Starfinder Society Scenario #2-12: Colossus Heist

Radaszam demands to come on the adventure but doesn't actively contribute anything to the adventure. Any time I brought him up the party ended up regarding him as a waste of space and in the end I felt that it would be best to avoid acknowledge that he is there. This felt horrible compared to his presence in other adventures where he is busy elsewhere doing important tasks. For all he does in the adventure he could be replaced with Julzakama and spend the adventure drinking beers while in the back of the truck.

The High DC Beacons
The beacons and the DC to repair them were the subject of other complaints elsewhere, but I don't think their high DCs are as big an issue if the party secures aid elsewhere and has one person very specialized in Computers. That goes sideways if the party doesn't get that aid however.

What I consider worse is that the adventure only rewards activating all three beacons. If the first beacon is destroyed the adventure requires that the party "attempt to activate" the other beacons despite there being no reward for succeeding in this part aside from avoiding damage.

That thankfully isn't obvious to the party though and they might still enjoy this part, but I do not feel that is possible if the party fail to activate all three. I will get into that condition after I talk about the NPC ally the party try to work with this adventure.

The NPC Ally

The NPC ally the party tries to get help from is the opposite and I loathe him with a ferocity greater than I ever felt for Aram Zey. He is far too useful and completely necessary for the adventure to function. This makes it awkward if the party don't convince him to help. From the start he is a self important jerk who has the party climb many flights of stairs to reach him, only to demand a diplomacy check or head back down to reschedule for the next day. Talking to him, he explains exactly what the party needs to do, but offers his help only if they prove themselves worthy.

The fact that he tests the party for access to his aid isn't a problem, but the adventure doesn't really provide any insight on what do if the party doesn't get his help. He shows up later no matter what to join in after the beasts appear. There is a purposeless reflex save that throws everyone to the ground that seems to only be there to allow the NPC to show off how easily he automatically succeeds that check the party probably fails. So much of this is given to given an impression of his vast skill, but it completely unearned and I would feel Aram Zey would be less demeaning to the party.

The party really needs his aid to be able to hit the DCs the adventure places and his aid autopasses the difficult piloting task involved completely removing the need for a vehicle tag on this adventure. I would even argue the adventure doesn't know what to do if you don't have access to his vehicle as it doesn't offer advice on how the party might "launch" themselves inside of the colossus.

That lack of advice isn't an killer issue to me, but does make this adventure feel very fragile if the party goes off the optimal path.

Which brings be back to those beacons. If the party destroy each of the beacons, the NPC ally regards the group as little more than children and just fixes it for them. He even does this if they party didn't secure his help! He just shows up and fixes everything the party failed to with seemingly no effort. This is the worst path the adventure can take as it makes no attempt to hide the track the party are on.

There are ways to fix this, but require changing the adventure itself. The best hope for this adventure though is that the party doesn't encounter this portion of the adventure. It makes it very important that the GM do what they are able to offer the party every tool that they need to succeed on this task, even if it is on just one of the beacons to give them a feeling of their own accomplishment.

Inside the Beast
The last part of the adventure is interesting, but it can run into issues making the party feel that this is a high paced search as they find datapads and equipment. I recommend resolving most of that searching later.

The biggest issue inside the beast is that all of the relics the party are supposed to find are hidden and near invisible to anyone without detect magic. Detect magic resolving something otherwise requiring a maxed out Perception makes either an irritating option. This can be an issue if the party has no spellcaster as locating these could be slow and the only time limit on this section starts when the party have all three relics in their hands.

Flight
This is around the level flight is becoming somewhat common, but the path to get to the beacons both have high Athletics DCs to climb and avoid deadly traps. Or can be resolved by flight.

While flight is a reasonable solution, the adventure should also not have high Athletics DCs in areas that are bypassable by flight. Those DCs should be lower or offer greater rewards than flight offer given that Athletics is a far greater investment. This would be less a note if this happened once, but it happens on both of the encounter maps where Athletics was mentioned.

If common equipment can avoid hazards, then the skill DCs to bypass them should not be be punishingly high.

OH GOD THE DCs. Initially I felt kind of bad for playing down with my skill monkey, because I tend to steal the thunder from other players. Nope. It was quickly apparent the DCs were ridiculous and we needed all the cheese we could get. My character was pretty much near the max of what I could get at my level at certain skills and even then I needed several assists to reasonably make some skill checks. And again, I was playing down (level 9 in tier 7-8). Our level 7 Operative could barely make those skills. If an Operative, the notorious "great at everything" class, has trouble succeeding, what chance do other classes have?

Related to that, all those difficult checks were tied to the same skill. Granted, it's a pretty common skill, but again, if you don't have a specialist in that skill, you're just out of luck. We had two party members (out of 4) just picking their nose half of the scenario, since they just couldn't help in any way. I think a nice spread of skills would've allowed more people to be able to help, or at least increase the chance of someone being specialised in one of those skills. But nope, it's all eggs in the same basket.

That's the technical side of this scenario. On the more structural/narrative side, things falter as well. One of the players looked up the author of this scenario, and it turns out she's mostly worked on Bestiary entries and supporting material for APs. Her adventure writing are limited to a season 4 Pathfinder 1 scenario (one I really liked, to be honest), and two APs in the last year of PF1 and the beginning of PF2 (neither of which I've played, both of which only got so-so reviews, from what I've gathered). And it looks like she's been thrown into the deep end without proper guidance or training in scenario writing. It really looks like a premise was given, but never got really fleshed out. It's like the scenario outline was "We want Horizon Zero Dawn meets Pacific Rim," without explaining anything else. The box text "cutscenes" were absolutely amazing. But as soon as control is handed back to the players, we just get to do some basic stuff that's not at all exciting. Giant monsters clash with each other, but we just make a single skill check to enter and escape.

Okay, I'm totally gonna judge a book by its cover here, but for a scenario called "Colossus Heist," there was very little heisting going on. I expected an Ocean's Eleven-style setup of infiltrating, blending in, and getting out unnoticed. But no, once you're in (again, single check, not a chase or sequence of events), it's just some combats versus creatures that sorta-but-not-really make sense to be here, and identification. No sneaking around, multi-stage plan, or blending in. Nope. Big room with monsters. That's it. That's not a heist, that's a break-in.

Oh, and the "finding out who's behind this"-part. Only the tiniest hint of who's behind it, and even that is a leap of logic. And the things we're asked to retrieve are total MacGuffins as well. We don't know (and can't know) what they do, and they're just randomly lying about everywhere. Story-wise, I felt like I've achieved nothing here.

I think it comes down to the author, again. She's shown skill in writing, but not necessarily in adventure writing. She puts down some great setpieces, don't get me wrong, but the finer details just aren't there. Why let a relatively inexperienced scenario author write such a high-level scenario?

I did like how there was no "boss encounter," but this was all an endurance race. We shouldn't be getting these too often, but it was a nice twist I appreciated.

For example, there are three beacons you need to find and reactivate but its unclear whether they need to be recovered and moved for another character to be able to work on them but therein lies a massive difference in the achievability of the skillchecks.

Once inside the belly of the beast there are many many super high skill checks but the basic computers check just to escape the tekenki at the end to escape is almost unmakeable for computers invested characters who don't ALSO have a very high intelligence.

The entire party had to spend 8 prestige to get body recoveries

The DCs in general are far far too high for basic successes. They really cannot be THAT high for basic clearance of obstacles. I am all for rewarding characters that specialize but this felt like it was meant to punish parties that DIDNT have characters specialized in computers.

The environment was also underdetailed which meant that many player plans required making up a mechanic wholecloth far far too often.