A series of five Starfinder Quests designed for 1st-level characters.
When a mysterious visitor comes to Absalom Station selling items belonging to a lost Starfinder, the Starfinder Society takes note. The PCs are dispatched to discover out how the recent arrival found these items, leading them on a series of quests beyond the Pact Worlds and into the stars.
Into the Unknown includes five, 1-hour adventures that take the PCs from exploring Absalom Station, to partaking in starship combat, to exploring an alien world. The fifth adventure in the series provides a stunning conclusion that takes the PC's previous accomplishments into account for a climactic final showdown against an enemy starship.
Written by Ron Lundeen.
Scenario Tags: Quest, Repeatable, Starship
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Game starts off solid enough. The first quest is a bit easy, but has a chance for some challenges. The second quest involves spaceship combat, and that's where the problems begin. It was kind of long and tedious, and we even made most of our rolls.
Third quest was basically a nothing. Took us like, half an our. A simple fight and some skill checks.
Fourth quest was where things really took a huge difficulty spike, as there is s huge monster that was way more powerful than anything we could handle. We only survived because our mystic managed to roll stupid high on some spell damage. Could have easily TPKed us.
Last quest was also difficult because we were put in a ship that was WAY too difficult for us to deal with. Seriously, it was almost impossible to make any of our needed rolls because the ship's tier was way higher than the party level. We won basically by just tanking hits and shooting guns with higher and higher penalties. It was almost impossible to do any fancy flying or repair systems, so we just shot guns and missed most of the time.
I've just finished running the Quests and the first 3 PFS scenarios at a Con. These reviews are partly for the impression that they collectively left on me and so the beginning of the reviews are identical.
Together, these form a wonderful introduction to both Starfinder and the Society. There are lots and lots of background details that just pop out and are very evocative of the setting. Together, they illustrate just how wide a range of possible games can be run using Starfinder and the variety of adventures that we can hopefully expect in Society play.
The end result of running this material is that I am much happier with both the mechanics and setting than I was going in. The game plays better than it appears that it might, all the characters were participating in all the scenarios and none really dominated any particular scenario.
And the setting has become quite interesting. There are LOTS of stories to be told and the system is robust enough to tell most of them :-).
=== Into the Unknown specific review
The 5 quests cover the basics of the game. Some interaction, lots of skill checks, some combat. They also give glimpses at some of the more interesting parts of the setting.
The 2 quests that are starship combat will take by far the most time, especially for new players and GMs. But together they give a good overview of combat and are sufficiently one sided that the PCs are very likely to prevail. The two combats feel quite different from each other.
I particularly liked the fact that the Venture Captain has been made into a boss that one would WANT. Competent, pleasant, treats the PCs as valued agents.
The end of the 4th quest was just brilliant. The one line entries for each world were VERY evocative. Every player at the table REALLY wanted to go visit one of the worlds and the world they wanted to go to was different for different players. One of the worlds is visited in Yesteryears Truth.
Unfortunately there is one aspect of the quest I found extremely lacking. Space combat. It is obscenely boring. It takes obscenely too long. It has the potential to TPK the party. I played this as the technomancer and was put into the science officer position. I had three options to do. Scan the ship, Move shields around, and target a ship system. During the combat we were never hit by the enemy ship and never took damage to the shields. The first round of combat I scanned the ship. Each helm phase after that I targeted the engines of the other ship. The combat took about hour and a half and I got approx 6 turns. Is there any way to add additional options for each position on the ship? Barring that is there any way to speed up space combat? Space combat to me just seems like a drawn out extremely long skill challenge with the chance of total party killing the party.
I had a fun time with the scenario in general. The first space fight took a long time though.
Regarding the starfield maps. They're nice and pretty, but trying to mark the asteroid field from the quest on them, in ANY color, is hard to see on black. Also, trying to print them out is a LOT of black ink. I'm not sure what to do about this (Space is dark...) but please come up with something that's easier on the printer and on the eyes.
Perfect introduction to what Starfinder (and Starfinder Society) has to offer.
If you're wanting to try out Starfinder, this is a good one to try as it covers the general types of things your characters will do: fight monstrous aliens, fight humanoid aliens, crew starships, explore planets, hack computers, negotiate with (or interrogate, your choice) aliens...
You won't use vehicle rules (non-starship vehicles, that is).
I noticed that the second space encounter has the Starfinders use a Tier 4 version of the Drake. Is that on purpose? I assumed so when I ran it for my group last night, but it seemed odd.
Spoilers!:
Presuming the party has high enough skill modifiers to make the higher DCs on a higher tier ship (my group did fine), the higher tier gives them a nice edge against the heavily armed pirate ship, so it could be on purpose.
