Starfinder Society Scenario #3-15: Frozen Ambitions: The Preluria Connection

Concisely summarising the backstory to The Preluria Connection is no easy task as it involves both the overall "Frozen Ambitions" storyline and then multiple complications leading up to the scenario itself. But I'll try! High Despot Jularaz, ruler of Vesk-8, is still trying to find profitable uses for the mineral shimmerstone (the major resource on the planet). One of his ideas is to outsource drug trials using shimmerstone, and a lab on one of the planet Preluria's orbitals (the "Vault of Vorlath") has succeeded in turning shimmerstone into an awesome combat-enhancer called shimmersheen. But a member of the mysterious sect known as the Xystrian Brotherhood (which pretends to be pacifist ascetics but are secretly information brokers and hired saboteurs) found out about the experiments. After this member, Firiz, went missing, the Xystrian Brotherhood decided (implausibly in my opinion) that they needed to bring in a third-party to investigate. To that end, they've contacted the Starfinder Society and invited a team (a.k.a. the PCs) to visit their homeworld, Xys, another planetoid that orbits Preluria. Ostensibly, the invitation is for a "get to know one another" tour as a predicate to future negotiations for exploration, but the Brotherhood hopes to use the goodwill generated by the invitation to persuade the Society to investigate Firiz's disappearance on the Vault of Vorlath. See, complicated! And that doesn't even cover who's running the lab or what happened to Firiz.

The five-day-tour of Xys itself is hand-waved, which is a little unfortunate in my opinion, as both Xys and the Brotherhood seem really interesting. The adventure really gets going when the PCs arrive at Firiz's last known location, a dive cantina on the Vault of Vorlath named The Crooked Doshko. There are several named NPCs that can be interacted with to learn about what happened the night Firiz disappeared. For whatever reason, my group really struggled with this part of the scenario and it seemingly took us ages to piece together that he left his comm unit with a dancer named Domakayo (love the shimmering bodysuit!) for safekeeping. As soon as Domakayo is persuaded to hand over the comm unit, however, a group of ijtikri mercenaries spring an attack. The mercs have (implausibly) come from the scientist Nraal's lab on Zrulik-3 (from "Freeing the Herd") and are also looking for the lab on the Vault of Vorlath and just so happened (I guess) to be in the right place at the right time to eavesdrop on the PCs.

Anyway, a hack of Firiz's comm unit uncovers coordinates leading to an abandoned industrial building several miles into the desert. This would normally be the set-up to a traditional Starfinder dungeon (hi-tech complex) crawl, but there's actually only a few rooms to explore here with one encounter (against shobhad mercenaries) and one trap. What's going on is that the lab's main scientist, Sorah Ka (fantastic art!) has somehow realised trouble is closing in and has decided to destroy all the evidence and scoot while the scooting is good. I'm honestly not sure what Sorah Ka is afraid of--there doesn't seem to be anything inherently evil about experimenting with shimmerstone, and even if there were, the experiments are taking place on a planetoid ruled by mercenaries who would presumably love to buy some combat enhancement serums (and further, we're in Near Space, not the Pact Worlds, so it's not like the Stewards are going to show up).

Sorah Ka flees in a battered delivery van, and the PCs need to give chase in another van! Vehicle chases have a special rules subset in the Core Rulebook, so some preparation by the GM (and patience by the players) is necessary to make them work. Assuming the PCs succeed on the chase, they can fight Sora Ka and more shobhad bodyguards face-to-face. Unfortunately, Firiz is discovered to have been murdered "more than a day ago." Maybe the Xystrian Brotherhood shouldn't have wasted 3d6 days for the Starfinders to arrive through the Drift and another 5 days giving them a tour! But the Xystrian Brotherhood is happy with the PCs' effort, as is the Starfinder Society, and investigation of the origins of the shimmersheen will continue.

I liked how the scenario had some intelligent trade-offs: PCs might spend credits for a ride to the remote complex or walk there themselves, taking some damage from the heat. If they don't succeed in disabling an alarm trap, guards get a bonus to their Initiative. Etc. Oddly, this didn't carry over to the consequences of what happens if the PCs lose any of their battles--the scenario explicitly mentions a couple of times that the PCs just wake up later, and it also provides them with an alternate way to continue the story. Losing the vehicle chase also doesn't have any particular consequences. It's *really* hard to fail a scenario in Starfinder Society!

Not having played a lot of recent scenarios I was stumbling a bit in the dark at the start, the setup is interesting, but does not appear to go anywhere just yet - it feels a bit like a setup, but we will see.
Once we actually hit the first proper location with a map, it felt like we had a fair number of options, personally, I would have liked a handout with a list of drinks and bar snacks, but the GM was pretty flexible so my character got her drink and a fried vesk style protein bar.
Other parts of the bar went pretty well for us, though it turned out that I was the only one who could talk, but it worked out ^^
After the bar, things mostly worked out, we discovered more about the plot and then faced the subsystem. It did not work out spectacularly fast but our group composition was partially to blame, and our tactics, but at that point in the session it did not feel like talking about tactics was a much better option than just playing. Again, I was pretty happy that while the used system is a bit on the complicated side, it at least did not end too quickly despite pretty bad rolls, which is usually the problem (prepping it and explaining it to players compares unfavorably to the actual time playing it).

The final fight was pretty okay, most of the setup was done via audio logs, and the enemy leader did not really seem to be someone we wanted to talk to. Sometimes, you just want to hunt down the criminals and leave the world a slightly better place.

The wrap-up... well the interaction with the people that sent us on this mission was a bit minimal, maybe caused by the fact, that we kinda got hints that they are a bit shift. Good Scenario, will update the review once I had the chance to read and run it.