March of the Dead

Centuries ago, the massive Shining Crusade destroyed the Whispering Tyrant Tar-Baphon, an
incredibly powerful lich. Knowing he might someday return, the Whispering Tyrant’s foes sealed his remains away under his old tower, Gallowspire, and formed the nation of Lastwall to guard
his crumbling edifice for centuries… until three years ago, when the Tyrant was reborn. In a matter of weeks, the furious lich laid waste to Lastwall. The lost nation, now known as the Gravelands, is a haunted and desolate place overrun with undead while the Tyrant’s cult, the Whispering Way, operates freely. Not far outside the Gravelands, the tiny village of Fiorna’s Faith has recently fallen, another victim of this ancient conflict.

Greetings once again, brave adventurers! It’s been a busy week with the release of Book of the Dead, the latest rulebook from Paizo for their flagship product, Pathfinder Second Edition. We’re going to close out our week by directing your attention to the adventure contained in the book and what that means for us in the Pathfinder Society.

First up, if you are not going to GM this adventure or want to play it before you run it, do not go to page 191 in Book of the Dead! Stay away! However, if you want to run this really cool adventure, go right ahead. Our Organized Play Coordinator, Alex Speidel, has informed us that this adventure, March of the Dead has been sanctioned for play with Pathfinder Society. Yay!! You can go to the Book of the Dead product page and download the sanctioning documents to use with the adventure.

This adventure is for 4 3rd-level characters and can be ran in Adventure Mode which means the GM can set the requirements for how to build the characters. The GM can choose to allow players to use ancestries, heritages, and backgrounds which are normally gated behind Achievement Point requirements. I always enjoy running and playing in Adventure Mode. You can read about that in a post I made here last year.

What is important to note about this particular adventure is that you earn double the XP, GP, Reputation, and Downtime to apply to the Pathfinder 2e Organized Play character of your choice. I do want to point out that this is NOT a repeatable adventure for that purpose. You can play it once for credit and GM it once for credit. You do not earn credit beyond the one play as a player and one run as a GM, although it will count towards earning your GM Glyphs each time. Read the Sanctioning Documents for full details. Be warned that this adventure runs well beyond four hours. Word from the early GMs with it have it clocked between seven to eight hours for a run. Some are going past eight hours, but that’s with a lot of roleplay going on…which of course means that’s even better!

You could even choose to play the Skeleton Ancestry in this adventure, but after going through it once, I think it would be best if players did not. Jason Bulmahn wrote the adventure and there’s some spots where I’m pretty sure Jason’s experiences playing 7 Days to Die influenced the development of this adventure. Jason has been playing that game with Dan Servo on his Twitch stream most Saturday nights lately and it’s a real blast. Catch them on a Horde Night and you’ll know what I mean.

In a quick addendum, Paizo has also finally received multiple products in their warehouse which are now available for purchase. Accessories like the Pathfinder Gears Deck and the Pathfinder Guns Deck are waiting for you to order them while the first book, Punks in a Powderkeg for the three-book Outlaws of Alkenstar Adventure Path is also available.

Looking down the road, we see an Adventure Path coming that ties into the Book of the Dead in a six-book campaign, Blood Lords. The first book is Zombie Feast which barring any shipping issues will arrive in August.

I’ll cover Lost Omens: Knights of Lastwall and an extremely important rulebook for Starfinder, Drift Crisis in upcoming posts. I’m particularly excited for Starfinder with this book as we are rebooting Starfinder Society at QuinCon 35 in July!