GoCorral

As before, I’ll preface this by stating that I have only read the Ruby Phoenix adventure path as research for my China RPG endeavor. I have NOT played through the campaign as a DM or as a player. If you’re interested in playing Ruby Phoenix yourself, I will be giving some spoilers for the campaign. The more notable spoilers are hidden, so if you’d like to stay spoiler-free, avoid those sections.

Ten years have passed and the Ruby Phoenix Tournament continues after the events in the previous module. This tournament is different though as the fabled Hao Jin has finally returned from her supposed death, as she always does. Gone for 300 years during which her will was slowly executed, Hao Jin decides to let the tournament continue, only now she will serve as the grand judge. The PCs are one of thirty-two teams invited to participate in the tournament. The grand prize is the same as in years past, the selection of a single magical item from Hao Jin’s famous treasure vault.

Part 1: Despair on Danger Island

The first adventure starts off with the PCs on a boat going to Bonmu, also known as Danger Island. On the island the PCs will get a phoenix necklace and three silver feathers. Over the next few days they must fight other teams and complete challenges to eventually obtain ten silver feathers by the deadline. Along the way enforcers that work for Hao Jin will challenge contestants to take their feathers away. Those who succeed in gathering ten silver feathers must bring them to a castle on a hill at the center of the island where Hao Jin is waiting. Completing this task allows a team to proceed to the next round of the tournament.

Those of you familiar with Yugioh Season 1 may find this plot very familiar… Minus a soul-sucked grandpa, its the same plot. I’d said that the stand-alone module felt like a shonen story and like a good sequel, its got the same plot that you loved from the first one.

Bonmu was once inhabited but is now overrun by monsters and undead. The island was originally settled by an ancient civilization prior to the Golarion’s Earthfall catastrophe. After thousands of years Bonmu was rediscovered by another group of people. Then one hundred years before the adventure begins a giant tsunami swept away most of that civilization. The tsunami also allowed all of the dangerous monsters to come to the island, making it a haven for dinosaurs and other enormous beasts. The undead on Bonmu are the shades of past inhabitants wiped out in one of the two disaster events in the known history of Danger Island.

Danger Island is chock full of encounters. Just stuff native to the island includes buried treasure, ancient shrines, tyrannosaurs, and undead. The tournament enforcers will also fight the players or demand they perform some trial or challenge to stay in the competition. The thirty-one other teams are also struggling to win and will challenge the PCs to fights where the silver feathers are wagered. The players have to keep their strength up in a test of endurance. Unlike a typical dungeon where you can rest for as long as you need to between explorations, Danger Island has only a short eight hour window each day where the players are supposedly safe. It’s an action packed adventure and I can confidently say that no group of players will face all the encounters in the adventure and it is unlikely that a group will successfully defeat all of the encounters they do run across. The adventure expects an ebb and flow of silver feathers for the PCs as they approach the required ten for entrance into the next stage of the tournament.

Danger Island also sets up the villains for the campaign, the Lightkeepers. They are a party of four that are intended to bully and outclass the PCs at this point. One of the suggested encounters is for the Lightkeepers to run into the PCs when their HP is depleted and challenge them to an immediate fight while they are injured. Easy victory for the Lightkeepers with a hurt foe. And the PCs have a rival to hate and want revenge against for the rest of the adventure path.

I think Danger Island is a great adventure. There’s tons to do. It’s mostly player directed for what they want to do with the occasional scripted event. The main weakness for me in particular is that its a 11th level adventure for Pathfinder 2e. I’ve played PF2E, but only once at 1st level. I do not have the system mastery to properly gamemaster an adventure at 11th level and my players don’t have the system mastery to properly make and play a functional character for 11th level. Let alone in an adventure that is explicitly competitive. I love the adventure’s design and the variety of encounters. Unfortunately, it will have to wait until I’m more familiar with the system before I can properly use it. I may end up running Season of Ghosts as it starts at 1st level and then having those characters move into the Fists of the Ruby Phoenix adventure path. Tian Xia all the way!