Starfinder Adventure Path: "Dead Suns, Chapter Five: The Thirteenth Gate" [RPG]

 NO SPOILERS

I played through Chapter 5 of Dead Suns with AZ102011, my Sentient Robotic Organism (Azlanti assassin robot) PC.  This character (meant initially as a short-term bridging PC) was barely verbal, and in retrospect a very poor choice for a role-playing game.  On the other hand, the AP had by this time made it clear that it was a 100% railroad, so there wasn’t a lot to have substantive conversations about.  I had mentally checked-out of the campaign by this point and don’t really remember much of Chapter 5, but on reading it for the purposes of this review, I’m not particularly impressed with it.  I understand Dead Suns was the first Starfinder AP and the writers were still figuring out the system and setting, but Paizo is very experienced with adventure design and this AP just keeps falling flat at every stage.  Anyway, we’ll start with the non-spoilerly back matter here and then move onto the adventure itself in the corresponding section below.

The back matter consists of four sections.

·         “Relics of the Kishalee” (4 pages): This section talks about the nature of kishalee technology, which is really interesting because it depended on manipulating demiplanar energies.  This allowed the tech to become highly advanced (despite long pre-dating the Drift), but also dangerously unpredictable or simply inoperative when used in any place other than the Material Plane.  The section introduces the game mechanic concept of relics, which are effectively unique (non-magical) items from an ancient culture that can’t be bought on the open market but have to be found (and can be sold for 100% of their value).  It’s one of the few ways to really have discovering new items be exciting for players, because relics aren’t just something listed in a book they can buy in-game at the local gear shop.  Kishalee dimensional comm units, disruption fusions, and more are pretty cool.

·         “Alien Worlds and Cultures” (12 pages): This a long but interesting section that essentially functions as a sort of preview of what a book on the Vast would contain.  It contains five two-page-long entries on various far-flung planets and introduces a new bit of tech related to each one.  None of these planets have anything to do with the AP, so they’re perfect for homebrew GMs who want to have the PCs pick a star in the sky and see what’s around it.  The planets are well-described and I’d be happy to see stories involving each of them.  We get Arshalin (a poison cloud marsh world embedded with mile-high shards of metal from an orbital disaster), Elytrio (from the classic SFS scenario Yesteryear’s Truth, a planet and culture perfect for exploring big ideas), Primoria (a planet where invertebrates have evolved as the dominant species), Sepres VI (great sci-fi concept of a planet whose entire remaining population lives in orbit after a bioweapon made it unlivable for just that species), and Silselrik (a planet with constant gravitational fluxes and sapient oozes).  There’s a lot of good stuff here, and it’s worth reading even if one has no interest in the adventure.

·         “Alien Archives” (8 pages): This section contains one-page entries on seven new creatures.  Five of the seven relate to the planets described in the previous section and have stats to make them playable PC races.  So we get Ilthisarian (weird serpentlike humanoids with additional snakes jutting from their shoulders, native to Arshalin), Ghibrani (beetle-like humanoids native to Elytrio), Scyphozoan (jellyfish-like creatures from Primoria), Seprevoi (four-legged but medium-sized creatures from Sepres VI), and Selamids (oozelike creatures with no fun ooze traits from Silselrik).  The new species are well-designed, but it’s clear the designers went to great lengths to prevent any type of power creep by making them more advantageous than existing Core Rulebook races.   There are also two new monsters, jubsnuths (twin-mouthed predators) and oblivion shades (bland, higher-CR shadows).

·         “Codex of Worlds” (1 page): This issue’s entry is Urrakar.  It’s a dark, cold, distant world notable only for the presence of “black emeralds” that some mining companies are after.  Bland and forgettable, especially compared to the planets introduced above.

It’s not really a section per se, but I’ll mention here that the inside front and inside back covers detail a new ship called the Modified Atech Bulwak.  It’s a Tier 7 ship that is unremarkable.

Now, onto the adventure.

SPOILERS!

The backstory to “The Thirteenth Gate” is fairly convoluted.  After the kishalee stole the Stellar Degenerator from the sivvs (poor inventory control, sivvs!) and later used it against an unnamed foe in a later war, they decided it was too powerful of a weapon to ever risk using again.  Instead of destroying it though, they constructed a pocket demiplane and wrangled a dozen stars(!) and a dozen moons(!) to lock and monitor the demiplane.  (talk about an infrastructure budget!)  There’s then some stuff about two scientists deciding to upload their consciousnesses to monitor things if kishalee civilisation ever faltered, and the two resulting AIs becoming rivals after one was corrupted and turned evil.  The “good” AI had to lock up the “bad” AI and millennia passed.  The bad news for the galaxy today is that the Cult of the Devourer has been one step ahead of the PCs the whole time and has arrived at the Gate of the Twelve Suns, helped the “bad” AI break free, and just need to find one circuit board to open the way to the demiplane and get the Stellar Degenerator.

In Part 1, the PCs have to travel through the Drift to reach the Vast where the Gate of the Twelve Suns is located.  Illogically (but perfectly keeping in tune with the AP so far), the amount of time the PCs spend gearing up and travelling make absolutely no difference to later events, despite the premise that the Cult is on the brink of finding an ultimate superweapon.  During the Drift travel, the PCs encounter Quillius, an “anhamut inevitable” who has been driven mad by a previous encounter with the Cult of the Devourer (the Drift must be smaller than I thought!).  Quillius is super tough but I guess there’s some role-playing possibilities with him.  Once the PCs arrive at the Gate of the Twelve Suns, there’s the chapter’s requisite starship combat against a Cult of the Devourer ship captained by the Jangly Man—I like him.  Oddly, there’s a forced reason why the PCs need to board his ship, something that almost everything else in Starfinder makes impossible or cumbersome.

In Part 2, the PCs set their ship down on the controller moon for one of the suns.  Here they enter a complex, battle some monsters and cultists, make a ton of Computers checks, and meet the AIs.  I’ve mentioned the railroading in this AP—everything must proceed in an exact order for the plot to work—but I’ve rarely seen a sidebar like the one on page 25 that instructs the GM on how to keep the PCs from leaving the rails!  The whole sequence in Part 2 is pretty forgettable, apart from the potentially mind-boggling twist that the “good” AI has decided that the PCs should open the demiplane so that they can destroy the Stellar Degenerator before anyone else can get to it.  That’s a pretty controversial call, but the PCs have to go along with it for the AP to continue.

In Part 3, the PCs have to chase the Cult of the Devourer to one of the other controller moons where they went to get the control board necessary to open the demiplane. One of the cultists there, a dwarf named Deldreg the Butcher, is great.  A three-part AP where everyone plays Cultists could be fun.  Anyway, the PCs fight a bunch of cultists and their leader, an android named Null-9, to get the control board.  When you think about it, in this entire AP, the PCs could have not been involved the whole time and everything up to this point would have played out exactly the same (and as we’ll see next chapter, stopping the Cult of the Devourer simply makes room for an even bigger threat out to get the Stellar Degenerator).  Anyway, the PCs presumably get the control board and follow the script to open the gate to the demiplane, cuing the cliffhanger that concludes the chapter.

Overall, the adventure has a nice touch here or a cool NPC there, but the story just gives the PCs absolutely no agency and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to boot.  But at least the back matter has some cool stuff!