I'm presently running a Starfinder campaign using a couple of homebrew rules widgets on Roll20. It's called Empyreal Skylark, and I thought I'd put up a journal here of how the homebrew rules (and lightly-homebrewed setting) and general GM-ing experience goes. It might be of interest to some people here; moreover, given the mighty homebrew-fu of this forum, some posters might have ideas that I haven't thought of (in which case I'd be happy to hear them). Hopefully the exercise is of some use and interest to a reader or two, anyway.
Obligatory warning for any of my players who might happen across this: there may be mild spoilers for the campaign in some of what I cover here, although I'll try to avoid them. In general this is about making the sausage rather than appreciating the sausage, so to speak, so fair warning.
I won't be posting summaries of our adventures here, but I will link to what I'm posting on our campaign forum (which I think should be publicly accessible) as I journal about our sessions.
The Setting
I'm using the Pact Worlds setting as-is in the Core Rulebook. Since I don't really have the resources to shell out for all the supplements and adventure paths -- we're not playing the Dead Suns AP, for instance -- I will invent freely within the bounds of the CRB's loose descriptions of various worlds and organizations, so I'm sure our play-verse will be "homebrew" in the sense of very rapidly diverging from most official developments in and details of the setting. I will sort of allude to some aspects of Society play canon but I won't by any means be taking all of it (like the Society Factions or the Scoured Stars Incident) on board in anything like its official form.
The basic conceit of Empyreal Skylark is that our team of aspiring Starfinders are participating in a kind of reality show set up by an amiable, fast-talking and mildly-dodgy Ysoki scoundrel who among other things is relying on profits from media streaming to help pay his debts. This scoundrel, Brister Fen, is a general provider of adventures, maker of trouble, and part-owner of the title ship which will (after our opening few sessions) be our chariot to the stars. The hope is that this conceit provides some inbuilt structure and direction and some added flavour to adventures.
The Homebrew Rules
I'm not doing anything very radical, like introducing new classes or tinkering with existing ones. The rules widgets I'm using are (hopefully successfully) designed to be limited and confined to certain specific functions, and will hopefully not unbalance anything too much in the larger system.
The widgets are (for those who don't want to read the PDF at the first link above):
"Failing Forward": Taking inspiration from various systems (I think the originator was Talislanta back in the day, at least it's the earliest example I know of) that prefer a graded approach to the success or failure of dice rolls. This is the mechanic that potentially has the largest impact on gameplay.
The basic model is that rolls between five and ten under a target DC are partial failure ("No, but [not a total loss]"), more than ten under a target DC are "normal" failure ("No"), and rolls under zero when all modifiers are taken into account are disastrous failure ("No, and [things get even worse]").
Conversely, rolls up to 5 under a target DC are partial success ("Yes, but [it didn't quite work as you intended]"), hitting the target DC is "normal" success ("Yes"), and five or more above the target DC is exceptional success ("Yes, and [something else cool happens, increasingly so with each 5-point increment]").
This only applies to player rolls. NPC rolls are just the usual succeed-or-fail.
Dramatic Interludes and Dramatic Encounters: An idea borrowed from the Savage Worlds system as an alternative to just having random monster encounter tables, and to involve the player a bit more in story-telling and world-building. Basically at appropriate times, the players roll on one of these tables to introduce either a Dramatic Interlude for their character (allowing them to muse on the events or setting and build their character and backstory a bit) or to introduce a Dramatic Encounter which will tie into or feature their character's perspective in some way.
The Tally System: Basically a version of the kind of XP-for-roleplay reward system used by Matt Mercer on Critical Role. Players get Tallies for generally committing to roleplay; for various sorts of actions that develop their characters or contribute moments of fun, awesome or movement to the story; for playing a Dramatic Interlude or a Dramatic Encounter; for the nonviolent resolution of important tasks; for general teamwork and as consolation for experiencing a disastrous failure roll. The basic formula is (30 XP * [character level]) * [Number of Tallies].
The resultant XP rewards are relatively modest, but the idea is to allow some flexibility and encourage role-play and to free me from the temptation to push every potential combat encounter into being an actual combat encounter in order to meet an XP "budget."
So, how does this all play out? Let's find out.
Session Zero & Early Prep:
We started out with a Session Zero where we tried to identify what we were all coming to the table for, and decided we wanted adventures that would involve:
- Getting out and exploring the cosmos.
- "Find a crew. Find a job. Keep flying." Varied jobs Firefly-style, everything from heists to wedding security to shipping wacky critters to obscure moons.
- Also somewhat Firefly-style (or Mass Effect-style, or Cowboy Bebop-style, or Dark Matter-style), adventures that let us explore one or another character's background and/or backstory and sometimes have some fun with the contrasts between their worldviews.
For my own prep, I also looked at the character concepts of what became our core group, talked to the players a bit and tried to work out specific things that I wanted them to get to do in each adventure.
So for example I would be trying to ensure that our Vesk Soldier would get to either Charge Boldly Into the Fray or Indulge His Quirky Love of the Jazz Saxophone (which he's positive was originally a Vesk invention); our Human Envoy would get to Show Leadership, Support His Comrades and/or Show His Diplomatic Skill; our Shirren Scholar Technomancer would get to Science the S*** Out of Something and/or Wield Their Magic in a Pivotal Way; our Android Icon Mechanic would get to Save the Day With Engineering and so on. Also in general that people would get opportunities to leverage their skills, professions and feats.
Obviously not every adventure will hit all these marks, they're just things I would try to keep in mind as I built scenarios. As we got into actual play we wound up with a group of four players for our first pair of sessions.
Session One:
(Summary).
I originally hoped to start us out -- after a short introductory scene on Akiton, Brister Fen's home planet -- rocketing into space aboard our ship, but one of our original players had a scheduling conflict and wasn't going to be able to sync up with the group for some weeks. So I conceived an alternate plan: do an initial planet-side arc on Akiton which would involve us resolving a crisis at the spaceport in Hivemarket, and run a separate solo for the missing player who would hopefully connect with us in time to leave the planet.
As it turned out, the player in whose behalf I originally conceived this strategy simply ghosted and I haven't heard from them since. Lesson learned: don't change your adventure plans based on one player's schedule. That said, it was perhaps kind of a happy accident. Though I worried about not getting into our "explore the cosmos" mission quickly enough, we all needed time to get comfortable with the system, I didn't feel really ready to run the starship combat rules, and I was also learning about being "behind the GM screen" on Roll20. Added to that, Akiton proves to be a pretty rich and fun adventure setting with lots of latitude to invent.
I presented the characters with a choice of two possible routes, one which would be more RP-heavy and the other which would be more combat-heavy. Amusingly, I thought it would be clear which was which. They picked the "safer" option and wound up in by far the most harrowing combat scenario I had sketched out... but good fun was had in the course of things.
"Failing Forward":
A twist on the "failing forward" mechanic I hadn't thought of before play was: should it apply to NPC saving throws against character abilities?
I decided it should, and we got a good example of "failing forward" out of our Shirren technomancer's attempt to Daze an opponent. The opponent beat their spell DC by what from the character's POV was a "partial failure" margin: the Daze spell didn't work, but it did piss off the target, who charged the spellcaster in a rage. (This of course was a mixed blessing but it had the happy effect of sparing them from the creature's ranged attack, which was more dangerous than its melee attack.)
In general I avoided using "failing forward" to do things like altering damage rolls. It was a means of provided added flavour or affecting enemy motivations and patterns of action in combat, or out of combat to provided added detail to the product of insight checks and the like. This seems to have worked tolerably well so far.
Dramatic Interlude:
Introducing the Dramatic Interlude mechanic was more of a mixed bag. I had a computer hacking scene which our Android Mechanic took on, and I decided to play the interface as a disturbingly intrusive system that used the character's memories to cloak its transmission of data. I thought this would be a way to ease them into things because it didn't involve making up anything about the story world that wasn't already in their character backstory.
In retrospect I felt bad about springing this mechanic on them without warning in a place where they wouldn't expect it, and they were a little taken aback (although they bore up well). They did engage with the scene a little bit but weren't really at home in the character's skin yet, so it wound up being mostly me doing the dramatic interlude, the opposite of how the mechanic is supposed to work.
Even more problematically, I got so wrapped up in the dramatic mechanic conceit that I effectively robbed them of an opportunity to use their actual skills to shine. So I would call this outing mostly a miss, though not a total loss, on my part as a GM. Something to learn from.
The Tally System:
The Tally System did, on the other hand, function in large part as I hoped it would. The players went out of their way to do cool and fun things, bantered with each other and committed to roleplay, worked effectively as a team, and delivered a metric tonne of fun and quotable moments for a three-hour session. By the end of the adventure I could give them a tour through all the nifty things they did that earned their Tallies, which was fun in itself. The experience bonus they got was modest but meaningful to everyone at the virtual table.
The Starfinder Rules:
I'm previously a "theatre of the mind" player who used to eschew detailed battle-maps where I could. This time out I opted to use battle-maps and take full advantage of the system's tactical "crunch;" why not play to the system's strengths? I'm glad I did, because the tactical set-piece was hugely fun as a result. In general, actual play is giving me an appreciation for the richness and careful balance on display in Paizo's work -- our characters' roles meshed well and gave everyone a satisfying sense of accomplishment -- so that's all to the good.
Using Roll20:
I was terrified of not knowing the Starfinder ruleset well enough by start of play, but it was running Roll20 as a GM -- and making far more extensive use of its features than campaigns I've participated in as a player -- that proved the far steeper learning curve. I gave my players, some of whom are far more experienced than I with a platform, some advanced warning and everyone was good-natured about it. Still, being confused about how to work the Turn Counter and what carried across on switches between pages, and getting muddled about working between layers on one map (I wound up unable to move my adversary tokens for a completely stupid reason) was suboptimal. I resolved to improve this for the next session.
Other GM Things:
This is my first time behind the GM screen in many years and I made a point of studying lots of actual play streams and broadcasts. Unsurprisingly, I found a lot of influences from that viewing and study cropped up in my GM'ing style. I've always been a bit theatrical but now found specific Matt Mercer phrases and tactics coming out of my mouth without prompting, in particular his willingness to commit to play and being unafraid to dramatize action in ridiculous but fun ways. Being no manner of voice actor, I discovered Austin Walker's (Friends at the Table) approach to dramatising NPCs without having to do accents and such coming naturally.
I also notice that I've picked up some bad habits from some of those same sources. Needlessly putting someone on the spot with a wanky "let's do some roleplay, b$&#!es" move is also very much an Austin Walker habit; I love the guy but that's not something I want to become a habit of mine. Food for thought.
Overall:
All in all, a tremendously fun session which succeeded more than it failed to judge by the extent to which my players have become ambassadors for the campaign to their friends. I'm thoroughly enjoying the Starfinder experience, though there are some things about my own play-style I need to tweak, and the house rules seem to be mostly functioning thus far. We just played our second session yesterday and I'm still cogitating about it, so will journal that one later this week.
Session Two:
(Summary.)
In this episode, the team head out to a new district of the decaying metropolis of Hivemarket, where the frontline privateers of the desert scavenging industry are based. They're there to hire a barge to get them out the Moorglade (our mysterious-crashed-ship-McGuffin), the encounter I was hoping to wrap this adventure with.
I started us out in an encounter at a scavenger bar that at first felt a bit flat. The players had seemed curious about some of the backdrop to this adventure and why things were happening, and I arranged a contact character to answer some of these questions while dropping some future RP hooks for one character in particular. However, they were substantially more eager to get out into the desert--and less curious about what their contact had to tell them--than I'd expected, and after a short time I could feel the scene dragging into an NPC infodump.
Fortunately there were a couple of fun distractions to throw in to spice up the proceedings before we headed out. One was their desert barge pilot, a crazy plant-person with a head full of long sand shanties and a "yarrr mateys" delivery. The other was a fake fight with a group of reluctant gangsters sent after them, which provided an unusual "combat" encounter that feature our heroes trying to miss... and failing, with amusing results.
Things picked up as we got out into the desert and a storm forced the barge down into one of a set of possible Dramatic Encounters. The resulting encounter was suitably fun and thrilling--with a pretty nifty cinematic ending-- even if it proved relatively easier than I'd expected. We didn't get to the Moorglade this session, but we got to introduce it after the team, having weathered the desert storm, completed the final leg of their outward journey. And we ended on a nice--if improvised--hook for the following session.
"Failing Forward."
Our homebrew dice mechanic allowed for a particular moment of fun this episode where our Android engineer missed a shot by a "No, but..." margin. I decided the "but" in this case was that the wild shot, while missing the intended target, hit something that could at least loosely be construed as adversarial (even if not a particularly active threat at that moment). The player's deadpan reaction was priceless.
Dramatic Encounter:
I used a stripped-down and adjusted version of this mechanic that built in a bit of the work of establishing setting, to reduce onus on the player (as we're all getting used to the setting and characters anyway). The player did an able job of meeting this halfway and delivered a really evocative piece from his backstory training as a Soldier in the Veskarium. I was happy with how this turned out.
The Tally System:
Taking a tour of the player Tallies and reliving fun moments from the session was my favourite part of the post-game for the second time in a row.
The Starfinder Rules:
Starfinder's tactical rules continued to deliver. I've been pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to make and run adventures for low-level characters that still feel big, thrilling and heroic. It's possible, particularly with the Alien Archive to hand, to craft low-CR NPCs and monsters that feel like something more than faceless fodder; and certain mechanics of the game, especially character Themes, do some admirable heavy-lifting in the business of making players think outside the infamous "murder-hobo" box. This is not an easy mark to hit in an RPG designed so specifically to preserve balance and progression.
Using Roll20:
Much smoother this time out, thank the Gods, though I'm still working out how to use the Jukebox feature smoothly at this stage and learning more about macros. All in all it's pretty easy to learn.
Other GM Things:
I'm learning to pace adventures and have a realistic expectation of what I can cover in a three-hour session. I've sternly resisted the temptation to fudge die rolls, as I'm a convert to the proposition that just playing out the rolls -- even if they muck with what you expected -- is an integral feature of the fun and challenge. There's some risk in this in that yes, some of the encounters I'm running are potentially quite dangerous even if they are CR-appropriate and the possibility of party members getting killed is real with one bad round. However, Starfinder's mechanics are designed to enhance the heroism and durability even of low-level characters and thus far the balancing-act has been successful.
My other takeaway reminder here: run the kind of game you'd want to engage with as a player. I'm struck by how easy it was to settle into a pattern of plunking down the characters in a bar and making them listen to someone drone on about information they don't strictly need. I hate that kind of stuff as a player and will have to be careful to find creative ways of avoiding it as a GM.
Overall:
Both our mechanics and Starfinder's worked well, and despite an opening miscue this turned out to be a thoroughly ejoyable session. I've been incredibly fortunate in the ensemble of players that found the game and am gaining an increased appreciation for all the things Starfinder gets right.
Session Three:
(Summary.)
We decided to introduce our fifth member this session, and I worked up a scenario whereby she'd be hired by an organisation working for an investor in Brister Fen's project, and also specifically interested in the welfare of a team member. This would also provide a chance to try out the Vehicle Chase rules.
All in all a tremendous session that had scope for two big set-pieces: first, the original team's encounter with a group of adversaries on the Moorglade -- and their recovery of the wreck's two survivors, along with a mysterious artifact and some sundry loot -- and second, a dramatic chase across the desert as their vengeful primary adversaries from the last two sessions (a terrorist / organised crime operation called the Kedaj Pride Front) came roaring out of Hivemarket in an attempt to whack the team, followed by the soon-to-be-fifth team member and a party bent on intercepting the bad guys.
This was more linear than previous sessions but still immensely satisfying. The players came up with some cool surprises: I hadn't expected the team not only to spare the life of their lead adversary at the shipwreck, but even to offer her a ride in repentance for sabotaging her shuttle. The consequences of this added some enjoyable drama and double-crossing to the later chase set-piece.
We ended the adventure with the bad guys dismissed, our fifth member leaping aboard the team's transport in spectacular fashion, and another day won for Team Skylark. Who got some great shots into the bargain.
"Failing Forward."
Our fifth team member "failed" a crucial athletics check--leaping from a vessel about to be destroyed by a Death Worm to the safety of the main team's vessel--by a partial-success "yes, but..." margin.
I decided the "but" in this case was that she'd wind up dangling by her fingertips and that another character would have to succeed in an Athletics check either to catch and pull her up in the current round, or (with increased difficulty) in the following round. As it happened, our lead NPC Brister Fen was closest and wound up making the leaping catch with his tail wrapped around the ship's railing. Hands-down the best cinematic moment this mechanic has yet produced.
Dramatic Interludes / Encounters:
None. The episode was wall-to-wall action and had no room for it.
The Tally System:
Still good fun, though I had to do this post-session in our Discord text chat this time out, which wasn't quite the same.
The Starfinder Rules:
I used one possible version of the sample Desert Chase in the CRB for this encounter, which is where the Death Worm came from. Simply fantastic. I can't remember the last time a tactical encounter in an RPG was this much of a rip-roaring roller-coaster.
We're playing the rules a little fast and loose (as in, totally flouting them) in the distance between Brister Fen and his camera drone and its degree of autonomy-of-action at this level, but mostly for dramatic purposes rather than for tactical ones. As they're a means of adding some flavour and humour to encounters more than anything else--I'm growing to relish the players' rueful chuckles as Mister Cricket moves around to "get the shots" while they're fighting for their lives--I'm fine with it.
Using Roll20:
The desert chase was mechanically sprawling and demanding. Not only was Roll20 up to the challenge--some slow-down due to the map size notwithstanding--but some well-deployed macros made the pace of the action far faster than if I'd been doing it all manually. I'm fast reaching the point where I'm not sure if I'd want to run a game without Roll20 or something like it.
Oh, and I managed some actual Battle Music this time out, too. It makes a real difference.
Other GM Things:
There was actual competition for our fifth player spot when we advertised on Roll20's "Looking For Game" service. I have never had to write rejection letters for a spot in a game before. Good "problem" to have but a weird experience.
"Saying Yes to Your Players" and "Respecting the Rolls" dovetailed nicely with the villain from the Moorglade -- one Nebra Thorn -- handy aboard the players' ship to provide some extra baddie muscle when the Death Worm unexpectedly wiped out most of the Kedaj Pride Front pursuit party. In general this session seemed to fire on all cylinders from my perspective.
I'm going to have to work up a homebrew solution for representing how well Brister Fen's streaming efforts work and/or misfire (just some minor widget for added flavour and providing an explanatory framework for the advancing fame of our Icon player -- having a painfully shy Icon in the group is an interesting challenge). We're making use of text-chat gaming between sessions to fill in some holes in the narrative and give the players a chance for interactions we won't have time for in the main sessions, and this seems to be working well.
Overall:
A satisfying conclusion to the Moorglade Incident mini-arc which will segue into full-on spacefaring adventure. I'm already brushing up on our space combat rules and looking forward to some properly starbound thrills next session.
Session Four:
(Summary.)
Where Session Three was the climax of the Moorglade storyline, Session Four was more about the transition to our next stage of adventure, Absalom Station... and about finally trying out the starship rules.
I worked up a couple of possibilities. One was a possible combination encounter, with planetside drama and spaceship combat (or the possibility of such) side by side. The other was a straightforward space combat encounter. I suspected the team would make the latter choice, which they did; and the encounter was good fun, for all that we struggled with voice chat technical issues and a new-rules learning curve.
The adversaries that naturally suggested themselves were a remnant force of the villains who tried to thwart our heroes on Akiton; the logic of it was hard to escape and I'm glad I went with it, much as I wanted to move on to something entirely new, as it shook loose a couple more things about that story arc for my players.
As a transitional and laying-the-groundwork episode, this wasn't quite as meaty as some of our other outings, but it was reasonably satisfying nevertheless. We were able to get in a little added RP on the last leg of the journey to Absalom Station and end with the players' arrival at the Horizon Docks, ready to embark on a truly new adventure.
"Failing Forward."
I can see ways I would use this in starship combat but I was too preoccupied with getting my head around those basic mechanics first to really leverage this in the game's main encounter.
Dramatic Interlude:
Our new player took this on -- I gave her latitude to choose which "mode" of Dramatic Interlude to play and decided to give her a whack at it as the Empyreal Skylark made its first leap to orbit. She floundered a little at first but quickly enlisted other crew members in a Dramatic Conversation (an optional version the mechanic offers) and produced a fun scene with Thys reminiscing about how she became a pilot and reassuring her team that she'd experienced very few crashes. We're still gaining confidence with this mechanic, and I'm still eyeing whether it's worth keeping in its current form, but the result this time was fun.
The Tally System:
Still solid, nothing particularly new to report here.
Inter-Session Text-Chat Play:
We've had this from the beginning, but it became especially important this time out. The prelude to this session was an unusually active period that provided some great opportunities for character-building. I also got to reward the players for their successes on Akiton with a roundup of out-takes from their adventures, and the aftermath thereof, commented on YouTube-style by a cantankerous and quarrelsome set of viewers. Speaking of which...
Other Potential Widgets? - The Views
As I mentioned last time, I'm looking for a mechanic to represent the successes and challenges of the team's media-stream. I'm beginning to further appreciate just how important this is becoming, because an adventuring campaign that has the setting equivalent of an online following is genuinely different from anything I've done before. Team Skylark have acquired the beginnings of its "online following" the top of Session Four and it's an element whose variables have begun to fire some of my players' imaginations.
For my first outing I tied this kind of outcome very roughly to multipliers of Profession skill checks, but I want to come up with a more thought-out way to express this, as it could easily become a flavourful means of providing adventure rewards, new complications and new jobs.
The Starfinder Rules:
The starship combat rules are a little counter-intuitive at first--I found myself doing turn orders wrong, for instance--but they were fun to play even with that first-few-steps awkwardness and I can see getting some truly memorable encounters out of them with more practice.
I also made use of the little-advertised but very real latitude that Starfinder provides to use story bonuses to supplement combat-related XP (or for that matter things like my own Tally System). The players made exactly the same call I would have made in their place as to whether to go down to the mysterious asteroid they find in the Drift or run like hell--they chose running like hell--but this also involved giving up a substantial chunk of encounter-related XP and potential loot. I compensated them with a Getting Out of Dodge story bonus
Using Roll20:
Duly noted: starship combat requires tokens that indicate direction and heading clearly. We had to do this on the fly during our combat, which slowed things down slightly. One of our players is very experienced with Roll20 macros and devised some very cool ones at the end of our session to help speed up starship combat.
Outside of that, Roll20 went nicely. Discord acted up quite badly... but ironically was just fine when we were chatting after the session, in what must be some online-gaming version of Murphy's Law.
Other GM Things:
I'm looking forward to getting back into a setting where we can foreground in-session RP a bit more, fun though trying out various elements of the tactical rules has been.
One of our players arrived a little late after a late night; it took me a while to realise he was disoriented and didn't quite understand what was happening in our scene in the Drift, which nearly led to an unforced error on his part. If I had it to do over again I'd probably take more time to clarify readiness and comprehension before proceeding, although it worked out okay.
Overall:
A flawed but still-fun session that checked off some needed rules-learning and story-transition boxes.
Sessions Five through Seven: The Project Starlight Incident
Session Five summary is here.
Sessions Six and Seven are summarized together here.
(I've switched the summaries over to PDF format because formatting on Roll20's campaign forum was driving me batty.)
Note:
Hello again. I've decided to use these posts to evaluate larger arcs, rather than trying to react session-by-session, so I have a better chance to process and reflect on how things are working. It also occurs to me I should maybe be posting these in the Community forum... but I don't know who to ask to get posts moved, so anyone who has advice on that score, it would be welcome.
Overall Impressions:
This was a three-session arc on Absalom Station. It was designed to look initially like a kind of pirate-related mystery revolving around an alien ship from out in the Vast -- crewed by a race that had killed a Starfinder in mysterious circumstances, to explain the Society's interest -- but to segue into something much, much more alien.
The hinge-piece of this adventure was a casino in Downlow called the Vast Company. It was designed to be a multi-faceted investigation puzzle that would give each of the team members something of their own to do. There were mysterious disappearances to look into, a smarmy casino manager to schmooze, bluff and bamboozle, mysterious computer systems to hack, arcane sigils to decipher and so on. This would eventually lead the crew to have evidence to investigate the alien ship itself, the Innocent Taxogeny, and resolve a crisis and a mystery related to it.
As an arc, the opening and closing sessions were very strong and the middle session was more problematic. I had given the casino a security staff and sort-of planned for combat to happen, but I hadn't really planned for the investigation to go completely haywire and lead to a general combat in the casino. And though I thought I had CR-balanced the security staff with the party, when I looked back and reevaluated, I really hadn't.
This ultimately led to a four-hour slog of a full-session combat in session six that one member of the group felt was unfairly "stacked" against the team, who suffered their first defeat. One member of the team got captured, completely unexpectedly, which actually turned out to set up some great story possibilities and a final chapter that actually turned out to be quite a barn-burner despite including little combat. The outcome was good overall but it doesn't change the fact that the middle session was mostly a miss.
The adventure's outcome was unexpected, too, but in a good way that will lead to future story hooks. For the most part this arc felt like a win, and better yet it felt like a win for roleplay and character development, which delivered most of its best moments.
"Failing Forward."
I find myself leaning more and more toward using this mechanic strategically, where a mixed outcome naturally suggests itself and spices up the story. I made use of it at various points during the investigation storyline, which actually made the outcome a lot less disastrous for the party than it could have been (our hacker bought time for themselves and the team with partial successess on "failed" hacking and bluff checks), and I did use it in combat once in a while, for example to give someone at least grazing damage on a point-blank shot that "missed" by a hair. I was mostly satisfied with how this worked.
Dramatic Interlude.
This mechanic saw little use in this arc, partly because it was too packed with other content and partly because I wass still brainstorming ways to integrate it better and make it feel more natural.
The Tally System.
Still functioning well and seemed to motivate players to work at role play and doing creative and fun things. Actually despite the "failure" of session six it was chock full of some pretty great moments like this from all the team members, the final episode likewise. Also...
Inter-Session Text Chat Play.
After session seven, the group in their post-adventure activities delivered enough quality inter-session chat play to fill its own real-time session. For the first time, I felt compelled to recognise this mechanically, rewarding each group member a Tally Point in the following session.
I have mixed feelings about doing this because I don't want to create the impression that this kind of play is expected; everybody has different amounts of spare time. But this time out, everyone's engagement was unusually intense -- we even got to play out a memorable junkrace scene -- so I felt justified in making an exception. These activities don't appear in this arc's summary, rather they appear at the beginning of the next one, but they all stemmed directly from this adventure.
The Views.
I came up with a rough rules widget for calculating "views" for the team's exploits on their reality-show media channel. It's a mutant beastie partly based on an obscure ruleset from a 1st-edition Shadowrun supplement called Shadowbeat. Mostly it is just flavour, but if the team ever want to have a purely showbiz-related adventure there is a money-making mechanic in it that is strictly for live, in-session play to enable that. It seems to be working well so far in that the group is enjoying it.
The Starfinder Rules.
Apart from my own miscue in calculating a potential combat encounter in session six (or rather having failed to anticipate that combat encounter), the ruleset is working nicely. Getting to build and explore a really detailed computer hack in this adventure was quite fun. The combat slog in session six was not down to the rules but rather...
Using Roll20.
... I made the foolish decision to track a large group of generic mooks each as their own separate entity on an unusually large map in Roll20. Fully 25% of the session was me hunting for tokens on the map as a result. Lesson learned. Outside of this Roll20 actually is working quite well for us, but this was a big one.
Other GM Things.
Players are beginning to settle more into their characters and we're early enough in level progression still that we can consider tweaking a couple of characters' Themes so that they would fit better. I was pleased to see that people came out of this arc with plans and ideas for their characters going forward, and to see how Themes can motivate players to really think about their characters (much moreso than alignment does).
Next Up: Adventures on Castrovel!
Sessions Eight Through Eleven: A Quandary on Castrovel
The Session Eight and Nine Summary is here.
The Session Ten and Eleven Summary is here.
Overall Impressions:
This was our most epic quest to date, and ended with a bravura set-piece that left the players, at least by their account, wanting more.
I'm front-loading this because with these sessions -- easily the most intricate and epic storyline I've run with this group -- it's front and centre, as opposed to my various homebrew ideas.
The concept for this adventure arc came straight out of a hook in one of the crew's backstories. Our Technomancer, a Shirren Host researcher and overall badass named Thresca, came to our group because he'd been disgraced by a failed experiment on Verces. They had tried to use a hybrid technology called the Tranquillity Implant to cure a neural disease -- tied to the Gap in some way -- called Nebular Syndrome. All of which came directly from the player.
I really loved this backstory element and was itching to use it for an adventure. When the opportunity arose I contacted this player and gave some options about how specifically the experiment had failed. Had it called up ungovernable aggression in the test subject? Accidentally summoned some horrible, destructive being? Produced a deadly poison?
He chose option 2 and the "Quandary on Castrovel" arc was born. The villain was going to be a duplicitous bastard who had deliberately sabotaged his experiment in a quest to call forth some unspeakable horror from another plane.
Question: why would this happen? Preferably because the villain would have a solid motivation other than Just Eeevil to do it. The CRB's prompts about corporate influence on Castrovel -- alongside my own fascination with a planet proud of preserving its wilderness in the face of corporate exploitation, but which was slowly failing and fracturing in this resolve -- made it obvious that the next adventure had to be on Castrovel.
Everything proceeded from that, and toward a Big Reveal moment where the villain would prove to be a disciple of the same appalling entity that had wrought such devastation on the character's life and laboratory on Verces, about a year before the campaign. It would hopefully be cathartic for the character and as a bonus would provide added hooks for another character's backstory -- our Elven Daredevil Operative -- who originated on the same planet.
The real trick was getting to that Big Reveal, and doing it without making the players feel all their efforts hadn't meant anything. Doing this was tricky, but ultimately satisfying. How? Well...
Delivering the Story Arc: Complexity & The Unexpected
My quest as a GM was to make the villain unlikable, but plausibly sympathetic, in a way that didn't excite the players' suspicions. I made him a Shirren, code-named him Mantis and often played him like a mantis: he had a habit of going very still and rigid in situations of stress or excess emotion, as if waiting the chance to pounce on his adversaries. I pre-schemed some of the initial elements of the overall arc with Thresca's player but did not tip to them how it would play out, and I still don't know if they just played along knowingly at certain points or were genuinely surprised by the outcome (and I'm fine with either option).
Making this arc work the way I ultimately wanted to involved an immense amount of complexity. There had to be:
- A central setting where the Big Reveal could play out (I picked The Ocean of Mists for sheer cool factor),
- A reason for them to go there that was connected to their prior adventures and not too obviously setting the stage for the Big Reveal (they had previously recovered the disembodied soul of a Solarian, which I had planned as a set-up for an adventure aboard the Kasatha Idari worldship... but I had decided that setting was a bit boring and so came up with the Orrery of Tranquil Harmony, reasoning the dead Solarian might've been interested in proto-Solarian artifacts and Temple of the Twelve suggested Castrovel as a site to find them)
- A corporate conflict tie-in to give the villain some semi-sympathetic motives (I picked a branch of the Aspis Consortium to serve in the Evil Corporation role -- I named it Tantis Resources, Inc. in a call-out to an Aspis villain in Pathfinder -- and had them employing Hellknight adversaries who would serve as foils, but probably not the actual primary adversaries, to the party)
- A potential tie-in to the Elven character's House, who had disowned her (the Ocean of Mists was good for this because its southern reach was relatively near Sovyrian and it was a plausible site for ancient Elven cultural sites that living cultures on Sovyrian would be interested in preserving, making them natural allies of an anti-corporate guerilla group)
- A constant lure to keep the adventure moving (the villain presented the prospect of rendezvous with Mantis -- who, since he was the villain and accompanying the party, was always somehow juuust around the next corner and past the next encounter -- as the prospective goal prior to getting to the Temple)
This made for a situation with lots of moving parts. There were several branch-points in the adventure. A particularly important one gave the players the option to reach the Rift through an aiudara on Sovyrian (allowing me to play the dragon Urvosk in the Portal Grove of Telasia, which would've been huge fun) or by hiking down to the Ocean of Mists by running a scam on Tantis Resources' big plantation near the Ocean of Mists itself (a site inspired by the Ursula K. Le Guin story "Old Music and the Slave Women").
The attitude of the guerrilla group, called the Children of Magdh (after the ancient Temple of the Big Bad where the Orrery awaited them) was up in the air, too. The villain tempted the team with the prospect of looting the Temple, and had they not accepted, things would have played out very differently; ultimately I'm glad they did because it gave elements of the Children, outraged by the prospect of outworlders pillaging their sacred places, reason to betray the whole operation to the Hellknights in advance, which heightened the stakes.
The Ocean of Mists needed a cohesive ecology and society into which the Children of Magdh would fit. During the adventure I decided this needed to include an adapted version of the super-cool Yaruk Stampede sequence from Temple of the Twelve, whence came the nature of the Mistcallers and the Mistcaller Choir and the machinations of the enigmatic Tesh-Ki.
One of my players, our Envoy Captain, added a fresh wrinkle when -- seeing the havoc the corporate-guerrilla conflict had unleashed -- he unexpectedly decided to use the infosphere to buy a little stock in Tantis (a publicly-traded company) and call for a shareholder's meeting to push a peace plan. This should not ordinarily work (minor shareholders don't have the clout for it), but it was a cool and creative use of his Envoy abilities and would complicate the ability of the Hellknights to simply try to kill the team, so I decided that his being a Starfinder on-mission (with the public profile of the Society behind him) plus his intimidatingly high Diplomacy rolls, would let the gambit work.
This all produced an arc with an absolute @$*%-ton of proper nouns and characters and factions and factors to track. Moreover, in a narrative sense this whole enterprise was a huuuuuge risk -- there is normally no better way to get your players to turn on you than "guess what? the whole adventure was a lie" -- but the way everything fit together, aided by the very intricacy that was also a bit of a drawback, kept it from feeling like a cheat. The Big Reveal that was the ultimate goal thus turned out to be tremendously satisfying for the party, aided by the outright epic nature of the final boss battle against the Magdh.
Overall Impressions
Simply our best adventure to date. See above.
"Failing Forward," Dramatic Interlude, the Tally System and other Homebrew Mechanics
All worked well, saving that there wasn't much room for the Dramatic Interlude mechanic which I'm coming to think about discarding.
Inter-Session Text Chat Play
I've come to see player investment in this as a measure of the success of an arc. The level of participation after this one was beyond epic; it amounted to whole RP session in itself, perhaps more than one, and was of immensely high quality. This adds a lot of work as a GM but it's hugely worth it, especially in this case where the team really needed some catharsis after discovering they had been so used and betrayed by the arc's villain. The only drawback is that our British player finds it much harder to participate in all this because of time zones, which makes me reconsider giving mechanic bonuses for it (which I won't do again, the playing field needs to be level for everyone).
The Views
Fun as ever. Here they functioned as a summary of key high points. The Team has also acquired "sponsors" (Brister Fen's criminal creditors on Akiton) who happily use the Team to advertise dodgy products. Coming up with their ads is one of my favourite parts of the whole process, if the truth be told. This adventure came with a follow-up "sponsor" ad for the X-34 "wheeled landspeeder."
The Starfinder Rules
Nothing to say for this one but: solid.
Using Roll20
Thankfully quite smooth on this outing, for the most part.
Next Up: Starship Adventures!
Sessions Twelve Through Fifteen: The Sinister Signal
The wrap-up of this arc is technically not quite done yet, but we're mostly finished. The summary can be found here.
This was something we'd been missing: a really starship-centric adventure. It featured the team taking on the plight of an android asteroid settlement encountering a sinister psychic weapon on its way to join the Refuge (basically an android Space Israel being built out of the planetesimals of the Diaspora).
We got to lean hard into starship life and space-related survival, to take another couple of snaps at starship combat (with genuinely thrilling results), and conduct a proper "dungeon crawl" in zero-G in an abandoned asteroid pirate base where an ill-fated expedition of treasure-hunters had come to grief.
End-to-end Space Adventure in the most direct sense, the whole arc was pretty satisfying.
Overall Impressions
After a pair of arcs that featured complicated alien scenarios and difficult moral decisions, the relatively straightforward character of this one was a welcome change. Personally I would place it second of our stories, behind the Quandary on Castrovel, but the nature of Starfinder is that these scenarios can be so different from each other -- because of all the different rules sets, situations and settings possible -- that it's difficult to directly compare them.
The Homebrew Mechanics, Inter-Session Chat and "The Views"
Everything firing on all cylinders, except we haven't gotten to do "The Views" for this arc yet. In the climactic battle, the players hit on the idea of using their media drone as a kind of mine detector and got it blown to smithereens, so I need to decide how much of poor Mister Cricket's "footage" survived.
Starfinder Rules (& Using Roll20)
Starship combat purred like a proverbial kitten. Having the right setting and prepping some "Action cards" with the adjusted DCs made all the difference. I also got to use Zero-G rules and really see the Disease Track rules in action in my game for the first time. All of it worked well, and the Disease Track gets quite scary as it escalates and saving throws get harder; the "Sinister Signal" of the title afflicting the minds of characters was an Affliction that came close to killing a member of the party and nearly left two more Confused for the adventure's climactic encounter.
One thing I had noticed in earlier sessions is that really taxing a party in terms of their material and personal resources requires some planning in Starfinder, its being often quite easy to rest and recharge in both the literal and figurative ways unless the GM is careful to put developments on clocks and impose consequences for stopping to take ten minute rests here and Take 20 there. The good news is that the results of that kind of planning can be a quite rewarding challenge for the party, who were more genuinely in fear for their safety in this adventure than perhaps any other.
Going into a One-Off: Breather-Town!
A group of misfits comes together on Eox to stop a dastardly criminal conspiracy from... restoring people to life.
One of our team mates has a new job and is on hiatus from the group for a bit. Our next adventure was going to be on Eox, so we're running a one-shot with some fresh characters in the interim. The idea is to do a noir crime thriller set in the Pact Port.
I can already say that while we were already having fun, the prospect of doing a one-shot has sharpened everyone's excitement for our coming sessions considerably, even for me. I might consider building periodic one-offs into future campaigns as part of the process.
At any rate I think I'll do a first for this journal and post up the actual adventure here and in the main Starinder forums once it's done.
Some One-Off Adventure Hooks We Didn't Use
If you're interested in trying a one-off Starfinder concept for your campaign, here are some possibilities we didn't wind up going with.
Brethedan Blues. A runaway Oma named Seo needs returning to her home. A quirky group of Brethedan Starfinders takes on the task.
(Omas are Space Whales and sometimes biological spaceships, so this is kind of a Free Willy in Space concept. The overall idea here was to use a party entirely hailing from the huge planetary system of Bretheda, bringing Urogs, Barathu, Kalo, Maraquoi and Haan into play as a crew. This was our very close First Runner-Up concept, losing out to Breather-Town by a coin toss.)
Skittermander in a Strange Land. A group of Skittermanders crash-land on a strange world and try to "help" the first person they see. The strange world... is Aucturn.
(This would have been like doing a We Be Goblins adventure, with plushier protagonists, on a planet of Lovecraftian horrors. It was another popular concept with our group but was ultimately relegated as being more chaos than we were up for.)
Embrace Us, Burning Mother. There's no higher honour for a group of Sarenrae's acolytes than to visit the Radiant Cathedral, a temple in a magical city inside the sun. But it does sort of ruin the occasion when you discover that one of you is a terrorist, determine to disable the Cathedtral's magical shielding and destroy it...
(A kind of high-school-adventurers-meets-counter-terrorist thriller concept. Would have placed higher in the running, but my group has had their fill of battling evil cultists for a while.)
If You Prick Us, Do We Not Bleep? A very strange alien has crash-landed on Aballon. It's soft and fleshy and a group of anacite scavengers has to decide what to do with it. It keeps talking of "home"... but soon a group of heavily-armed Knights of Golarion have landed in search of it, and they claim to be its home, though it seems to fear them. What's a simple machine to do?
(Aballon has thus far gotten very little love in my campaign and I would love to rectify that at some point. Diving straight into playing a group of anacites might was clearly a bridge too far for my group, who didn't know quite what to make of this one. But a group more interested in transhumanism and the digital tech aspects of the setting might be able to do something with this.)
Star-Crossed in Skyfire. It's Transition on Triaxus, the season when life on the planet's surface begins to stir and blood begins to run hotter. It's produced a romance for a young Dragonkin princess of a Silver House. Trouble is, she's fallen for a Chromatic, and it cannot come to good. Can our heroes find her and talk sense into her before disaster strikes?
(This was meant to provide an opportunity to play some Dragonkin and Ryphorian characters and exploit the potential of Triaxus, another world our game has barely touched on so far -- I yearn for more Triaxus as an old fan of Anne McCaffrey's Pern books from way back -- and to get to rewrite the ending of Romeo & Juliet into the bargain. I know groups that would jump at the chance to do "star-crossed lovers who are also dragons;" though mine wasn't one of them. :))
Next Up: Breather-Town!
Sessions Sixteen Through Nineteen: Breather-Town
The summary of our Eox one-off is here. It was great fun!
The adventure we ran was a noir crime thriller. Our players really got into it, coming up with some very vivid characters and playing them to the hilt. It's hard to convey in writing how hilarious "Carnage's" prim accent was, or how spot-on Clyve's gravelly Private Eye delivery was, or how amusing the team's in-character banter was.
Multi-path investigation adventures are a ton of work, even running with a party who are plainly planning to shoot first and ask questions later. The summary alone of this session is more than two dozen pages long and what's here represents only a slice of the content I generated for this outing. But it was well worth it. Eox makes so many possible kinds of zaniness possible that making stuff for this setting isn't really work.
Overall Impression
The adventure was a nice palate-cleanser between outings in our main campaign. There are a lot of things that detective adventures do naturally, like encouraging adventures through a cross-section of a society and providing natural opportunities for a mixture of roleplay and combat, that make them a good exercise for an RPG even if it's notoriously difficult to make investigation adventures work. Ultimately I felt like this one worked, or at very least delivered some thrills and fun.
Homebrew Mechanics
We tried to find ways to make this one-off feel consequential for our main campaign, even if it wasn't directly tied to it. We settled on a couple of solutions for this: the first was "unlockables," as I made a more extensive list of equipment than that in the CRB available to the main campaign on the conclusion of this one-off; the second was Tally Points, which we "banked" from this one-off to distribute evenly between characters in the main campaign, so that those characters would see concrete benefit. Both of these seemed to work pretty well, although "banking" Tally Points created some confusion at first.
Starfinder Rules, Roll20 & Discord
Starfinder's rule set worked nicely. I hoped to have an opportunity to revisit Vehicle Chases in Eox's radioactive wilderness, but we didn't wind up taking that path; still, we got to try out necro-grafts and some different character builds in play, and we discovered first hand how deadly Marrowblights can be.
Roll20 worked well for this outing. Discord, which is our choice for voice chat, malfunctioned badly on the second and third sessions: badly enough in the third one that I had to conduct most of it by text. Fortunately this inconvenience was not crippling.
Other GM Stuff
There was an interesting problem in running an investigation adventure in a time-frame of only a few sessions. From time to time I improvised "clues" in response to cool (or just sensible) player ideas that I hadn't planned for... but I occasionally found myself wondering if there should be more hard limitations, red herrings and blind alleys.
I also considered, but didn't pull the trigger on, using film noir tropes like having representatives of various factions show up at the team's home (Clyve's in particular) to make threats and offers and move the plot along (in the style of Devil in a Blue Dress, The Big Lebowski or any number of noir thrillers of yesteryear). I'm still not sure whether I made the right calls on these things, although I did make the calls that allowed us to reach adventure's end within ten hours of gaming. I suppose I'd have to try running this with different groups to get a larger sample.
And I do believe I will think about making periodic one-offs an integral part of any future campaigns I run. Having a break and some new characters to play with for a few sessions was satisfying, and has sharpened our excitement to rejoin our customary heroes.
Next Up
We're returning to Empyreal Skylark in just over a week. Huzzah!
(Correction to the above: the Eox adventure proper was Sessions 17 - 19. There was a short planning session in there.)