Mummy's Mask - Pathfinder 2e Conversion
The ancient lands of Osirion are blanketed by the sands of time, and eldritch secrets and vast riches lay just beneath the sun-blistered surface. As modern Osirion opens its vaults and tombs to outsiders for the first time in centuries, many of these lost treasures and secrets are now emerging—some more troublesome than others. Hakotep I, a now-forgotten pharaoh, was robbed upon his burial. A secret sect took his heart and his funerary mask, both containing a portion of his soul. Betrayed the chance to pass on into the afterlife during his burial, Hakotep has existed in a state between life and death for millennia. The recent rediscovery of one of these lost soul fragments has allowed the trapped pharaoh to once again work in this world to redress the wrongs committed against him, and a cult worshipping him as a god-king grows in the heart of Osirion. Can a group of heroes brave terrible guardians, foul cults, and the burning sands of the desert to stop the rebirth of this ancient tyrant?
Have you ever wanted to head into the desert sands, uncover lost ruins, dive into ancient pyramids, and take on the forces of undead and evil pharaohs? Have you ever seen The Mummy staring the one and only Brendan Fraser and decided you wanted that?
A year ago, I… well, didn’t finish an adventure, but we did finish the adventure path when everyone died. More on that later. I ran Mummy’s Mask for a group, had a ton of fun, really enjoyed the puzzles and interesting traps, and failed both times to enucleate some adventurers. I’ll get their eyeballs one of these days…
But to do all that, I had to first convert Mummy’s Mask from Pathfinder 1st Edition to Pathfinder 2nd Edition. If you want my thoughts on the adventure and the conversion, keep reading. If you just want the conversion, click the link below.
Just an important note: this conversion was created to be used with Pathfinder 2nd Edition. A conversion still relies on the original adventure created by Paizo to be run. Get Mummy’s Mask on Paizo to run the adventure.
Tomb Raiders (But it’s legal!)
The adventure opens up with the player’s forming a team of tomb raiders to dive into the Necropolis of a city. But they aren’t bad tomb raiders, instead the pharaoh has decreed that these tombs are supposed to be raided, their treasures taken, and then sold off into the local economy (worshippers of Abadar, the invisible hand of the market, really likes stimulating the local economy).
As they dive into these tombs, they find a rival group is trying to do more than just stimulate the economy with grave goods and ancient sarcophagi, but rather attempting to return an evil and long forgotten pharaoh back into the world so that the evil and long forgotten pharaoh can rule with an iron, undead fist.
Why Are There So Many Traps!?
As befits a game set in the endless deserts of Osirian (heavily inspired by pop culture and Egyptian mythology), there are a lot of traps. The biggest challenge in this adventure path was converting all the traps. In total there were almost 50 traps to convert, which means 50 traps for your players to trigger, 50 traps to almost kill your players, and 50 traps to run.
It’s a lot of traps, and those are probably the things I like the least in any adventure. I always feel a bit awkward as the Game Master when running hazards, especially when I design them in a homebrew campaign. I have to set a DC for whether or not a player sees the trap? Isn’t that kind of cheating since I know everyone’s passive Perception and I want the trap to do trap things? It feels like a bit of a double-edged sword.
If I make the trap DC too low, then I know the party will see it and will dismantle it and it doesn’t do anything (so I shouldn’t spend that much time on it) or I make the trap DC too high, cause I know what everyone’s Perception modifier is like and then when they trigger it, they know that I know their Perception and I made it really high which invalidates them having a really high Perception modifier.
Maybe these are just me things that keep me awake at night. Maybe I think too much about these things and it’d just be better if I roll 3d10 to set the trap DC.
More Than Tomb Raiders
In the adventure, your group turns out to be more than just tomb raiders out for a quick gold piece. You are destined to save the world from an undead enemy that threatens to destroy your home and tear nations apart with… flying pyramids!
It’s a pretty fun adventure as you dive into ancient libraries, fight unique undead monsters, battle an actual sarcophagus that wants to swallow a creature whole and crush them (move over mimic, I have a new best friend), and brings out some of D&D’s most classic monsters like crypt things, dark creepers, adherer, sphinxes, and more!
One weakness that I heard about the story, however, is that the adventure needs you to care about Osirian and saving it from the big bad. In my opinion, if you are holding that as a weakness, than almost every adventure has that weakness. From my readings of people and their concerns on that, it seems like their parties are consisted of adventurers not from the region who say ‘not my problem’ and teleport to the other side of the world.
Which is a pretty short-sighted viewpoint. I think the adventure is very well written, has a lot of engagement, pulls your adventurers in, and doesn’t suffer from that ‘weakness’ more than any other adventure. If you have a group of people whose knee-jerk reaction to any opposition is “why should I help?” - then that is a group problem, not an adventure problem.
Being served the adventure hook (multiple times) and still ignoring it just makes for bad players, not bad adventure books. And it also strikes me as a very ‘othering’. Like your group is willing to save European-fantasy nations and kingdoms from massive threats, but Egypt-fantasy nations are on their own cause it’s not your problem.
But my party didn’t have a problem grabbing the hook and (trying) to save the nation. They may have strongly disliked the ruler (sorry Ruby Prince) and been kicked out of a city (totally not their fault), but that didn’t stop them from grabbing onto the adventure hook and risking their lives to save the world from complete destruction.
Monsters
As I mentioned, there are a lot of classic Dungeons & Dragons monsters in here. Some I heard about before (we even did a deep dive on a few of them, like the Mummy and the Dark Ones). Some I had not heard about, like adherers and crypt things.
Let me tell you, some of these classic monsters just seem like they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. I mean, really? Crypt Thing was the best you could come up with for a name? It’s an undead that can teleport creatures into random areas around them, which, as you might guess, splits the party! The number one rule of adventuring is to never split the party, and that is a crypt thing’s signature move! You could’ve called “Adventurer Murderer” or “Party Splitter” but instead they went with… that thing in a crypt. Not very inspiring.
All told, I converted 94 stat blocks for this adventure, which is almost double what I had to convert for Skull & Shackles. (Also Skull & Shackles didn’t have that many traps… not that I’m still stuck on that.)
If you ever want to get really good at creating monsters in a new system, convert almost a hundred monsters from a previous edition or game and into the new system. You’ll either have it figured out 100% or you’ll never be good at making monsters in that system.
Though, that brings me to that one monster… Spellcasters are dangerous in Pathfinder 2nd edition, especially high level spellcasters with high spell save DCs when your party runs into a fight that they are under leveled for and ignore your hints that maybe you should find some other monsters to beat up first before entering that one room. Which leads me too…
That’s a TPK
So I had a Total Party Kill (not my first! I TPK’d a party twice in Tomb of Annihilation, and then TPK’d that party again in Dungeon of the Mad Mage… is 4 TPKs saying something about me as a Game Master?).
My party had entered into the final dungeon of the fourth book (well, the entire fourth book is basically one massive dungeon). They went left, heading straight for the big bad of the book, got an NPC follower of theirs killed by a trap with phantasmal killer on it, and then took on the BBEG down a character, with spell slots and hit points depleted, and got cooked.
The disintegrate spell is a killer. Turns out when you get reduced to 0 hit points, you don’t get to make death saves, you just die. Well, that wiped out one character very quickly, followed by a second character. By that point, I was out of disintegrates, but nowhere near out of spell slots and the remaining character was focused on healing and buffing, not unleashing untold devastation on their enemies, and they soon perished against the boss.
It was an interesting combat for me. Part of me wondered about my conversion (no one else who ran the AP conversion has told me they’ve had issues with it in regards to balance), part of me was very sad that we ended Mummy’s Mask shortly after that as people’s excitement for it waned after the TPK, and part of me was a bit excited.
One of my favorite parts of adventures is running the beginning. When people first create characters and we first begin an adventure, everyone is so much more excited for an adventure, that I kind of want to start a new adventure every week. Starting something new is the best part!
Adventuring in Osirian
The conversion took a lot of time to create, but it was definitely worth it. The adventure is a lot of fun (even if my group didn’t finish it due to… dying), and there are multiple chances when you can try and pull someone’s eye out of their head in the adventure (which is pretty unique)! I had a lot of fun running this adventure, and I have to give the Find the Path Podcast props for introducing me to this adventure. I had never heard of it before, but after listening to their actual play of it, it inspired me to not just run the adventure, but to convert it to a new system and spend so much time on this project.
If you’re looking to run Pathfinder 2e and want something more than your standard fare with tons of undead, Mummy’s Mask is for you—especially if you love The Mummy.
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