The Slithering - Pathfinder 2e Adventure Review - Paizo.

This video is brought to you by The Deck of Many and their Big Bad Booklet series. Hello and welcome to the Gallant Goblin! Today we’re taking a look at the newly released standalone adventure for Pathfinder, The Slithering, by Ron Lundeen with cover art by Setiawan Lee.

Many thanks to Paizo for sending us a review copy. The Slithering is a 65 page long adventure designed for four players that begins at level 5 and ends at level 8. These standalone adventures are great if you’d like to have a full story that won’t take years and years of biweekly sessions to get through.

The Slithering is special for a number of other reasons too, primary among them is that you are not allowed to play as a human character in this adventure. The adventure does have an accompanying flip-mat sold separately if you’re somehow able to play the game in person.

For those of you playing online these days like me, the maps are extractable from the PDF version of the adventure so you can use them on your online RPG tool of choice like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds. As always, the first part of this review is open to potential players and GMs, but the second half is strictly for GMs only.

Players, I will let you know when I need you need to skip ahead a little bit. Another defining feature of this adventure is that it takes place in the city of Kibwe in the Mwangi Expanse, which is a vast rainforest located southwest of Absalom City. Kibwe is a city that serves as a trading post with a diverse population and many visitors coming and going for trade.

It also serves as host for many refugees coming in from neighboring cities, and there's some strife within the city right now due to the recent emancipation of the local slave population. This adventure begins with the player characters visiting an open-air market together.

As they engage in some bartering, the shop owner suddenly and painfully transforms into an ooze creature right before their eyes. After dealing with the ensuing chaos, the party is approached by a member of the Kibwe Representative Council who informs them that this was not the first time that such a transformation had occurred in town recently.

And since the adventuring party looks like a capable adventuring party, she offers them a job of discovering what exactly is behind the transformations, and thus begins the adventure. As players, you’ll be tracking down clues, engaging in research, and eventually trying to find a way to put a stop to the transformations even as they threaten to wipe out the entire city.

This adventure is somewhat of a companion piece to the new Advanced Player’s Guide, also coming out right now, featuring new playable ancestries. You can see our review of that by clicking the "i" in the corner of your screen. As this adventure requires you to play as non-human characters, Paizo released a free set of pre- generated 5th level characters you can use to play the adventure if you choose, using the ancestries and classes from the Advanced Player’s Guide.

You get a kobold witch, an orc investigator, a lizardfolk oracle, and a catfolk swashbuckler. A CATFOLK SWASHBUCKLER! You can check those characters out at the link in the description of this video down below. It’s a fun read even if you don’t plan to play The Slithering in particular.

But for players, there are of course new magical items with a decidedly slime-like flair, there's new enemies to fight, and a new uncommon archetype called the Oozemorph. If your character has suffered from the deadly touch of an ooze or another amorphous creature like a gibbering mouther, they may have lingering effects, such as making them part ooze themselves, and this archetype can give you some protection from precision damage, as your organs are not always where they’re supposed to be You can recover from bleed damage more easily.

You can communicate on some level with some ooze creatures, and you can gain some resistance to bludgeoning damage as things tend to just bounce off your rubbery skin. Finally, let’s say you caught the eye of a basilisk or some such creature that’s trying to cause you harm through eye contact.

Well, lucky you—you can just instantly liquefy your eyes and let them pour down your cheeks to save on that saving throw you just failed, though you are blinded for a bit afterwards while you wait for your eyes to reform. So hopefully, this is enough to whet your appetite as a player for this adventure.

If it’s something you’d like to try, give your GM a heads up or think about GM'ing it yourself! These shorter adventures are a great way to wade into the great world of GM'ing. Now, give me just a moment to speak to the GMs out there to give them a slightly better idea of what to expect in this adventure without spoiling anything for you players.

You can skip ahead to my final thoughts using the time stamps in the video description down below so go, do that now, players, skip ahead a little bit! OK. GMs only now Let me give you just a few more details about the story so you’ll know if this is an adventure you’d enjoy telling.

First, if you enjoy the Aspis Consortium as an antagonist organization, you’re in luck in The Slithering. As you’d expect in a Mwangi Expanse adventure, there is a dangerous trek through the jungle to a demon-infested city to recover the artifact that may help cure the ooze plague and finally in the last chapter, the players will have to storm an Aspis Consortium stronghold accompanied by a golem that is not really under their direct control, which can and should lead to some interesting shenanigans.

There’s also just some interesting encounters such as a public debate about the worth of non-humans in this city that your players will have to engage in using some special rules. It takes place in initiative order and your players will have to extol the virtues of diversity in a manner of their choosing.

Another interesting aspect is that the Slithering, as it's called, is a transferable condition, and the player characters may very well become carriers which can have some very interesting story ramifications depending on the players’ actions and who they come into contact with.

Finally the book provides you, as the GM, with a guide to the city of Kibwe, which is useful of course for this adventure, but also if you’d like to continue the story beyond its written ending or feature it in one of your own campaigns. If you’re looking for a short, off-beat adventure that involves some encroaching horror, some jungle exploration, and a big mystery to solve, look no further than the Slithering.

It has a number of factors that make it unique, and it’s a great opportunity to take some of the new features in the Advanced Player’s Guide out for a spin.
Levels 5-8 is a great way to get a handle on those new player classes to see if it's something you’d enjoy playing in a full adventure path.

The Slithering is out now online or at your local game store. The print edition has an MSRP of $22.99 and the PDF version is $15.99 at Paizo.com. The pregenerated characters are free at the link in the video description down below. And the double sided flip-mat has an MSRP of $14.99 .

This is part of the Pathfinder Adventure Subscription through Paizo. We know about the next three adventures in this series right now. Troubles in Otari releases in early November, though we don’t have a high-resolution picture of the cover just yet.

This is designed to be a bridge from the upcoming Pathfinder Beginner Box to the full game, and I'm very excited to see how they pull that off. Next is The Dead God’s Hand, an exploration of Aroden’s life and what exists below the city of Absalom. That releases in early December.

And then Malevolence, a horror-themed adventure for 3rd level characters in late March, and we don't have a cover for that just yet. We’ll also have a full review of the Pathfinder Beginner Box when we get our hands on it. Let me know what you think of The Slithering and these standalone short adventures in the comments section down below! Thanks again to Paizo for sending us a copy to review, and to our sponsors at The Deck of Many and their Big Bad Booklet series.

The Big Bad Booklet is a monthly zine about boss monsters for 5th edition D&D! This month, come meet King Bllrk, a sentient gelatinous cube with a taste for the finer things in life and an army of chef-goons at his disposal. King Bllrk: he'll make you an offer you can't ref-ooze! Very appropriate for The Slithering.

Subscribe today at BigBadBooklet.com Thanks for watching today! We’re dropping a lot of Paizo reviews today for Pathfinder and Starfinder, so be sure to check those out if you’re a Paizo fan or you're just curious about what it’s like on the other side of the RPG fence.