Last Saturday, I played another game in my ongoing Pathfinder 2e game. We’re playing through the Gatewalkers Adventure Path. This session was the second session of the third chapter of the first book of the adventure path: The Seventh Arch. I’ve written about the greater number of the party before in my post: Sketching the Gatewalkers. Since that post, we’ve added one additional player chracter: Radira, a dwarven barbarian. Bill’s player also retired Bill and replaced him with Miasma, a goblin alchemist.
Prep
I needed to review the map and key for the Memory Cache section of Seventh Arch and prepare the rooms. In preparing modules for my group, I’ve found the “Lazy DM” method put forward by Mike Shea of Sly Flourish to really help me prep my games in a way that works for my brain. I’ll break those down. Most of these steps actually take me longer to explain than to do.
Review Characters
The idea is that the session is meant to create fun situations using the characters at your table.
At my table there are:
- Miasma: Goblin alchemist, likes explosions, wants more formulas, chaos gremlin.
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Madame Azullah: Elven fortune-teller, spells revolve mostly around affecting dice rolls or getting an early sense of what’s going on in social situation.
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Renard: Kitsune cleric of Callistria, hiding the full measure of their true nature of the party, on the run from their home situation.
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Stallman: Skeleton witch, fits a similar niche to Madame Azullah but focused slightly more on harming enemies than helping allies. Searching for where they belong.
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Leopold: Dhampir investigator, comes from a noble family. Father is a vampire but so good at his government job that no one does anything about that. Has an ability where he gets a free mention that something in the room is suspicious, no context for why.
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Radira: Dwarven barbarian, got dragged into a shadowy fae land, joined the party to help get home, got tossed even further from home.
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Adanel: Elven thaumaturge, uses strange things he’s collected on his journeys to affect enemies in strange ways. GM PC (this game originally traded sessions between me GMing and Renard’s player GMing)
Strong Start
This one was easy, and came more or less from the book.
Group entered a trapped corridor feeding them the worst of their failures. Reminder set for myself to tell Leopold of the strange eyes (which contain magic sensors).
Other Steps
I largely just pulled the rest of the steps: Scenes, Secrets, NPCs, Treasure from the module. A couple of NPCs I thought might be a bigger piece of my party’s playthrough, I used a random generator to give names.
Recognition of Need for Content Warning
As I read through the module, I came across a section where there is imagery of heads cradled in the branches of trees, described as odd fruit. I decided to let everyone know, through the assistance of another player who’d co-GMed earlier in the game to email everyone with a quick heads-up about the imagery that would appear and a reminder about our table’s safety tools. No one ended up with a problem, but I’d rather give a warning no one needs for something potentially upsetting than not give one that’s needed.
Playthrough
Throughout the Playthrough section, italic text is me navel-gazing and analyzing choices I made.
We began the session right where we’d left off two weeks ago, in the middle of the caves leading to the “Memory Cache.”
They crossed a small stream to enter a hallway full of carvings of elves.
I immediately got payoff on the “Hey, it’s suspicious” power and got to tell our investigator that something was off with the statues’ eyes.
With the information that the eyes were suspicious, the investigator immediately approached the trap, triggered it, and critically failed the will save. It showed him memories of a time he’d failed to live up to his parents’ high standards and dealt a massive amount of mental damge.
During this scene there were a couple times I fudged a DC on a check where players had kept missing saves by one over and over and the scene was dragging on in a way that felt much more difficult than the “Low” difficulty advertised on the page. Giving a go ahead on a 19 for a DC 20 let things move forward rather than linger in a way that was just eating HP without anything too interesting happening.
Miasma got to have some fun success here, with her choice to put points into Thievery and carry Thieves’ Tools paying off. I was glad because her poisons have had bad luck in previous sessions and seeing a character finally work how they were planned is great.
Eventually, as there were two of four sensors left, Leopold got a critical success on his Thievery check to disable the sensor which we ruled as rewriting a rune on the sensor to introduce feedback and take out both remaining sensors and stop the trap. (At this point Miasma and Leopold had had repeated fails and were hurting for HP.)
Renard used some healing to top everyone off and we entered the next room.
Radira the Barbarian entered the room first, and saw three skeletons emerge from piles of bone and rotting and rusting bits of armor. She immediately approached the closest skeleton and got some good attacks in, but the skeletons were resistant to the slashing damage of her axe.
Madame Azullah at one point asked about whether the skeletons were mindless, but turned down an opportunity to Recall Knowledge, so the party made an assumption that the Skeletal Champions were mindless (a false assumption) and tried fighting them just with basic powers. Radira ended up tanking three skeletons herself and soaked multiple critical hits before falling (The natural 20s were with the GM dice in Foundry last night).
At one point Stallman dropped a second-level fire spell on a skeleton, which it succeeded the save to take half damage, the roll wasn’t great, and they had the unknown resistance to Fire, so the second-level slot resulted in 1 whole damage to a single skeleton.
Combat devolved for a moment into discussion about “I burned a second-level slot for one damage.” and how yep, that’s how resistances and making saves work. I have a feeling that Recall Knowledge will become a larger part of the groups repertoire when entering combat going forward.
Radira was taken down by skeletal criticals, but brought back by Renard. Adenel inserted himself next to one of the skeletons and activated his Thaumaturge “Exploit Personal Antithesis” power to create a weakness in the skeletons and critically suceeded so the full litany of skeleton resistances got revealed to the party to use to best effect.
Learning moment for the group, the lucky roll by the GM PC provides a ton of information for the party and shows how lore and knowledge skill rolls can make combat easier.
Radira rises from her healing to finish striking down the last skeletons. The party searches the room for treasure, and Leopold ends up upgrading his regular crossbow straight to a +1 striking crossbow. That’ll give some extra firepower to his character in combat, which considering he was feeling like the investigator wasn’t a great fit for the game a few sessions ago, I really like.
The group searched the skeleton room and found a crack in the wall which led to a fungal forest shining in many colors. Some Fungus leshys approached them trying to keep them from messing with the forest. Miasma had a great time chatting with the leshys about the best way to take care of different fungi and made a trade with them of wonderful rotted bits of corpse from the different things that the party has slain in the past. The leshys were greatly excited to have new substrate for their mushrooms and gifted the party with a magical shield in return for the farming advice that came from the alchemist.
We had a chat here about where the session was and how long it was likely to last. I took a look at my notes and realized that the skeletons were likely the last combat they’d have. The next scene had a chance to devolve into combat, but given the party’s habit to talk over fight, I decided that I just wouldn’t trigger the fight and told them that they’d had the last combat of the night and that we’d be playing out two more social scenes and we decided on a time to finish the game. I don’t think that decision about how the scene would play out or the delivery of that information to the players hurt the game at all. We still had to play the scenes to see how we got to that conclusion and still had a great time with those scenes.
From the scene with the leshys, there was one continuing path on toward the end of the cave passage. In the next chamber were a couple of scalescribes who were eager to engage the party in discussion. And to my great enjoyment, the party was just as eager to discuss things with the scalescribes. Since the scalescribes were looking to con the party out of any information they could get from them, I made sure to let Leopold the Investigator know that they were the suspicious thing in the room. And yet, Renard fully engaged with their interviews. Eventually Madame Azullah got impatient with the process and asked how long it would be to get the “appointment” the scalescribes said they were interviewing the party for.
Here, the module had said that the scalescribes would roll a single secret deception roll versus the party members’ perception DC. That roll was a natural 1. Which was a fantastic result for drama. “Hey, they are definitely lying to you” is an excellent piece of information to give a party.
The recognition that the Scalescribes were lying to them was mentioned in the module as causing a start to combat, but Radira the Barbarian got a Natural 20 on an intimidation roll so I ruled that there would be a little more time to figure out their exact position before combat. That’s when Renard dropped the best moment of this scene.
“So, back at character creation, I got this flavor item of a religious text. (Changes to character voice) How would you like to know more about Callistria? I have this book I could give you that has so much information.”
It’s great when players interact with NPCs on the NPCs terms in a way like that. They recognized that these characters were hungry for new information and came up with a way to use that to their benefit.
Our witches got an idea based on how excitedly the scalescribes took to the religious text.
“We need scrolls to feed to our familiars and learn these spells. Could you make us scrolls of these spells and we’ll let you keep the spellbook we found?”
We’d had to put learning spells from a spellbook found in Kaneepo’s lair weeks ago on hold because the treasure granted in this adventure path isn’t a lot and scribing scrolls can be expensive. This was a super creative solution to that problem, so given the scalescribes’ innate ability to make scrolls, I let it happen.
Once the scalescribes were placated with goodies the party was free to enter the Memory Cache proper.
This is the scene for which I’d previously issued the Content Warning for this session, so I reiterated it as we entered the scene in case any safety tools were used. I use Lines and Veils and a variation on Script Change for my game so I quickly reminded everyone those tools were available.
Everyone was ready to proceed so they entered the Memory Cache. They met the Caulborn Gardeners who are in charge of the “Grove of Memory” as the caulborn refer to the location that the players were looking for.
Radira traded the memory of her most traumatic day to the caulborn in exchange for the group’s admission to the grove. Her player is excited to think over how her character will be changed by having that memory permanently removed from the character.
There is no mechanical effect here, just an exciting roleplaying challenge for the player. I kind of like having this sort of cost for plot events in a game. Of course, I have one player who is involved in community theatre and a bunch of active roleplayers so it’s part of our fun at the table to think over how the character would act.
The players met with the great sage Iskariel, whose head was installed in the grove of memory Futurama-style. They discussed the curse that had been placed on the key they carry. Then they had a chance to discuss and ask questions of the sage before the session ended. They got some exposition on how there was this great big psychic whale that gave people superpowers (and hey, we have superpowers) but did things to the affected individuals’ minds (hey, we don’t remember this whole long section of time) but, I think the best question asked came from Stallman. He asked simply, “Where do I belong” and the entire table went “awwww….”.
We closed out there and when we meet again we’ll be covering the exposition from Iskariel and how the elves of Loskialua respond to it and where the Players can go to collect the necessary ingredients for the restorative draft Iskariel told them about. She gave them a hint about “She Who Walks Through Seasons” which piqued some interest from players in what that might mean.
Overall Impressions
Overall, I feel like this was a good session. We got a lot done, and only one bit of the session was combat.
I feel like I could have done a better job to make the complex trap in the hallway a little more engaging with the players beyond “it damages you, now what do you do to try and disable it”. That part of the evening seemed to stretch more than any other.
I’ll have to think in the future how to keep up engagement during scenes like that.
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