Starfinder Adventure Path: "Dawn of Flame, Chapter 3: Sun Divers" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

I've been fortunate to have a great group of players to run Dawn of Flame via play-by-post, and Chapter 3 of the AP was where I felt I could repay them for their patience with the previous two instalments (that mostly involved dealing with forgettable terrorists and gangs).  In Sun Divers, we really get into some deep exploration and intriguing world-building.  It's a memorable adventure, and definitely different than anything I've run before.  Let's get into it, shall we?

I love the salamander warrior on the cover--great art, and it fits perfectly with the overall colouring and art design of the AP.  The inside front- and back- covers provide information on a Tier 6 light freighter called the Sun Diver.  No spoilers here, so I'll just say it's well-described and interesting (especially with multiple decks you ascend vertically rather than the standard "flat" horizontal compartment interior layout we usually see in Starfinder).  Inside, there are four pieces of back-matter.

First up is "Noma" (8 pages), a gazetteer of a mysterious bubble-city inside the sun!  My notes say it's "delightfully weird", and I think that's a good descriptor for a city inhabited only by inscrutable constructs conducting unfathomable experiments from sector to sector of the city.  It's perfect for some classic Star Trek-style investigation of "strange new worlds", though the GM may need to add a bit of mechanical "crunch" to flesh out the flavourful descriptions.  The entry also introduces some new technological items; I love the concept of "polyfluid" weapons and armor, which allow the user to switch the damage type of a kinetic weapon (B, P, or S) or the DR the armor provides with just a swift action.  Perfect for adjusting to different threats in the middle of an encounter.  Finally, a new theme is introduced: "Tinker".  The premise is good, but the actual benefits are pretty minor and highly situational (like the vast majority of themes).

Next is "Criminal Organizations of the Galaxy" (8 pages), a useful overview of adversaries a GM can employ in homebrew campaigns.  We're introduced to the Abazobaris (a vesk crime family sort of like the mafia), the Disciples of Grace (a group of reptoid slavers that pose as a religious group--clever), the Golden League (a legacy group from Pathfinder; fairly vague and generic); the Ixo Syndicate (a sort of Old West "company store" mining operation--interesting, though limited in geographical scope), and the Verdant Shield (ecoterrorists with the interesting twist that they've been secretly taken over by a hacker who's only out for money).  Overall, there's nothing spectacular here, but it's a useful introduction.  The entry finishes with some new gear, much of which would be worth it for a stealth mission: micro taps, surveillance jammers, a thief drone, etc.

This issue's "Alien Archives" (8 pages) introduces six new creatures: djinni (basically the nice opposites of efreet), ghuls (undead corpse feasters), photonic anomalies (natural hazards for starships), protocite reclaimers (constructs that recycle broken robots or building rubble), protocite speakers (not really useful outside a very specific context), and wysps (surprisingly friendly and likable despite their alignment).

Last, in the "Codex of Worlds" (1 page) is a moon named Elao that orbits a gas giant in the Vast named Irtanza.  Elao is a lush jungle world undergoing a radical transformation as crystalline structures have started consuming more and more of it.  It would be a good setting for a homebrew adventure.

Okay, on to the adventure!

SPOILERS!

If you read the non-spoilerly section above, you probably put two and two together and realised the adventure was going to involve taking the new ship, the Sun Diver, into the new sun city, Noma.  The premise for my campaign was that the PCs are a group of scientist/explorers sponsored by an academic consortium from Near Space, and have been sent on an expedition to investigate the Pact Worlds' sun.  Here, that idea finally starts to pay off, and I found Chapter 3 the best part of the first half of the AP.

Part 1 ("Securing the Sun Diver") has Nib from the Deep Cultures Institute reveal that there just might be a way to actually get to the mysterious "Noma" whose coordinates deep inside the sun were discovered at the end of Chapter Two.  Nib says a member of a rival organisation, the Corona Artifact Divers, has developed a prototype ship called the Sun Diver that can allegedly survive a journey into the sun and back.  The PCs make a quick visit to the HQ of the Corona Artifact Divers and interact with a fun osharu NPC named Pahdric to learn more.  It seems that the inventor of the ship, a woman named Lurian, has been spending most of her time at a casino called the Vestrani Gaming Complex in the nearby bubble-city of Verdeon.  

When the PCs get to the casino, Lurian's location isn't obvious.  The PCs need to track her down (which may take a few days), and when they do, they'll learn that she's deeply in debt to casino and that it's holding onto the Sun Diver until she can pay off her debts.  The most straightforward way the PCs can help Lurian achieve this is to gamble, and gamble well!  The casino is fully fleshed-out with a variety of games suitable for different skills (there's even something for the more athletic PCs to do), and there's enough staged incidents (an assassination attempt, potential recruitment in a heist, a performer who needs a PC as a last-minute fill in, etc.) that the sequence never devolves into simply rolling dice.  I thought it was fantastic fun and very open-ended (the PCs can even try to break into the garage and just steal the Sun Diver), but I can see how some players think it goes on too long.

Part 2 ('Into the Fire') assumes the PCs have obtained the Sun Diver.  I really like the concept of the vessel, and it provides a logical reason why the PCs are the centre of the story, which is something some adventures struggle with (here, there's only one ship, after all!).  The ship has a sort of "yee-haw!" cowboy voice for its AI, which was a lot of fun to role-play.  Anyway, into the sun!  One of the things that's done well is that for every day of travel, the Sun Diver takes Hull Point damage that can't be repaired--so the players get more and more nervous as they see their ship slowly disintegrating before their eyes, knowing that the further they get into the sun, the longer the journey back out will be as well.  I think it added a nice sense of foreboding (along with the fact that no one can come help if they run into trouble!).  

The bulk of this part of the chapter is exploration of Noma.  As I said in the non-spoilerly section above, I thought this was some good world-building.  Some of the sectors need some fleshing out (and maybe the GM should add an encounter here or there to keep things exciting), but for the most part the adventure ran well as written.  It's really good to have some genuine, curiosity-driven exploration in a game that can unfortunately sometimes devolve into "encounter-encounter-encounter-boss" type of gameplay.

Part 3 ('The Core') starts when the PCs reach The Core, the sector of the city that records the results of all the experiments going on in the other sectors.  Here, the PCs will realise that, only some weeks before, another expedition landed and partially looted the place before leaving.  However, that expedition (a scouting team from General Khaim's forces led by a commando salamander named Sulphrax) overlooked something: a horacalcum tablet.  Assuming the PCs recognise its value, they've found a valuable key to another location even deeper in the sun (which leads into Chapter Four).  But Sulphrax and his troops return to Noma for a second search, and a big firefight is inevitable.  I would have preferred a different climax, as the timing is too coincidental and the PCs still don't really get any insight into what's going on behind the scenes.

And that's Sun Divers.  Overall, I thought it was great.  If you can keep your players' attention through the first two chapters of the AP, this is where it starts to get really good.