Pathfinder Society Scenario # 10-11: "The Hao Jin Hierophant" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

I played The Hao Jin Hierophant a few months back and, unusually for me, I can barely remember doing so.  This points to either a) I was drinking too much rum during the session or b) the scenario is pretty boring.  Even reading it for the purposes of this review, I still only get the vaguest recollection of what happened during the session.  There are some worthwhile and admirable themes in the story, but unfortunately they just didn't come together in a way that made for interesting or memorable gameplay.

SPOILERS

The Hao Jin Hierophant is a scenario that tells one of the unintended side effects of the epic conclusion of # 10-00, The Hao Jin Cataclysm (Aram Zey's merging with the Phoenix Spirit to become the new guardian of the tapestry demiplane).  It seems that at least one community within the tapestry, a village named Onhae (originally taken from Tian Xia centuries ago) has discarded its traditional religion and come to worship Aram Zey as a god!  It's an interesting and plausible twist that the PCs won't know about when they're sent into the tapestry by Zey's successor as Master of Spells, Sorrina Westyr.   The tapestry is still (more slowly) unravelling, and several teams are being inserted to find and preserve as much of the contents within as possible.  The PCs' particular mission is twofold: 1) visit Onhae and gather as much information as possible about its local culture; and 2) retrieve a sample of a rare purple flower said to bloom only once every 144 years.  The briefing is actually pretty exciting (it starts with an appearance by members of the Decemvirate!) and has the feel of the entire Society working together to accomplish an urgent task that usually only comes during the yearly Specials.

The villagers of Onhae are the descendants of people taken from the Sunsu Godae ethnic group in Tian Xia, and they're extremely distrustful of outsiders.  Once the PCs enter the tapestry and approach the village, they have a limited amount of time to snoop around and ask questions before the villagers get annoyed with them and kick them out.  Mechanically, this exercise in amateur ethnography is handle by giving the PCs three "phases", each lasting about 20 minutes of in-game time, to either visit specific places in the village, gather general rumors, or look around for more subtle clues about what the village is like and what's going on there.  Each choice essentially involves a particular skill check that, if successful, gains the table a "culture point"--and the more culture points the group gets, the better they've done in learning about Onhae and its peoples (and the more rewards they'll get at the end of the session.

This exploration of Onhae is a major part of the session.  On the one hand, I appreciate the attention that went into the writing here (there's some detailed incorporation of setting lore from Tian Xia) and the overall theme (that the Pathfinder Society can help preserve cultures--or at least information about those cultures--rather than just being Indiana Jones' style tomb-robbers).  I think it takes a really good GM to make this part of the session come alive, however.  When I played it, and reading through it I can see why, it was a lot more in the vein of "visit a kitchen this phase; roll a skill check related to cooking; you learn unspecific information about Onhae cooking practices; you've earned 1 culture point".  I do understand how hard it must be to try to "gamify" something like anthropology, but I just don't think it's handled successfully in The Hao Jin Hierophant as the entire process comes across as bland and somewhat tedious.  As an aside, I'm also not convinced that "you've visited a village for an hour and have now understood and recorded its culture!" is how anthropology really works.  A storyline involving the PCs needing to perhaps extract a member of the Pathfinder Society who has been embedded in the village for some years to learn about the residents of Onhae and their customs might have worked better.

During the exploration of Onhae, several villagers will point to the need to speak with Lin Fen Hai, the village's leader.  However, she's not in the village as she's off praying at holy spot.  When the PCs go to find her, a battle ensues because she's being psychically manipulated by an evil plant creature called an etheroot into believing the PCs are evil spirits.  There's more backstory to the situation than that, but the first combat of the session is along a jungle path against Fen and two of her followers.

Either by following Fen's backtrail, or by seeking out the rare purple flower, the PCs will stumble directly into the clearing where the etheroot lives.  There's another battle here, but it must be forgettable as I have only the foggiest recollection of it!

The last encounter of the scenario is frankly bizarre: a "silver squall" appears, described as "a planar tide of aggressive, competing ideas."  This violent psychic storm somehow . . . argues . . . about the village relying on shame, pride, fear, and faith, and the PCs are supposed to defeat it by presenting . . . counter-arguments?  Even having read the scenario, I'm very fuzzy about the whole thing, and I think perhaps the writer was trying too hard to get the players to really pay attention and use the information they learned during the investigation part of the scenario.  But in practice it just turned out to be a weird, abstract, semi-metaphysical event that (thankfully) was over quickly.

Having learned about the village's culture and obtaining a sample of the purple flower, the PCs can exit the tapestry.  There's a solid conclusion and plenty of information about different ways the village may move forward depending on the PCs' actions.

Overall, I almost feel bad that I don't like The Hao Jin Hierophant more.  It's well-intentioned, allows for open-ended gameplay, and makes room for an academic approach that I normally love.  Somehow though, it just falls flat to me.  Onhae never really "clicked", mind-controlling plant monsters aren't really that interesting, and some of the content was just too vague and abstract to really get a handle on.  I don't think it's a bad scenario, just a somewhat boring one.