Pathfinder Module: "Pathfinder Online: Thornkeep" [RPG]

Ah, Thornkeep!  I think many who experience it will have a love-hate relationship with it.  On the plus side, there’s a great town ripe for exploitation by homebrew GMs who need a perfect place to launch a sandbox campaign.  In addition, the five dungeon levels within can be raced through in PFS for a full 3 XP each!  On the down side, those dungeon levels are of such inconsistent and often unfair difficulty that sudden PC deaths and even TPKs have become notorious.  I’ve run all five dungeon levels, and I can testify they can be a group-destroyer! 

 

Thornkeep is a 96-page book that includes a full gazetteer of the eponymous town and the surrounding area, a full description of each of the five dungeon levels under the town, and then a lengthy discussion of plans for an online Pathfinder game.  The artwork within is great, and there are some nice maps.  It’s worth mentioning that there are several associated products: flip-mats that make running four of the dungeon levels much easier, a novel (Crusader Road) that fleshes out a lot of the setting and NPCs, and even a granite plaque that reproduces the cover art.

 

The book starts with a two-page introduction from Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens that explains its origins as a Kickstarter incentive.  The Kickstarter was to raise funds for Pathfinder Online, a massively multiplayer online RPG.  The town of Thornkeep was designed as one of the three starting locations in the game, and this book and its expanded content was the result of several Kickstarter stretch goals being met.  There's a sidebar that provides an overview of the five levels of the dungeons under the town, including suggested level ranges.  The sidebar explains that because each was written by a different author, "all five dungeons have vastly different aesthetics, inhabitants, and dangers."  That's an understatement!

 

The first major part of the book is an 18 page gazetteer of Thornkeep.  Thornkeep is a small town--just 600 residents--but it definitely doesn't have "small town charm"!  Instead, it's a dangerous place used by bandits and gangs of thieves.  Locals protect themselves by hiring protection from mercenaries, as the town's current ruler doesn't particularly care what happens in the town.  Nonetheless, it's not a completely chaotic "pirate's den" type of environment, as some order is provided by the multiple factions in the town.  These take the form of guilds--a mercenary guild, a hunter's guild, a wizard's guild, and a thieves' guild.  I'm guessing this design has something to do with the online game, and that the players could have their characters join a guild for advancement.

 

Thornkeep has an interesting backstory and there's plenty of flavourful fodder for role-playing in the description provided here.  There's a full map of the town and a description of 38(!) locations within, many of which have little adventure hooks. I assume today most readers just gloss over this and head to the dungeon levels, but I'm really impressed by the detail in this section.   It provides a good, classic overview of a group's "home base." It'd be a perfect location for an open-ended sandbox campaign, and a believable base for a group of PCs to start becoming major players in the River Kingdom.  I used as much of it as I could even when running the dungeon levels in PFS, as the locations and NPCs provided make for some good role-playing and keep those sessions from being pure dungeon-crawling.

 

The next part of the book provides detail on Echo Wood, the larger area in which the town of Thornkeep is located.  Although the section is only eight pages long, there are several great locations for adventures, though a GM would need to flesh them out from the brief descriptions provided.  For example, there's Mosswater, an entire town overrun by merrows decades ago--who knows what treasures the fleeing residents left behind? Echo Wood also contains the Emerald Spire, but that's a whole other topic!  There's a brief random encounter table that could have used expansion (and it suffers from the common problem of threats ranging all the way from CR1 to CR8, which means it'd be a potential TPK generator if a GM really rolled randomly on it).  But all in all, this chapter's a good complement to the chapter on the town, and adds to the book's usefulness in setting up a classic, open-ended sandbox campaign.  

 

The next five chapters of the book are eight pages in length each and devoted to the five dungeon levels under Thornkeep.  As a sidebar in the Echo Wood chapter explains, each dungeon level is designed for PCs of different levels, and there's probably not enough XP in one level to get the PCs ready for the next.  Thus, side quests will be necessary, and it'd be a really bad idea for a group to try to tackle the levels one after another without doing some adventuring elsewhere.  I only ran the dungeon levels via PFS, where this wasn't a problem (apart from some awkwardness in making it clear that certain staircases were effectively off-limits), but in a regular campaign the GM may need to do some fancy footwork to keep groups from exploring areas they're just not ready for.  As I mentioned above, each of the five levels is written by a different author, and even for PCs within the appropriate level ranges for them, the challenge levels vary dramatically.  What they do share is a unified backstory about an ancient Azlanti wizard named Nhur Athemon who was exiled from his homeland and came to the Echo Wood to build a complex for his research and experiments.  The gazetteer sections of the book do a decent job providing some lore and adventure hooks to get PCs into the first level of the dungeon, and there's a little bit of connection between the dungeon levels themselves, though for the most part they're pretty independent.  Before moving onto each of the levels, I'll just note that the Thornkeep Flip-Mats cover the second, third, fourth and fifth levels, but a GM will have to draw their own map for level one (and it's not an easy one to draw).

 

Level One is "The Accursed Halls", written by Richard Baker, and designed for 1st-level PCs.  Frankly, I don't think it's a great start.  Apart from the sprawling and confusing map, there's a video-game style requirement to obtain seven crystals of different colors scattered throughout the dungeon in order to open the door to the next one.  PCs can easily be lulled in to a sense of complacency through multiple fights against goblins and the like, before suddenly being hit with some genuinely unfair encounters against wights, a shadow, and surprisingly nasty fungal crawlers.  If you read the forums, there are a *lot* of complaints about this level and the number of PC deaths, and I can testify that when I ran it, there was the same result.  A group of six min-maxed PCs might be fine, but a group of four average PCs should expect casualties.

 

Level Two is "The Forgotten Laboratory", written by Jason Buhlman, and designed for 2nd or 3rd level PCs.  As the name implies, this level was where Nhur Athemon conducted arcane and alchemical experiments.  Although the wizard himself is long dead, the labs have since been taken over by a half-orc alchemist beautifully named "Krenar Half-Face."  There are some really fun bits in this dungeon, including mutated goblins, a goblin with alchemical vials embedded in his head (love the pic of Snarltongue!), and some clever traps.  But compared to Level One, it was a breeze for the PCs and they finished it quickly.

 

Level Three is “The Enigma Vaults”, written by James Jacobs and designed for 3^rd or 4^th level characters.  Stylistically, this level is great—it’s a sort of museum where Nhur Athemon stored and displayed artifacts from other planets.  There are a lot of cool links to setting lore that doesn’t get much attention because it involves worlds other than Golarion.  But it’s the boss of this level, a mi-go cleric named The Visitant, that I’ll never forget, as he pretty much broke my gaming group!  He has claw four claw attacks—not a big deal.  He has grab—not a big deal.  He has sneak attack—a bigger deal, especially since he summons allies to help with flanking.  He has a special power called evisceration, which means every time he succeeds on one of those grab checks, he inflicts sneak attack and ability score damage—a very deadly deal!  Following most forum GMs, I went with the catch-and-release style when running the Visitant (dropping every grapple as a free action to continue the series of attacks), but this proved incredibly deadly—a couple of PCs were killed, one was permanently damaged, and one fled.  There was real anger at the table afterwards, and the whole situation got escalated up to real-life PFS oversight in an attempt to reverse things.  The players thought I was a terrible GM, I thought they were overreacting, and the group never really recovered.  Suffice it to say, I was off to play-by-post to run the next two levels!

 

Level Four is “Sanctum of a Lost Age” by Erik Mona, designed for 7^th level PCs.  This is a good example where you can see what separates a skilled, professional writer from the lazy “drop a bunch of random monsters in rooms and call it good” type.  The story involves Nhur Athemon’s three traitorous apprentices imprisoned in a time-stasis field indefinitely.  The level is very interesting and dynamic, and the order in which PCs do things can change the entire way the situations play out.  For example, when I ran this, an NPC who joins the PCs got himself killed in a trap, and his death created a paradox that destroyed the time-stasis, which in turn instantly destroyed every living creature and organic thing that had been trapped there!  The apprentices themselves are definitely manageable, but there’s one potentially-lethal room where multiple high-CR monsters can be released every round if the PCs aren’t smart about how they deal with things.  Overall, I thought this was probably the best written level in the book.

 

Level Five is “The Dark Menagerie” written by Ed Greenwood and designed for 5th level PCs.  I have no idea why they put this adventure after the previous one (both in the book and in terms of moving down through the dungeons), as the PCs’ levels are supposed to be lower here than in “Sanctum of a Lost Age.”  I think it was considered quite a coup at the time to get Ed Greenwood of Forgotten Realms fame to write a level, but unfortunately this is by far the least-inspired one in the book.  The concept is that Nhur Athemon had created a zoo of exotic living creatures and engineered illusory environments to place them in, and all of this has been in stasis until the PCs arrive.  The problem is that the creatures aren’t particularly rare and, apart from negotiating with a sphinx, there’s really nothing to do besides step into each room and fight the monsters within.  I expected a lot more from a legend in the field.  It does play fast if you need to quickly level up some PCs, but that’s about it.

 

The last section of the book is essentially promotional puff for the Pathfinder Online game, and it comes in at an absurdly long 26 pages (the longest chapter in the book).  There’s little enduring value in this section now, but even at the time it came out, the assorted interviews when the game designers delivered little more than some of their early ideas, concept art, and discussion about the tech demo they were putting together.  Frankly, this is the sort of thing that should be offered for free on a website to spruik the game, not printed in a sourcebook.  I’ve never played the game (my understanding is it never really got off the ground in the sense of having paid subscribers), and there’s not a lot here that makes it sound particularly special or appealing compared to the many other sword and sorcery MMORPGs out there.

 

To end quickly because I’m running out of space, overall there’s some value in Thornkeep—but just be careful how you use it!