Leon Aquilla's page

This AP really drives home how brutal the Swarm is. I enjoyed the intro, the spectacular setpiece of the initial attack, as well as the fighting withdrawal.

One small sidenote, I might issue the marching boots item that's added in this AP as standard issue to your players just to give them a fighting chance at not being worn out by the time they reach the bridge.

I think the tension was lost 2/3rds of the way through, the side jaunt through the town might've been treated as a sidequest -- the encounter felt a bit weak.

At the end of Book 4, the Swarm is breathing down your neck, their monsters are practically at the door, tensions are high -- and then suddenly you get transported into a mindscape where time is dilated and there is no pressure and you gird yourself for a long trip.

The adventure itself is not -bad-, there's nothing particularly bad about it, but the people you meet are mostly inconsequential to the greater story and fade away at the end of the AP -- even the merchants are just there to be merchants -- and you're given imaginary money to spend that stays persistent with you when you leave the mindscape.

Again, none of this on its own is bad, but it felt out of pace as you are nearing the climax of Attack of the Swarm -- the tension should be ratcheted -up-, but the entire AP feels like it moves at its own pace, with occasional segues back into the real world with no real stakes. Playing as Thresher Lords or piloting an enemy ship and assuming direct control of it is not as fun as piloting your -own- ship and doing some real good in the real world.

I'll be honest, I mostly rushed through this just because I felt like it was sucking all of the energy of the campaign. In my opinion this AP works better if done earlier -- perhaps between 2 and 3, as a prelude to finding the crown.

Love this megadungeon, my people are only 3/4ths through the 2nd level and we're very excited to see what happens next, every room tells its own story.

The 1 star ratings skewing this are based on suffering from a misalignment of expectations. This is definitely a dungeon that will kill you on the 1st floor if you're not careful, and I would urge GM's to consider having Wrin Sivinxi guide the group to the mitflits and maggots/flies first to avoid a bad situation, then leave them on their own afterwards.

Also this dungeon has NO intro - just "You stand in front of the ruins of Gauntlight". No problem, I improvised my own little intro, but it would have been nice to have maybe a page or two about it.

I think this is the best AP of the 6-part group. It's actually in another star system, with a setting that's bizarre and alien (a floating island in a gas giant calm zone), has a "town" you can visit, and even has other areas to putz around in if you want a sidequest or three.

This is the AP where I think Starfinder began to really hit its stride.

This was the AP where the writers finally began to realize what they had on their hands. It's not quite there but it's much better than AP #2.

The only issue I have with this AP is again they use painfully convoluted logic to make you march out into the boonies of Eox on foot when you could get there by spaceship in a couple minutes. I improvised and explained that given Eox's dead, flat surface with no trees or other surface elements that the person the group was seeking would be able to spot them miles away and they had to sneak up on them. But something more from the book might have been helpful (No smoothskins allowed to fly over anywhere other than the Pact Port!)

My least favorite AP of all the ones released by Paizo as of October 1st, 2021.

There's too much Pathfinder in this AP in my opinion - if the plot of this was having to time travel to the Mwangi Expanse in 2nd edition I don't think anyone would notice, except for the space-armor you're wearing.

The whole point of going there on foot is because there's a no fly zone over that entire continent -- but there are no mechanisms for enforcing this. Furthermore, the Starship Operations Manual gives you tools for drop pods so a particularly ornery group could say "Alright, we'll air-drop to the target and get closer, within one day's travel based on satellite recon. Now what?"

I think the AP could have benefitted more from interfacing with the vehicle rules and making it a motorized caravan rather than expecting you to stomp through on foot. That probably would have interacted better with the more modern setting.

At the time it was probably a good AP but it's just aged poorly. Which is unfortunate because despite that it DID have some good moments - the sharpshooter in the reclining Buddha-inspired statue being a particular favorite memory of my group, as I basically ran it narratively and if the group was taking too long to approach I'd play the sound of a Barrett .50 cal being fired out of my laptop speakers and roll a d20 behind the screen. There was a lot of very sharp thinking utilized for that encounter by the players.

Similarly my envoy was very disappointed there seemed to be no way to talk the Undead Elf bound to the site into not attacking the group.

There's been a lot of words written about the Dead Suns AP as a whole. I don't want to rehash what other people have written, but here are my thoughts:

1. Requires buy-in from the players, no players guide - As it starts out almost as abruptly as Abomination Vaults for PF2. You're here to meet a dwarf about joining the SF Society, he gets murked, you get drawn into a conspiracy. If the players are disinterested, then no amount of begging by the Shirren SF Society contact is going to make them care.

2. Red Herrings - There's several red herrings floating around involving corporate bureaucratic infighting between a mining guild and a corporation over who gets to claim the Drift Rock that's never really elaborated upon and is honestly just a time-waster as there's no payoff for the group at all. I think it's better to excise this part entirely.

3. Another Red Herring - There's a character that you meet who basically disappears and is never mentioned again, except that your choice to complete the job or not complete the job may affect whether you get somebody's away message in the third AP. Was kind of disappointed.

4. The Ship Is A Deathtrap - Part 2 takes place on a derelict. Really cool, really spooky, except the players are marooned on this ship with no choice but to go forward. Good to chase the players up a tree, bad in that they probably were not prepared for this. My suggestion? Have an unethical space goblin/Wytchwyrd merchant dock with the derelict and offer medical services or consumables to the group. They will need them, if most peoples accounts of playing this AP are to be believed.

A good starting adventure - thoroughly enjoyed it after only 2/3rds of the way through. You can use the generic flipmat from Paizo for a desert environment that emulates Akiton well. We used dominoes to simulate the canyon environment.

A couple of things keep this from being a 5 star review -

1. 2/3rds of the way through, you are required to get a 3 piece mcguffin to open a thing. However the people who give you the mcguffin quest are more than happy to lead you to the door its required to open -- but the book is very vague on what the barrier is. It just says a "field" as far as I can tell, but there's nowhere that describes its effects. I had to improvise and put in a level 3 jolting console trap as a way of deterring the players from trying to open the door without the macguffin.

2. Also 2/3rds of the way through, the group gets 3 spell gems as loot. ALL technomancer junk spells. I get the junk theme, but considering that there are 10-12 classes total, that means that there is a less than 10% chance these spellgems would have been useful to the group. I instead made one of the gems Junk Shards which is useable by Witchwarpers. But Mystics get the shaft. I think it would have been more reasonable to make one of them Junk Shards, a Technomancer only gem, and a Mystic gem, so that nobody felt screwed by the choices.

3. The difficulty curve is pretty tight. There's a junk golem with DR 5/Adamantine. For a level 2 group that's a pretty nasty encounter. Before BAB at level 3 combat can be either a cakewalk or a hellish death spiral. I improvised the junk golem by allowing the group to steal the item they need from him and cause it to make him fall apart. I would also restrict the CR 3/CR 3 encounter in front of the wrecked ship to only having to fight one of the two. Though comically the Space goblin's megalaser exploded on him during that scene -- also the megalaser should probably do 3d6 instead of a standard 1d6 explosion. Bigger Junk Laser, bigger boom if you ask me.

An okay, above-average AP, mainly brought down by some of the over-arching meta issues present (ships relatively unimportant, and also given to you for the mission at hand, feels on rails).

The main issue and the reason I give it 3 stars is because it starts off with a ship fight, but....it issues you the ship by default, and kits it out with lasers, against an encounter which is RESISTANT TO BURNING.

This turns what is basically the players' first exposure to the AP into a boring "I kick you, you kick me" attrition fight with very little give. I strongly urge GM's to either swap the weapons on the starting ship, or give 2-3 fighter craft to your group instead.

I understand Paizo has a long-standing policy of not creating pawns for gargantuan models.

But the final encounter of the AP is a gargantuan-sized boss. As you may be able to guess, he has no pawn.

Seems like a glaring oversight.

I love Starfinder. I've been supporting it with subscriptions since the core rulebook came out -- but I have to admit I found Pact Worlds a bit lacking in imagination. Part of this is probably because they were dealing with legacy content (Distant Worlds already basically declared who lived where and what the worlds were like).

But with Near Space the Starfinder writing team has been able to spread their wings and go a bit crazy, and the delivered product is fantastic from end to end.

Art - 5/5, love it, each Veskarium world's description is riven with detail and great art. Seeing how Skittermanders interact with their Vesk overlords will help me to describe them in future encounters. I suspect that instead of viewing Skittermanders as cute, cuddly carebears, my players will now wonder if there are Skittermanders nearby if that means that Vesk are too. I want that art of Conqueror's Forge in a gas cloud as a wallpaper or poster.

Worldbuilding - 5/5, again, the Veskarium is just as interesting of a place as the Pact Worlds, and you could build an entire campaign here and never leave the system. The dynamics of Vesk-6 I found especially interesting, as I think the Pahtra/Vesk conflict has a lot of potential for some great plot hooks. The rest of Near Space has some fascinating locations as well, my favorite being the Dyson Sphere and the Toe Jam & Earl-like planet of Orry.

Most importantly though, I never felt like any of the write-ups of the Veskarium insulted my intelligence. The book doesn't shy away from pointing out that some Pahtras really don't like the situation on Vesk-6, or that hey, Skittermanders are in fact the Grotz/Goblins/Gretchens of the SF universe.

Mechanical Options - 5/5. I'm glad someone on the team clearly thought that not having +STR Pahtra was a missed opportunity. The Vesk, Skittermander, and other Veskarium races all equally got showered with variations as well to bring them out of their shells. Or pouches. Whatever Skitters have.

Gamemastering Mechanical Options - 3/5. This is the only place I felt was lacking a bit. I would have liked some fleshed out Veskarium NPC blocks akin to the ones provided in Pact Worlds Chapter 3 "Supporting Cast". I wouldn't have needed a whole 12 pages like Pact worlds, but I have a good idea in my head of what say, a Pact Worlds mercenary or criminal is armed with, and what an Aeon Guard infantryman is armed with. I have no idea what your average Level 3 Vesk infantry is armed with, though if I had to hazard a guess it would be a Peacekeeper's Aegis, a Doshko, and some sort of Laser weapon and 2-3 pages devoted to the Veskarium's military make-up in that respect would have been nice.

I consider almost every Starfinder splat a must-buy, but to be honest if you had to pick between Pact Worlds and this, I'd pick this. That's how good it is. Probably the best splat I've read in a good long while.

Really love everything about this book - my favorite part is that it brings a lot of Classic Pathfinder class playstyles back to the Starfinder table like Paladin & Barbarian.

The continuity error of artists depicting Kasathans with human-esque irises is driving me -insane- though. And there's a picture of a Kasathan with his mask off and his mouth open in a tavern full of people on Page 144?