Pathfinder Modules: "The Pact Stone Pyramid" [RPG]

 NO SPOILERS

The Pact Stone Pyramid lives up to its reputation as one of the best of Paizo's 3.5-era modules.  I ran it as part of my "Roots of Golarion" campaign of pre-PFRPG adventures, and everyone at the table agreed it was excellent.  The adventures works perfectly as a standalone experience, but also ties intriguingly into the Aucturn Enigma storyline that began with Entombed with the Pharaohs and concludes (many real-life years later!) with the Doomsday Dawn playtest adventure.  The adventure has a great combination of open, sand-boxy elements, strong NPCs, and some really original dungeon-type challenges.  Getting to experience some of this early material is one of the two main reasons I started the Roots of Golarion campaign (the other being to game regularly with my son), and I'm really glad I did.

SPOILERS!

Set entirely in the Egypt-analogue country of Osirion in Golarion, The Pact Stone Pyramid adds some fascinating lore to the setting.  Several millennia ago, Osirion was ruled for a time by the legendary Four Pharaohs of Ascension--the Fiend Pharaoh, the Radiant Pharaoh, the Cerulean Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh of Numbers.  To ensure they would never betray one another, they used an artifact called the Pact Stone to magically bind their life forces together, so that the death of one would be the death of all.  The Pact Stone was hidden in a temple called Ahn'Selota outside the ancient city of Tumen.  As every Osirionotologist knows, one pharaoh died from an incurable disease and thus dragged the others to their deaths, thus ending their reign.

All of that is history and legend, but the immediate background to the adventure involves a powerful noblewoman named Exemplar Khymrasa.  Khymrasa has developed an obsession with the tales and believes that, if she finds the pyramid where the Pact Stone is hidden, she can resurrect the other three Pharaohs of Ascension and then out of gratitude they'll welcome her as the new fourth member of the quartet, displacing the current government of Osirion entirely and ushering in a new age.  To that end, Khymrasa has used her vast resources to search high and low for Ahn'Selota, and has finally pinpointed the site.  Though the pyramid is buried under tons of sand, she's launched an extensive excavation operation.

This is where the PCs come in.  The Pathfinder Society also has an interest in the ancient pyramid, though (perhaps a bit oddly) not particularly because of the Pact Stone.  Instead, Venture-Captain Jalden Krenshar explains in Sothis, it's because a cache of ancient lost seeds may be preserved there--seeds that could help the deserts of Osirion flourish with life.  An horticulturalist sage named Hoffenburrow is on his way to the site from another mission, but Krenshar needs the PCs to slow down the dig for a week or two until he arrives and they can help him retrieve the seeds.  Krenshar explains that the Pathfinders have one ace up their sleeves: an agent known only as the Mithral Scarab (recurring from Entombed with the Pharaohs) has gone undercover as a slave at the dig site, and will be the PCs' contact person there.

The module handwaves the journey to the dig site and assumes the PCs will be easily able to disguise themselves as slaves on the premise that there are thousands of people working there and no one really knows anyone else.  I probably would have liked to have seen these aspects of the adventure fleshed out a bit, as the Disguise skill is often underused in adventures and would have been excellent to spotlight here.  In any event, the Mithral Scarab soon finds the PCs and fills them in on her plan.  She's been subtly spreading word that the dig is cursed, and that terrible things will happen if it continues.  If the PCs can assist with some tangible sabotage, that will lend credence to the rumor and slow things down.  This part of the adventure is really fun and open-ended.  The module suggests several different things (with associated skill DCs) the PCs can do for sabotage, such rigging pulleys to fail, cutting wagon axles, or even animating the dead at the slave graveyard!  PCs love to have an excuse to be sneaky and creative in wrecking things--for example, my son used illusion magic to help bolster the curse story.   My only suggestion for this part of the adventure is that it would have been really helpful if the module gave the GM more information on the timeline of the dig and how much certain actions would slow it down--something like an abstract "Sabotage Points" mechanism would have been great here.

The dig site isn't unguarded, of course, and as the sabotage mounts Exemplar Khymrasa will start sending out forces to find the culprits.  These include her allies, the Sand Sage (an expert in divination magic!) and Master Soan and his monks from the Shrine of Horns in Egorian.  These NPCs have full artwork and write-ups in the appendix (as does Khymrasa), and are suitably dangerous foes with interesting backstories.  There's a lot of flexibility in how the GM handles this section of the adventure, which is something I always appreciate.

At some point, despite the sabotage, Khymrasa's army of slaves will succeed in uncovering the pyramid.  The second part of the module takes place inside Ahn-Selota and assumes the PCs either rush inside to explore it before Khymrasa's scouts can, or that they actually strike up a deal with her by promising to bring her the Pact Stone on the condition they keep anything else.  The pyramid itself is certainly not another dull, uninspired dungeon crawl.  True, there are traps, monsters, and treasures, but some real originality and thought went into designing it.  For foes, I loved the "reincarnix" (a monster that, once killed, comes back to life in a different form a few rounds later), the "portal golem" (a golem with a permanent passwall in its chest that provides access to different areas of the pyramid), a swarm that's a deadly combination of invisible and has an aura of silence around it (meaning a PC might be getting chewed up by something they can't see and can't warn the others about), and more.  For traps and puzzles, there's a classic "doubling coin" trap (more money seems great at first until the hoard risks crushing you to death), a treasury protected by an antilife shell, gem-capped stakes that, when pulled out of the wall brings a vampire on the other side back to life, and the need to figure out to use gaseous form (or super-shrinking) to navigate narrow tubes connecting one level to the next.  There's some really clever elements here.  (My PCs actually ended up bypassing some of the early rooms by deciding to simply dimension door in, and I had to quickly do some math to see where they ended up.)

Something akin to a "boss" in the pyramid is Suekahn, a "ghalshoaton devil" bound to the pyramid until it has slain 56 intruders.  He's an interesting figure because he actually wants the PCs to disable as many of the traps as possible so that more people will come into the pyramid, and sometimes he'll bail the group out when they get in a bind.  The appendix has a two-page entry on ghalshoaton devils--they've never been updated and collected elsewhere, potentially because the Osirion-specific nature of their powers and backstory doesn't necessarily fit so well their being devils from Hell.

A great twist is that the legendary Pact Stone is not at all what Khymrasa envisioned.  Instead of a portable artifact that the PCs could bring out to her, it actually constitutes the floor of an entire chamber of the pyramid and is completely immobile!  Just by walking on the floor together, the PCs could become temporarily bound together themselves by its magic, which has some really interesting implications: their hit points are pooled, healing someone heals the pool, but if one dies, they all die!  The pyramid also contains some items tying into the Aucturn Enigma, including a countdown clock and The Last Theorem.

Once the PCs emerge from the pyramid, the third and final part of the adventure begins.  While they've been inside, Khymrasa's forces will have found and captured the Mithral Scarab and Hoffenburrow, and are holding them hostage.  The PCs may be able to trick Khymrasa by giving her something else found in the pyramid and claiming it's the Pact Stone--if so, everyone may be able to walk away without further violence.  Probably more likely is that there's a final encounter that could be pretty exciting depending on how it's handled.

As I said in the intro, The Pact Stone Pyramid features a great mix of scripted and improv-style elements.  The backstory is fascinating, the encounters are original, and there's great flavour throughout.  I highly recommend this one.