In this thrilling kick-off to the new Fly Free or Die Starfinder Adventure Path, a crew of scoundrels, rogues, and misfits finds it hard to survive in a galaxy where everyone has a price. Targeted by a crime boss and his army of enforcers, preyed upon by faceless mega-corporations, and hounded by rivals, the crew of the Free Trader Oliphaunt line up the big score that will at last make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. But when their many enemies join forces and the crew loses it all, they find out there's two things in the galaxy that can't be bought: freedom... and revenge.
It's just another day punching the clock when the player characters, a blue-collar transport crew, are blamed for a bad cargo and stiffed of their bonuses. They take a dangerous job smuggling weapons to a world conquered by militant hobgoblins, but one fiasco later, they're in debt to a crime boss and about to be fired. Their only chance is to steal the Oliphaunt, an experimental cargo hauler with a magical secret, and then survive long enough to collect the payoff!
“We're No Heroes" is a Starfinder Roleplaying Game adventure for four 1st-level characters. It makes an excellent introduction to the game for new players. The adventure begins the Fly Free or Die Adventure Path, a six-part, monthly campaign in which a merchant crew with an experimental starship tries to get rich, escape interplanetary assassins, and outwit their rivals. This volume also includes rules for finding, buying, and selling interstellar cargo (and using the profits to enhance your starship), a collection of deadly threats, and a player's guide that provides advice and new character creation options ideal for this Adventure Path.
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: 978-1-64078-282-2
We're No Heroes 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 (5.3 MB PDF).
Other Resources: This product is also available on the following platforms:
This is a review for books 1 though 4 of this AP. It's very disappointing. There is very little connection between the authors when you go from book to book. It seems each book has a different theme with a different set of campaign expectations.
For example book 1 & 2 there are ways to gain BP for your ship. Book 3 and 4 don't even mention them at all.
Book 3 mentions did the party take the high road or the low road. but only gives examples within book 3. But much more serious high/and low road examples can be pulled from book 1 and 2.
Book 1 has a few very deadly encounters. Books 2 through 4 do not.
I GM APs for a connected story, not a series on modules. Paizo used to be great at this. But in this AP it seems the authors had no contact with each other and the overall AP developer simply didn't do their job very well.
The book and the story are solid enough to get you into Starfinder, and has enough wiggle for creative ideas and characters all within the theme's paramiter of space-truck drivers working for corp with no morals. Firefly vibes essentially. The writers working with the mechanics did a good job. Thats that carries this star rating.
However.
The PDF images for the MAPS are horrible, low qauility and fuzzy at best whenever I use -any- PDF image extraction program (adobe, office libra ect). AND they don't fit any dimensional adjustments in roll20. Maybe in foundry?- but I don't have that to compare. SO it's incredibly fustrating to pay for the (very few) maps you get out of this adventure path, and they aren't as useful as they should be. Plus there are so many other potential scenes and places that -should- have maps, that don't have maps it feels like, so then you're just sitting there talking with a random image pop up or an old map scene with your players wondering if they should tune out or not because you need to dingle-dangle some keys infront of them with an RP scene with an NPC.
I'm not to unfamiluar with graphics and getting images to work in roll20 or just working on various DPI qauilities. No amount of adjustment and grid aligment works. So expect to either play with your virtual table top system of choice's grid-system OFF or make your own maps (which defeats the purpose of -buying- these APs in my opionion).
This entire adventure path is "Bad things happen to you every job, and someone will betray you every time you turn around.
The players need to decide before they start how far their reactions to this can diverge before the game stops being fun.
By book 6, one player was murdering every person who betrayed us, non combatant or not (to be fair, they had been conspiring to kill us, so they weren't exactly innocent.) and another player was trying to only kill people who were actively shooting us, and the game eventually fell apart.
Also, make sure your players *know* when doing a smart thing lets them avoid a fight. Even if that means having "cut away" scenes showing shadowy figures waiting for them where they were not going. Without that, by the end of the 5th book, (or possibly even with that) it just felt like we just automatically failed whenever the adventure wanted something dramatic to happen.
We're No Heroes is a frustrating start to the Fly Free or Die AP. It sets a great tone and has a very cool core concept, but it quickly reveals itself to be very narrow in scope and very determined to deliver a "playable movie" sort of story. I went through it as a player and had a good time leaning into the concept, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't frustrated and emotionally disconnected from the events to a degree that I haven't experienced with other APs.
If I had to characterize We're No Heroes, its as a playable series of improbably persistent no win scenarios, crossed with the typical Starfinder writing and encounter design. Each of the scenarios involve the PCs being given a job, some improbable event causing the job to go bad, the PCs having to do some easy skill checks or combat to salvage the remains, getting some sort of moral choice, and then there being essentially no meaningful consequence for any choice made. The events are written such that there's no way to avoid things "going bad", and no way to turn them around.
It leads to an odd feeling in play. The amount of "things going wrong" is oppressive, but they're never all that hard to resolve. Narratively, the PCs are always down on their luck, but mechanically, you're getting credits and leveling up just fine. You're never in a position where you're really, truly, put on the back foot, and none of the bad twists are a result of your own mistakes - just the author's narrative chugging along. It's a format that delivers the right "feel" but only on a surface level.
Some specific annoyances:
Berry Selling:
Nothing about this scenario makes much sense, from the berries being completely unwanted in the market, to a criminal intermediary sending enforcers to attack the PCs for berries she doesn't even want. It smells like a sandbox of possibilities to establish merchant connections and leverage your social skills, but everything is just a dead end. It actively resists PC problem solving in order to leave them with the moral dilemma at the end.
The Stealing of the Ship:
Level 1 or 2 characters slickly stealing a high value super special experimental ship from right under the noses of a big corporation's highest security is an enormous stretch that requires exceedingly weak foes, humble security measures and incongruously low DCs. However, it's especially baffling in the context of this adventure, which has so far presented nothing but partial failures for even the most innocuous of tasks. It shatters any illusion that there's consistency and fantastical-realism to the world. These tasks are doable for low level PCs because the authors wanted to PCs to get the Oliphaunt, and they thought this would be a fun set piece to give it to them.
-----------
All these complaints said, the adventure definitely establishes that scrappy "feel", that the PCs are nobodies in an unfair universe and rolling with the punches. For a group willing to go along for the ride without thinking too hard, its quite the romp with some fun moral dilemmas to argue about and ponder in character. It has some great art and a wide variety of encounters and challenges.
All in all, a unique adventure, but with some irritations that are likely to break it for some groups.
The writing is disjointed and unclear. In the end, I had to write 5 pages of notes to tighten up the writing and make decisions about who does what and when. I really don't think anyone play tested this all the way through. The timing of the events makes everything happen at once, taking choices away from the players.
The economic parts of the game are silly and defy logic.
Railroad-y to the point of silliness as well, the storyline even comes right out and says, "no matter what choice the characters make, this is the outcome".
The NPC's are not compelling and there wasn't anyone to care about for the most part.
And the "Fly Free or DIE!" has like no flying. None. At all. I had 4 characters with a mix of starship combat skills that didn't get used. But they did die quite a bit in some of the unbalanced combat situations.
Struggling and dissapointed trying to use the BD514 map on the virtual tabletop system I and my all over the country players use.
After an hour of trying and failing to get the grids of the ship to match the VTT, we realized the GRIDS ARE NOT SQUARES....seriously. Not only are the grids not truly square, but the 'not squareness' is not even consistent across the map, so adjusting for it with ratio tweaks is a failure too.
Of course problem would be solved or ignorable if the ship had been included in those interactive map pages with the adventure, but for some reason is not...
Have had issues with Paizo maps like this before, and becoming increasingly disheartened by my purchases in the last year.
I hear you. Paizo is a print tabletop roleplaying game publisher. I see the maps as inspirational illustration. The GM can use them to recreate for their game around the table. Paizo has not focused on digital VTT play and has historically used VTT partners to convert the maps and images as best they can. We continue to work to expand and improve our product design for these pandemic times. I don't see Paizo circling back to update already published adventures, but we work to ensure the VTT playability of future products.
Pathfinder Starfinder Accessories, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
The Painted Oryx wrote:
How is this adventure? Anyone feel like writing a review? Considering purchasing it but want to know a bit more.
Fun. Not a railroad, but definitely not something I'd recommend for first-timers.
If your players aren't all in on the "This gig sucks" train, they're going to be whining that they're being put in no-win situations. You won't get any gear/disposable income until about 2/3rds of the way through (unless your party are psychos).
