Pathfinder Society Scenario # 9-05: "Call of the Copper Gate" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

I played Call of the Copper Gate with my vigilante (shh!) character, The Shining Knight (a.k.a., Siegfried).  I have to admit, I didn't have a lot of fun, but I think that was mostly because the GM frankly wasn't very good.  In reading the scenario for the purposes of this review, it looks like a really solid adventure that makes great use of previous PFS scenarios and continues a long-running subplot.  For PFS lore aficionados, this is a must-play scenario.  For others, it has a good mix of combat and role-playing, and features some creatures and concepts from later in the bestiaries that may be unfamiliar.

SPOILERS!

Call of the Copper Gate is another adventure involving the long-running saga of the Blakros Museum.  Before it was a museum, it was the estate of a powerful wizard and astrologer named Ralzeros the Overwatched.  Ralzeros became obsessed with the endless expanses between the stars and the unfathomable creatures thought to live there (the Dark Tapestry) and created an extradimensional observatory to watch them.  He reinforced the door to this observatory with a mystically warded copper gate linked to three magic beacons to alert him to danger.  In past scenarios (going as far back as Season Zero), the Society has become wrapped up in the dangers presented by the legacy of Ralzeros the Overwatched and its effect on Imrizade Blakros as well as the museum's current curator, Nigel Aldain.  Call of the Copper Gate involves these key elements and a servant of an Outer God!

The initial "briefing" is a fun and fast start, as the PCs are in the Grand Lodge when alarms sound and Venture-Captain Ambrus Valsin and Paracountess Zarta Dralneen rush around the corner, agitated and arguing.  One of the vaults below the Grand Lodge is suddenly being overrun with magical plant matter presumably being spewed from one of the arcane devices stored there.  Zarta persuades a reluctant Valsin to let the Dark Archive handle the emergency, and she enlists the nearest Pathfinders she sees (the PCs) to follow her into the vault.  There's no time for questions, no time for Knowledge checks, and no time to prep--it's straight into danger!  It's a great change of pace from the way scenarios normally start.

The vault is filled with fungal strands that are hard to move through and coated with toxins harmful to living creatures because they aren't native to this world--they're from the foreboding planet Aucturn!  And more, an "Aucturn Shard Golem" (a variant junk golem) is in the chamber as well, protecting the device responsible for bringing it and the fungus into the vault: a magical beacon (one of the three Ralzeros created to protect the copper gate to his extradimensional observatory).  The Shining Knight rushed in to smash the beacon to pieces and would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for meddling kids a GM mistakenly thinking the scenario didn't allow it.  In a nice story addition, Zarta takes part in the battle (though if she has to do everything, the PCs get fewer rewards, which makes sense).  

Zarta recognises the beacon as something the Society purchased recently from the Arcanamirium (the largest school of magic in the Inner Sea) and says it was one of three.  She suggests that if this one has malfunctioned, the other two could as well, and sends the PCs off to find them and place them in special warding containers.  At the Arcanamirium, the PCs face the most fearsome foe of all: bureaucracy!  I really like it, as dealing with a large institution can be enormously challenging.  The PCs eventually find their way to journeyman wizard Maren Fuln (from # 3-07) conversing with a denizen of Aucturn named Nggith-Tsa.  This part is handled really well.  There's a lot of information to be gained from Nggith-Tsa before an (inevitable battle), and the scenario is detailed about how conversational strands affect the fight to come.  I'm not explaining it well, but suffice it to say, a well-prepared GM will find themselves well-supported by the scenario here.  Like Zarta, Fuln will also participate in the battle.

With two beacons secured, the PCs learn that the third is in the Blakros Museum.  Once the PCs arrive, curator Nigel Aldain reports that intruders broke into the basement and have taken Imrizade Blakros prisoner.  Nigel joins the PCs in the assault (I like how he tells them he's learned to start preparing combat spells every day given all the previous problems at the museum) where they learn the culprits are cerebric fungi and a psychic worshipper of Nyalathotep (with bad art) named Fylzilka.  (I liked that the longer it takes the PCs to bash down the door to the basement, the longer Fylzilka gets to buff--trade-offs like that make for a game where actions matter).  The beacon is spewing Aucturn's poisonous atmosphere into the room, so the rare PC who has prepared gust of wind will feel very clever!  Imrizade is unconscious from wounds, but if healed, will also participate in the battle.  It's nice to see key NPCs be more than just plot- and RP-fodder and instead feel like active participants.

With the third beacon in safe hands, the present danger is over--though the lure of the mysterious copper door remains (perhaps for a future adventure?).  Zarta asks the PCs to do additional research and write a report on the beacons for her, which is a neat way of allowing them to make a Knowledge (arcana) check for their Day Job if they wish.  In the end, I thought Call of the Copper Gate was an excellent continuation of the Pathfinder Society's involvement with the Blakros Museum.  Someday, it might be a fun idea to run these scenarios in order as part of a mini campaign.

Armageddon 2001 # 1-2 (DC Comics, 1991) [COMICS]

 Armageddon 2001 is a famous DC Comics crossover not because of its merits (good or bad) but because of the how the company handled it.  As most fans of the era will know, the whole premise of the 1991 series was that a hero named Waverider travelled back in time from 2001 to the then-present to warn super heroes (sequentially, in each book, of course) that one of their number would become a despotic tyrant named Monarch in a decade’s time.  The crossover lasted almost six months in real time, launched and concluded with a 64-page special. 

The driving force of the entire crossover is the attempt to figure out who becomes Monarch and stop them before it’s too late.  What made the crossover notorious is that, due to some clues in early issues, readers put together a pretty solid theory that made the fan press: it was Captain Atom!  When DC saw the theory and, knowing it was absolutely correct, they panicked.  Thinking that if everyone knew who done it in a whodunnit the crossover would flop, they changed, mid-stream, who it was!  Instead of Captain Atom (a character with truly astounding cosmic-level powers that one could imagine defeating most of earth’s heroes) it became Hawk (a third-tier character who was one half of a duo and could mostly just jump around and punch low-level threats).  In other words, it was a desperate attempt to “salvage” the crossover, and resulted in clues and character motivations that no longer really made sense. 

The general takeaway, which I think is right, is that it’s okay if clever fans put the pieces together to figure out where a story is going—they can still have a great deal of fun along the way along with the satisfaction of seeing themselves proved correct at the end, whereas no one will really be satisfied by a resolution that seems to come out of nowhere because it was a last-minute, knee-jerk switch.  Writing a true whodunnit-type mystery is hard, and it’s better that it’s a little too easy to identify the culprit than that the reader feels they’ve been treated unfairly all along.

Anyway!  This post covers the two specials that bookended the crossover.

Issue # 1 has a great cover, with the tagline: “Ten years from now the world will survive.  These heroes won’t.”  As a child, Matthew Ryder was saved from an earthquake by a super hero, but he never knew which one.  In the year 2001, an unknown super hero betrayed all the others and killed them!  Now, in 2030, Matthew Ryder lives in a world ruled by the fascist Monarch, and even Ryder’s own daughter is a member of the authoritarian government.  Learning that time-travel has just been discovered, Ryder sneaks into the facility and (through some trickery) manages to get sent back in time, though the process transforms him into Waverider (because he’s riding the waves of time!) with the super power of being able to touch someone and see their future.  It’s a classic, compelling story and an excellent start to the crossover.  It also gives a natural reason why Waverider needs to visit each character’s book, because by touching them he can see whether or not they’re the one who becomes Monarch.  The artwork isn’t stellar, but reading this 30 years later, I really enjoyed the story.

Issue # 2 has “At last! The shocking identity of Monarch revealed!” on the cover.  It seems that Captain Atom’s future is to see his children and grandchildren murdered by street gangs, their bodies sent by the “police” to the town dump in a world that has slid into anarchy and degradation.  Enraged and perhaps a little insane with grief, he destroys entire city blocks!  I wonder if this was the core of DC’s original plan, because it’s easy to see just a step further that future Captain Atom decides he has to intervene to set the world on the right course, and thus becomes Monarch.  But instead, back in the present, Monarch arrives from the future and abducts Hawk and Dove.  Monarch kills Dove to force Hawk to become him in a completely unpersuasive story twist (that is, I can see why Hawk would hate Monarch, but why would Hawk then decide to take over the world?).  Anyway, Monarch lures all the world’s heroes into a huge battle where he plans to detonate a neutron bomb to kill them, but Captain Atom absorbs the blast and is sent way back in time to the era of the dinosaurs! (a story told in some subsequent limited series).  The only nice bit is that it’s revealed the hero who pulled a young Matthew Ryder out of the rubble was . . . Waverider!  Nice.