The discovery of a series of millennia-old ruins sets off a chain of events that puts an ancient titanic spacecraft on course to the Pact Worlds. When the vessel—which belongs to an evil, warmongering civilization long thought dead—begins destroying all other ships in its path and attacking important resources to increase its power, the heroes must rescue millions of lives from destruction and find a way to stop the ship and all aboard it. Will the heroes be triumphant? Or will the alien species take the Pact Worlds as its new home and conquer the galaxy?
Rescuing a xenoarcheological team on a distant, frozen world from weather gone haywire, the heroes unearth more than they bargained for as an ancient ruin rises from the ground and kicks off a series of events that could change the face of the galaxy forever. The tower contains secrets of a warlike civilization thought long dead and is strangely connected to small moon in the Pact Worlds. Returning to explore a previously unknown facility under the moon's surface that threatens to overheat and destroy all life there, the heroes learn that the moon is signaling a gigantic alien craft, drawing it toward the system with lethal intent!
“Waking the Worldseed” is a Starfinder Roleplaying Game adventure for four 13th-level characters. This adventure begins The Devastation Ark Adventure Path, a three-part, monthly campaign in which the players stop the threat of an ancient alien civilization in Starfinder's first high-level adventures! This volume also includes a gazetteer of the moon of Hibb and a selection of deadly threats.
Each monthly full-color softcover Starfinder Adventure Path volume contains a new installment of a series of interconnected science-fantasy quests that together create a fully developed plot of sweeping scale and epic challenges. Each 64-page volume of the Starfinder Adventure Path also contains in-depth articles that detail and expand the Starfinder campaign setting and provide new rules, a host of exciting new monsters and alien races, a new planet to explore and starship to pilot, and more!
ISBN-13: 978-1-64078-260-0
Waking the Worldseed is sanctioned for use in Starfinder Society Organized Play. The rules for running this Adventure Path and Chronicle sheets are available as a free download (5.1 MB PDF).
Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:
Everything about this AP clicks. It's not too long, it's not too short, it has some challenging but not difficult nor easy "space" combat, and it has some great hooks. Love the Sivv, love the art, love the Bantrid deep-dive, love the monsters added in the Alien Archive.
I was between 4 and 5 stars throughout entire book, but I finally decided on 5 stars after finishing book and sleeping night on it ;D
I'm gonna go through rough spots first but not in any particular order.
First obvious thing about the book is that where normal starfinder ap books covers two levels worth of adventuring and ends on third level up, this one covers 3 levels worth of adventuring and ends on fourth. So basically a LOT happens in the book and lot of it is facing foes of equal or higher CR giving book much more difficulty spikes than ap books usually have. Book also as result has LOT of very high CR traps. Gives Sivvs nice "well they were really into overkill" feel ;D
While that is noticeably weird, I wouldn't consider it a bad thing as characters on these levels are tough enough to handle it and it is nice to have extra challenge once a while. I DID run the ap for five characters(two soldiers, techomancer, mystic and envoy, one of the soldier players has to leave rest of the campaign though so I'll be running book 2 and 3 with four players) without adjusting encounters and didn't feel particularly like they had easy time :D I am curious to hear though more experiences from parties with four players if they felt about same as I did while running this.
Second thing is the usual Starfinder AP npc problemo: Unless AP book is focused on single NPC for most of the story or keeps bringing back same npcs on every book, NPCs fill feel bit flat. Like yeah, book does do good job of giving Nifri, Ms. Nott and Uso more or less memorable personalities and I can infer what they are like as person, but I know absolutely nothing about their background or who they are otherwise. I don't hold this against this book though because that is general trend on starfinder aps.
Another thing related to that though is that while it is nice book has lot of small roleplaying moments, it does kinda feel like book rushes through them to get to the encounter parts. Like I wonder if with more page count there had been more focus on the Abadarcorp and Bantrid relations? But then again I do think its good thing book doesn't have Dead Suns part 1 problem of putting too much focus into secondary conflict that is irrelevant for rest of the adventure path. Still its cool book has big consequences on Hibbs' future and Bantrids' society causing nice potential status quo shakeup.
I do find it extra funny though how book gives more examples of Abadarcorp being much more reasonable and ethical than in Starfinder Society overall. Like sure there is one misanthrope in adventure who believes they would misuse quantum technology and cause disaster, but if players do try to snub bantrids in favor of the megacorp, they actually reprimand players for that(even though they will still buy the data xD) and continue working together with bantrids anyway. I still do like roleplaying potential given by questions raised by npcs in character.
On note of something that I don't consider con per say but should be mentioned is that exp in adventure is very tight. If players start on exp amount of 13th level and do absolute everything exp giving perfectly, they have 3600 xp extra of level 16th limit. I do think this is good thing honestly though because adventure's design means players are likely to do everything(its fairly linear adventure in design) so if they do miss some you have room to include your own stuff.
One more small nitpick isn't really nitpick but more of joke: I find it funny how commercialized Christmas resort spot looks like basically Christmas wonderland resort even though there is no Christmas equivalent in pact worlds ;D Like I get most of it, having singing and jolly decorated trees in dark winter makes universally sense, but why they connect dwarves and elves with winter resort decorations is part I'm way too amused with.
This adventure's version of atmospheric starship combat has one problem: all custom stunts are dc 20 plus ship tier and have consequences for failure so uh... Yeah 15 plus ship tier is considered hard dc, so the all stunts are just too impractical to use even if they are cool.
But yeah and the final negative or nitpicks I have is some parts of
scene with Izu:
So I just start with obvious: Why exactly is it DC 30 life science or culture check to know that bantrids have anxiety if they stay still? Like sure that is easy DC at these levels, but still its example of silly DC inflation at high level adventures. I'm pretty sure that isn't obscure information in universe.
But yeah that one is the nitpick, here is the negative: DC 38 perception check to notice anything off about Izu is kinda ridiculously high for most characters. Like yeah, players would get multiple chances to roll it, but if they are trusting types(my party didn't think initially there was anything weird about lone bantrid in place), they could bring Izu through entire dungeon without ever getting chance to get exp from him and he would get away without anyone wiser. And in event they are both paranoid and lucky is that if they confront Izu before fixing quantum core... Well the exp is tight that they level up just before entering command deck pre fighting Izu if they did everything. Yeah fixing quantum core and catwalk is what pushes pcs to level up. So there is small chance of pcs fighting creature higher cr than difficulty chart allows as that goes up to only +3 the apl x'D Though as spellcaster monster he isn't that bad to deal with. Either way, while I like concept of encounter, I do think it has lot of holes that would need adjustment.
Like in my case party is really trusting until they eventually stop being unlucky and get good roll on dice. After that they get him to reveal the fake form and after that since they have telepathic communication and don't know what to make of Izu, they basically are like "sure yeah we'll give data to abadarcorp(maybe, we'll decide later)" which means that since Izu doesn't have good sense motive listed(though I presume it would require similar dcs as spotting him), Izu might as well leave now that they know he isn't just bantrid and his mission is done. Which again wouldn't give them exp since they didn't beat encounter where they do what bad guy wants x'D But yeah, in my case I required DC 38 bluff check and direct statement "Yes we are going to do this" without wiggling around, and players didn't just say that directly, so I had Izu decide to try his luck with next team and try to murder them.
Now to the good/great parts:
Foreshadowing in the adventure is stellar. Not just foreshadowing for rest of the AP, but foreshadowing on Jedarat that you can later learn full truth of Worldseed's historical data. One of my players had really nice "OH. All the loose ends click together in way I understand them" moment when they finally learned of what was happening in Jedarat and how it connected to Worldseed xD (I think they didn't initially realize that Jedarant facility was military research facility, so they were unsure of how this random ruin is connected to Worldseed and Ark Prime besides names being mentioned in data files. I think they might have been unsure of connection between bantrid rebels, why they were on worldseed and events as well until that point)
Second thing is that Sivv Dominion is delightfully ridiculously cruel and evil in most inhuman ways possible. Later books continue this trend and I do think they might be bit too cartoonishly evil since its kinda easy to get into "maybe they ARE completely irredeemable" feeling, but more on that in later books. Either way, what I want to say is that writers did good job of highlighting why you don't want Dominion to come back and how horrifying it is. Heck these books make it much easier to get picture of what life in Sivv Dominion was like compared to me still being unsure of whether Kishalee were militaristic or not, whether they were democratic or not and such ;D I do also notice lack of term "Rel-State" in favor of "Quantum Hyperspace" this book, but I don't mind it
Third is something personal: there are lot of high level monsters I want to use more but can't because aps don't go that high and this book uses some of my favorites ;D Thank you for including certain aberration here <3
Fourth is again something personal: so throughuot the campaign, one of the two soldiers had gotten bit too over confident, so they stopped taking 10 minute rests to restore stamina even when rest of the party does. So there was something really satisfying with bear moving to melee and getting crit for 141 damage and getting ko'd by CR 18 combatant array robot ;D Made them go like "oh s@!# this is actually going to be really painful" even more than animated armor earlier did(which was pretty dangerous as well). That keeper drone was hardest encounter in entire campaign starting from dead suns up to this point and it was delightful since I knew players wouldn't die from it, but they did take beating before beating it.
Basically I want to say that I love absurdly high damage in high levels, it really feels like things have gotten real and seeing creature deal one third of characters entire pool combined in single attack and mystic heal them to almost full of hp book in retaliation is nice :D
Oh and before I forget articles as usual are nice, and I liked that adventure had nice "you made big discovery" moment with
discovering:
fifth/final Eloritu's rune depending on whether party has played Dawn of Flame as well ;D
I do hope starfinder writers eventually do sequel to all six being discovered and to have further lore on its meaning.
(in general I found ways all previous aps had different missions and ways to get involved amusing. Though I do some of them make more sense than others since some of them don't require party to know there is already ongoing emergency before arriving)
There's a mechanical timing issue in the first part of the adventure that GMs will need to work around.
1. The PCs are called in for their expertise when an emergency arises.
2. When the PCs arrive, it's stated repeatedly that the emergency started a week earlier.
3. But the thing is, the PCs get the call on Absalom Station and the emergency is taking place in the Vast. So 6 days is the bare minimum amount of time for the request for help to be transmitted to Absalom Station (1 day) and for the PCs to respond (5 days). Average die results suggest that PCs will typically arrive 3 weeks after the emergency began and might not arrive for up to 5 weeks.
This matters because the emergency has some time-critical elements.
They're high level PCs without a better Drift Engine? Maybe something to suggest when they build their ship.
There's a mechanical timing issue in the first part of the adventure that GMs will need to work around.
1. The PCs are called in for their expertise when an emergency arises.
2. When the PCs arrive, it's stated repeatedly that the emergency started a week earlier.
3. But the thing is, the PCs get the call on Absalom Station and the emergency is taking place in the Vast. So 6 days is the bare minimum amount of time for the request for help to be transmitted to Absalom Station (1 day) and for the PCs to respond (5 days). Average die results suggest that PCs will typically arrive 3 weeks after the emergency began and might not arrive for up to 5 weeks.
This matters because the emergency has some time-critical elements.
They're high level PCs without a better Drift Engine? Maybe something to suggest when they build their ship.
Rating 3 should be enough to arrive in 1 week on a good roll (the DM, of course, rolled a 1 for the time the message took to arrive...) or Rating 4 for a bad roll.
But groups who either do not invest in a better drift engine or who use the squadron rules from the starship operation manual will have problems (huge ships like the HQ are limited to rating 2).
Thing is, there are multiple other parties who respond to the emergency as well and are present no later than a day after the PCs arrive. So even if the PCs have a suped-up Drift engine, we're still dealing with the law of averages.
Sounds like it would have been good idea to present a slightly different starting situation depending on when the PCs arrive, but let the time sensitive stuff only start once they are there.
I think that is pretty much the assumption yeah. Some of AP sequel intro starts actually have pcs called before the emergency, like Dead Suns just have you enter to research area as starfinders(because of the ruins found in area) and it turns out during travel there when you arrive that things have gone bad.
There's a mechanical timing issue in the first part of the adventure that GMs will need to work around.
1. The PCs are called in for their expertise when an emergency arises.
2. When the PCs arrive, it's stated repeatedly that the emergency started a week earlier.
3. But the thing is, the PCs get the call on Absalom Station and the emergency is taking place in the Vast. So 6 days is the bare minimum amount of time for the request for help to be transmitted to Absalom Station (1 day) and for the PCs to respond (5 days). Average die results suggest that PCs will typically arrive 3 weeks after the emergency began and might not arrive for up to 5 weeks.
This matters because the emergency has some time-critical elements.
Don't better drift engines cut the base time in half or more? By the time you're level 13, you should probably have an upgraded drift engine.
I have some other quibbles about the map of the main location in Part Two (and no problems but a couple of minor questions about Part Three), but I should say that overall I'm drawn in by this adventure and am eager to have the full story of this AP in my hands.
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Sparrowhawk_92 wrote:
Is there a reason the PDF for this is so huge? I don't think it should be 300+ MB for an AP volume.
Supporting that, as a point of comparison, the entire Starfinder Core Rulebook is only 139.62 MB in size -- and I remember the problems I had downloading that PDF when it first came out.
Pathfinder LO Special Edition, Maps, Pathfinder Accessories, PF Special Edition Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Starfinder Superscriber
I didn't have any trouble downloading the files, except for having to wait longer for the watermarking or whatever it's called to get done. Still, I'm looking at my Downloads page, which lists the "1 per chapter" package at 498.54 MB and the "single file" package at 339.79 MB. Compare that with the PF AP files this month: 74.48 and 50.25 MB, respectively.
I thought perhaps it was some weirdness with the zip files, but after I unpacked them, the pdfs are also huge. Maybe something to do with the way they were created. <shrug>
BTW, does anyone know if ships in this book use old or new prices for starship stuff?
The New Horizon Borealis (nitpick: Should be New Horizons) checks out under the new math, with a caveat. Total budget comes out to 229/300 BP, which includes the unlisted expense of adding a weapon mount to the aft quadrant. Design budget is all well in the green, save for slightly over-budgeted shields (27/23), but that's purposeful and mentioned in the text.
* There's an error in the stat block, which omits its Drift rating. The Borealis is Drift-capable and should have a rating of 2.
* The ship's map and "fluff" includes 2 recreation suites (a gym and a HAC) but the stats only include the HAC. It can afford to pay for both BP-wise, but would need to free up an expansion bay to do so. Whether or not this is an "error" is debatable; the standard starship rules treat the three recreation suites as separate entities, but APs have sometimes treated them as interchangeable (basically suggesting that if you pay for the HAC's PCU cost, you can pencil in however many rec suite types as you want). I suppose they do this since RAW, rec suites don't "do" anything, though the COM's Downtime rules have since added some minor mechanical effects that distinguish between them.
This math also assumes that the ship's boutique and ballroom are considered to fall under the aegis of luxurious crew/quest quarters rather than an Amenities expansion bay (Near Space).
Speaking of the Borealis, the Drift travel issue for the NPCs who show up in Part Two removes a lot of moving parts if we assume that the press all arrived together on one of these liners; a press junket that New Horizons intended to ship out here to report on the opening of the new resort village (and, depending on how you read it, possibly the planet as a whole). So these reporters have just arrived after a 5d6/2-day voyage that departed with a specific arrival date in mind, which just so happens to coincide with the PCs resolving Part One.
This still leaves the loose thread of how an NPC reporter gets operational access to a shuttle, but that seems far from impossible.
It’s one of my bugbears with the concept of the drift. It was a cool idea to make SF different - but it hasn’t stopped a variety of tropes creeping in to APs which just don’t really work (like “tracking” PCs through drift travel, some systems being “near” the Veskarium, the swarm attacking both The pact worlds and the Vesk at the same time before being driven off via an alliance and so forth...).
There’s often the need to tinker with timelines and assumptions.
It’s one of my bugbears with the concept of the drift. It was a cool idea to make SF different - but it hasn’t stopped a variety of tropes creeping in to APs which just don’t really work (like “tracking” PCs through drift travel, some systems being “near” the Veskarium, the swarm attacking both The pact worlds and the Vesk at the same time before being driven off via an alliance and so forth...).
There’s often the need to tinker with timelines and assumptions.
Imo the problem are the use of tropes and not the drift.
It’s one of my bugbears with the concept of the drift. It was a cool idea to make SF different - but it hasn’t stopped a variety of tropes creeping in to APs which just don’t really work (like “tracking” PCs through drift travel, some systems being “near” the Veskarium, the swarm attacking both The pact worlds and the Vesk at the same time before being driven off via an alliance and so forth...).
There’s often the need to tinker with timelines and assumptions.
Imo the problem are the use of tropes and not the drift.
I posted about it on the Starfinder boards, but you can recompress these bloated PDFs yourself. Plenty of PDF optimizers available (for free) that'll bring that file size way down. My personal copy of Waking the Worldseed is now sitting at 35 MB on my PC.
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My question: what do the recompressed files give up?
As a result of some unexpected file size issues on Starfinder APs beginning with volume #31 (The Devastation Ark part 1), we have released interactive map PDFs so that GMs can extract the maps from that PDF instead. We will continue releasing interactive maps for the entire run of Fly Free or Die and beyond.
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This PDF is unfortunately affected by the same problem as the "We're No Heroes" PDF. All images and maps contained in the PDF are cut up into small tiles, which makes it nearly impossible to use in a VTT.
I assume this is an error that occurred when creating the PDF since the current Pathfinder Adventure Path PDFs are not affected by this issue (and neither was the previous version of this PDF before it was pared down in size).
Paizo, could you please recreate this PDF with images intact? That would be super helpful for anyone wanting to use this adventure with a VTT. Thank you!
Posting here since there is no Devastation Ark adventure path forum - let's say we're running this for a group that hasn't done one of the "assumed" APs prior to this one. Is there a recommended starting amount of credits for 13th level characters (other than the wealth by level table)?
Posting here since there is no Devastation Ark adventure path forum - let's say we're running this for a group that hasn't done one of the "assumed" APs prior to this one. Is there a recommended starting amount of credits for 13th level characters (other than the wealth by level table)?
Posting here since there is no Devastation Ark adventure path forum - let's say we're running this for a group that hasn't done one of the "assumed" APs prior to this one. Is there a recommended starting amount of credits for 13th level characters (other than the wealth by level table)?
The subforum is open by the way.
Yes, thank you for mentioning that The Penecontemporaneous One, I saw your post and asked for it to be made.
Posting here since there is no Devastation Ark adventure path forum - let's say we're running this for a group that hasn't done one of the "assumed" APs prior to this one. Is there a recommended starting amount of credits for 13th level characters (other than the wealth by level table)?
The subforum is open by the way.
Yes, thank you for mentioning that The Penecontemporaneous One, I saw your post and asked for it to be made.
At long last, this posting handle lives up to its geological* origin. Thank ye kindly! :)
*:
Penecontemporaneous is when "something" (like a fold or other geologic forces) act on a rock/stratum at the same time as the rocks are forming, so the forum being created at roughly the same time as my comment is just a bit dorky and perfect. Thank you again! :)
So just to note, they ARE planning to sanction this right?
I'm bit confused of how this is going to work since book is level 13-15 adventure(with it ending on level 16) :'D I guess it could have different gold amount for level 13-14 or 15 level character?
I do kinda hope they sanction this as two chronicles(tier 13-14 and 15-16) instead of single chronicle that might cover both subtiers :'D
Mostly because if this is single chronicle, then its going to be really hard to get chronicles for tiers 17-18 and 19-20 from latter two books ever applied unless there is at least four level 13-20 3 part aps. If this book would be two chronicles, then that means with existence of second level 13-20 ap you could get all chronicles applied ;D (even if it wouldn't be that good idea since likely you won't get level 20 scenarios in long time if ever :p )
This PDF is unfortunately affected by the same problem as the "We're No Heroes" PDF. All images and maps contained in the PDF are cut up into small tiles, which makes it nearly impossible to use in a VTT.
I assume this is an error that occurred when creating the PDF since the current Pathfinder Adventure Path PDFs are not affected by this issue (and neither was the previous version of this PDF before it was pared down in size).
Paizo, could you please recreate this PDF with images intact? That would be super helpful for anyone wanting to use this adventure with a VTT. Thank you!
Has this been resolved in later releases? Drift Hackers book 1 had the same problem, but when they fixed the missing interactive maps, the new version of the PDF had also fixed the sliced up images/file size problem too
No. The opposite, in fact; if you downloaded the Devastation Ark PDFs as they came out, the file sizes were huge but the images were intact. When the formatting/file size problem continued into Fly Free or Die, those Devastation Ark PDFs were replaced with the versions that are currently available.
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