Pathfinder Module: "Risen From the Sands" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

This Pathfinder module for characters level 2-4 was released on Free RPG day in 2014 and is still free to download from the Paizo website.  Even at that price point, Risen From the Sands is too dear as it'll likely cost everyone at the table their characters.  What you can read about in the other reviews and forum discussions on the Paizo site is perfectly true in my experience: this module is very poorly balanced and is a TPK-generator in waiting.  I ran this for four PCs and two of them died, with the other two fleeing the adventure locale after just two encounters in order to survive.  To some degree this might be forgivable if the module contained an interesting story, fantastic encounter design, or a significant addition to world-lore, but it really doesn't.  It's the sort of uninspired dungeon crawl that any competent GM could put together themselves in an afternoon.  I would call it forgettable, but it may be very memorable indeed to the players who don't make it past the first few rooms!  Really the only thing I can recommend about Risen From the Sands is the artwork--the cover, for example, is a fantastic image.  Overall, this is a module that fails from both a gameplay and a story perspective and should be avoided.

A special note for PFS players: If you want to try this as a sort of "hard mode" scenario, I'd suggest you bring (fairly optimized) fourth-level PCs.  The Level 3 pre-gens included in the module (which are the only Iconics that can be played) probably don't have the sheer firepower necessary to make it through without a lot of luck.

SPOILERS

The backstory to Risen From the Sands is bog standard for fantasy gaming: an ancient pharaoh ("The Pharaoh of Sphinxes") in Osirion (Golarion's equivalent to ancient Egypt) was interred after death in a remote pyramid and arose as a mummy.  The pyramid has been lost for millennia until the shifting sands uncovered it, and now there's a race by archaeologists and tomb robbers to get to the pyramid and discover its secrets and riches.  The PCs receive a paragraph of intro text about the pyramid's discovery and are then assumed to set out for it, with the only choice they need to make  whether to travel on foot (a 7 day journey) or take camels (cutting the time to 4 1/2 days).  The troubles with the module starts right here, as the PCs are told about all these groups "vying to be the first to plunder the tomb's treasures" which makes it sound like speed is of the essence, but in fact it makes no difference and PCs spending money for camels have wasted their dough (at least in terms of getting there; cursed or diseased PCs on the way home may find the purchases worthwhile!).  Of equal unimportance is the purchase of any equipment to make desert travel more survivable, as the module simply handwaves the entire journey to the pyramid.

The interior of the pyramid consists of eighteen rooms, and in very old-school dungeon design, almost every room contains a trap or monsters--but what happens in one room never spills over to what happens in the other rooms.  The traps are the sort of thing one would expect in an ancient pyramid--pit traps, collapsing ceilings, a swinging axe, etc.  The monsters are mostly different types of undead (zombies, skeletons, and mummies feature prominently) with a couple of animated statues, a swarm, and elementals spicing things up a little.  There's a heavy concentration of creatures that can inflict diseases of various types and a nasty cursed item (very difficult to detect at the PCs' level), which means that even if the PCs make it out of the pyramid alive, there's a fair chance they'll die before making it back to civilization.  It all makes you feel sorry for the suckers who go in there!  There's only one puzzle, which is unfortunate--more puzzles and fewer monsters would still fit the feel of exploring an ancient lost pyramid while easing the difficulty somewhat.

I don't think there's value in going through the module encounter-by-encounter.  The PCs I ran this for spotted the first couple of traps (thanks to the Iconic Investigator's Trap Spotting feature) but were wrecked by the first monster: a CR 5 construct with the Trample ability, a hardness of 8, and 52 hit points placed in the middle of a narrow 750' long hallway!  Through some really clever quick-thinking by one of the players, they barely escaped, only to run into the next encounter: a CR 4
mimic.  Few PCs of Level 2-4 are going to make the Reflex save to keep their weapons from getting trapped by the mimic's adhesive, and its ability to automatically grapple and constrict an opponent on a successful hit makes it a pretty dangerous creature.  Coming in such short succession to the construct, that was all she wrote and the survivors were lucky to make it out.  If they had pushed forward, I don't think they would have made it far.

It's a very disappointing module, and I'm surprised to see it was written by someone as good as Rob McCreary.  I understand from the forums that he didn't know what pre-gens would be placed in the module when he was writing it, which is fair enough.  Still, even apart from that, it's just not a very interesting or entertaining module compared to other ones that Paizo has released on Free RPG Day over the years.  With so many high-quality adventures out there now, Risen From the Sands deserves to be buried for a few millennia like the pyramid it contains.