We Be Heroes is a free adventure produced by Paizo, originally for the Pathfinder Playtest ahead of the release of Pathfinder Second Edition.
We Be Heroes contains four pregen characters, or your table can create their own level 1 goblin heroes.
Introduction
This week, one member of my group was out and the planned session had some big story moments I didn’t want to rob him of. So instead, I ran my group through the Free RPG Day Adventure from 2019, We Be Heroes. I mostly ran the module as written, though I did substitute the final versions of monsters as included in the Pathfinder Second Edition Bestaries rather than trying to pair Second Edition characters made by the Players with Playtest Bestiary monsters.
This is our experience, and yours may differ, especially if you learn from where ours went wrong.
Synopsis
Your first level party are goblins from the Crookedtoes tribe. You are tasked by the chief with tracking down some food and a missing scout. This task leads the party to a combat with some zombie pigs before they discover a massive army of skeletons coming directly toward their camp.
The second half of the adventure has the goblins tasked with making their way through a cave system to find a group of knights in an attempt to save the Crookedtoes tribe. The adventure culminates in an epilogue discussing what happens to the Knights, the Crookedtoes, and the Player Characters following the adventure based on the success (or failure) of the Player Characters.
The story is a nice simple one, easy to read, easy to follow. Nothing special, but sometimes a story of heroic goblins saving their friends is just what your table needs.
Gameplay Experience
The first portion of the adventure was great. Two of my group used pre-generated characters from those included with the adventure and two created their own. We all had fun putting on our high, squeaky, raspy goblin voices as I ran them through the first assignment to track down food and a scout. The zombie pigs at the farmhouse were dealt with pretty handily.
The second half of the adventure was not so kind to my players. The trip through the caves plays out as a dungeon crawl, and honestly one that if your group makes the right choices for which way to turn you could just skip half the combats, including the most severe, and just go straight to the exit from the cave where you enter a social encounter to convince the knights to help save your goblinoid people.
My group did not make the right choices. They almost did, they thought about checking out the passage that would have led them to safety. But, in the second room they explored there was a homunculus who cannot speak but only write. Written all over the room were variations on “Kill the chicken”.
Now, my group are experienced TTRPG players. If a “chicken” is being made a big deal of, they are already talking about the cockatrice they’ll be dealing with. There were discussions among them about the actual job being to just get to the knights and figure things out. And yet, they decide instead to leave the door which leads to a tunnel going directly to the exit chamber to this complex and instead try to stealth over to the cockatrice and save a wizard.
The cockatrice is a level 3 creature, and mathematically it was devastating to the party. Its damage isn’t great, but the party has to continually roll above a 10 on the die for their fortitude saves to make the DC 20 Fortitude Save required by the Cockatrice’s Calcification trait. For us, that did not happen. This entire combat, none of the party rolled above a 5 even once.
Our Inventor was petrified by the second round of combat, followed by our Barbarian becoming Slowed 2 because she rolled a natural 1 on her fortitude, then used a hero point to reroll for… another natural 1.
The sorcerer and the druid bravely ran away from the murder chicken as it caught their barbarian and back to the Crookedtoes to tell them to just forget about that evil cave, too dangerous.
And so we went to the bad ending in the epilogue, where the two PCs are the only survivors of the Crookedtoes, make it to Absalom, and live as street urchins until recruited into the Pathfinder Society.
Overall
One of my players described the experience with this adventure as “1/10 Would Not Play Again.” And I honestly can’t blame him given how things played out for our group.
I personally did not realize how big a threat the Party Level +2 Cockatrice would be. My experience with first party Pathfinder adventures has always been that there may be a rough patch that requires thinking, but that the challenge is generally doable.
Here, the party could easily have escaped and skipped that combat, but the module as written strongly suggests that they go hunt down the cockatrice. And perhaps the cockatrice and the PCs would have had a bit more parity were everyone using playtest rules.
Were I to run this adventure again, I would probably tone down the room where the homunculus is pushing the party to go save its creator. I feel like that might have pushed my party a little too far into not wanting to run from a challenge when they started facing the Condition Spiral as the cockatrice slowed them and they had less chance to position and fight back against it. I might also apply the Weak template to the Cockatrice and make it a level 2 threat rather than level 3.
So my overall thought is that the adventure has a nice simple story to introduce a group to the Pathfinder Setting but that at least one of the combats could use a little work by the Gamemaster ahead of being put in front of the players.
The adventure is full of lovely Paizo Goblin flavor, so I think that if you want to bring that to your table the tiny bit of extra work is worth it, but I definitely wouldn’t spring this one unedited on a party again. It left way too much to the swing of the dice and ended up feeling undeservedly harsh to the players.
Leave a Reply