Pathfinder 2nd edition released in August 2019. Their Core Rulebook (weighing in around 640 pages) and Bestiary were the first products off the line, allowing you to play the game fully. In conjunction with the core material, they also released their first module (now branded Pathfinder Adventures) “Fall of Plaguestone” and their first Adventure Path volume “Age of Ashes: Hellknight Hill” on the same day. As I had the means at the time, I went ahead and purchased my own copy of each of these except for the Adventure Path– after all, it was only part one of six, and was designed to take a campaign from level 1-20…I was on the last third of Kingmaker still, so it wasn’t like I was going to be ready to run the campaign any time soon anyways.
Paizo announced a 2nd edition of their roleplaying game in 2018, and had placed out a playtest document at Gencon 2018. I had taken a look through the playtest PDF of the core rules, and found some really interesting changes that they’d made– such as removing Attack of Opportunity as a default, having classes choose feats from only their class (and of an appropriate level) instead of from all the feats made to man that you met prerequisites for, and the three-action system. Some of their designs were a bit weird…they playtested a mechanic called Resonance, which was a hard cap on the number of magic items that you could use per day. Not a bad idea in general– but when your limit is 2 plus your Charisma modifier, and even items as simple as potions count against it, it didn’t feel good for any class that wasn’t Charisma focused like Sorcerer and Bard.
This Resonance system eventually turned into the Invested Item system– characters now have a limit of 10 magical items that they can Invest themselves in, but not every item needs Investment. Potions and other consumables for instance do not need to be Invested, and as such you don’t begin to run into limits on what you can take until you reach the mid to higher levels. Shields were also reworked– the playtest gave the idea that they could be more than just a bonus to AC if you equipped them. Now shields needed to use one of your three actions on your turn to Raise them and gain the bonus to AC, and while raised you might be able to use your Reaction in order to block incoming damage– you take less damage, while your shield would get Dented. The Dent system was thrown out in favor of shields gaining hit points, hardness, and a break threshold. Multiclassing, which we were told would work through Dedication Feats that you could take in place of your regular Class Feats, was introduced in the full rules as well! The multiclassing system in itself is something I could talk for ages for…but I shall leave that to another time.
To be more on-topic, I received my copies of the PF2e rulebook et al. in September of 2019, and proceeded to read through a lot of it. Paladins were now just a subtype of the Champion class, you added your level to many things, and the varying degrees of proficiency gave a way to differentiate skill divides between characters without making the d20 roll irrelevant! Prepared as I now was, I read through the Fall of Plaguestone adventure and called my friends to my house for a few sessions of Pathfinder 2e!
Up to this point I had ran one Paizo Adventure Path (AP) to date, as well as a Pathfinder Society (PFS) scenario and a very short early-era-Paizo module. This new Adventure was quite exciting– in the back the adventure toolbox gave me five or six new magical rings, and there were some backgrounds included for the players that even tied into the story and could cause side-quests! In three parts, the first part was dominated by a mystery to be solved which involved a lot of interaction with NPC’s around town, and to date remains one of my favorite investigations to run players through. That being said– I ran my party of three players through the module, with little knowledge of how to adjust the encounters for fewer than the four that all of Paizo’s adventures are designed for. Instead of going through each encounter and adjusting down for one fewer PC, I opted to make heavy usage of the Weak template– introduced in the Bestiary, it was meant to be a quick and dirty way of leveling down a creature by 1, by reducing all of its numerical statistics by 2 and decreasing hit points by a certain amount depending upon level.
With a Bard, Barbarian, and Cleric to forge the way, the opening encounter…was rough. At a Severe level of difficulty, I opted to remove one of the mooks to adjust for one less PC. As it turns out that put the expected encounter difficulty at just barely more than Severe, which likely wasn’t a huge impact to the XP budget– the problem was that the first fight my players had in the system was a Severe one. Two mooks and one mini-boss type of creature, only one PC was left standing at the end of the fight. Certainly more difficult than the fights they’d been having in the Kingmaker campaign!
The group quickly moved away from the encounter and into the thick of the mystery the adventure presented them with. The rest of the session went relatively smoothly– talking to NPC’s, doing some odd jobs around town, and culminating in a chase scene! While official rules for the Chase sub-system wouldn’t be introduced until early 2020 in the Gamemastery Guide, an early version of the rules presented itself towards the end of part 1 with an extended skill test (along with some non-skill checks like a reflex save). I personally think that part went really well, and my players seemed to catch on after a moment too.
The finale of part 1 of the adventure was a delve into the hideout of the villain, which featured three encounters and four traps at differing points. Sadly none of these traps happened to be the excellent Complex Hazards the system introduced as a catch-all for complicated traps, environmental effects, and haunts. Instead, all the traps were Simple Hazards, which meant they were fire and forget type things– a collapsing roof, two spear launchers, a crossbow pointed at a door that fired when the door was opened (that one was particularly nasty, taking down one of the players in one shot), and a poisoned lock. The combat encounters involved trained attack animals, a really cool unique creature, and the boss (whose arena was interspersed with those two spear traps mentioned earlier).
When part one was finished, we moved on to part two. A new NPC arrived to rope them into an ecological rescue mission, and soon they found themselves fighting off bloodthirsty plants and cunning orcs. A few more unique creatures were introduced here, including one which could be offered as an animal companion if the party handled it properly– I thought that was exceptionally interesting! Part two of this adventure felt particularly short to me– very little roleplaying, but seven encounters over two different locations. It was in the final two encounters however that spelled doom for our party. Two moderate encounters, each of them featuring a single creature two levels higher than the party. Not terrible on paper at first…but the two encounters are designed to blend into a single encounter, which makes for one Extreme-threat fight. Extreme encounters are meant to give about a 50/50 shot of being a complete TPK, and if you avoid that there’s usually at least one PC death.
A party of higher-level adventurers might have been properly prepared for an Extreme difficulty encounter at this stage– they’d already faced three encounters in the area so far, so some resources and HP were drained, but higher level PC’s have a buffer of HP and a larger pool of resources to throw at problems. The party they had might’ve been able to pull something out if they hadn’t already been through three rough encounters prior to that one. But as it was, it became a bloodbath. The Barbarian went down, and the Cleric and Bard began to run– at low health and no resources, they were in trouble. Scarred as they were by the events that had transpired within the dungeon, they outpaced their foe and caved in the entrance, hopefully sealing it– and their poor departed barbarian friend– in an earthen grave forever.
This marked the end of this group’s foray into PF2e. With one character dead and another player not horribly invested in the system, we closed out Fall of Plaguestone on that sad note. I was personally a bit disappointed that the game hadn’t become a huge hit, but well, clearly things didn’t go perfectly– I wasn’t certain if it was something I had done, or a flaw with the system or adventure themselves. I had enjoyed the mechanics of running the game, but it didn’t really hit a home run out of the park for anyone playing I don’t think. Still…I was willing to give it another chance. I just needed to find more players to try it out with while I returned to running my 1e Kingmaker campaign. I did get my chance to try again– in fact, to try again with Fall of Plaguestone, about nine months later. We’ll talk about that next time.
The Busy Basilisk 