Starfinder Society Scenario # 2-05: "Meeting of Queens" [RPG]

 

NO SPOILERS

I played through Meeting of Queens with my embri mystic, Speaker for the Dead.  I like that the scenario involves the PCs interacting with a rarely-scene species and learning a bit of the backstory for one of the key planets in the Pact Worlds.  The plot has a couple of interesting twists.  There wasn't anything that jumped out at me to make the scenario feel particularly noteworthy, however, and, reading through it afterwards, I can see some obvious ways it could have been improved.  It's a middling scenario overall.

SPOILERS!

Meeting of Queens is the first Starfinder Society adventure set on the Castrovellian continent known as the Colonies (home to the ant-like formians).  The scenario's plot ties into the history of Castrovel, as it involves a ritual reenactment of the "Meeting of Queens", a time when the warring formian queens united together to fight a common foe (the lashuntas on the continent of Asana).  For the first time since a peace agreement was reached on Castrovel three decades ago, outsiders have been invited to participate in this reenactment.  In his briefing to the PCs, Venture-Captain Arvin says lashuntas, staff from Qabarat University, and Starfinders have been asked to play the role of one of the now-extinct formian tribes by making a trek overland from the edge of the Colonies to the meeting site.  Arvin tasks the PCs with essentially making a good impression on their hosts in a high-stakes diplomatic mission.

 As an aside, I still discern a complete lack of personality coming from Arvin.  I also wonder why the decision was made to have all Starfinder Venture-Captains based on Absalom Station instead of spread out across the Pact Worlds.  It seems like a little thing, but it means every scenario starts the same and requires the formality of travelling through the Drift (where nothing ever happens) to reach the point where the adventure really starts.

Once on Castrovel, the Starfinders meet the rest of the delegates for a party the night before the planned departure overland.  There are six named NPCs to interact with here and a series of minor events (one of the delegates is drunk, one offers the PCs some revolting food, one is in a bad mood, etc.) to be dealt with.  Depending on the outcome of some skill checks, the PCs might gain some friends among the other delegates (which generally results in automatic attempts to Aid Another on particular skills from those delegates, which is something very easy for a GM to forget about).  The social "events" are fine, and I always appreciate some role-playing opportunities.  However, when a bunch of NPCs are thrown at the group, they really need to have artwork and personality descriptions--otherwise, it's just too hard to tell them apart and to make the role-playing interesting (unless the GM is *really* good).

The next part of the scenario is the overland travel.  There are six different encounters (though only one involves combat) here, and the main thing the PCs are trying to achieve is to stay on schedule.  If they lose too much travel time (all given in half-day increments) by not dealing properly with the encounters, they could end up late for the Meeting of Queens and that would, of course, make a poor impression on the formians.  An interesting complication, at least for the combat encounter, is that the PCs are expected to recreate the original journey by foregoing all use of powered devices--that means only archaic weapons!  A good challenge, even if some players will whine about their perfect builds becoming less useful for a session.  I also like how the scenario writer made some of the encounters optional and gave the GM explicit instructions to tailor them to how interested the players were in the travel section--some added flexibility is usually a good thing.

The Meeting of Queens itself is a little bit of text-box description of the ritual and then an action scene, as one of the delegates (a phentomite graduate student from the university) has activated a psychic feedback device that makes the assembled formians attack each other!  All the fuss about travel delays really boils down to whether the PCs are seated near the front of the event (and thus have an easy time chasing the saboteur) or seated near the back (and thus have to deal with more difficult terrain, the possibility of falling down the rafters, and being attacked by crazed formians).  The saboteur himself surrenders the moment a PC reaches him, and confesses he was bribed by an unknown party to set off the device on the promise that a scholarship fund would be set up for impoverished university students.

The feedback device is in communication with a mysterious ship in orbit, and it falls to the PCs and some climactic starship combat to deal with the problem.  Like with most starship combats, I have no particular recollection of this one, and I'm pretty sure my PC did nothing meaningful in it.

The conclusion offers the PCs a moral decision (and reporting condition) on whether to turn the saboteur over to the formians, over to the lashuntas, or over to the Starfinder Society.  It's not a particularly interesting decision to my mind, as there's no information given to the players as to what the different choices might entail in terms of consequences--if all three options result in imprisonment, for example, then it doesn't seem to matter.  A twist in the tail ending reveals that the previously-undisclosed sponsor of the lashunta delegation is Datch!  I don't think the revelation really hits, as it's not clear how/why the Starfinder Society would have gotten in particular trouble for what happened at the meeting.

I guess I've been pretty hard on Meeting of Queens.  It's not a bad scenario per se, and involves a good mix of role-playing, skill challenges, and some action scenes.  For whatever reason, it just doesn't quite cohere into an especially good scenario either.  I'm going to mark it down as average, with the reminder that an excuse to hang out with buddies, eat pretzels, and roll dice is always welcome.