A favor for their best friend and ally brings the player characters to the ocean planet of Entha, which the Company is terraforming into a paradise for rich dilettantes. The churning water world is home to many mysteries, including a fantastic underwater realm of powerful magic. Now the crew must save an underwater rig from destruction, rescue the workers there, and somehow win the friendship of a strange alien species. But the Company manager on Entha is a dragon, she's got a team of aquatic alien troubleshooters, and the PCs are the trouble that needs to be shot.
"Professional Courtesy" is a Starfinder adventure for four 5th-level characters. This adventure continues the Fly Free or Die Adventure Path, a six-part monthly campaign in which players take on the role of a merchant crew with an experimental starship, trying to get rich, escape interplanetary assassins, and outwit their rivals. This volume also details the aquatic world of Entha and its many dangerous and intelligent inhabitants, a well-armed Company warship, gear and character options for underwater adventures, and a series of "Side Jobs"—short mini-adventures the GM can insert into the campaign at any time.
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: 978-1-64078-298-3
Professional Courtesy 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).
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Professional Courtesy is quite the odd duck AP volume. After the first two volumes, the PCs are established as rogue traders, thieves and opportunists, who may or may not be driven by higher ideals. They may or may not be willing to stick their necks out for others if there isn't a payout on the other end. In this volume however, they are all but required to be selfless heroes rising to the occasion. While the adventure offers several places to still engage in petty theft (or outright petty meanness), which does allow for some moral differentiation, the core thrust of the plot is a non-negotiable odyssey into becoming political and ecological activists at high personal cost and little personal reward. Not engaging with this concept more or less requires you to skip the book. It's just a weird hard sell, and that context spoils what might've been a very entertaining adventure in another AP.
As far as the content is concerned, the adventure is fun enough, with some interesting and varied encounters and flashy set pieces. I have quite a few gripes with the individual encounters, many of which were ambitious, but fell flat with our group to some degree. Even so, I certainly admire that this book is more adventurous in what it tries to deliver! I would love to see something like this, but better considered as part of a larger AP and with more playtesting. Beyond the written content, the maps and art were excellent, with the map for Terra-4 and the Aglian swarm as highlights.
Overall, this adventure is hard to recommend as part of Fly Free or Die. It has some good ideas, but it's not a great fit for the AP. It would probably make for a fine standalone adventure though, so I still rate it decently high on that basis.
Specific Gripes:
The golden league ambush is just staggeringly undertuned, and there's no consideration for if the PCs want to investigate where they came from or to follow up on this at all.
The hugbot encounter is just... so weird. Like, the warehouse needs to be visited constantly by people looking to pick up shipments (per Skix) and yet it has malfunctioning and hostile robots roaming it that no one warns you about. It has complicated rules for containers moving about, but there's zero reason to engage with them because the encounter is incredibly easy. It feels like the writer just went wild with making stuff without consideration for the experience of playing or running it.
The Wintermourn crew are disappointing. They're not fun enough to be interesting, or unpleasant enough to be hateable, or competent enough to really feel like rivals. At this point you've already beaten or rescued them several times, so it's hard to take them seriously. Their presence here seems incidental, and they just have no real role to play except to potentially cause trouble for the party right at the end.
The flooding of Terra 5 is an incredible cinematic encounter absolutely crippled by fiddly mechanics and unclear requirements from the player perspective. The expansive facility has to be explored round by round due to the rate of flooding, slowing the experience to a crawl. The lack of intel on the player side means you have no real understanding of what you need to accomplish (or if you're on a short or medium term timer). Due to the movement restrictions and expansive complex, you can easily have a 20, 30 or even 50 round encounter with flooding tracked round by round.
Getting sucked into Shan's Aglian-saving mission is strange. There's a timer hanging over the PCs heads to leave the planet, they expect it to be highly dangerous to stay, and they're here to rescue Shan, not take her into more danger. Shan offers only bleeding heart type reasons to act. There's zero consideration in the AP to what happens if the crew skips this.
The interactions with the aglians are mainly around them resisting help, despite the dire and insurmountable nature of the threat against them. The PCs have to go through a series of trials to gain enough trust to be *allowed* to help them. For a group that has mixed morals, this is a ridiculous ask, and yet again there's no real alternative approach provided in the text. The only morally grey or repugnant actions covered by the AP is what happens if you engage in some petty theft.
Perhaps the most grievous problem after all the trials with the aglians is the pinkstone. It's been hyped up as the tool to defeat the harvester, but in the actual fight, it's terrible. It provides no benefit that jamming the gears or hacking the mainframe can't accomplish (the DC is ever so slightly lower) and it has by far the worst "fail by more than 5" effect of any of the sabotage options. Using it is an enormous risk, and leaving it behind is probably the right choice for any party that doesn't have a dedicated mystic. This uselessness completely undercuts the last half of the book, making all the painstaking effort to convince the aglians feel totally wasted.
The moral judgement at the end feels pointless and incongruous with the mandatory main path of the adventure, which requires the party to engage in selfless heroics or skip the book entirely.
This would have been a great eco-friendly AP or stand-alone. I would totally buy an adventure with a bunch of Xenodruids doing some save the whales schtick.
But this is so thematically inappropriate for the general thrust of this AP series. I mean, the first one is called "We're no Heroes". Well the third one should be called "You're Gonna Be Heroes Whether You Like It Or Not".
EJ is played so comically over the top. Your choices are "Side with the People Chucking Kittens into Vats of Drain-O Or Not". And as if to remind you you made the wrong choice, the corp is incredibly cheap about rewarding you if you decide to take their side rather than the side of Shan/Tarika. That's not how you balance things! People do bad things mainly out of financial motivation, not because they're Saturday morning cartoon villains! Bad!
Here's some more bulletpoints on some other questionable design choices:
- A recurring criticism of FFOD is "We STOLE A FREAKING SHIP FROM THESE GUYS, why would we return to Absalom Station to do business?". Well, this AP starts out with you going back to Absalom. And worse, it confirms to the players that Absalom Station is NOT safe by having you ambushed there. Bad!
- Ship encounters are undertuned if you've been doing moderately well at your BP count. You will blow away the Gideron Authority ships, and probably EJ Corp's Negotiator too.
- Too much focus on the Wintermourne's crew. My group is not interested in them other than exchanging banter. The "What are they up to now/how do they feel?" bit is interesting, but they shouldn't have taken up as much page space as they did.
- Terra-5 is interesting, though a bit underwhelming. It's way too easy to "save" the platform. A couple of repairs to the struts and repairing the pump room and closing off some hatches and you're done. I did like the water flooding concepts and would have loved for this to be expanded on in some sort of Poseidon Adventure-esque adventure.
- HIGHLY UNDERTUNED. Low DC's and CR's all over. Nothing was even vaguely threatening about most of them if you're prepared for underwater combat. I think I had someone maybe fail one check.
- Side jobs are location-specific. If you're not on Absalom Station, you can't take the second or third jobs. Well, if the second job is appropriate for 6th level why would I be in the Golarion system when I did it? Unless I've gone completely off-script?
- Great art from Pixoloid Studios and Tomasz Chistowski.
I have loved the first two books of "Fly Free or Die!" but I am looking at this and feeling disappointed. It seems beset with problems.
As a GM I'm expected to convince these rogue traders who are hunted throughout the Vast by crime lords and corporate assassins to keep returning to Absalom Station to chat with their friendly fixer. They really don't want to do that.
The first encounter starts with a vague briefing to pick up a cargo but the authorisation, the payment, the urgency and the loading details are very confused. I can fix that but I feel I am doing someone else's job here.
The combat encounter in the Warehouse involves some potentially "interesting moving objects" but they move too randomly to be useful tactically to players and they are much too obvious for them to be a obstacle to players. So I am wondering what was in the author's mind.
There are some underwater encounters that involve special vehicles. I was disappointed to find no pictures of those vehicles. It would have been a very helpful visual aid. Surely they should be high priority in the art briefing.
There are some complex rules and mechanisms for calculating the depth of rising water in a multi-roomed installation that is sinking. It would have been really helpful to have a simple chart or graphic to track this.
When the PCs take the main mission and rescue the NPC, she proposes that they band together to save the moderately intelligent shrimps who are getting emotional about terraforming. Now that's a pretty hard sell to engage a bunch of cynical rogue traders who probably enjoy seafood. It's like me (a vegetarian) trying to persuade a room full of fast-food-eating gamers to adopt a plant diet. It's unlikely to have universal appeal.
Worse... so far the players have been given genuine opportunities to make difficult choices and take the high moral ground or trade down-and-dirty. My players have taken time to debate this seriously and come to a group decision every time. There have usually been consequences for either choice. But in this book they are presented with a high-minded NPC's ecological mission and no alternative. If they don't follow the mission that's the end of the adventure – shut the book. And it's somewhat outrageous at the end of the book to ask the GM to mark the players moral choice from low to high when they had no alternative but to comply with the high moral choice or put away their dice and go home.
To add insult to injury, in spite of many customers' complaints about the first two books, this PDF has once again been produced so that text and pictures are fractured into random slices and impossible to easily extract for online tabletops. Surely that would have been easy to fix.
So I really hope book 4 returns to the excellent standard of the first two volumes.
I wasn't super excited per se about this AP, but the product descriptions really nail the theme of the AP in a super engaging way. I need to play more Starfinder.
I wasn't super excited per se about this AP, but the product descriptions really nail the theme of the AP in a super engaging way. I need to play more Starfinder.
That depends on the implementation. Agents of Edgewatch also sounded super exciting, but in the end it was just stuff you do in every other AP too with a little different flavor text.
So my fear is that this AP won't really do justice to the firefly concept it promotes or play any differently but instead will just be the usual dungeon crawls for level appropriate loot like basically all other APs. Which for this book means, land on the planet, do some side quest to earn the trust of species whatever, kill the mooks and finally crawl through the company warship and kill the dragon...
Err, I see nobody has informed paizo staff that this pdf is only available in "file per chapter" format ^^;
Noted. This will be corrected.
Message received, and error corrected. Thanks for your patience, everyone! You should now see the Single File version available to download, although you may need to refresh your downloads in order for things to update.
I agree, all of the Fly Free Or Die PDFs have the image problem with lines of text included as part of the image and generally poor image resolution. The Devastation Ark original large file size PDFs did not have this issue but the newer updated smaller file size ones too. Please fix this, it may well mean I never run this since I mainly game online.
I have to agree. I also run online using a VTT, and the inability to use the images in these PDFs automatically puts this AP at the back of my list of campaigns I would want to run. These PDFs are are, truly, only slightly more useful to me than having no PDF at all. Each month this problem isn't fixed is a month I step closer to cancelling my AP subscription. I'm just glad that I had the Devastation Ark PDFs in hand before Paizo *retroactively* rendered them unusable.
I raised a new topic "Problems with Images in Starfinder Adventure Paths" with some extra details on the Customer Service forum and Logan said she has passed it on. So here's hoping the issue will get fixed.
Jason, there is a problem with Shan's statblock in FFoD: Prof Courtesy at page 24.
Shan's class is not listed in her statblock. While Starfinder may not see this is as a problem, VTT software which assumes either an Alien Archve entry or a NPC/PC class does. Does she have a class? Envoy?
I guess as statted she is just a special NPC and those are her stats. I'll live with it!
MINOR SPOILER NECESSARY FOR A QUESTION FOR THE DESIGNERS: I really like this adventure, have read it and am prepping to run it for my group that just started Merchants of the Void after really enjoying all of the individuals, themes and organizations encountered in We're No Heroes. I just wanted to ask, on page 20 it says Righteous, the drill operator is an android, but on page 25 it says that, while shrapnel hit him and he was pinned to his seat by a collapsed drilling rig, he likely drowned, but according to page 42 of the Starfinder Core Rulebook androids don't need to breathe, so doesn't that mean Righteous would be able to be rescued and would be trapped but wouldn't drown? Is the idea that since he was hit by shrapnel he isn't airtight and the water has entered and damaged his internal systems or are androids always vulnerable to drowning? I am wondering if I missed something and would love some clarification just so I can convey the events to my players and have it make sense as I love the events of this adventure and the world and it's inhabitants are really interesting and engagingly designed.
I agree, all of the Fly Free Or Die PDFs have the image problem with lines of text included as part of the image and generally poor image resolution. The Devastation Ark original large file size PDFs did not have this issue but the newer updated smaller file size ones too. Please fix this, it may well mean I never run this since I mainly game online.
There's a simple solution to this. Download "TokenTool" go to File > Open PDF and it will separate all the images from the PDF individually.
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