Pathfinder (GameMastery) Compleat Encounters: "Terror in the Chamber of Pain" [RPG]

 

NO SPOILERS

Terror in the Chamber of Pain was a very early Paizo product, part of its “Compleat Encounter” line that combined a few miniatures, a short adventure, and gridded cards that fit together as an encounter map.  I’ve run a few of these now, and I wasn’t particularly impressed with this one.  The cards fit together in a confusing way and don’t always match the room descriptions given in the adventure text.  The artwork for the two NPCs in the set is fine, but neither one is particularly tough for the planned party of 8^th level PCs.  And although I only have the cards, in the picture of the three minis, one of the minis is very different than what’s promised.  The adventure backstory doesn’t make a ton of sense either.  I guess the one good thing I can say is that the adventure is cleverly written to be easily inserted into pretty much anyplace the PCs find themselves.

SPOILERS!

Terror in the Chamber of Pain involves an evil cleric/torturer named the Seeker in Shadow, who, with the aid of a half-orc assistant, wanders the planes inflicting pain on hapless victims out of a sheer delight in cruelty.  The backstory is that the Seeker in Shadow was once a cleric of “Astanoth, God of Truth and Beauty” (a deity that never appears elsewhere).  But after his family was savagely murdered, the cleric fell into madness, despair and a thirst for vengeance, so his god cursed him to wander the planes for all eternity in his perverted chapel, the “Chamber of Pain.”  Astanoth isn’t exactly inspiring confidence in his decision-making as a deity.

Anyway, the cool thing is that the Chamber of Pain, being a mobile, inter-planar building, can appear literally anywhere.  There’s a ton of easy adventure hooks to get the PCs involved in checking it out—such as the kidnapping of an NPC they know, being hired to investigate disappearances on the streets, or simply stumbling across it in the wilderness where it wasn’t when they camped the night before!  But apart from that useful premise, the adventure itself falls very flat and is rather unmemorable.  The Seeker in Shadow is a chump and no threat to the party, while his assistant is dangerous only if he lands some shurikens laced with purple worm poison.  The “Compleat Encounter” products usually include a unique magic item or artefact, and in this case it’s a fairly uninteresting “Rack of Ruin” that provides a bonus on Intimidate checks to interrogate a foe.  The artwork for the “Rack of Ruin” looks like one would expect (a medieval torture device), but the pictured miniature is just a wooden table with some tools on it—not sure what happened there.

All in all, there’s not much reason to track this down and play it.  Unlike some of the other “Compleat Encounter” adventures, it doesn’t even have a proto-Golarion lore element.  Probably best to leave it forgotten.