Pathfinder Society Scenario # 9-07: "Salvation of the Sages" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

I started playing Salvation of the Sages with my half-orc Paladin of Sarenrae.  I say "started" because I had to leave before the first encounter due to a plot point discussed in the spoilers below.  Suffice it to say, there's something that makes this scenario very hard for paladins and certain other character concepts to play within alignment and other restrictions.  Putting that to one side, however, the scenario looks really interesting, has an epic conclusion, and nicely resolves some long-standing storylines within PFS.  I guess I'd recommend it for those PCs with more  . . . flexible . . . conceptions of morality.

SPOILERS

Salvation of the Sages starts with a briefing in the city of Merab in Osirion.  Venture-Captain Diya Akan and one of the jewelled sages, Tahonikepsu, explain the situation.  The sage jewels used by the leaders of the faction have, since their inception, been contaminated with a fragment of the soul of an evil necromancer named Aryana Tahari.  Although at present the contamination manifests as easily-resisted evil thoughts and urgings, the influence of Tahari's soul seems to be growing.  The jewelled sages have decided to come together as a group and try to remove the contamination before it becomes too powerful and leads the order into evil.  To do this, they need to perform a ritual at the heart of Tahari's stronghold when she was among the living: a village named Resa that has now fallen into ruins.  There's a lot of additional information and backstory that stems from previous scenarios (none of which I've played), so I'm just summarising the gist of the plot here.

My involvement as a player in the scenario unfortunately ended with the next scene.  The members of the order assemble, and the GM asks for Knowledge (religion) checks.  It turns out that one of the jewelled sages is a freaking lich, and, yep, detects as evil!  In a group with multiple paladins, that brought the adventure to a sudden lurch.  I will say some excellent role-playing eventuated all around, but the bottom line was that there was no way my character could ally himself with a lich--so I had to walk!  I'm of two minds about the issue.  On the one hand, I think it was short-sighted and exclusionary.  On the other hand, it was a good moral dilemma and no one said life as a paladin would be easy.  I do find it ironic now that there's no consideration of this problem whatsoever in the scenario, but there is extensive discussion of how PCs may react to another problematic member of the sages--Grandmaster Torch.  Anyway, the rest of this review is based purely on reading the scenario.

The first encounter of the scenario is triggered when the group move toward the ruins of Resa.  By bringing the sage jewels back in proximity to Tahari's source of strength, the group enable the evil necromancer's spirit to activate a deadly ward.  In a very cool and well-described moment, a basalt monolith erupts from the rumbling earth, sandstorms begin assaulting the area, and masses of undead creatures arise to attack.  In mechanical terms, the monolith gives off periodic waves of negative energy and needs to be disabled through skill checks, while the horde of undead use the troop rules from Bestiary 6 to good effect.  A really nice touch is that the undead can air walk by climbing along the surfaces of buildings that collapsed millennia ago, but so can PCs who have strong connections to undead (like dhampirs or sorcerers with the undead bloodline).  One of the jewelled sages directly assists the PCs in the combat, while the others are helping off-grid cinematically.  It looks like a really good encounter to start things off, though it is also the last combat the PCs will face until the last part of the scenario.

The middle part of Salvation of the Sages is general exploration of Tahari's underground vault containing her research laboratories.  There aren't any encounters here, but there are a couple of traps (with a decontamination trap that inflicts a maximized fireball on players particularly nasty).  There's a ton of background information on Tahari, the diseases she created, potential cures, and much more.  It's definitely fitting that there's so much information to process in a mission that spotlights the Scarab Sages.  Players who like to put the pieces together and assemble a narrative will be happy with what they have to work with.  In a way, it's like a dungeon crawl but with important lore in every room instead of monsters.  Some character concepts won't have much to do in this section of the scenario, but authors can't always cater to everyone and I think that's okay.  The hack n' slashers certainly have their fair share of scenarios.

The big capstone to the scenario is probably the most complex encounter I've ever seen in PFS.  The PCs take part in a ritual to draw the evil of Tahari out of the sage jewels and into a coherent form so it can be banished or destroyed.  There's a *lot* going on here: multiple skill checks for the rituals; four different sets of enemies with complex stat blocks who arrive, contingent on events, at staggered times; multiple ongoing hazards and magical effects that have to be resolved each round; an elaborate presentation of a mindscape mechanism (PCs can journey into a sage jewel to try to expel Tahari); and handling the jewelled sages themselves, who can either help the PCs (if freed from Tahari's influence) or turn against the PCs (if possessed too directly by Tahari's evil).  At this point in the game's (and organized play's) lifecycle, I have no qualms about complex encounters--though I think if any scenario should be gated behind 4 or 5 star GM access, it might be this one!  GMs need to prep for this encounter thoroughly and probably have a round-by-round flow chart or something similar ready.  I haven't played or run the encounter, so I can't evaluate how well it works in practice but it does sound pretty epic.

I really appreciate how the scenario's epilogue accounts for a wide variety of possibilities in what happens during the ritual.  Resolution is provided for if the ritual works or fails, of course, but there's also specific discussion of each of the sages and what happens to them if their own sage jewel was destroyed.  As I often say in these reviews, too many scenarios end too abruptly, but that's not the case here.

My concluding thoughts are that, although it's certainly a bottom-heavy scenario and the issue with the lich is significant, I have to imagine Salvation of the Sages was a satisfying resolution to those players invested in the saga of the sage jewels.  It makes me wish I had been playing since the beginning of PFS so it could have full impact on me.