Angel Gabriel's page

I have loved the first two books of "Fly Free or Die!" but I am looking at this and feeling disappointed. It seems beset with problems.

As a GM I'm expected to convince these rogue traders who are hunted throughout the Vast by crime lords and corporate assassins to keep returning to Absalom Station to chat with their friendly fixer. They really don't want to do that.

The first encounter starts with a vague briefing to pick up a cargo but the authorisation, the payment, the urgency and the loading details are very confused. I can fix that but I feel I am doing someone else's job here.

The combat encounter in the Warehouse involves some potentially "interesting moving objects" but they move too randomly to be useful tactically to players and they are much too obvious for them to be a obstacle to players. So I am wondering what was in the author's mind.

There are some underwater encounters that involve special vehicles. I was disappointed to find no pictures of those vehicles. It would have been a very helpful visual aid. Surely they should be high priority in the art briefing.

There are some complex rules and mechanisms for calculating the depth of rising water in a multi-roomed installation that is sinking. It would have been really helpful to have a simple chart or graphic to track this.

When the PCs take the main mission and rescue the NPC, she proposes that they band together to save the moderately intelligent shrimps who are getting emotional about terraforming. Now that's a pretty hard sell to engage a bunch of cynical rogue traders who probably enjoy seafood. It's like me (a vegetarian) trying to persuade a room full of fast-food-eating gamers to adopt a plant diet. It's unlikely to have universal appeal.

Worse... so far the players have been given genuine opportunities to make difficult choices and take the high moral ground or trade down-and-dirty. My players have taken time to debate this seriously and come to a group decision every time. There have usually been consequences for either choice. But in this book they are presented with a high-minded NPC's ecological mission and no alternative. If they don't follow the mission that's the end of the adventure – shut the book. And it's somewhat outrageous at the end of the book to ask the GM to mark the players moral choice from low to high when they had no alternative but to comply with the high moral choice or put away their dice and go home.

To add insult to injury, in spite of many customers' complaints about the first two books, this PDF has once again been produced so that text and pictures are fractured into random slices and impossible to easily extract for online tabletops. Surely that would have been easy to fix.

So I really hope book 4 returns to the excellent standard of the first two volumes.

Well, prepare yourself for some weirdness. This second instalment of "Fly Free or Die!" has some pretty surreal jobs for the rogue trader players. The cargos they need to truck around are not your standard crates of supplies – and the suppliers and buyers are highly colourful characters that are great fun to roleplay.

The first mission has a parallel plot which involves some detective work and, in my opinion, the GM needs to make some positive assists to make the players aware that they should be investigating in the first place. The clues are a bit obscure and need some clarifying but the story is good. The outcome can be very satisfying for players. The adventure path continues to toss in frustrations and bad luck that the players can turn around and overcome – but only just.

The second chapter opens up with a cargo that needs to be rounded-up before it can be loaded-up and it provoked some incredulity from my players. But, with some goodwill, they went along with it and it made for some unusual and entertaining encounters. However well they perform, there are some consequences which are beyond the control of the players and I find that a controversial issue in published adventures but it led to some entertaining challenges on their starship so I guess it's justified.

This point is probably the first chance for players to spend there rewards and upgrade their starship so that's a nice payoff because their 'special' starship is very central to the campaign. Here are some starship conflicts that are more than just face-to-face combats and I think these are far more interesting than straight shoot-outs. I'm not sure the challenge level is quite right for these, but I guess that varies a lot depending on players' experience.

The final job in this book has some very bizarre scenes that recall "Fistful of Dollars", "The Prisoner" and "Star Wars". You will have fun whether you are running or playing.

There is a LOT of content in the book. It's very original and makes for excellent gaming.

I had great fun running this. It pretty much does what it says on the tin. The theme is – making tough decisions under unreasonable circumstances – and the players pretty much buy in to that form of abuse for this set-up. Revenge and evening the score come at the end of this adventure.

There are genuine free choices for the players and they can deal down-and-dirty or stand up for the ordinary people who are getting screwed by the uncaring corporates and the unscrupulous crime syndicates.

The encounters are imaginative and cinematic. The combats seemed pretty well balanced for my team of four players. There is plenty of opportunity for leveraging diplomacy to get ahead or to avoid combat. The nemeses for the characters are set in this adventure and they are ripe for further development in later instalments and they are interesting enough to be engaging in the long term.

There is a mechanical system of charts for finding and buying and selling cargos but there is absolutely no need and no real opportunity to use it. I'm very glad of that because it depends entirely on random generation with so many negative odds that you would be crazy to trade in that environment.

I was looking for a Firefly themed adventure path to run, and this did the job very well. Nice job!

Recent adventures seem to drop into this repetitive formula of:
• Arbitrary ambush by random monsters.
• Meet a new tribe/race/allies who need a favour done.
• Token diplomatic encounter.
• Irritating "Exploration Mode" skill check.
• Avoidable moderate fight.
• Final tough fight.

Box ticking to get 10 "Treasure Bundles".

Our GM did a great job of doing his best to navigate through the plot holes and inconsistencies that previous reviewers have listed in full. Our enjoyment came from good company and his GM'ing skills and not a lot from this adventure.

Too many adventures so far have felt like mechanical exercises that players have to suffer in order to get their 1XP, 2PP, 10 Treasure Bundles and then grind through the admin of "Downtime" to scrabble up 2 more gp. We deserve better.

I played this and found it difficult to understand what was going on. I started to prep it and still found it hard to understand the story. (It's no secret that it is to do with resolving previous incarnations.) But after getting to grips with it I found it to be an intriguing adventure. It needs quite a lot of work from the GM to help players understand what is going on. Some mysteries remain unresolved after the end of Part 1. In fact the characters are deliberately misled so you need to deal with that player frustration and keep them interested. Players absolutely MUST play both parts and play them before they forget the complex plot entirely. Some of the combats are indeed very challenging. The out of tier adjustments don't really compensate enough (in my opinion).

But an intelligent group of players with some assistance and encouragement from the GM will find this a very rewarding adventure.

I like adventures that have a strong flavour and explore a defined theme and this one fits the bill perfectly. The atmosphere throughout is creepy and threatening in an unusual way. Conventional characters will be challenged in ways to which they are unaccustomed. The occult theme owes a lot to Dennis Wheatley, Fritz Leiber and H P Lovecraft. Many of the "monsters" are of a particular type and that creates a threatening focus. The clues lead the players through the mystery, step by step but they will need a notebook to keep track of the evidence. I had to make a timeline for myself in order to get to grips with the back story, the cast, and the likely train of events. This is probably the most complex module I have every had to prep, as a GM, but it is well worth it. It is a masterpiece.

Please sanction it for PFS soon. I have a waiting list of players and it has been out since Autumn 2015.

We played "Plunder and Peril" over this weekend and had a really great time. It is a wonderful mix of different locations and challenges and it manages to incorporate just about every pirate theme possible. I would score it a certain 5 star adventure and a possible improvement of Raiders of the Fever seas. The first adventure seemed a little short and we played that in a long evening until 1.00am in the morning. It set the scene very well and established the plot and the crew. Part 2 was a very long haul and took all Saturday. It was pretty challenging for the players and incorporated a good balance of role-play, combat and skullduggery. Part 3 took us about 8 hours and I had to miss out a couple of arbitrary encounters so that people could hit the finale and get home. It served as a brilliant climax to the story where all the loose ends came together.

The whole story hangs together very well and it would be a real shame to break it up. These adventures are not three separate missions, they are one tightly scripted long saga.

Any adventure that has such a high chance, within the first two rounds of the first encounter, of wiping out a party or killing individuals, who most probably cannot be brought back into the game, leaves players sitting around with nothing to do for 4 hours. The rest of their team may be left without a viable party. That is not fun and it's not entertaining. It's a liability at a convention. Worse than that, it's a serious design fault. I have no problem with getting killed (it's a personal habit) but I at least like to make the middle or end of the adventure. I cannot recommend this adventure. It's a shame, because this is otherwise an atmospheric adventure with an interesting story but there are other more sophisticated ways to instil fear and awe in players without dropping a grand piano on them without warning.

I ran this at a convention last week and it was perfect for building a dark atmosphere. You might want to put a minimum age limit on players because some scenes are pretty disturbing. It gave me nightmares! It's a story of betrayal and retribution for past deeds and, played right, there can be no happy ending. It needs some prep to get the names and the motives right and I had to draw myself up a family tree to understand the background history. My players did the adventure in a slightly different order to that envisaged but that wasn't a problem. The risk level is very high in places and there is a strong chance that they won't come back from this one. But the module has a very high standard of writing and I have no hesitation in giving it 5 stars. I hope to run it again. The website's GM suggestions for setting the scene and motivating the PCs using Count Varian Jeggare was very attractive to my players and I would recommend taking a look at that, too.

We had a great time with "We Be Goblins, Too" at London's Leisure Games, FREE RPG Day. We ran it twice and both times we were certainly the loudest game in the shop. We worked through most of the farmyard noises plus Mnaaarr! This is an excellent adventures and worked well with new players and veterans alike. "Southern Comfort" said one player. Yeaaah! A certain curly-tailed old friend was the hero of one game. It's a shame we didn't play the game in a pub. It would have got a lot louder still!

This one has it all! I have played and run several "Tarot" themed adventures over the years but this is certainly the one that carries this through most successfully. They tend to be a bit random but this one has wrapped the surreal card images together into a single coherent plot that builds to a climax. Crystal has done a brilliant job of using the powerful images on the card to evoke a weird world of folktales gone mad.
The people and things you meet will engage you, fascinate you, and sometimes do their best to kill you, or worse. But this is definitely not a combat/combat/combat adventures. You need your smartz.

This is one of my favourites. The GM has all the necessary story to create a dramatic and terrifying start and an intriguing detective story and finish with a puzzling raid on a wizard's tower. What more could you want?

Some encounters need sensible handling by the GM to make them suitable challenges for all parties and the navigation through the adventure fooled me until I read a helpful explanation posted by the Author. But don't be put off by that. Follow those hints and your players will love it!

We have been playing this over a series of evenings and it has been really good fun. The descriptions and the atmosphere give the GM plenty of opportunity to build a creepy, threatening backdrop to the story. The adventure can run down several different paths after the first encounter, although the printed running order is, in my opinion, the best to build up the tension.

This is a wonderful adventure for those who like hamming up the roleplaying. I encouraged my players to take twisted and dysfunctional characters and that was a big help in keeping the atmosphere.

My players took a unusual route to the finale but the adventure still works brilliantly.

I recommend GMs to use the D20 rules for Sanity loss to add another layer of menace. [Sanity Points = Wisdom x 5. Roll percentile below that to avoid losing Sanity Points. Succeed = 1d3. Fail = 1 d6 or 1d8 or 1d10. Losing more San points than half your Wisdom Ability = temporary "nauseated" and gain a phobia for tentacles / undead / sharp objects / dark places etc.]

We want lots more adventures from Rich please!