Starfinder Society Scenario # 2-24: "Cornered Rat" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

Cornered Rat is the last scenario in Season Two, and the penultimate adventure in the "Year of a Thousand Bites" (which concludes in a multi-table Special).  Set for PCs of Levels 9-12, it does a nice job of giving such high-level field agents some recognition.  I played it via play-by-post (at low subtier) with my first SFS character, a drug-addicted Solarian named Troivayan.  The scenario didn't make a big impression on me while playing it, at it seemed like a pretty standard space-dungeon crawl.  Reading it for the purposes of this review, however, I can see it contains some nice touches, like numerous callbacks to previous scenarios, a well-implemented skills challenge, a bit of old school mapping, and an interesting final battle.  Plus, it's Luwazi Elsebo's final briefing as First Seeker!  I think with the play-by-post games, I'm often just so focused on posting my PC's actions and moving on with my day that I don't really take in the big picture of an adventure, and Cornered Rat is a good example of one that's better than I realised at the time.

SPOILERS!

First things first: wow, Datch has a cool backstory!  A poor physical talent in a school for assassins, she realised the only way she could win was through manipulation and making her fellow students look bad (even if they weren't).  In short, Datch became the ultimate character assassin, destroying reputations, using blackmail to coerce people, influencing entire communities through social media botfarms and trolls, etc.  I had known the general idea of "Year of a Thousand Bites"--that Datch was behind a smear campaign against the Starfinder Society--but I never put the pieces together that her doing so was just to provide AbadarCorp a "dangerous enemy" that she could then use to gradually work her way up in the organisation.  As this scenario starts, there's about to be a vote of no-confidence in AbadarCorp's current executive archdirector, and Datch has positioned herself to be the natural alternative (all while seemingly keeping her hands clean!).  It's all an effective commentary on modern politics and really excellent storytelling.

From the PCs' perspective, things start with a briefing by Luwazi Elsebo.  She explains that SFS agents have discovered the location of a hidden installation in the Diaspora established by Datch and currently inhabited by several worshippers of Lao Shu Po ("Grandmother Rat", the deity worshipped or feared by many ysoki).  Luwazi wants the PCs to lead a strikeforce into the installation to find information they can use against Datch in the upcoming AbadarCorp vote.  The briefing has some nice bits about this being Luwazi's final briefing, and the PCs being amongst the most senior field agents in the Society, a sign that this mission is of the utmost importance to the SFS.  The mission here shows the fruits of what happened in # 2-20 ('Shades of Spite'), where the PCs impressed a ysoki master assassin enough to gain information about the location of Datch's installation.  Throughout the scenario, there are references to several bits of lore from Season 1 and Season 2 scenarios, and the GM is instructed to highlight these for PCs with the relevant Chronicles--I really appreciate the efforts at continuity.

The Society is expecting trouble, so although the PCs are leading the strike force, several vessels are being sent with them into the Diaspora.  When the fleet approaches the asteroid where the installation is supposed to be located, a starship battle against several drones begins.  I'm a well-known critic of starship combat in Starfinder, but this one has some nice touches: hexes full of asteroids that have to be evaded (but can provide cover), fixed turrets providing alternative targets, and the interesting ability to direct other ships in the SFS fleet to attack certain targets.  Once the battle is won by forcing the enemy drones to pull back, the idea is that the PCs' ship will land on the asteroid while the rest of the fleet provides cover against further drone attacks.  In game, this translates to a fixed in-game countdown--90 minutes--for the PCs to get in and out of the installation; and if they exceed that timeline, they automatically fail the mission!  High-stakes make for good gameplay, and several later bits in the scenario explicitly take certain #s of minutes (and if the PCs are in the lazy habit of taking a 10-minute rest after every battle, this will come back to bite them).

Although the Society knows they're on the right asteroid, the actual entrance to the installation is hidden.  This portion of the scenario is a 5-step skill challenge as the PCs need to land safely, avoid falling debris from the starship battle, locate the entrance, maneuver across the asteroid in limited gravity, and unlock/blast through the doors.  Each of of these steps is accompanied by direct damage or negative conditions on a failed check.  A good mix of skills are used across different steps, and this isn't a skills challenge where one single Operative makes everyone else redundant (multiple successes by different PCs are necessary for the group to succeed).  It's a strong example of how to do a skills challenge right, and just needs a good GM to add a bit of colour in describing the events and their outcomes.

The next part of the scenario involves navigating the interior of the complex.  Here, the writer (Mikko Kallio) did something really interesting.  Instead of the traditional room-by-room crawl, the PCs have to navigate a literal maze!  Players who remember the "good old days" may make an actual pencil-and-paper map, because every wrong turn and dead end takes a fixed amount of time (usually five minutes) from their ongoing 90-minute countdown.  In addition, many intersections and dead ends have traps (explosives, toxic spores, flying daggers, etc.) or encounters (Laoite cultists, a "troll factory", etc.), so PCs who are poor at navigating the maze will find themselves more and more worn down before they finally get to the center.  It's also the first time I've really seen the potential of the flip-tiles, as the GM just needs to lay down the designated combination of tiles for the area/intersection where the encounter takes place (because drawing the whole thing on a flip-mat would be agonising work and lessen the point of it being a maze where the players can't automatically know where they are in relation to where they've already been).  I really liked the unique (for modern gaming) premise and execution.

Success in navigating the labyrinth leads to the installation's inner sanctum (and a very cool map!) where the PCs will encounter the master assassin Dispassion, Datch's former instructor.  Dispassion is willing to tell the PCs about Datch if they can defeat him.  He's a high-level Operative with some unique special abilities relating to having shadowy puppets that he can switch positions with and make attacks with.  As a very mobile foe, he'll avoid the "cornered and full attacked every round" problem, though I don't thing he really has enough pure offensive power to defeat the PCs (unless they truly got worn down on the way in).  Once defeated, Dispassion spills the beans about Datch before triggering a self-destruct mechanism that will consume the asteroid in a fiery explosion!  (the PCs' escape is hand-waved, however)

All in all, Cornered Rat is one of those scenarios that rewards looking beyond the surface.  It's a solid segment in the "Year of a Thousand Bites" and nicely sets up the big finale to come.