Starfinder Adventure Path # 3: "Dead Suns, Chapter 3: Splintered Worlds" [RPG]

 

NO SPOILERS

As always with my reviews of AP volumes, the adventure itself is reviewed in the “Spoilers!” section below.  Here, I’ll go over the non-spoilery back matter.  I’ll just mention the cover and interior covers quickly: I love the creepy character on the front cover (far better than the one in Chapter One).  The interior covers are the stats and layout for a Tier 4 vessel called a Nebulor Outfitters Starhopper—it could make a decent ship for a group of PCs.  Anyway, the back matter proper consists of four entries.

·         * Eox (8 pages): This section starts with a two-page spread containing a sort of planetary map of Eox divided into its eastern and western hemispheres and with notable locations indicated by dots.  The locations are then fleshed out in the text, with some of my favorites including Blackmoon (the subject of a Starfinder Society scenario), The Lifeline (a wall protecting the small section of the planet designed for living creatures from the rest), and the notorious Halls of the Living (completely believable and highly immoral reality television).  The section does a good job updating Eox from its original appearance in Pathfinder while maintaining the setting connection.  I imagine this entry is less important now after the publication of Pact Worlds, but it’s still a nice, concise overview of the planet.  The section also contains a couple of pages on necrografts (augmentations that involve adding undead parts to living creatures—some are pretty good given the price).

·       * The Corpse Fleet (8 pages): This section details the (really interesting) history of the Corpse Fleet, renegades who refused to go along with Eox signing the Absalom Pact that created the Pact Worlds.  The history section is adroitly opaque about whether the Corpse Fleet’s creation was secretly anticipated or even intentionally mandated by the Eoxian government.  The section goes through the military structure, goals, and important individuals in the Corpse Fleet, and this last list has a bunch of great story ideas contained within it for homebrew GMs.  The section ends with two pages each on military necrotech (mostly weapons with the “necrotic” property that hurt the living while healing undead) and on new Corpse Fleet ships.  It’s all very well-written, and I don’t think the section has been reprinted elsewhere.

·       * Alien Archives (9 pages): We get seven new creatures: elebrians (a new playable race—the original inhabitants of Eox), ghouls (a necessity!), marrowblights (multi-armed undead with a weird “pounce” ability that isn’t very good), skreelings (offspring of skreesires), skreesires (kinda reptilian generic space monsters), jiang-shi vampires (inherited from Pathfinder and real-world mythology, their culturally-specific associations like roosters and rice sound a bit strange in a futuristic setting), veolisks (kinda like basilisks with a gaze that causes confusion and could be pretty dangerous).

·         * Codex of Worlds (1 page): In this issue, we’re told of Barrow, a rogue planetoid used as a shipyard and repair dock by the Corpse Fleet.  It’s not really worth a full page, as a couple of lines could have done the same thing.

Okay, now on to the adventure!

SPOILERS!

The planet-hopping nature of Dead Suns continues.  If Chapter One was Absalom Station and Chapter Two was Castrovel, Chapter Three is (briefly) the Diaspora and then (mostly) Eox.  At the end of Chapter Two, the PCs learned that the Cult of the Devourer had transmitted information on the possible whereabouts of the Stellar Degenerator to a base in the Diaspora.  The background information is pretty interesting (and involved!), and PCs may have the opportunity to learn some of it in the course of the adventure.  It starts with a long-dead prophet of the Cult of the Devourer named Nyara and her magnum opus, a tome called The Entropy of Existence and Glorious Rise of the Void.  In her cryptic prophecies, allusion is made to what could very well be the Stellar Degenerator as laying somewhere within or beyond a distant, unexplored star system called Nejeor.  As this chapter begins, the Devourer cultists in the Diaspora who received the transmission from the Castrovellian sect have already made the connection and set off for Nejeor.  What they, and the PCs don’t know, is that the Corpse Fleet (renegade Eoxians) kept an eye on things, saw a transmission to this hidden base, raided it for information, and have also set off for Nejeor!  The idea is that there’s a race for this superweapon, and if anyone other than the PCs win, the galaxy will suffer.

The adventure is separated into three parts.

Part 1 (“Field of the Lost”) starts with the PCs’ arrival in the Diaspora, where their starship is immediately attacked by a patrolling pirate vessel named the Rusty Rivet (a Nebulor Outfitters Starhopper from the inside front cover).  This starship combat is intended to go the PCs’ way and can even be handled completely peacefully, as the pirate captain surrenders quickly and invites the PCs aboard so she can be conveniently interrogated about the location of the Devourer base.  The set-up doesn’t speak very highly of the supposed vaunted Free Captains, but I guess that can be remedied in a future AP.

The pirates point the PCs to an asteroid, but the Starfinders will have to comb its apparently desolate surface to find a secret entrance to the underground complex.  But even getting that far could be a challenge, as there’s a rogue sarcesian with a sniper rifle to make it difficult (the rationale for his placement there is a bit far-fetched, but I *do* like long-range encounters).  In addition, there’s a back-matter monster: a skreesire (and its offsprings, skreelings) to be overcome.  A skreesire can take some temporary mental control of foes and that, combined with a nearby acid pool, could prove pretty nasty.

Part 2 (“The Vanished Cult”) starts with the PCs discovering the cultist base is eerily abandoned.  It’s a big complex with lots to explore, and wasn’t left completely unguarded: there are some cool-looking security robots, a veolisk (from the back-matter), and my persona -favorite, an awesome laser wall trap (don’t roll a nat 1 on your save!).  Careful searching my clue the PCs in that the Corpse Fleet came here after the cultists left.  This is definitely one of those (fairly common) situations where a group would be stuck if they didn’t have someone skilled in Computers.  For better or worse, the group I was in had a super-Operative that could make any skill check in the game with ease.  However, all the searching and hacking in the world doesn’t discover that the cultists and Corpse Fleet have set off for Nejeor.  Instead, all the PCs have to go on is a vague idea that if the Corpse Fleet is involved, then Eox should be their next step.  In any event, as the PCs hop in the Sunrise Maiden for whatever destination, two Corpse Fleet fighters who have been watching the asteroid swoop in to attack.  What I find patently ridiculous is that the fighters wait for the PCs’ ship to get going before attacking, as it would have been a sitting duck while parked on the asteroid.  Another example of a forced starship combat that doesn’t really make a ton of sense plot-wise.

Part 3 (“Planet of the Dead”) has the PCs’ headed to Eox to meet up with a contact provided by their Starfinder Society contact, Chiskisk.  Chiskisk explains that the authorities on Eox have set up a specialised government agency called the Ministry of Eternal Vigilance to investigate the Corpse Fleet and that it’s headquartered in a city called Orphys.  Like some real-world government agencies, the “Ministry of Eternal Vigilance” is essentially a tiny pro forma office that does little and mostly exists so that the authorities can claim to be interested.  The Ministry of Eternal Vigilance is headed by a bored ghoul bureaucrat Waneda Trux, and this was probably my favorite part of Chapter Three.  Props to the GM for making Waneda really come alive (pun!) as an NPC with limitless time and a limitless fondness for rules and regulations. 

Waneda has a couple of leads to follow about Corpse Fleet activity in Orphys and, depending on how the PCs handled the Eoxian Ambassador’s special mission in Chapter 1, provides some different resources (a nice tie-in).  The leads were actually planted by the Corpse Fleet to lure the PCs into a trap, and from a metagame perspective they work perfectly because plenty of adventures are premised on PCs following even sketchier evidence to get to the next encounter.  But this section of the AP is far less of a railroad than earlier parts, as the PCs have some time to explore Orphys, a city given some memorable flavour by its connection to the flesh vat and necrograft industries.  I particularly love a shopowner who calls himself Gentlesage—a corpsefolk wearing archaic finery (like a dented monocle and dingy top hat) who considers himself too fancy for his surroundings.

The clues eventually lead the PCs to a hermit outside the city (and outside of its environmental protections for living creatures).  The hermit is a marrowblight Corpse Folk sympathiser (with cool artwork!), and she ambushes the PCs with the help of a pet ellicoth.  Alas, this is the battle where my dearly departed barathu envoy B’rrlb’lub (a.k.a., “Excitable Flying Jellyfish”) was killed and added to the marrowblight’s “Skin Shack”.  To add insult to injury, in our group’s next session we were walking back from the marrowblight when the *real* boss of Chapter Three (a jiang-shi vampire) springs her ambush.  My new PC, a really interesting (honest!) wannabe-ghoul, got bull-rushed into a pool of acid for 20d6 damage per round and died.  (A real bummer for me, but I can’t blame anyone but myself for that gaffe!)  The vampire has a data module that provides the link the PCs need for Chapter Four—again, though, without some *really* good skill in Computers, a group could easily be stuck (especially because the data module has self-deletion countermeasure with some failed checks).

Despite losing two PCs in short succession, I really enjoyed the Eox portions of Chapter Three.  The Diaspora stuff, on the other hand, was fairly forgettable, generic space-dungeon crawling.  Next chapter, we leave the Pact Worlds behind and set off to explore strange new worlds and new civilizations.