First Time Running: Pathfinder 2e Remaster Beginner Box

I've been playing Pathfinder 2e since shortly after it first released, but not felt any particular urge to run it until I got invited to play the Beginner Box adventure, Menace Under Otari, in a streamed game. After a couple of weeks of playing with some complete beginners it dawned on me that I actually know the rules of PF2 reasonably well, and between that and around 15 years of GMing experience, there was no reason I couldn't give it a go myself.

I kicked off with one of the pre-remaster Free RPG Day adventures, A Fistful Of Flowers, an adorable one-shot about a group of leshies out searching for some missing members of their community. That went OK, so I decided to dive in, pick up my own copy of the Beginner Box, and run the adventure at MK-RPG.

What's In The Box?

You get a lot for your money in the box. The two softcover rulebooks cover a lot in a small space.

The hero's handbook has all the basic rules you need for getting started, plus a guide to character creation. This is all heavily cut down from the core rules - the only classes are fighter, rogue, wizard and cleric, and only go up to level 3, while the ancestries include human, elf and dwarf. The actual character creation rules are somewhat altered. While it's possible, using the core rules, to make a character who's completely useless at their key abilities by making really stupid choices, these cut down rules ensure that you get a character with at least a +3 modifier in their class stat who's going to be generally competent at what they do.

Not that you need to use these rules, as there are also pre-made characters in the box - level 1 versions of Valeros the fighter, Merisiel the rogue, Ezren the wizard and Kyra the cleric. These custom character sheets have an additional sheet to explain what everything means, with letter codes for easy reference, have a picture of the arrow symbols PF2 uses to tell you how many actions something takes, and a colour picture of the different dice, which corresponds to the colours of the dice set that's also in the box.

Then there's the reference card. This sums up how dice rolls work, gives you a list of the most common actions like Strike and Stride with their action costs, and has a section to put action and reaction tokens for an easy way to keep track of what you've used on your turn. On the back are descriptions of some of the most common conditions. In short, a handy quick reference of the stuff you need most often without having to hand the book around.

The GM's guide has the adventure Menace Under Otari, as well as some solid advice on GMing generally and how to make your own adventures, and a selection of low level monsters and magic items suitable for level 1-3 characters. It also recommends Troubles In Otari, a set of adventures that directly follow on from Menace Under Otari and should be playable with just the beginner box rulebooks.

There's a set of punched cardboard sheets, which have the aforementioned action and reaction tokens, along with character and monster pawns (plus the little plastic stands to make them stand upright on the battle board). The four iconics are there, plus various ancestry/class combinations for people who chose to use the character creation rules instead, all the monsters you need to run Menace Under Otari and all the other monsters mentioned in the GM's guide. Where there are multiples of the same monster (such as goblins and kobolds) each one has a coloured mark so you can easily keep track of which is which in a fight.

Finally there's a flip-mat, one of Pathfinder's folding battle boards, depicting the Menace Under Otari dungeon. In short, everything I needed to run this adventure was included. I added just two things - a GM screen, and a print-out of the guide to levelling up to level 2 for each character, as we were on a time limit and wanted everyone to be able to level simultaneously and not have to pass the book around.

Running The Game

I was able to get four players for the game. One was my husband who's also experienced in PF2. The others had all played various versions of D&D before but were all new to PF2. With all the basics laid out on the character sheets and the reference cards, I didn't have much explaining to do, and we were able to dive in pretty quick.

The adventure is a fun dungeon crawl in its own right, but where it really shines is in the way it teaches the rules. The first fight is just a straight up fight - nothing special, just a chance to use those Stride, Strike and Cast A Spell actions and get the feel of how the system works. Then comes a skill challenge, where we dig a little into the actions associated with each skill and learn how using equipment can sometimes affect difficulty classes. Each new fight introduces a new concept: conditions, enemies with resistances and weaknesses, enemies who use tactics, etc. and a variety of traps, puzzles and other curios round things out nicely.

By the end of the adventure, the players had a solid grasp on how PF2 works, and I'm pretty sure 2/3 of the new players were sold on the system (the other seemed to be firmly in the 'D&D 5e is the best game ever' camp, but at least he gave it a go.) Just as importantly, the gradual introduction of new mechanics meant that I also learned as we played. The adventure spells everything out very clearly, advising on how certain monsters will use their special abilities. While it can't possibly account for everything players might do, there were only a few moments when I found myself having to think on my feet to come up with a ruling for unusually creative actions.

And by the end we were getting some really fun moments facilitated by the rules. It was great to see effective use of Demoralise to frighten a boss monster, Reposition to throw an enemy off a cliff, and much to my surprise, Deception (plus a magic item) to disguise the fighter as the dead boss monster, leading to a fight with an enemy who literally didn't see them coming.

Having completed this adventure I feel confident in my ability to run PF2, and am thoroughly looking forward to running more of it, both my own adventures and published material.

In short, job done.

Longcon 2024

Longcon is a revival of an older Garrison convention, where the premise is that rather than playing different games in five gaming slots across the weekend, you spend the full weekend playing one long game. An initial attempt to revive it in 2023 didn't work out, but with much more notice for potential players to get it onto the schedule, 2024 went ahead.

This was a very small convention, smaller than any other Garrison convention I've been to. Nevertheless I managed to meet up with a few regulars in the bar on Friday night. We talked about the games, and I explained that I knew almost nothing about the game I was about to play, except that it was based on a TV show I hadn't seen (Justified), but I was pretty sure that we were going to do crime.

Day 1

The game I'd signed up for was Copperhead County, a FITD game that the author calls "a Southern noir game about organized crime and political corruption in a fictional slice of present-day Tennessee". We kicked off with character creation. I picked the Cleaner, supposedly the brains of the operation, although once we'd done stats I was pretty much the designated face. Loretta the Cleaner was joined by Johnny Bob the Brick and Axle the Mover.

The story began with the three of us coming back into town, five years after the raid that destroyed our operation, to attend the funeral of our former boss who died in prison. Like most FITD games we'd all created a few NPCs during character creation, so Loretta's first meeting was with her old friend Milton the bartender, who'd given her a job when she first came to town, still wearing her wedding dress after ditching her fiancé at the altar. It soon became apparent that Copperhead County had become a much worse place since we'd fled the raid, and by the end of the funeral we'd decided that the three of us were going to have to do something about it.

Cut to a few weeks later. We'd managed to make ourselves unpopular with basically everyone except a local biker gang. We'd carved out a bit of space to sell weed, but what Johnny Bob really wanted was a meth lab. Which also meant we needed a meth cook, as you don't want to go messing with meth if you don't know what you're doing.

Johnny Bob had found a meth lab out in the woods run by the Mountain Mafia, and while it was pretty well guarded, we reckoned we could take it. We went in at night, but before we could start, we actually found the meth cook. He was trying to escape, but also wanted to help his sister, who was still imprisoned in the lab, and also revenge on all of them. We were happy to help in exchange for him coming to work for us instead, and in we went.

Loretta set up her sniper rifle, aiming to pick off a few guards while drawing them away from the lab while the others crept round the other side. That didn't exactly happen. Instead there was gunfire from the other side of the site, and Loretta had to go running, pursued by guards. Some of them got taken out by the explosives trap she'd set up in advance, but then it turned out whoever had shot at her had also set up a bunch of land mines.

Several explosions later, the pursuing guards were all dead but Loretta was unconscious with serious burns. Things weren't going well at the other end either, with Johnny taking serious injuries in the gunfight. Axle ended up being the one to save the day, setting two guards on fire and getting out completely unharmed.

Our next mission was a society party, where Loretta entirely failed to roll well on her social skills, Johnny ended up having a rather disturbing encounter in the bathroom, and Axle once again ended up saving the day. Quote of the weekend: "Why does she have so many sex knives?"

Trouble came looking for us after that, with Loretta's ex fiancé showing up trying to blackmail her into going back to him, plus the ongoing developments as we learned someone in the background was very determined to screw over the three of us and take over our operation. We ended with us teaming up with our biker friends for an assault on the Mountain Mafia, who were annoyed about us stealing their meth lab, aided by a rocket launcher Axle had bought off the dark web. Turns out, when all you have is a rocket launcher, every problem looks like a target.

Overall I think Copperhead County is a well put together game, doing a great job of  reworking the Blades in the Dark concept into a modern day real world setting. My character's special abilities felt fun and thematic, the actions were easy to understand and use, and the XP triggers were fun to discuss at the end of each of the three sessions. It's well worth checking out, even if, like me, you never watch this kind of TV show, as the playbook will guide you in how to make the genre work.

To me, its only issue is FITD itself. Particularly when you're a new character, your chances of rolling 6s are low, meaning the chances of things constantly getting worse are high. It's the kind of downward spiral more commonly associated with horror games like Call of Cthulhu, which can make it really difficult to think of yourself as a badass criminal when everything you do ends up blowing up in your face.

So overall I'm thoroughly impressed with Copperhead County, but do expect starting characters to struggle as much here as they do in any other FITD game.

Day 2

While the intentions was to play the same game across five slots, the GM normally only does one day of Garrison conventions and knew there was a chance he wouldn't be able to run on day 2. We'd agreed in advance that if he had to drop out, I'd take over, so on Sunday morning I pulled out the contingency plan: Starforged.

I picked Starforged partly because it requires no preparation beyond some printing, and partly because as a game with a GMless mode, I'd still get to play. So Johnny Bob became Cowboy the hotshot pilot, Axle became Cleric the battlefield medic, and Loretta became Pyro the psionicist. Based on my previous experiences with Starforged I also gave everyone +1 to one stat, and had us all pick a starship module in addition to the one extra asset you get at character creation. In a short game like this it's common for the ship modules to see very little use, which can be disappointing if that's the asset you picked. This way everyone had a path or companion, but we still had some fun stuff for the brief time we did spend on the ship.

Cowboy had picked Courier as his path so it made sense to do a courier mission. He told us we were transporting a case of DNA samples, and we randomly generated the Jovian planet Zephyr, with a toxic atmosphere and constant megastorm. The journey there was pretty quiet, but our descent into atmo rapidly became exciting when we encountered a space pufferfish with mental control powers, which initially took over the ship's AI causing it to do nothing but sing Taylor Swift songs. Its influence rapidly spread across the crew itself, and ultimately we ended up losing control and crashing onto the planet.

From then we had a journey through some caves, meeting a giant spider along the way, before making it to the settlement which rapidly turned out to be some kind of cult to Taylor Swift. We had to take the samples to a professor, but he was out on the research farm, so we asked to borrow a vehicle. They agreed, on the condition that we get it out of the shed ourselves, which first meant clearing out the infestation of acid blooded cave worms.

The journey out to the farm was pretty smooth, and we even got some help from the local wildlife, which by this point we assumed everything was about to go horribly wrong. And it was, as we arrived to realise what they were farming here was people, the case we were carrying was a ruse, and the real DNA samples we were delivering was ourselves.

We fled, fighting off the guards that pursued us, back to the settlement, with Taylor Swift playing from all the enemy vehicles. We took a few injuries, but managed to Shake It Off. We knew there'd be Bad Blood for not finishing the delivery so we threw the case out of the vehicle as we went, and then dived back into the cave systems. We got our ship repaired and took off, smashing straight through the injured space pufferfish which went off like a burst balloon, taking out all the enemy ships as we left atmo and swore never to visit that planet again. Cowboy decided to quit the courier business. But at least we got a nice hover skiff out of it.

Starforged is absolutely the game I would recommend for a situation like this when you don't know how long you're playing for, if at all, or how many players you're going to have. I did no prep and it all just worked. I'm lucky enough to have both the asset deck and the reference guide, which make things a bit smoother at the table. For each player I printed a character sheet, and a double sided page with adventure moves on one side and combat moves on the other, as those are the ones people are regularly referring to. Based on this game, I would also add a single copy of the exploration moves, as we used those quite a lot. For the rest, we passed the reference guide around.

Reflections

This was a great opportunity to play things like FITD games with downtime phases that you normally never get to do in a one-shot, to create a character and then get to stay with them for hours, to play without the pressure to wrap things up in a single session.

There are some minor downsides. With everyone being in one group all weekend you don't get to see much of the other players outside your group, not even at meal times since the games don't have set slots. I did miss some of the social aspect of conventions, and other than the people in my group and those I saw in the bar, I'm not really sure who else was there.

While for that reason I wouldn't want this as my only con, it's a fantastic addition to the usual convention offerings. I'd definitely like to add this to my annual convention schedule and I'm already starting to think about what I could potentially run next year.