Pathfinder Society Scenario # 4-11: "The Disappeared" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

I played through The Disappeared via play-by-post with my go-to Iconic, Quinn the Investigator.  Season Four PFS scenarios have a (well-deserved) reputation for really ramping up the combat difficulty, but I didn’t find that an issue at all in this one.  It’s fair to say that combat itself takes a back seat in The Disappeared, and instead characters who specialise in deception, stealth, and smooth

talking get their time in the spotlight.  The plot’s interesting and original, and the gameplay experience is very different than the norm.  I really enjoyed it, and I strongly recommend it.

SPOILERS

Zarta Dralneen, the very . . . memorable . . . Chelish liaison to the Pathfinder Society has disappeared!  Or, perhaps more accurately, she has been disappeared.  Worried about the fate of the secrets she has about the Society, Venture-Captain Ambrus Valsin calls on the PCs to discover what happened to her, where she is, or if she’s even still alive.  It’s clear the government of Cheliax knows something, as they’ve taken to denying she ever existed in the first place!  So Valsin tasks the PCs with infiltrating the Chelish Embassy in Absalom during an evening gala to search for clues.  Their cover will be as “Pathfinders with information about Sargava to sell to the ambassador,” and that should get them as far as the waiting room.  Valsin explains that he’s been able to get Amara Li an invitation to the gala, and she’ll be able to keep the ambassador busy for an hour, and that’s all the time the Pathfinders will have to slip out of the waiting room, search for clues to Zarta’s fate, and return to the waiting room before the ambassador turns up and starts getting suspicious.

How this works mechanically is that the PCs are, quite literally, on the clock.  They have sixty minutes in-game for their search, and various actions take different specified amounts of time, with the GM given discretion to account for PC actions that haven’t been accounted for.  Drawing the attention of embassy staff by being clumsy with stealth or disguises results in one “strike” each time it happens, and the group only gets a certain number of strikes before the gig is up and they’ve been discovered.  The GM is encouraged to be transparent with the PCs about how much time they have left and how many strikes they’ve accumulated, as this encourages some great risk vs reward role-playing about how to proceed because there’s often a cautious but slower option compared to a faster but more noticeable option on how to proceed.

This may all sound a bit abstract, but it all works well in practice.  For example, after they’ve slipped out of the waiting room, the PCs need to traverse a long hallway bustling with servants without being noticed.  They can take their time and wait for a pause in activity (a Perception check, with each attempt taking 2 minutes) or just stride down like they belong there (a Bluff check that only takes 1 minute).  Failing either check lands the group a strike.  Not every option is as binary as that, and there’s lot of fun to be had with the various ideas PCs might come up with to get where they want to go—Zarta’s personal quarters.

The description of Zarta’s quarters is perfectly lascivious, fitting the character to a T.  One of the only two mandatory combats in the session takes place here, as the rooms are guarded by summoned devils.  Zarta had some brief notice that she was about to be taken into custody by Chelish internal security, so she arranged for some clues to be left for anyone coming to help her later.  The clues take the form of some messages encoded in a basic substitution cipher, and I like the added touch that if players attempt to decode it, every minute they take in real time is deducted from the sixty minute total they have in game! 

The clues should lead the PCs into embassy’s ventilation system which, as we all know from myriad spy movies, are the perfect way to travel.  The vents then exit into the embassy’s records room which is full of filing cabinets arranged by subject matter.  Various skill checks are used here to pinpoint what happened to Zarta, with each attempt taking a certain amount of time.  By putting together various pieces of evidence, the PCs can conclude that Zarta was framed for espionage by a Chelish rival named Tancred Desimire, arrested, and imprisoned at the Hellknight fortress of Citadel Vraid outside of Korvosa! (there’s a sort of silly fight against animated chairs in the records room, which I think was inserted just to satisfy some notion of a minimum number of combats per scenario).

 Armed with the information, the PCs then need to reverse course and see if they can make it back to the waiting room in time.  If they fail, or if they accumulate too many strikes, they then have to battle successively difficult waves of Chelish security forces until they either get captured, surrender, or make a dramatic escape by something like crashing out a window!

As I said, the plot of The Disappeared is certainly an original one.  I like that some rarely-used skills (like Disguise) really get a chance to shine, and the ticking-clock mechanism keeps things exciting. I really enjoyed the scenario, and I imagine there’s a follow-up where the PCs have to try to rescue Zarta from Citadel Vraid.  This is definitely one worth playing, especially for PCs who are more than just hack n’ slashers.