Starfinder Adventure Path #6: Empire of Bones (Dead Suns 6 of 6)

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Starfinder Adventure Path #6: Empire of Bones (Dead Suns 6 of 6)
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A Near-Death Experience

The undead Corpse Fleet has appeared in orbit above the Gate of Twelve Suns, intent on seizing the ancient alien superweapon called the Stellar Degenerator. The heroes are massively outgunned, and their only hope to defeat the Corpse Fleet is by infiltrating the fleet's flagship and taking control of the vessel's bridge. Only then can the heroes pilot the ship on a collision course with the superweapon in a desperate bid to end both threats at once. If successful, the heroes can destroy the Stellar Degenerator, but they'll need to escape the carnage to live to tell the tale!

This volume of Starfinder Adventure Path concludes the Dead Suns Adventure Path and includes:

  • "Empire of Bones," a Starfinder adventure for 11th-level characters, by Owen K.C. Stephens.
  • Advice on how you can continue your campaign past the final encounter and details on the devastation inflicted on the galaxy should the heroes fail, by John Compton.
  • Technological specifications for starships of extraordinary size and power, by Owen K.C. Stephens.
  • A collection of starships from the dreaded undead navy known as the Corpse Fleet, by Jason Keeley.
  • An archive of new creatures, including a plethora of undead monstrosities and a crystalline humanoid that can redirect blasts of energy, by Owen K.C. Stephens and Larry Wilhelm.
  • Statistics and deck plans for a massive undead flagship, by Owen K.C. Stephens, plus an introduction to a planet constantly wracked by energy storms, by Larry Wilhelm.

ISBN-13: 978-1-64078-042-2

The Dead Suns Adventure Path is sanctioned for use in Starfinder Society Organized Play. The rules for running this Adventure Path and Chronicle sheet are available as a free download (1.7 MB PDF).

Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:

Hero Lab Online
Fantasy Grounds Virtual Tabletop
SoundSet on Syrinscape
Archives of Nethys

Note: This product is part of the Starfinder Adventure Path Subscription.

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Awesome finale!

5/5

Spoiler: The module completely surprised my players, as they thought they would have to enter the Stellar Degenerator and not a huge Eoxian ship. One of the big criticisms of this module is that it does not have a complete map for a huge ship, however, this is not really necessary as the mission is simple: go directly to the control command and not wandering around the ship without a route. My players really enjoyed this adventure, although the final battle could have been more epic. All in all, an awesome ride.


With more rails than a Grav Train and more explosions than a Bay film.

4/5

In the conclusion to the Dead Suns AP, Empire of Bones, the PCs are off to stop the Corpse Fleet from seizing the Death Star Stellar Degenerator and using it to extinguish life wherever they see fit. It's a big, flashy climax to the AP - filled with the kind of energy that you'd expect out of your favorite Sci-Fi action movie. With stellar set pieces and some flashy, high level encounters, it really leaves a strong and exciting impression. At the same time, the railroading comes in HEAVY, and it'll take some serious GM rewriting to get it to feel more natural. For groups that like to have personal agency, this adventure is likely to leave a bad taste in their mouth. But for those in it to clash energy blades with big bads over a weapon that could end the universe, and who don't much care how it happens, this has plenty to love.

Overall, it's one of the stronger books of the Dead Suns AP on virtue of its set pieces and encounters, but there's so much more it could have been.

The Good:
  • Great and Memorable Encounters There are a lot of interesting, novel, and challenging encounters to be had here, from fighting a starship while on foot, to shooting from a speeding grav train, to the final climactic encounter on the starship's bridge. The new enemies introduced are tough for their CR, which is an appropriate spike in difficulty for the last mission. The starship encounter at the end is outrageously easy, but super satisfying.
  • Desperate mission energy There's some really great vibes here as the PCs delve into the flagship - something between Star Wars and Independence Day, maybe. The PCs really feel like elite operatives taking down things from the inside.
  • Great art and maps Though the maps have fairly simple layouts, the theme and feel of the Corpse Fleet comes through clearly. Lots of interesting detail in them. The art is also of great quality - I especially liked the Stellar Degenerator peeking out of the demiplane, and the cybernetic zombie control room.
  • Very cool artifacts Gained at the 11th hour. Creepy and powerful.

  • The Bad:
  • Railroading Its been said to death already, but this adventure asks you to railroad PCs in a really unintuitive way. The Corpse Fleet arrives just in time to contest the Degenerator, but then gets delayed by convenient defenses. Rather than close the demiplane, board the Degenerator, or any other more logical approach, the adventure wants the party to board the Empire of Bones and use the ship to ram the Degenerator to destroy both ships. To say its a stretch is putting it lightly. A hardworking GM can alter the scenario to make this more palatable -- for me, I had the Pact Fleet follow the PCs to the system and then engage the Corpse Fleet in battle. Chiskisk and Ambassador Nor then served as mouth pieces to suggest a way forward, with Nor having a "man on the inside" to make boarding the Empire of Bones more practical.
  • Baykoks are quite overtuned Even with a fairly low save DC, 1d3 rounds of paralysis is far too long to be delivered on every successful attack. I reduced it to 1 round and still found the baykok's combination of high accuracy, flight, solid damage, and control effects to easily let them punch up against higher level PCs.
  • With a few exceptions, its too stingy with loot Thanks to the lack of opportunity to buy and resupply, the PCs are likely equipped with outdated armor and weapons by the time they hit this book. There's a feel-bad sense that you're underequipped to handle the increasingly difficult encounters. A more generous selection of loot would help with that.

  • Stay on the Grav-Train!

    3/5

    NO SPOILERS

    Yes, I did save the galaxy. You're welcome. Empire of Bones is the sixth and final installment of the Dead Suns adventure path, designed to take characters from Level 11 to Level 13 or so. If you've read my review of the previous instalments, you'll know I'm not a big fan of the AP overall. It has a pretty cliched plot and a very heavy-handed approach to ensuring PCs stick to the rails no matter what. Of course, that doesn't mean there aren't bits and pieces that are salvageable, or that a GM couldn't take the (pardon the cover art pun) skeleton of the AP and make something better out of it. But Chapter 6 has pretty much the same flaws as the earlier chapters. Now that a lot of other APs have been released, I'd suggest shopping around for something better.

    As usual, I'll start with the non-spoilery back matter.

    * The inside front- and back- covers feature the stats, interior layout, and some background on a truly massive Tier 20 Corpse Fleet ship class called the Blackwind Annihilator. Categorised as "supercolossal ultranoughts", there only a handful of these vessels in existence. They're best thought of as the equivalent of Imperial Super Star Destroyers. I can't speak to the stats, etc., but I like the little description of the status/fate of each individually-named one of these (adds a bit of fun lore to the game).

    * The first back matter proper is "Ships of the Line" (4 pages). This section introduces the supercolossal base frame, a category that allows for unlimited expansion bays and designed for a crew of over 100,000! Lots of new starship systems are added here to support such a large ship. The new "spinal-mount weapons" category is pretty cool. "Take 6d12x10 damage from my vortex devourer, fools!" I should note that this all came out before Starship Operations Manual, and I don't know how that book treats the material here.

    * Next, we get "Ships of the Corpse Fleet" (6 pages). This section has a ton of cool stuff for ships crewed by undead, like a "ghost drive" (allows a ship to become briefly insubstantial) and a "corpse recycler" (turns bodies into necrograft UPBs). Several new Corpse Fleets ships are introduced, ranging from a tiny Tier 1/3 "Barrow Boneshard" to the hefty Tier 16 "Barrow Cenotaph." Starfinder starship combat has never appealed to me, but I know it does to some folks, so hopefully they get something out of this section.

    * This issue's "Alien Archives" (8 pages) is 85.7% undead. Many of the creatures will be familiar to long-time gamers. We get 1) baykoks (soul-devouring undead); 2) corpsefolk (formerly known as "zombie masters"); 3) gatecrashers (these guys are neat, as they wield multiple massively oversized unwieldy weapons with ease); 4) kuobozus (also known as "black monks"; they have pretty much the CREEPIEST artwork ever); 5) mohrgs (paralysing skeletal undead); 6) pale strangers (very cool undead gunslingers); and 7) shimreen (the only non-undead entry, this is a playable race of crystalline undead with an incredibly wussy special power--occasionally add 3d4 damage to an attack once you get to Level 16!).

    * For the "Codex of Worlds" (1 page) we get Shimrinsara, the home planet of the crystalline shimreen introduced above. The place is a "storm-torn world of master artisans". If you were *really* a fan of "The Saga of Crystar, the Crystal Warrior" in the 1980s, now's your chance to live out your childhood dreams.

    SPOILERS!:

    Previously on Dead Suns/Star Wars: A New Hope: A ruthless master of eldritch forces (with a huge military fleet) sought a superweapon capable of dominating the galaxy by sending entire planets to their dooms! Fortunately, a rag-tag bunch of heroes stepped up to save the day.

    Part 1 ("Close to the Bone") of Chapter 6 starts with the PCs seeing a massive armada of Corpse Fleet ships arrive to claim the Gate of Twelve Suns, intent on taking the Stellar Degenerator for their own nefarious purposes. The flagship of the Corpse Fleet armada is the Empire of Bones, one of the "supercolossal ultranoughts" mentioned above. As the Corpse Fleet ships begin engaging the automated defense batteries protecting the Gate, the PCs realise there's only one thing to do: destroy the Gate before it's too late! No. Such a plan would be "beyond the scope of this adventure." The one and only, completely obvious and viable plan is to sneak aboard the Empire of Bones, navigate its miles-long corridors without getting caught, storm the bridge, kill the admiral and bridge crew, and set the ship on a suicide course to ram the Stellar Degenerator. Like, duh! Sarcasm aside, I do really like the variety of new crew actions ("Fly Casual", "Dampen Life Signs", "Garbled Communication", etc.) to support pretending to be a Corpse Fleet vessel in order to land in the Empire of Bones. It's an idea that could be easily abstracted to other Starfinder starship encounters.

    Part 2 ("Mass Graves") has the PCs landing in "hangar country" aboard the flagship, trying to figure out exactly where they are and where the bridge is. There's a cool battle in the hangar here, as one of the Corpse Fleet starfighters turns its guns on against the PCs when they're on foot! (honestly, it should have been tougher) and a crane that can be used to pick up and smash opponents. But after this, the PCs are then expected to do a room-by-room search (as if dungeon crawling) which really slows down the excitement of what should be a crazy bold plan. My main criticism of this entire section is that there's hardly any feeling whatsoever that a massive space battle is going on outside. The ship never rocks from being hit, there aren't constant emergency crew orders being given over the intercoms, damaged vessels and injured crew being attended to, etc. Essentially, there's no timeline whatsoever for the PCs, and no hurry--the adventure even contemplates them taking multiple overnight rests! It's just a really weird way to dampen suspense, like if Luke was depicted having a brief cockpit snooze in the middle of the trench run. Anyway, the PCs learn they need to take a grav-train to the bridge.

    Part 3 ("In the Marrow") provides a cool map of the grav-train station (though it's a big one!). But securing the grav-train is one thing, fending off a security train that gives chase is another. Unlike some gamers, I actually enjoy Chase sub-systems, and the author certainly provided a lot of detail for this one.

    Part 4 ("Dead to Rights") has the big bridge battle against Admiral Serovox and his minions. It's a genuinely tough battle, as Serovox uses greater invisibility and displacement to make himself hard to hit and uses wall of force to separate the PCs from one another. I think our GM let us win. There's some good dialogue and really interesting relics in trophy cases here. Assuming the PCs win, their final task is to steer the Empire of Bones toward the Stellar Degenerator and then get away *quick* (actually, *slow* is just fine; there's no time limit on how long it takes them to escape, as long as they don't take anymore overnight rests).

    I've jumped over some interesting bits in the summaries above: for example, the PCs can find a computer virus to mask their movements from security cameras, there are security keys scattered about that provide bonuses on hacking attempts, there's a battle against some ginormous ellicoths, and there's a cool pale undead planning a mutiny that the PCs can interact with. Again, I really did find the lack of a timeline for how long the Corpse Fleet will take to overcome the automated security batteries made it impossible to tell how much of a hurry the PCs should be in.

    Assuming the PCs succeed, they get praise from the Starfinder Society and (if they reveal what they've done publicly) become famous in the Pact Worlds. The artwork of the PCs receiving medals from Luwazi Elsebo just like at the end of A New Hope is cute. Many, if only there was a Star Wars role-playing game out there!

    A "Continuing the Campaign" section (6 pages) offers some alternatives for GMs, including ideas of what happens if the PCs fail. Two two-page write-ups offer further storyline ideas. One involves an "apocalypse atrocite" getting the Cult of the Devourer to use the Gate of Twelve Suns itself for nefarious purposes; it looked interesting but perhaps a bit too "samey" to the previous stories. The other was really clever, involving a stowaway invasive species aboard the PCs' ship spreading plague everywhere they go.


    Not a railroad, despite what others say

    4/5

    A serviceable ending that is of suitable spectacle for the AP.

    I added some flourishes to it here and there (a rag-tag coalition of Hellknights, Iomedaens, and Diaspora pirates came to help engage the Corpse Fleet) but ran it mostly as written. With the Starship Operations Manual I might even consider replacing parts 1-2 with an armada battle if that's what your players are into, with a boarding action at the end to reconnect parts 3-4 into it.

    I really don't understand the issue of a party wanting to go towards the superweapon and being denied and feeling railroaded. Just throw several Barrow Reaper cruisers at them. If they smash those, throw five at them. Eventually they'll get the message that they can't approach the superweapon. I explained that the superdreadnought was almost completely exposed save for a small picket escort because its ships were busy subduing the anti-capital ship weapons & securing the macguffin and that seemed to do the trick for my players.

    If all else fails, it's not really a huge annoyance to run the entirety of the AP on board the Steller Degenerator using the maps for the Empire of Bones.

    And by the way - this isn't railroading. Railroading is ignoring good ideas by your players, not preventing bad ideas from coming to fruition.

    Part 3 and part 4 were especially memorable for my group -- the enemies were challenging, but at a higher level the group had lots of ways to deal with those encounters.


    Was considering 4 stars but...

    5/5

    ...In practice the biggest problem of this book didn't matter much :'D

    Yeah I agree 100% that as written, book assumes a LOT of coincidences and plans from PCs they would have no idea would work out :'D Like even if PCs assume on meta that Tier 20 starship isn't piloted by CR 20 officers because otherwise adventure would be impossible, AP assumes that they 1) decide to go on suicide mission without any intel 2) they scan ship with dc that is basically impossible to fail if they had invested in computer ranks and notice distress beacon near one of hangers. The distress beacon is set up by group of hostile undead unrelated to corpse fleet 3) The place they went to enter ship because of beacon ALSO happens to be where treacherous Commander is stationed who decides to not set off alarm yet 4) the treacherous commander just happens to have two viruses that allows PCs to head to location they just discovered can be used to take over the ship.

    ...Yeah, all of that could have been solved with just PCs being contacted by Nor's corpse fleet double agent to give them intel so that it doesn't seem like massive coincidence that works out in PCs favor :p I didn't even go with Malakar being the double agent in my version, but its really silly what book normally assumes. As said that almost made me lower the score to four stars, but because it was easy to fix and because book is otherwise great...

    ...Ah yeah, Owen did suberb job with this one. All encounters are mechanically and tactically interesting and challenging(though unfortunately for me, the train chase ended fast because I rolled super low for enemy pilots roll to keep up) and book makes good job of making the corpse fleet mooks feel threatening and competent. And final boss has memorable super villain personality and competent enough to almost kill the party :D The taste of power with piloting the ship in the end was fun, though admittedly book overestimates difficulty of it(the omenbringers don't do enough damage to threaten ship with 1050 hp)

    So yeah this was best book in dead suns and I consider ap worth to run just for it :D Now to homebrew cr 20 version of the crew for ship ;D


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    Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

    2 people marked this as a favorite.
    CorvusMask wrote:

    Anyhoo, after reading this through, I can safely say that final two books are best books in Dead Suns ._. I mean, its mostly action, but its REALLY cool climactic action with cool encounters and cool personalities for the named baddies. All three main officers you face aboard the ship have chance to shine their personality in nice ways.

    I especially love how the final boss is set up

    Glad you liked it!


    If the PDF version is done, you should give us an early Christmas present and release it now. My group just finished #5 in the series last weekend, and now we are in a holding pattern waiting impatiently for the last one in the series. :-)

    Scarab Sages Starfinder Design Lead

    Subscribers are getting pdf access as their orders ship--that takes a while. But it won't be long now before everyone can grab it!

    Scarab Sages

    Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber

    While looking for the usual Paizo end-of-AP Easter egg, I had a bit of

    deja vu:
    The copyright notice is from #5.


    Would anyone with the PDF be willing to share a bit about the new player race?

    Dark Archive

    Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

    Its basically crystal humanoid from stormy planet capable of morphing their arm into melee weapon

    Sovereign Court Creative Director, Starfinder

    logic_poet wrote:
    While looking for the usual Paizo end-of-AP Easter egg, I had a bit of ** spoiler omitted **

    The print copies of the adventure have the correct copyright information (and end-of-AP quote). This issue is only in the pdf, which we will fix ASAP. Thanks for pointing it out!

    President, SmiteWorks

    This is now available for Fantasy Grounds.

    Get the PDF here, sync the account at Fantasygrounds.com and then you can get a $15.99 discount on the purchase when you add it to your cart there. $7 final price.

    Starfinder RPG - Dead Suns AP 6: Empire of Bones

    It's also available on Steam at full price but then syncable back here to get the PDF added to your account.
    Starfinder DLC for Fantasy Grounds on Steam


    Pathfinder Maps, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber
    Robert G. McCreary wrote:
    logic_poet wrote:
    While looking for the usual Paizo end-of-AP Easter egg, I had a bit of ** spoiler omitted **
    The print copies of the adventure have the correct copyright information (and end-of-AP quote). This issue is only in the pdf, which we will fix ASAP. Thanks for pointing it out!

    Any update on this?

    Dark Archive

    Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
    Owen K. C. Stephens wrote:
    CorvusMask wrote:

    Anyhoo, after reading this through, I can safely say that final two books are best books in Dead Suns ._. I mean, its mostly action, but its REALLY cool climactic action with cool encounters and cool personalities for the named baddies. All three main officers you face aboard the ship have chance to shine their personality in nice ways.

    I especially love how the final boss is set up

    Glad you liked it!

    Woo finally run it and reviewed it :3 Loved it~

    Now to prep for Devastation Arc and hope society sanctioning comes sooner than later xD

    Dark Archive

    Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

    On sidenote, realized this took our group about 5 months. I'm wondering what is average playtime for Starfinder APs? Pathfinder 1e APs have taken about year(add or reduce month or two), I'm not particularly surprised about starfinder aps taking less time since they are shorter and go to lower levels, but I'm still curious?

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