess. What follows is a rather boring little dungeon-crawl heavily focused on riddles, one of my least favorite things of dungeon-crawling play.
8. The Sarkorian Prophecy. This is a kind of interesting one, with some hostile wilderness exploration in the Worldwound, encounters with geysers, sandstorms, etc. and a night hag to start us off, before facing down Shadow Lodge traitors who are attempting to steal the very thing that you were also sent to recover. I appreciate the complete and utter lack of a dungeon to crawl, although as is always the case for these, when there's more context, we're not given much to work with and the module ends up feeling smaller than its promise. Also not sure why this one is inserted between the Heresy of Man episodes, since it obviously has nothing to do with them at all.
9. The Heresy of Man Part 3: Beneath Forgotten Sands. This is the third, and I believe final, part of the "Heresy of Man" series. It is a desert buried ruin, with evil genie related threats in it, and you're chasing a rival band of Shadow Lodge guys... who don't actually do anything except, I guess, add a sense of the clock ticking? You never actually encounter any of them except a few hired workers. I found myself subconsciously with Arabian Niiiights stuck in my head while reading it. It's a serviceable enough little dungeon crawl, with lava elementals and a genie version of a succubus, etc. but I admit I'm not even sure after reading it what the point was. I think maybe there was an artifact you were trying to recover or something.  
10. Fury of the Fiend. This is actually a sequel to Fingerprints of the Fiend from way back in Season 0, if anyone remembers that one. It's an ambitious module, and like most ambitious season modules, it's too small to do its ambition justice. At heart, it's a damsel in distress rescue mission, but you start off having to impersonate a hellknight, convince people to let you go rescue the damsels in distress, and then you go fight haunts, morlocks, a demonic cleric and a retriever. While it's obviously pretty railroady, the concept isn't bad, but it just needs to be expanded to full module size. These seasonal mini-modules are just too small to actually allow this module to do everything it's trying to do.
11. The Penumbral Accords. This is a quick and dirty, no frills rescue the damsel(s) in distress (twin girls, in this case) who are being transported to Shadow Plane slavery. A museum in Absalom has a once annually conjunction with the Shadow Plane, and the PCs infiltrate it, find the girls (and any other slaves, I suppose) and destroy the device that causes the conjunction. The Shadow Plane version of the museum is more of a mad scientist torture chamber kind of thing, and there's shadowy foes; fetchlings, shadow mastiffs, etc. to face. Nothing special, but nothing wrong with this one. The backstory for how it happened is perhaps more interesting than the module itself, but you have precious little opportunity to explore it.
12. Below the Silver Tarn. For this batch of adventures, this is probably the best one. In spite of it's relatively high level, it plays like a fairly low fantasy survival horror module, set in an isolated, cut-off mining town next to a possessed lake with a powerful devil buried under the water. There's a lot of interesting roleplaying opportunities too, involved with working with the various factions or cliques of miners in the town, who all have their own ideas of how to solve their current problems. It does come across as a little bit railroady, but I think not only is that normal for Paizo, but it's a little bit inevitable for this type of module that's meant to be played in a convention setting, rather than as part of a home campaign. Of course, I'm evaluating them more as part of their suitability for use at home, so rather than beat to death the railroady nature of them, I'll try to focus on how much they have that might be useable or stealable.

Pathfinder Society Scenarios Season 2 Part 1

Wow, I've not touched this topic in a long time. But, I still have many of these scenarios; I just never read/reviewed them in my quick and dirty analysis of them, so let's start it back up! Season 2 has 26 normal scenarios, and then a "special" unnumbered scenario as well, so let's see about getting it done! While I noticed looking back at my old ones that season 1 did not reset the numbering following the season 0, season 2 seems to have done so. On the Pathfinder wiki, at least, they number the "special' episode as number 0, so I'll follow that convention too.

If you did this in live play, it ran from summer 2010 to summer 2011. Of course, I have no interest in live play and I don't even know if they still do it or not. It's just adventure module fodder to me. I'll reiterate that in general I find these modules to be a little light; they often try to encompass an idea too big for a smallish one-shot adventure. But that doesn't mean that they aren't useable ideas in your own campaigns, either intermingled with other stuff, or fleshed out with more details.

0. Year of the Shadow Lodge: The theme of many of the adventures this year is the "Shadow Lodge", a conspiracy within the Pathfinder Society that wants to overthrow the current leadership and change the direction of the society in various ways. At some kind of big "Pathfinder Faire", one of these Shadow Lodge radicals attempts to literally attack the main Lodge and steal secrets of the Decemvirate from it. This means that a potentially cool political intrigue module is turned into a more standard simple "stop the terrorist attack while it's happening" type of thing. The most interesting thing about it is that it was meant to be run as a big ole event with an overseer GM "managing" several table GMs, who all are running the event for different groups at the same time. The Overseer GM does certain things and the table GMs do different things. Each table is supposed to have a "tier" (level, basically, or close to) of player at it, so the encounters are modified somewhat by tier. In all, the idea of a big event like this is more interesting, in my opinion, than the actual module itself, but the module is serviceable enough. As usual, it's a little thin, but I promise; I won't keep beating on that particular dead horse; it's common for almost all of these scenarios.
1. Before the Dawn Part I: The Bloodcove Disguise. The PCs are to attempt a rescue mission of a Pathfinder Society mission that's under attack by fiendish intelligent gorillas in the fantasy "Africa" of the setting. But mostly that comes in the next one; here, they have to sneak into Bloodcove, a pirate haven of the Pathfinder Society's bitter enemies, the Aspis Consortium, and sneak around in disguise trying to get their expedition set up. It's meant to be a tense intrigue kind of scenario, and... well, it's reasonably well done for what it is. It bills itself as an urban intrigue sandbox, and that's a close enough approximation of what it really is. I recommend this one to loot, even if I don't necessarily care for the Golarion-specific details. I do dislike, I admit, Pathfinder's growing reliance on minigames, though, like the accumulation of "Awareness points" to see if your enemies see through your attempt to disguise your intentions. The faction goals appear again too, for whatever that's worth. Most of them aren't worth noting; they're just minor side quests.
2. Before the Dawn Part II: Rescue at Azlant Ridge. While a great idea, the rescue operation through the jungle with your rivals in hot pursuit, this is a disappointing module. The actual travel is handwaved; it happens between the modules, and you start off now already almost there. There's a tiny little mini-dungeon to explore, and through DMus ex machina, you are supposed to have the PCs utilize an old iron golem to fight a big King Kong-like thing, while the PCs are... spectators, I guess. Not recommended.
3. The Rebel's Ransom. This module is set in Osirion, the Pathfinder "Ancient Egypt" analog. While it attempts to do many things; some overland desert travel, negotiating with a tough bandit action-grrl, etc. in reality all it really is is a dumb little dungeon focused on puzzles and traps. I hate these kinds of modules, so I can't really comment on how good it is; to me, they're all terrible.
4. Shadows Fall on Absolom. As the title kind of alludes to, we're back to Shadow Lodge stuff, for the first time since the weird season kick-off group party thing-a-ma-jig. This was clearly inspired by the Mission Impossible movies (and show) complete with a doppleganger in a staged room giving the PCs their mission, just like Tom Cruise with a mask on trying to get a confession from the bad guy. This would be a great one to stretch out and make a bigger part of a campaign.
5. Eyes of the Ten, Part III: Red Revolution. This is part three of a four part arc, and they need to be played in order. However, they aren't released in order; or rather, their release is widely scattered. The first two were not contiguous and were back in the prior season. Despite that, they clearly were a sneak peak into the Shadow Lodge issues, which many of these modules, including the last one, pretend like the PCs are just now discovering—oddly. I really liked the first of the Eyes of the Ten series, but not so much the second one. This third one is an exceptionally complex adventure, with a lot of backstory, and oddly, takes place on the Golarion version of Barsoom. In general, I'm a fan of Barsoom and any module that attempts to (more or less) faithfully mimic the conventions of the Barsoom stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I feel like in this case the whole scenario is too rushed and too forced—and seriously railroady. Not only that, cool as it is, it probably doesn't really fit in almost anyone's campaign normally. The whole thing comes across as a reasonably cool experiment, but one that probably shouldn't have been tried.

Pathfinder Society Scenarios Season #1 Part 5

Wow, it's been a long time since I worked on this project. Let's see if I can breathe some life back into it...

51. The City of Strangers Part I: The Shadow Gambit. There's a lot of reasons not to like this scenario. For one, it takes place in what is probably the worst single setting element of the entire Golarion setting: the Burning Man fantasy city of Kaer Maga. Although most of these are by necessity somewhat railroady, given that they're meant to get players into the action as quickly as possible in a convention type setting, this one is one the worst, and requires players to accept several things that most players would be very unlikely to accept, like the assassins who jump them cheekily telling them that they'll just have to figure out where the person who hired them is, after they told them that they need to talk to him, or that they need to ride around town for an hour with bags over their heads before meeting with a guy who demands that the PCs owe him a favor if he tells them what they need so that they can do what is already a favor for him. You have to do this, though, because the entire plot of this (and even more especially the next one) hinge on it. Anyway, this is mostly just a module of wandering around a rather stupidly designed high concept town asking questions and fighting criminals. At the very end, they get to finally go take out a sub-boss, at least. Blegh.
52. The City of Strangers Part II: The Twofold Demise. The attitude that makes Kaer Maga so intolerable a location for normal people to play in comes forward again; the guy who demanded that the PCs owed him a favor so that he could help them do him a favor (don't try to figure it out. Just remember r-strategy and accept that you'll never undestand this mentality) is even more demandy and absurd here. While the PCs are wandering around aimlessly because there are no clues at all to give them any direction on how to accomplish the scenario's goals, they're attacked by exactly the people that they need to be, of course. This leads them to... of course, a little dungeoncrawl lower in the city. Once they complete it, they conveniently find all of the evidence of Shadow Lodge skulduggery that they're looking for. One small upside; because of the scenario length restrictions, the dungeon is actually what normal people would call a dungeon, and is mercifully small and short. Enough so, in fact, that it doesn't bother me too much the way dungeoncrawls normally do.
53. Echoes of Everwar IV: The Faithless Dead. Presuming that you've played the other three parts of this series, you can do this finale. It has a kind of The Mummy feel to it; trying to restore a powerful sorcerer of sorts from the past; or rather, trying to stop the restoration of such which the events of the prior scenarios put into play. In spite of the fact that like most of these scenarios, it just jumps right in without preamble, it kind of tries to make up for it by offering a bit more roleplaying opportunities than most of these; you're to riddle with a sphinx, coax the spirits of "the mummy's" concubines out of magical items that they're stored in, and then go do a pseudo-Egyptian themed small dungeon. All in all, this is far from the worst of these types of scenarios I've reviewed.
54. Eyes of the Ten Part II: The Maze of the Open Road. This scenario is way too precious for its own good; it's only 23 pages long, fer cryin' out loud, and something like 8-9 pages of that at least are set-up, summary, and the faction stuff that they always throw into these things. In spite of that, you're whisked all over Golarion, from a demiplane where you talk to a medusa, to a Chelaxian manor where you fight devils and uncover a guy who's actually dead and being impersonated by a rogue Pathfinder, to the jungles of the Mwangi Expanse where you encounter a weird lich intelligent ape who runs a heretical cult—which you'll defeat almost as soon as you hear about it, assuming that you do actually hear anything about who they are and what their goals are before just fighting and killing them, which is hardly a given. This would all be relatively interesting—if esoterically D&Dish—for a long campaign, but as part two of a two-part very short module, it simply is trying to do way too much.
55. The Infernal Vault. This is an interesting scenario. I mean, the scenario itself is a pretty bog-standard small little dungeoncrawl with some dumb traps, human mercenaries, a few devils and undead and a stronk wamman boss at the end. Nothing to see here that's worth seeing. But there's a backstory, which again, the PCs probably aren't really in a position to get unless the GM just flat out tells it to them. And it illuminates a major problem that I have with a lot of the Pathfinder material. In their effort to be a bid "edgy" or "mature" and "shades of gray" they simply have a nihilistic, nothing matters because everything gives way to entropy of evil anyway kind of vibe to them that is seriously off-putting. I can kinda see what they're trying to do, and I detect this vibe a lot in a lot of their other material too, but they are not at all subtle, and where a little bit goes a long way, they give us a firehose of it. I dunno; while in good circumstances the broken psychology of entertainers shouldn't really be too much an issue to their customers, in Paizo's case it's been bleeding through for some time and poisoning much of their output. This scenario in particular made it noticeable again.
56. The Jester's Fraud. This is a curious scenario to end the season on, because it has none of the feel of a "season finale" and is just a pretty standard "adventure of the week" kind of feel. It involves a little bit of skulduggery, but mostly just tracking and fighting. It starts almost in media res, as most of these do, as the person that you've been sent after a super brief briefing himself stumbles into the inn that you're staying in and is being pursued by annis hags that you have to fight. He then gives you what you want, but asks for additional help. You go out into the backcountry to find a stolen evil artifact, and other than an optional encounter with some giant slugs, you just fight humans—bandits, mercenaries and bosses. There's a centaur too, depending on your level, but this is a curiously rather unfanastic adventure in many respects. Even the evil McGuffin is underwhelming, because we're never given an opportunity to understand what it's capable of or what's supposed to be so evil about it; it's just a McGuffin that might as well be a plain ole block of wood for all the scenario writers care.

So, I've now done two full seasons, Season #0 and Season #1. There are 11 (but the count is off because of Season #0) full seasons for First Edition Pathfinder. I haven't been able to get my hands on anything from Second Edition, and probably won't get around to it. But that leaves me plenty of little mini-modules to review here yet, assuming I don't lose interest like I did for a long stretch there earlier.

Pathfinder Society Scenarios Season #1 Part 4

46. Eyes of the Ten Part I--Requiem for the Red Raven.  This is the first part of a four-parter for relatively high level characters (level 12.)  The scenarios have to do with the "Shadow Lodge"; a secret society within the Pathfinder Society itself that wants to overthrow the current leadership and replace it with... themselves, naturally.  Venture-Captain Helstrom from Absalom, who's appeared in many of the scenarios so far to date, is one such Shadow Lodger, looking to get on the Decimvirate himself.  The adventure is also more than twice the length of the average; I don't know yet if it's going to be the new normal, or not (we'll see as we continue this exercise.)  The PCs are invited to a lodge in Galt (the "French Revolution" country of their setting) by the Decimvirate themselves, but some of their old venture-captain allies are there, all excited by their schemes for advancement, which seem to be bearing fruit.  Curiously, several pages of location descriptions are included, allowing the PCs to wander around the lodge exploring it in some detail.  Unbeknownst to the players, the local Pathfinders suspect Adril has been murdering members of the Decimvirate, and this whole affair is a loyalty test or a trap, and the PCs are also there to prove their loyalty.  Adril is murdered in the middle of the ceremony by the Red Raven, a kind of combination of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Frank Nitti of The Untouchables movie.  He escapes after doing so through a weird extradimensional "maze" that Helstrom himself used to assassinate members of the Decimvirate; in fact, one such member was part of the Galtan heirarchy, and the Red Raven was striking in revenge, completely unrelated to politics within the Pathfinder Society.  Finally, the Pathfinder's suspicions about Helstrom (and the PCs themselves) are brought forward, and the PCs have to solve the mystery to absolve themselves.  The maze is inhabited by a medusa and lots of "stoned" people and monsters.  The maze deposits them in the Batcave (if the Red Raven were Bruce Wayne, which in some ways he is.)  However, Bruce Wayne's mansion is under attack by antifa, who wants to execute him and confiscate his stuff.  It's expected that the PCs will rescue him, although they may well not.  Either they do and talk to him, or they don't and read his papers, and they have all of the evidence to condemn Helstrom.  Returning to the Lodge, they report their findings to the venture captain and Osprey (another shadowy Pathfinder agent featured in some earlier scenarios), and find that Helstrom's body is missing (or he himself, if he were somehow saved from being killed.)  The whole scenario surrounds this already fairly complex plot with some complex set piece combats with plenty of "crawling" through tunnels, caves and passages with lots of weird monsters.  This, more than any scenario I've looked at so far, feels like a full-fledged "module" which removes some of the charm of this type of scenario on the one hand, but serves as a pretty nice (albeit railroady) adventure otherwise.
47. The Darkest Vengeance.  Set in Ustalav, Paizo's Transylvania and much of the original inspiration for my own Timischburg, and the PCs are to investigate a corrupt Pathfinder who is suspected of embezzling funds from the society to fund his own private obsessions.  Of course, his lodge is... in the caverns underneath a manor somewhere.  Sigh.  And it connects to the Underdark.  But first, they find that squatters are living in the manor, and they pretend to be the legitimate owners, hoping to murder the PCs or at least rob them in the evening.  Anyway, there's traps, there's the squatters, there's some other weird monsters (for some reason).  Dark Creepers are a major player, and one of them has in fact kidnapped the corrupt Pathfinder and has been torturing him; payment for a past betrayal.  Anyway, the PCs find the secret laboratory, including a rather dumb experiment in making blinding lights out of crystal (which doesn't seem to be a very useful thing to do in most situations) and then go save (presumably) the dude in distress. (A very common occurrence in Paizo scenarios, because they have an allergic reaction to damsels in distress, or something.)  The corrupt Pathfinder is put out to pasture in some remote location where he can't do the organization much more harm, and the venture captain who recruited you in the first place takes his place, rewarding the PCs.  In essence, the location doesn't matter, because this bizarre dungeoncrawl could take place anywhere; bizarre in the sense that there's no good reason for this dungeoncrawl down into the Underdark to actually exist in this location, but it does anyway.
48. The Devil We Know Part IV: The Rules of the Swift.  This is the series that takes place in the tunnels beneath Cassomir, where derros are kidnapping people.  The Swift is a prison, and they've broken through and kidnapped all of the prisoners, except for one who's actually an Aspis Consortium agent who had a deal with the derros.  Of course, the Consortium is also betraying the derros by making sure that Pathfinder agents (the PC's patron) finds out about them and goes and exterminates them, while keeping the Consortium's involvement on the DL.  In reality, the scenario is just a dungeoncrawl through a prison and the Underdark tunnels beneath it, with strange monsters who's presence is poorly explained, if at all, including an earth elemental, ghasts, mites and, of course, derros.  And a small subplot about a magical bell that is to be stolen spills the beans about the Consortium involvement, although the good news is that the derros are effectively and pretty much permanently defeated.
49. Among the Dead. This is a rather sad trap-filled dungeon, a sequel to Among the Living from way back to early in season 0.  There's a zombie cult beneath Oppara that the PCs need to infiltrate and destroy, in part to send a message that the Pathfinder Society doesn't brook murder of its members.  The PCs meet their contact out in the wilderness, and he's under attack by wild dogs (yes, this is a low level adventure...)  Almost immediately, it turns into its trap-dungeon exploration.  Other than traps, exotic zombies make up a large percentage of the challenges to face (monsters to fight).  Poltergeists and bat swarms give it a little variety, and the presence of tons of different types of traps I guess makes the traps more interesting?  I dunno; ask someone who thinks trapped dungeons are intriguing; I clearly do not.  After fighting some cultists and more traps, you finally face the unique, exotic wight who is the "boss" of the scenario.
50. Fortune's Blight. The PCs wander the River Kingdoms attempting to find a missing fragment of a broken and cursed magic sword.  They are dropped off in the woods and immediately come across a disguised green hag who was related to the curse of the sword and wants the fragment back.  She has another fragment.  Later, the ghost of another green hag killed due to the sword tries to attack the PCs too. They continue their travels by boat, and in the town of Sevenarches, they find a third fragment with a sword expert guy that they're meeting with.  The fragments fuse and the guy is dominated, and the PCs now have to fight him.  Assuming that he can be defeated without being killed, he can tell the PCs that while dominated, he understood how the curse must be broken--two monsters must be killed.  One of them is the green hag met at the beginning, and the other is a harpy, who lives in a nest with a bunch of other harpies.  When they kill them both, the curse is lifted, and the adventure ends.  This one seems particularly weak in terms of motivation and having a thread to follow that isn't just strap you to the rails.  It's a more forgettable one, although the chance to use harpies and hags is at least unusual.

Pathfinder Society Scenarios Season #1 Part 3

Let's keep this moving; I haven't done anything with this in a couple of weeks.

39. The Citadel of Flame: With only a bare minimum of context and set-up, the PCs find themselves out in the desert looking at an old temple of Moloch that is, as the title of the module suggests, fire-themed.  They fight fire elementals, cultists, devils, traps, extreme heat, and finally, the cult leader boss.    It's a very typical evil temple dungeon crawl type adventure, so if you like that kind of thing and want to keep it brief, this is a good scenario for you.  I strongly suspect that if you like that kind of thing, you prefer it to not be brief, so I think this kind of dungeon crawl meant to be done in just a couple of hours or so (maybe longer given Pathfinder's complexity and the length of time to resolve complex tactical combat) probably doesn't really scratch very many people's particular itch.  Either go all out and make it a full-blown module-length scenario, or don't do a dungeon crawl.  Obviously, based on my tastes, I'd prefer the latter to the former.
40. Hall of Drunken Heroes: This is actually a rather interesting and diverse scenario, especially given it's short length.  Much of it takes place in (and below) a "fest hall"—a ridiculous bohemian RennFaire wish-fulfillment fantasy, but luckily that doesn't mean that the adventure itself is as ridiculous as that premise.  It starts with some spy-like skulduggery, a nice change of pace, includes the interrogation of a minor demon, dealing with good guys who are "charmed" magically by a succubus, so in theory should be dealt with delicately, and may turn out to be a rousing, great bar fist fight kinda thing (watch Tony Curtis' The Great Race for one of the best examples ever put to film, albeit comically) if you're lucky.  Afterwards, they talk with the rather earthy priest caste of Cayden Caillean, or whatever his name is, but find that one's been possessed by a demon.  There's a really kinda clever dream-state or pscyhic kind of "surgery" that they do, which was probably borrowed from either Dr. Strange or Professor X to get information from the possessed priest—where they find out that a "nest" of demons, led by a succubus trying to free her imprisoned demonic lover from a research lab below the fest hall needs to be dealt with.  This is a little half dozen areas dungeon, and I find that after such a great set-up, I don't even mind doing a small dungeon crawl like this.  I could do without traps, because I think that they're silly, but as you can imagine, the encounters will be demonic; a succubus, a shadow demon, and the "boss" demon who's been imprisoned varies depending on the CR needed for the group; either a nabassu or a hezrou, if you're into esoteric D&D demon titles.  This little scenario really has it all.  It even manages to somehow introduce compelling and charismatic interesting NPCs.
41. The Devil We Know, Part III: Crypt of Fools: Part of the Taldan Devil We Know series introduced earlier in the season with derros and strange cults and stuff under the capital city of Cassomir.  While this one starts out strong and in an overt Lovecraftian vein, even, with the questioning of a creepy cultist who's quite insane and who's in Swift Prison, it's really a module that's focused on solving puzzles, one of my least favorite activities that are often considered "core" to the D&D experience.  Oh, sure, there's cultists to fight, and mites, skeletons and derros and giant centipedes and other monsters (depending on the EL needed) like an otyugh, etc. but the core of this module is interpreting some painted handouts to piece together the location of the little dungeon you need to explore.  You rescue some prisoners, but the local Pathfinder Venture-Captain is unable to make headway with the Taldan bureaucracy, so the derro threat isn't completely finished off (see The Devil We Know, Part IV: Rules of the Swift in another 7-8 or so episodes.)  Serviceable, but not great.
42. Echoes of the Everwar, Part II: The Watcher of Ages: We're back to the concubines' rings again, from the Echoes of Everwar series; a four parter.  Parts 1-3 can be played in any order, but Part 4 can only be played after the other three are all done.  This scenario, given its typical brevity, sure spends a lot of time on backstory and context, much of which I'm not sure the PCs will actually ever uncover unless the GM just tells it to them somehow (although to be fair, I haven't read the next two parts yet.)  And yet after all of that, this is just a really arch-D&Dish (and not in a great way) dungeon crawl populated by a bunch of esoteric and weird monsters chosen more for their tactical diversity (as near as I can tell) as for any other reason.  You'll fight barghests, deal with a xorn, fight gargoyles, bat swarms and cave fishers (giant crabs), morlocks and a roper.  I think this kind of adventure is silly bordering on outright ridiculous, but it is kinda iconic to the game, I suppose.
43. The Pallid Plague: If you are a regular Pathfinder Module player, this one has a suspiciously similar premise (and the exact same location!) as D0 Hollow's Last Hope, except it's nearby fey who are the main victims (so far) and resentful human cultists plotting "revenge" for the crime of not having suffered enough or whatever is the motivation.  You fight unique animal plague zombies and plaguey flower fields tended by gardeners (who are actually druids, who've sacrificed their animal companions to become plague zombies).  There's a Wiccan "wise latina" wise woman lady who can magically cure everything with her magical feminism (although skill challenges are needed to make this work), more cultists, sick fey, and then the "boss" with her zombies and cultists having, of all things, a big party and feast in the woods that you have to fight.  While I guess the module itself is serviceable enough, the premise is so silly that I have a really hard time taking any of it seriously.
44. Echoes of the Everwar, Part 3: Terror at Whistledown: The final of the "three McGuffins" part of Echoes of the Everwar, before we head towards the conclusion in Part 4.  The set-up, as always, is brief, although the module itself spends the better part of a page and half giving the entire Echoes of the Everwar backstory word for word as before, before adding some module specific backstory.  The PCs find themselves in Whistledown, a charming lakeside gnome community that's turned to panic because undead mohrgs and vampire spawn (numbers depending on PCs EL needed) are taking townspeople away at night.  At night, of course, they attack again coming by rowboat, and the PCs are supposed to fight them off.  They can find a ranger smuggler after this who's boat they're using; he was chased off of his smuggler island when the undead arrived, and he can tell them where to go next.  As the PCs cross the lake, in spite of Varisia's generally Iberian or Mediterranean-like climate, they get attacked by anacondas (!?) although that encounter is optional.  When they get there, there's a little building that contains the smuggler's loot plus more undead, including a fairly difficult vampire boss.  Once all three of these "concubine McGuffin" missions are complete, you can play the final Echoes of the Everwar scenario, which is number 53 in this series.
45. Delirium's Tangle: Grandmaster Torch has gotten over his head, dispatched a visiting minotaur dignitary (who's been magically dominated) into a labyrinth to retrieve some ancient elven artifact, but he didn't come back.  Knowing that if his involvement is uncovered, he'll be sentenced to death, he calls in a favor, but hides his involvement, calling the minotaur dignitary his "close friend", etc.  Heh.  Grandmaster Torch.  He may yet end up being a charismatic character, although so far, much of his deviousness will not be apparent to any players, only to people who've read the modules that he's in.  Of course, after this compelling introduction, you immediately are meant to go into maintenance tunnels and the scenario is basically just a routine dungeon crawl.  You fight some giant beetles (although not too giant; size Small), morlocks, and have to make skill challenges to "solve" the maze itself, which although described as possessing Lovecraftian geometry, just kinda seems to be readily handled with some routine skill challenges.  The scenario includes this odd note, which while true, should have led one to suggest that maybe a maze wasn't the best idea anyway: "Mazes Can Be Boring. Despite their prominence in literature, few things frustrate players quite like encountering a maze in a roleplaying game. Describing a labyrinth in terms of right and left turns from a character perspective can be confusing and repetitive. Drawing the maze itself on the battle grid is often too time-consuming for a 4-hour game. By abstracting the maze into a series of skill and ability checks, the act of solving the maze falls to the characters, rather than the players."  What prominence in what literature, I wonder?  Anyway, hopefully the PCs make their skill challenges, because otherwise they face a barrage of tedious and probably fatal traps everywhere else.  They fight a giant leech, who for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me this leech has been whispering madness to the inhabitants of the maze.  After solving one more puzzle, they find the "boss" an insane elf sorcerer cursed with some kind of unnatural longevity and hanging suspended from the ceiling where he's been tied up for centuries.  The minotaur is rescued, and the adventure ends... it's a bit weird, but nobody—I guess—can ever say that it isn't pretty iconically D&Dish.

Pathfinder Society Scenarios Season #1 Part 2

Here's the next crop of scenarios, still in season #1 (although with numbering carrying forward from "Season #0.")

34. Encounter at the Drowning Stones: This one is one of the better scenarios in this entire run so far.  It posits that a Pathfinder agent is missing (a common theme) but in this case, he was a spy embedded within an Aspis Consortium expedition.  You head into the Fake African jungles to find an archaeological site that's supposed to have treasure and magic at it with the rival organization already having a head start (echoes of Raiders of the Lost Ark should be obvious) having to deal with probably hostile (unless you're really diplomatic) tribe of savages, lots of big dangerous wild animals, hostile weather, etc. only to find your rivals campsite and they've all drank the Kool-Aid and killed themselves.  The Pathfinder agent himself isn't there, though—further investigation shows that a demon has taken over the site for a long time and corrupted it; you'll end up fighting all kinds of Deep Ones (scum, but let's be honest about what they're supposed to be) and a succubus.  There's also a sunken temple/cave full of treasure (much of it cursed) and more Deep Ones, but it never rises to the level of a "dungeon" unless one tricky entrance and one chamber count.  Altogether, this is really one of my favorite of these scenarios.  It could be rather easily fleshed out into an entire module-sized adventure without too much trouble too.
35. Voice in the Void: This one is a small dungeon-crawl of sorts with a strong Lovecraftian theme; the PCs are called in to investigate a museum in Absalom (the same one way back in The Mists of Mwangi, actually) where the daughter of an influential family has been lost for a few days, and the watchmen who went looking for her also failed to return.  Lovecraftiana is interpreted here as some oozes (including a gibbering mouther; the "little shoggoth" of D&D) and a bunch of mold and fungus type stuff. The daughter is possessed by some kind of archaic sorcerer who's been preserved in a brain cylinder, and she can be rescued (or killed, I suppose) before some gate to Aucturn, the Yuggoth of Golarion is completely opened.  Although I like the Lovecraftian theme, it's reinterpreted in some rather traditional D&D elements, so it may not feel particularly Lovecraftian to many players, plus—at the end of the day, it's a little dungeon-crawl after all.
36. Echoes of the Everwar Part I: The Prisoner of Skull Hill: The Echoes of Everwar four part series has to do with an old Osirian sorcerer who's cursed with eternal life (but not eternal youth.)  He's anxious to remove the curse, and the exposure of his long-dead concubines with their magic rings might be the key.  One such is the subject of this adventure.  The backstory is again somewhat convoluted; there's an old Chelish fortress, keep and series of attached farms that hangs out in the Hold of Belkzen.  It was recently attacked by orcs and its inhabitants butchered, but somehow the orcs managed to break into the crypt below where the Osirian witch is buried.  This triggers a magical cataclysm where a rock falls from the sky, releases necromantic energy that turns the orcs into undead, and it also comes with the pod of some odd carnivorous plant that reproduces the way the Alien did before James Cameron created the Queen and the eggs.  However, all this backstory context is actually considerably more interesting than the actual adventure which is a strange site-based crawl of the ruined keep, including traps, undead orcs, and the weird plant.  None of it really seems to fit together or make much sense, and if it wasn't for the strange context of the metaplot, I'd say that this is such an odd melange of strange, disconnected cliches that it must have been hatched up when the writer was suffering from an extremely high fever and was actually delirious.  And actually; even with the backstory, that might well be the case.
37. The Beggar's Pearl: This is another odd one; a dungeon-crawl with a weird theme.  The PCs are tasked with taking a unique pearl and some notes and go find a dwarf, who was known to have them not long ago, and who was looking to reclaim the halls of his ancestors.  The PCs do find him after traveling in a mountain range for a little while, lost, bedraggled and under attack by mites and giant ants.  He's grateful, but clearly confused and has his recent memories somewhat scrambled.  He can lead the PCs to the halls of his ancestors, but they're covered in weird mold and fungus, and are infested by some dark fey creatures (mites, mostly) and derros which have been torturing and experimenting on various prisoners (including the dwarf, which is why his memory is somewhat confused.)  They fight all these, navigate a bunch of stupid traps, and find a party going on where completely high mites and derros are dancing for some kind of strange dark fey queen, whom they also kill.  The PCs have essentially freed the Halls for the dwarves to reclaim, but the dwarf who's inheritance it is is himself not in any position to do anything about it right away, and neither are any of the other prisoners that they rescue, but there are loads of hints about future favors and whatnot as well as fame and notoriety among the dwarves themselves for helping them reclaim one of the halls of a past master, and his lost techniques.
38. No Plunder, No Pay: One that does something quite a bit different; the PCs break a pirate captain out of a brig in the Sodden Lands, a place that's victimized by a magical, never-ending hurricane. (So the prison break is done in pouring rain.)  They then must commandeer a ship and sail out to the location where the pirate captain's ship sank... only to discover a ghostly version of his ship and crew plying the waters right there, in a storm, of course. (If there's time in the session, there's an optional encounter with a sea monster on the way; exactly what kind varies by level from Elasmosaurus to a young Sea Serpent.) Finally the PCs (presumably using magic; this scenario is relatively higher level) go underwater to the shipwreck, fight more undead and a giant octopus and recover the pirate's stolen cargo.

Pathfinder Society Season #1 Part 1

A summary, from the Pathfinder wiki (technically I combined and edited together the text from the wiki and the source link, from the link that the Pathfinder wiki links to; a post on the Paizo messageboards.)

The Pathfinder Society explores a variety of opportunities throughout the Inner Sea, making inroads with the Blakros Family. The information broker Grandmaster Torch aids the society in completing several missions...but always at a price. The Pathfinder Society completes a long battle with the cult of Groetus in Cassomir that turns out to be a cover for a more sinister foe. Amenopheus tries to learn about the Jeweled Sages by helping an ancient evil rogue in a ritual that the Society is able to stop by gathering several relics, bringing Amenopheus back to square 1 (he will not reveal his reasons for helping Zuberi until Season 5). The Pathfinder Society twice foils the cult of Zyphus in Taldor, making an enemy of the cult. Whispers of a "Shadow Lodge" of disaffected Pathfinders prove to be a reality, as the Pathfinders discover and thwart a cell in Kaer Maga. The Eyes of the Ten arc begins, leading the Pathfinders on an epic journey.

Let's get started with another one of these, shall we?  That summary gives away some minor spoilers for some of the adventures, but not for the greater meta-plot arc overall.  I said earlier that I really liked the Grandmaster Torch adventure, for what it was worth (although it was pretty railroady about letting Torch get the best of the Pathfinders, and most likely they won't even know about it.  That's the nature of the type of scenario, though, and the purpose for which they were written.  I'm also not thrilled by anything that has to do with Kaer Maga, and having them mentioned so prominently in the summary of the season isn't great, but realistically, it's probably just one scenario.  I certainly hope so.  I should also note that the numbering of the scenarios did not reset; the "first" scenario of this season is actually number 29.

29. The Devil We Know Part I: Shipyard Rats: This scenario starts off a small series of linked scenarios; something that they did at least a little bit of in every season afterwards (well, if the titles are any guide.  I haven't read them yet.)  A Pathfinder has been kidnapped; part of a wave of kidnappings going on in Taldor's capitol city, but this time, the local Pathfinder Lodge chief has a clue; an Aspis Consortium servant boy escaped (one of their agents was captured too; they want to work together.)  He'll lead you to one dockside tavern where you'll fight some guys and release some prisoners, but the one you're really looking for isn't here, so now you need to go to a ship where more prisoners are waiting.  But still not the one you're looking for (sigh.)  So you head off to yet another location to rescue more of them.  It's... an underground hide-out, of course.  With traps, and the "boss" with his hecuevas.  There's a bit of a cliff-hanger feel to it, though—captives reference derro coming and taking other prisoners, although they don't know anything else about that, and it's beyond the scope of this scenario.
30. The Devil We Know Part II: Cassomir's Locker: Actually, the derro were using the guys in the above scenario; they've got their own slaving operation going on independent of whatever those terrorists want.  The Pathfinders get wind of it, and go into "Cassomir Below"; a sewer system, mostly, to find out what's going on.  There's also a small neighborhood that's sunk and the street level was raised up above it (this is actually a real thing in some cities; I've been in one or two of these undercities in real life.)  Unfortunately, the entire adventure is really just a dungeon crawl, though, full of traps and only loosely sensibly appearing monsters.  Rats feature prominently, as there's some kind of artifact that turns rats into super-dire rats or some-such.  Once again, you're supposed to leave the PCs with the impression that while they've set back the menace, they haven't (yet) defeated it.  Later in the season, two more adventures that are part of this series will still appear.
31. Sniper in the Deep: After an extraordinarily flimsy set-up back in Absalom, the PCs are supposed to run what amounts to a small errand; find a Pathfinder who hasn't been checking in (but it's supposed that he's just asleep in a well-known inn) and get him on track to find the artifact he's been claiming he's "close" to finding.  Of course, he's not just asleep, and the thugs who murdered him attack the PCs when they show up asking around, although the clues and notes that point towards the artifact are conveniently left laying around in the room he was renting.  There's a side mission to recover the murdered Pathfinder's body, although I'm not sure that you need to do this (and of course, if you do, you have to fight giant crabs.)  The more interesting part of the adventure is the recovery of the artifact, which is underwater in a shipwreck in the harbor (the harbor of Absalom is very shallow, and they've deliberately created a blockade of sunken ships just below (and occasionally not entirely so) the surface.  Here, you'll find undead sailors, Deep Ones (or one of the standard D&D equivalents, I should point out), sharks, and the dead Pathfinder's apprentice, who had betrayed and murdered him, and serves as the "boss" of the adventure.
32. Drow of the Darklands Pyramid: Although technically related to the tomb-raiding going on in Fake Egypt in Golarion, in reality, this adventure starts at the entrance to a cave and the entire thing is an underground dungeon crawl.  As you can probably guess from the title, it involves drow making raids from the Underdark... er, sorry, the Darklands, and the drow in Golarion are demon-worshippers, so there's loads of standard demons to fight (quasits, babaus, vrocks, a hezrou, etc.)  The drow have their own archaeological expedition going on just underground, and it's linked to what the Pathfinder Society is doing, which explains the conflict. (Plus, they're drow.  Of course you have to fight them.)  There's a novelty trick; all of the PCs have (temporarily) the ability to fly in part of this, and they have to fight flying drow and driders.  If this all seems a little odd and superheroish to you, it does to me too.  I'm not a fan, I suppose, of novelty parlor tricks like that and find them kind of silly.  Once inside this cavern, you have to explore the underground pyramid (and dungeon crawl within a dungeon crawl! How novel! Sigh.)  Luckily, this is very scanty on traps; you mostly just fight lots of drow, some driders, and a handful of demons, recover some stolen artifacts, etc.  It's stand-alone, very cliched (except for the chintzy mechanical novelty to make the tactical combat feel different) and overall, a relatively weak effort in this series.  Unless you really like that kind of stuff, I suppose—but I don't think D&D of any variety (including Pathfinder) is interesting enough as a tactical game that tactical parlor tricks are interesting in their own right; and this adventure clearly is structured around the tactical novelty much more so than around anything else interesting.
33. Assault on the Kingdom of the Impossible: Taking place in Jalmeray; a strange island kingdom that's half Achaemanid Persia and half mythical India, although as is often the case, it doesn't really matter where the scenario takes place, because none of that context and background color actually make any difference, nor do you really get to partake of any of it anyway.  That said, the plot here is kinda interesting; you're setting a trap for a bandit that's been robbing Pathfinder caravans.  This guy's a real piece of work; he murdered the former Venture-Captain of the Lodge here, he's got enslaved wizards disassembling magical items, and he's brought back into activity a cult of tiger monks that the local people hate because they're evil. In spite of that, we're supposed to believe that it's better to negotiate with this bastard and make him a Pathfinder agent rather than just shut his operation down the old-fashioned way by killing him.  The ruler of the island has also sent agents to deal with him, which may get in your way if you're not diplomatic.  There aren't really any monsters in this scenario; it does a good job of showing how plain old "bad guys" can still be interesting from a plot perspective.  Also, the scenario is unusual relative to those I've read so far anyway in that the faction missions are a bit more complicated and difficult than in other scenarios, although they tend to come down to some kind of social skill check to resolve rather than good roleplaying (gotta cater to your audience still, I suppose.)

Pathfinder Society Season #0 Conclusions

Well, I've now finished all of the scenarios in Pathfinder Society Season #0, the beta test of the Pathfinder Society, which was basically the Paizo equivalent to the RPGA and it's Living Campaign series.  I've read every adventure, and posted a brief summary of each—not like the summaries given in the wiki, but actual spoiler summaries with brief mini-reviews of some of them (mostly if they were significantly better or worse than the average.)  While these scenarios were obviously written for a Living Campaign, well, a scenario is a scenario, and a regular old-fashioned home game could certainly make use of them as well. I'm actually not 100% sure what I hoped to accomplish by reading all of these, but given that they're significantly shorter than an adventure path modules, or even most of the stand-alone modules; varying from 15-21 or so pages in length (at least four and half or so pages of which are not module content, including cover, inside cover, OGL, and a document at the end that spells out the treasures and XP, etc.)  Add a few maps, an illustration or two, and white space here and there, and these are all relatively short.  Not only that, some of the content is the faction specific stuff, which I read, but which really kind of happens "off-line" from the module per se, except in one notable exception.

I'm not going to run these.  I wouldn't turn them into fan fiction installments either.  To do either, they'd have to be significantly fleshed out with more detail and some bridging sections that are handwaved and rushed over in the modules themselves.  I might consider a much more loose adaptation of some of them into DH5 in such a way that it would qualify as one or the other of those, but I certainly have nothing more firm than extremely vague, "hey, that might be cool" plans in those regards.

In general, I find the following mostly consistent features: the modules are all really brief, but in many cases, the concept of the module is too big for the page count.  This leads to inadequate treatment of set-up, surprisingly brief treatment of the adventure itself, little NPC interaction or drama possibilities, little in the way of action/adventure possibilities—if there's more than three or four encounters max, that's a lot.  Not only that, you're rushed off into the adventure without any context or set-up, for the most part (and quite often, the context and set-up is the wrong kind of context and set-up; fan fiction that it's unlikely the PCs will ever find out unless you simply tell it to them).  Now, to be fair, I'm totally OK with starting an adventure (or story, even moreso) in media res, but this isn't supposed to be that, it just kinda feels like it defaults to that... kinda.  Every single time.  I also think that the brilliant idea of the faction goals is, more than half of the time, overly contrived, forced and silly rather than natural.  Too bad, because the idea is really good.

However, this very brevity makes the odd dungeon crawl actually acceptable, because it feels more natural than the completely bizarre and contrived "story of D&D", which is interesting.  A dungeon crawl with only half a dozen or so keyed locations actually feels like the kind of place that monsters or villains might actually hang out in, rather than some bizarre clearing the levels of fantasy Nakatomi Plaza, except it goes down underground instead of up into the sky.  I have mentioned plenty of times before how much I don't like dungeon crawls, right?  Well, I'll let it go (for now) without beating that particular dead horse any more than I already have.

So, I'm still wondering what exactly I'm going to do next.  Rather than decide, I'll probably just keep going with Season #1.  In the meantime, I can figure out what this stuff all means and what (if anything) I do with it.  If the answer is: "for now, nothing—just keep reading and summarizing them; that's sufficiently interesting in its own right," then so be it.  I would prefer to do a little bit of something more with them, though.  I just have no idea for sure what it would be.

Pathfinder Society Season #0 Part 4

The final portion of the Season #0 review.  I've got eight scenarios to review, and this post won't go up until they're all done!

Here's the summary of Season #0, from the Pathfinder Wiki:

In the summer of 4708 AR, the Pathfinder Society held its annual Grand Convocation at the Grand Lodge in Absalom, the City at the Center of the World. Hundreds of new agents had recently joined the Society, some graduating from the Grand Lodge's training program, others earning field commissions through their previous exploits. This influx of new (and untried) agents gave the Society's leadership, the anonymous Decemvirate, the opportunity to expand the Society's activities in an unprecedented manner. The Decemvirate expanded cautiously, not pushing the limits of these new agents too hard. 

From the Grand Lodge in Absalom, Pathfinders were sent all over the Inner Sea region. Some teams were sent to explore newly-discovered ruins or investigate strange items; others went in aid of members or allies of the Society. Through its actions, the Society gained several new allies, including Skelg the Ripper, an envoy from the Lands of the Linnorm Kings, and Nigel Aldain, curator of the (now infamous) Blakros Museum in Absalom. Agents were sent to many of the nations in the Inner Sea, including Taldor, Andoran, Cheliax, and Qadira. Teams were dispatched to locations as far-flung at the lawless River Kingdoms, revolution-wracked Galt, and the jungles of the Mwangi Expanse. 

Throughout the year, various national governments saw the Pathfinder Society as a tool to further their own goals, and quietly began to support individual agents within the Society. These national factions garnered much support, and began to co-opt Society missions for their own ends. Pathfinders who once worked as a team instead carried hidden agendas from one of five national factions: the Eagle Knights of Andoran; the nobility of devil-worshiping Cheliax; the Sapphire Sage of Osirion; the merchants of Qadira; or the nobles of Taldor. While not leading to outright conflict between members, these factions often distracted Pathfinders from the Society's goals. 

By the end of the season, the Decemvirate had tested their crop of new agents, weeding out those unable to handle the duties of a Pathfinder. The Society's masked leaders had also noted the increase in nationalism among the Society's members. Rather than clamp down on the national influences, the Society embraced them, and Pathfinders began overtly assisting various nations as troubleshooters and investigators, alongside their normal duty of exploration. But there were some in the Society who saw this rise of nationalism as an ill omen, and yet others who saw it as an opportunity to strike.

Anyway, on to the scenarios...

21. The Eternal Obelisk—I will say one thing about the brevity of the Pathfinder Society scenarios; when they have to do dungeon crawls, it's nice that they are so brief.  This one has, what—six total areas, is all?  Anyway, a headstrong and idiotic teenaged girl runs off to try and prove her worth as a future Pathfinder by exploring a temple that promises eternal life.  She is instead killed and decapitated by the medusa that lives there, and her stone head is sent to her father: a powerful man, who blames the Pathfinder Society for putting such foolish notions in the head of his daughter.  There are mephits, some animated petrified horse statues, grimlocks, a xorn, and of course the medusa herself to face.  I have to admit, although I don't like dungeon crawls, the idea of facing a medusa in an underground lair, a la Clash of the Titans, is a pretty classic trope that I can kind of get behind.
22. Fingerprints of the Fiend—A fabulous lost city has been found!  The Aspis Consortium has already taken over and set up a dig site, giving this scenario some of the vibe of the middle act of Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Nazi dig site of Tanis.  But first, the PCs must climb the Cliffs of Insanity while being attacked by an erinyes.  Speaking of 80s adventure movie pop culture references, after fighting some of the camp, the PCs might well find themselves in a mine cart chase down to the city, like Indy and Short Run.  Almost a page's worth of text describes rules for adjudicating this possibility.  There's also morlocks (another reference, although The Time Machine probably can't really be called pop culture), a damaged golem, and the "boss" of the scenario, a cleric of Asmodeus and his Aspis Consortium bodyguards.  While the city is therefore open to exploration, the deus ex machina  notion of there being hundreds if not thousands of morlocks and possibly more golems just out of sight is supposed to encourage them to just pick up and leave at this point.
23. Tide of Morning—The PCs are to go to a forest in Andoran and deal with an unfriendly druid, asking for his lorestone McGuffin.  However, the druid has just been murdered, and the PCs must face a few waves of fey and gnome enemies, make their way before sunrise to a druid circle deeper in the forest, and stop a sunrise ritual to destroy the lorestone before the fey can do so.  Not one of the more memorable scenarios.
24. Decline of Glory—Taking place in a swampland in Taldor seems a far-cry from the Old West of Americana, but the plot of this little module is right out of the idea of cattle barons trying to force homesteaders off of their property through intimidation.  Add unfamiliar and inhospitable weather, an attack of ghouls, and fungus and plant-based enemies here and there complete the picture.  If you're successful, you've helped establish a new Pathfinder Lodge, although why they'd want one in this out of the way backwater (literally because it's in the middle of a swamp) is never really explained very well.  This scenario also has a number of notable typos; the first that I've paid attention to them, so either the earlier ones didn't have any, or at least they were inconspicuous and I didn't notice them.
25. Hands of the Muted God—A strange, but mostly benevolent cult of silence operates in Absalom, and the Pathfinder Society wants to find out if their silent object of worship actually managed to become a god or not (this is related to a key element of the Golarion setting.  See Starstone on the Pathfinder wiki for more information.)  They follow the cultists up a mountain trail in the wilderness on the island, and are ambushed by drow (making their first appearance in this series), a chimera, and finally fighting a drider demon cult priest.
26. Lost at Bitter End—Messing around with the ruins of ancient civilizations in Golarion seems to be a sure-fire way to unleash some kind of ancient catastrophe—which the PCs end up having to be the clean-up crew for.  A Pathfinder has been messing around with an anti-magic zone far to the south and accidentally gotten herself and an entire town sucked into a demiplane full of waiting undead soldiers and devils.  You have to travel there, find out what happened to her, disrupt the invasion plans, bring back the missing townspeople, etc.  You'll fight some juju zombies, hellcats, bone devils and weird necromantic clerics.  And, of course, the hapless Pathfinder who unleashed all this is hopelessly dead.  This seems to be a common theme of these scenarios, actually.
27. Our Lady of Silver—This one is different.  Not only does it include a fair bit of material related to the faction missions (stuff that otherwise happens completely "off screen") but it also is a slow starter, giving you plenty of time to role play the wedding of a young Pathfinder to the daughter of an important merchant prince.  The after wedding feast is disrupted and robbed, and clues point towards a jealous and angry spurned former suitor of the daughter.  The PCs fight a clan of dervishes and an erinyes before being arrested and discovering that they've been themselves framed for being in league with the thieves.  They're meant to clear their names, but have to rush off to confront imposters pretending to be them, as well as the sorcerer spurned suitor.
28. Lyrics of Extinction—This is not one of the better scenarios.  A lot of space is dedicated to backstory and fictional anthropological details, while the adventure itself is a perfunctory, "oh, yeah, here's some encounters for you to fight" without much context on why you would be doing so.  It feels like some fan fiction about the Battle of Jericho with the alignment reversed came first, and fitting it into a workable adventure came later.  Anyway, the PCs rush off into the "African" jungle to meet with a witch-doctor in his canoe (which seems like a scene from Disney's Jungle Cruise ride), looking for a "song" which causes city walls to fall.  They fight giant beetles and stuff like that before finding the cleric of Zon-Kuthon.  Along with all kinds of text about what natives believe about their desecrated temple (in spite of the fact that no natives are around to tell the PCs this information) you finally get the bad guy and all of his bad toys and wrap up this poorly conceived adventure.

Pathfinder Society Season #0 Part 3

Well... I went back to ENWorld and its spin-off Circvs Maximvs briefly late last week, and I think I decided that I don't really need that in my life.  Curiously, I had one guy tell me he thought Captain Marvel is a great character, because he relates to feeling like the only competent person in the room, that nobody ever listens to, and who is always held back.

Classic Gamma delusion bubble, if you've ever read anything by Vox Day on his categories of socio-sexual taxonomy. Pointing out that that says a lot more about the poster himself than it does about either the character or the movie wasn't likely to engender much honest or fruitful discussion, though, but it reminded me why I quit posting over there in the first place.  I'll likely just quietly walk away again without looking back, and I doubt I'll miss it much.  But in the meantime, I want to finish up the Season #0, at the very least, of this Pathfinder Society scenario review.  Because once I'm done with Season #0, I've got plenty more seasons to go, assuming I don't tire of the exercise.

Anyhoo...  UPDATE: I ran out of time before I could do all of the scenarios I needed to do for this post.  I'll add two more later when I get the chance to read and summarize them.  UPDATE 2: Got 'em.

13. The Prince of Augustana—After an almost painfully contrived, forced, and thin pretext, the PCs explore the sewers under a city in Andoran, fighting sewer gangsters, supporting a sewer priest and his begger entourage, and discover that a poor fellow thinking he's the lost prince of Andoran is nothing more than a deluded, crazy fellow addicted to a powerful narcotic.  One of the weakest of the scenarios I've read so far.
14. The Many Fortunes of Grandmaster Torch—This scenario is a fun bit of urban skulduggery and intrigue. By default, the set-up is a bit too thin (a common problem for all of these scenarios) but as the PCs run around town trying to recover some smuggled magical statues while chasing down other faction intrigue goals, they should have a good time if that's the kind of thing that you like (I certainly do.)  This one's begging to be fleshed out into a full-blown module.  It's one of my favorites so far.
15. The Asmodeus Mirage—A magical little demi-plane opens once every hundred years out of the desert mist like Brigadoon and you must go in, explore it, and bring the source of it back out (which will mean that it becomes part of the normal world, I suppose.)  Here you'll find unlikely things like a friendly tribe of gnolls, a talkative stir-crazy brass dragon who wants his lair cleared of parasites, desert hazards, and a few devils to fight.  This is really too big of a concept for this type of scenario, so it moves much too quickly.
16. To Scale the Dragon—The set-up here is kinda weird; you need to recover the bones of the iconic mountain mystic guy so someone can get some secret via a seance, but the Pathfinder Society's notorious rival, the Aspis Consortium wants it too.  You have to travel via high, snowy mountain passes to where the thing is, fight a rhemoraz and yeti-like creatures, evade or defeat an ambush from your rivals and arrive back where you started only to discover the place under siege by the yetis.  Along the way, you get dog-sled chase rules.
17. Perils of the Pirate Pact—A river pirate adventure, where you go to help a river pirate captain in return for a valuable text that the Pathfinder Society covets.  You get attacked by pirates, you find the pirate captain's earlier expedition ship, covered in giant spider webs and crawling with giant spiders, they disembark to look for supposed buried treasure and deal with web-covered traps, spider swarms, and some ettercaps.  The treasure is non-existent, the book that led you there is a forgery, and the captain's lieutenant is a traitor trying to supplant him, so she attempts to kill you before you can spill the beans.
18. The Trouble With Secrets—In Golarion's fake Egypt, you must confront the remnants of a vampire looking for revenge against the Pathfinder Society.  In catacombs underneath the Lodge, the PCs will face dominated pit fighters and their hyena pets, animated statues, vampire spawn, and the vampire herself, the "boss" of the adventure.  The pit fighters can be rescued rather than fought, maybe.  It's kinda a fun one.
19. Skeleton Moon—There's a complex backstory here, but let's ignore it for now since it is unlikely that the players will learn of it.  A Pathfinder on the outs needs to be investigated in his crumbling tower on Kortos.  You go there, fight his pet cockatrices, some of this assistants, find out that he's doing a ritual that supposed to make him a spirit (and thus immune to the wasting disease that's killing him) which fails, causing him to go mad and possess an assassin vine, which you also must fight.  At the end, his most trusted servant turns out to have been a traitor, and he ambushes you with his Aspis Consortium thugs to steal his master's notes from you
20. King Xeros of Old Azlant—The story of a kind of legendary ghost ship, or Flying Dutchman that sails the Ethereal Seas appears in Abasalom Harbor and begs to be explored.  Turns out that it's not exactly haunted as it is occupied by xill slavers and various other strange, extraplanar entities (like a xenophage creeper; whatever exactly that is) and whatnot.  It has a little bit of an Aliens vibe to it too, and it makes obvious nods to Planescape and even Spelljammer.  An unusual adventure, and at the end, the PCs just have to race to get off the thing before it spirits itself away into the ether once again taking them with it.

Pathfinder Society Season #0 Part 2

I had actually almost completely forgotten that I was doing this!  I should continue.  Fun stuff!

6. Black Waters—Back in Absalom, the crew is tasked with exploring the haunted remnants of an old boarding school of the nobility that collapsed in an earthquake ten years ago and was flooded.  There's something missing underneath that they are meant to find, and a noblewoman grieving for her lost daughter also seeks news of her death.  Undead and a crazy grieving father haunt the remains, but miraculously, the daughter of the noblewoman is alive, sustained by a ring of sustenance, but Wisdom drained to 0, and sleeping in a coma in a sarcophagus.  An odd spin on the Sleeping Beauty legend, but the folk-tale reference is welcome, even if muted in such as way that it's almost easy to miss.
7. Among the Living—Simultaneously the name of the module as well as an opera that you must attend in the decadent gilded capital of the pseudo-Byzantine Empire of Golarion, what you will discover quickly in your search for a missing Pathfinder who was looking for archaeological treasures underneath the opera house was that he was the dupe of a dark death cult, who will attack the opera with zombies.  You can't get out until you destroy the magical stone that the Pathfinder found underneath the opera house, which also was the source of the strange zombies who cause an especially virulent, fast-acting zombie plague among those it affects.
8. Slave Pits of Absalom—There aren't really any "pits" although there is a neighborhood called that where you have to enter an office building.  A Chelish noblewoman married to an Osiriani Ambassador is kidnapped by an over-zealous Taldoran spy anxious to embarrass them and acting beyond his mandate.  The PCs must find her, rescue her, and if Taldan, keep the Empire from being embarrassed by it. They mostly just walk from one combat encounter to another; first in a fantasy crack house where the kidnapper himself is known to be seen.  He points them to a Vudrish slaver.  The PCs go to his office, get in another fight, and find out that the poor lady was sold to gnoll slavers on a ship (it is illegal for gnolls to enter Absalom.)  On the way to the ship, they are ambushed by gang members in the slavers' employ, then they get on the ship and fight the gnolls, and rescue the damsel in distress, and potentially many other slaves in the hold as well, not to mention embarrassing politically anyone involved.
9. Eye of the Crocodile King—An interesting mad-scientist story, traditionally handled.  A senior Pathfinder handler invites you to go to a wizard school and help out a family friend; turns out that while making weird crocodile-human hybrids, he was briefly possessed by the soul of a disgraced former head of the academy who was imprisoned in an amulet.  Now, the crocodile hybrid is possessed, and the poor dim-witted ranger who worked with the young wizard is dominated daily.  Now living in the sewers, he's raising a small army of troglodytes to invade and destroy the academy in revenge.  So—small sewer crawl, fighting rat swarms, an injured otyugh, various troglodytes and the Crocodile King himself; plus some small side quests involving either spies or finding a backdoor sewer entrance into the academy for future spies to take advantage of.
10. Blood at Dralkard Manor—This is an interesting one.  A soon to retire Venture-Captain sends the PCs to check out a "manse" (usage in the module incorrect, where they obviously assume that it's just an alternate olde-timey spelling for mansion, and not the parsonages attached home to a church.  What can you do?  It's starting to become common enough that some dictionaries have actually added that definition in recent years; basically just a large house or countryside manor.) Anyhoo, rumors are that the place is haunted.  When the PCs get there, there are two bandit gang members living there; one on the second floor who's casting illusions through the floorboards to try and convince trespassers that the place is haunted, and one who's the only woman in the gang, and because they're all a bunch of hapless betas, they all have a crush on her (you'll find love notes throughout the adventure.)  When these two are dispatched, there are also two vargouilles locked in a room, and an assassin vine.  And finally, the bandit captain comes back the next morning with a wounded sheriff in tow, who they plan on "feeding" to the vargouilles.  So you kill him and his entourage too, save the sheriff and have a now friendly contact in the area when the retired venture-captain rebuilds and moves in.
11. The Third Riddle—This is probably the least interesting by a long shot of all of the scenarios I've read so far.  You are to go to Osirion looking for what happened to a Pathfinder who found a lost "Egyptian" temple out in the desert.  Although you do get ambushed briefly in the desert, in an attempt to make an interesting combat environment (a moving wagon caravan attacked by riders) the context, backstory and set-up is laughably hasty and thin, and more word count is spent, by a considerable margin, on even one of the three absurd riddle/traps that you have to solve.  There's also a ghostly old guy talking to you kind of like the hologram/librarian from The Time Machine, and when you solve each puzzle, and I'm not actually kidding here, a blue chest appears that you can't do anything with except open to get a piece of the McGuffin.  Does it make that little chest-open Zelda chime sound when you do?

12. Stay of Execution—We're back in Taldor this time, trying to retrieve an object stolen from the Pathfinders in Absalom.  The thief is in a frontier prison that is like a small microcosm of Escape From NY.  So, you go in, fight prisoners and a gargoyle guard, make a deal with the thief, and get the thing back.  Why you should need to make a deal with the runagate is beyond me; if the Pathfinder Society wants to send a message, he should be brutally killed and then cast speak with dead to find out where he stashed the thing.  Yeah, yeah—it's probably too high a level for the PCs, but can't they bring him back to Oppara where a big-time Pathfinder operation is running and get it done there, or something?  Anyway, the scenario feels a little contrived.

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.