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NO SPOILERS
The Silverhex Chronicles is a series of six linked adventures
designed to take about one hour each.
Although they can formally be played in any order, I’d suggest doing
them roughly in the order they appear (or, at least doing the last two
sequentially at the end). As Quests go,
this one comes pretty low in my estimation.
There are a lot of plot holes, not many interesting NPCs, and the
encounter difficulty is all over the map.
I don’t think it’s a great representation of what Pathfinder has to
offer, and I would choose others unless I’ve started to run out of
material. I played through this over the
course of two nights with the four-player adjustment in effect.
SPOILERS
The backstory to The Silverhex Chronicles doesn’t
quite gel. There’s a half-orc explorer
named Ulisha who operates out of the River Kingdoms. She’s discovered an ancient enchanted sickle
and wants to sell it to the PCs so that she can “pay off a bounty” that has been placed on her head by noblemen she has angered.
Ulisha has gone into hiding, but has left a series of letters for the
PCs with leads to profitable opportunities in the River Kingdoms so that (I
think) they can earn enough money to buy the sickle so that she can pay off the
debt. It’s a very roundabout way of doing
things, and I’m not convinced it makes sense.
Natural questions are: why doesn’t she slip out of the River Kingdoms
and sell the sickle herself and why do the PCs want the sickle so bad? (there’s
no explanation of its historical value or, until the Chronicle, its magical
abilities). In addition, we find out at
the very end that her debt can be cleared for just 500 gp and that she’s going
to charge the PCs over 6,000 gp for the sickle, which they wouldn’t be able to
afford even if they succeeded on every quest!
It all hangs together poorly and is too transparently an ill thought-out
MacGuffin.
Anyway, each of the six Quests are preceded by a handout
letter and together they take the PCs on a little tour of the River Kingdoms.
“Mausoleum” is the first Quest, and from a morality point of
view, it’s a doozy. The PCs are asked to
break into the mausoleum of a recently-deceased nobleman and steal whatever’s
valuable inside. It’s not exactly a
mission for lawful or good PCs, and can’t even be justified by the usual
“Indiana Jones-style archaeology” rationale.
The adventure takes place in Gralton, a town filled with exiles from the
Red Revolution in Galt, and they’re some of the nobles that are after
Ulisa. When the PCs arrive at the
cemetery, they find the body of a young man draped over a post in front of the
mausoleum they’re supposed to break into.
The post holds a cryptic clue to getting the mausoleum’s door to open
without setting off a trap, provided by a magic
mouth: “When the last sun falls upon this spot, receive my thanks.” The idea here is that a member of a rival
noble house thought the reference to “sun” was a reference to “son” and killed
the interred noble’s son in a bid to gain access inside. (I actually came to the same conclusion, thinking
I was being clever—apparently, murderers and I think alike!)
In fact, the puzzle’s solution is the obvious one: it’s when
rays of the setting sun fall upon the post.
The problem is that the scenario doesn’t make it clear to the PCs what
time of day it is and that the sun’s rays can’t fall on the post because of the shadow cast by a
spire on a different mausoleum (the Conclusion section mentions this to the GM,
but many understandably won’t notice until it’s too late). What the PCs are supposed to do is cut down
or break the spire (add vandalism to grave-robbing!) to gain access to the
mausoleum. Inside is a valuable tapestry
(worth enough to pay off Ulisa’s debt—done, everyone go home!). The complication in this Quest is that the
murderer of the noble’s son is lurking about, and there’ll inevitably be a battle
with her. She’s heavily outnumbered,
however, and won’t pose any real threat.
This one wasn’t bad in concept, but care really needed to be
given to the exposition of crucial information to the players in order for it
to work properly.
“Mists” is the second quest and sees the PCs in the
bordering country of Ustalav. Ulisa has
told them she buried a magic lantern in a place called “Cannibal Grove”, and
the PCs are expected to recover it. (the
backstory, which the PCs won’t get, explains that she stole the lantern from a
necromancer and hid it in a place full of evil energy so that he couldn’t find
it easily) The adventure starts at an
inn called the Restless Bear, and the writer does a good job giving it
and its proprietor some flavour.
Once the PCs head off into the wilderness, they’ll find that the lantern
is in the middle of a haunt that has a pretty cool effect: as “Cannibal Grove”
would indicate, it might force a PC to eat some of their own flesh! The added complication for this scenario
takes the form of a super-tiny fey with 9 hp who wants the lantern, and she’s
temporarily aided by an elk. The battle is almost laughably easy.
Still, I didn’t mind this one as it had some good atmosphere.
“Colony” is the third quest, and has the PCs travel to
Allenstead, a small village on the border with Razmiran. The hook is solid: Allenstead has always been
staunchly resistant to the faith of “The Living God” Razmir, but suddenly, in
the course of just weeks, the whole town has converted! The cause must be related to the recent
arrival of a priest of Razmir and the strange sceptre he carries. Ulisa wants the PCs to get that sceptre by
hook or by crook, on the assumption that it’s magical and therefore quite
valuable. (she’s really able to keep up
on current events despite hiding out in a cave in the wilderness!)
The PCs arrive in time to hear about a daily noontime
sermon. My group spent some time
formulating heist-like plans to try to swipe that sceptre, which would have
been a lot of fun, but the scenario has other ideas. At the sermon, the priest goes to use his
magic wand to hypnotize the crowd (as he’s done every day previously) only to
find out it doesn’t work—he’s exhausted its charges! It’s a very, ahem, convenient coincidence as
far as the PCs are concerned. The priest
runs for it, the PCs give chase (with the aid of some skill checks to escape the
crowd) and do battle. It was okay, but I
liked the premise more than the execution.
“Crash”, the fourth quest, was a real wake-up call—or, some
might say, a kick in the nethers! The
hook is again solid: Ulisa has found clues pointing to the location of a
potentially-unexplored crash site of debris from the “Rain of Stars” (when a
fantastical vessel broke up over Numeria, raining down shattered bits of
strange metals and wondrous devices).
Following her directions, the PCs unearth a metallic pod with silver
disks and a bracelet inside. Getting the
stuff is easy, but getting out with it is the challenge. The PCs are waylaid by a group of kellids who
demand the PCs turn over the loot along with all of their gold. There’s not really a diplomatic way out of
this without failing the quest, and realistically the PCs are going to have to
fight. But these kellids include two
Level 1 barbarians who can use Power Attack with their greatswords to do 2d6+10
points of damage with a single hit! It’s
brutal enough to kill a Level 1 PC outright (especially on a crit!) and that’s
exactly what happened to one poor player’s PC before mine hastily
surrendered. Low-level games always hold
the risk of something going very wrong when crits are involved, but this
encounter was drastically more dangerous than all the others in the series and
wasn’t really fair. The lesson here is
that scenario writers need to rely on formal CR less and common sense/judgement
more: antagonists like raging barbarians and ghouls are far more lethal than
their CRs might indicate.
“Webs” is the fifth quest, and it suffered from not clearly
explaining to the PCs what they needed to do.
The letter from Ulisa references a desire to obtain spider silk (from
giant spider nests, naturally) and sell it in Daggermark so the Poisoner’s
Guild can use it in their concoctions.
That seems straightforward, and obtaining the spider silk is. But the letter makes a passing reference to a
particular merchant as “not being as forthright in our latest dealings as I’d
like, and perhaps it’s time I sold elsewhere.”
The scenario expects the PCs to interpret that as the need to seek out
multiple buyers and haggle in order to get the best possible deal for the
spider silk. None of us at the table
clued in, and we simply sold the spider silk for the 200 gp we were first offered and
thus missed the entire back-half of the quest..
It’s rare in Pathfinder, but especially in Society play, that haggling
is allowed, as traditionally scenarios give a fixed price and PCs take it or
leave it. A better explanation of why
the PCs needed to eke every single gold piece out of the sale would have made
this quest much better—but even then, it’s still rather forgettable. The morality angle of PCs taking part in the poison trade is also never broached.
“Silverhex” is the final quest, as the PCs learn of Ulisa’s
location (either by haggling really well in the previous quest or, very
coincidentally(!), overhearing the man who hired the assassins remarking where
she’s been hiding. The PCs may arrive at
her cave hide-out in time to set an ambush for the assassins, or, if not, just
as they attack Ulisa. Ulisa wields silverhex (the magic sickle) in battle
and you would think, given all the fuss, it would be really cool and
impressive, but it’s just a spell-storing sickle and her stat block doesn’t
even indicate what spell it has stored!
The assassins put up a fair fight, and I have no difficulty complaints
with this one. After the battle, the PCs
can then intervene with the noble who set the bounty on Ulisa and get it lifted
for just 500 gp or a DC 25 Diplomacy check.
There’s been a lot of drama over so little!
There’s a last bit of weirdness on the Chronicle sheet. One of the boons speaks about the PCs coming
to the attention of the Pathfinder Society and being invited to join as a field
agent. Nowhere else in The
Silverhex Chronicles is there a reference to the PCs not yet being
Pathfinders (the default assumption for PFS), so it was a bit jarring.
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