Starfinder Bounty # 5: "Echoes of Woe" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

 

I’m of two minds about Echoes of Woe, the fifth in the series of Starfinder “Bounties” (short adventures meant to be played in 60-90 minutes).  The premise is solid and at points it has a good feel, but I also think it’s overlong and a bit too “video-gamey” to really make the best use of that feel.  I ran it via play-by-post for Starfinder Society, but I think it would probably be best as a home game one-shot where the GM can customise it more and not feel rushed to finish in a certain time frame.

 

I think the cover is good, but the interior artwork doesn’t quite fit the bill.

 

SPOILERS!

 

Echoes of Woe is set in the growing town of Ysantro in the Qabarat region of Castrovel.  Because the city is expanding, a company named TeleWright wants to redevelop an old, abandoned hospital—but it can’t do that until the site receives a final inspection, and no one’s willing to go in it because of rumors that it’s haunted!  Thus, the PCs get hired for the job.  It’s a classic set-up (everyone loves creepy hospitals, asylums, and orphanages).

 

The backstory to the Bounty is good too.  Back when the hospital was in operation, the hospital’s head doctor, Sikooli, tried to cure her son, Ajanu, of a degenerative disease caused by exposure to sunlight.  Sikooli hit on the idea of combining particles from the Shadow Plane with nanites, but the resulting “venumbrites” drained the life of everyone inside the hospital, including Sikooli!  Today, Sikooli roams the hospital as a grieving ghost, while her son, Ajanu, is an undead borai who still lives in the hospital to care for her.

 

One of the issues in terms of duration is that the Hospital flip-mat has a *lot* of rooms (14), and players of this type of RPG are trained to cautiously explore each one.  Add in a bit of good role-playing and some combat, and 60-90 minutes isn’t realistic for most groups.  The atmosphere set up by the scenario is pretty good, and I especially liked a sidebar’s tips on how the GM can make it darker or lighten it up depending the group’s comfort level with horror.  Still, some of the hard-coded elements (like scouring the hospital for multiple pieces of a ritual to set things right, dealing with four different squoxes) seemed a bit repetitive and detracted from the feel.  And one of my common mechanical complaint—asking for skill checks to accomplish something but providing no penalties if they fail (so you just have endless retrying until success) definitely rears its ugly head here.

 

So my advice (noting that Halloween is just a few weeks away as I write this) is to draw upon the broad outlines of the scenario, dispense with all the squoxes but one (and make it a shadowy, venumbrite-affected one), and do the whole thing theatre-of-the-mind without even showing a flip-mat.  The game will be faster, spookier, and more fun.