I wanted to make somethings clear before I started
A) I played this as one of 6 characters on Foundry VTT
B) THere was a 4 hour timeblock assigned to this running
C) High Tier
I recently had the pleasure of playing this scenario on Foundry. Even from the description I realised it was some form of follow up to an earlier scenario I had not played. What I came to learn a bit further in is that it was attempting to mix an investigative scenario with mech combat. Sadly I found that one of things was crushed by the other.
Investigative or mystery scenarios can be interesting, however they are nearly always timesinks. People ask odd questions, npcs have to explain more than normal and often there are artifical gates in case the pcs solve the mystery too early. Ie a death, a piece of boxed text and so forth.In this scenario you gain 3-4 pieces of key boxed information from the npcs of which one is a killer.. and all the one line sentences point to that person. Its not a bad way to reveal information, but comes across as a little unnatural, as there feels there is not a way to investigate the killer outside of these boxed text dumps.
Tangled up in this story is a Mech combat. Ill be honest. Ive never read the mech combat rules, I doubt many have. THis is my first ever encounter with it in Starfinder. I didnt know what to expect, however the dm was very excited about the prospect. However much to my chagrin , the mech stuff occured basically at the terminus of the scenario. I didnt really have the focus at this point to appreciate it or all the rules I suddenly had to learn. THe problem is that all the combats feel like they come towards the end of the scenario and that means the pacing feels very off and rushed. The investigation as all investigations are is time consuming as I mentioned earlier and while the combats are logical where they are they feel almost pushed in to give the obligatory amount of combat encounters.
In the end by the time of the mech combat we were close to one hour and a half overtime. Im not faulting the dm at all. While we did had a player or two who was very excitable and distracting , he did push us through the scenario. It was more the fact we just didnt get to appreciate what we were given until .. it was gone.
Im not sure mixing an investigation and a unknown mech combat was a great idea.
I would never advise running this in a convention slot.. ever. Even a standard slot at a store might find playing through this in time hard. Its a great scenario, with interesting elements... but it has one or two big issues with pacing and encounter location.
