Starfinder Adventure Path #40: Planetfall (Horizons of the Vast 1 of 6)

Ring Side Report- RPG Review of Starfinder Adventure Path #40: Planetfall (Horizons of the Vast 1 of 6)

Originally posted at www.throatpunchgames.com, a new idea every day!

Product- Starfinder Adventure Path #40: Planetfall (Horizons of the Vast 1 of 6)

System- Starfinder

Producer- Paizo

Price- $22.99 here https://paizo.com/products/btq026i0/discuss?Starfinder-Adventure-Path-40-Pl anetfall

TL; DR- Fun but it can drag if not careful! 87%

Basics- INTO THE UNKNOWN! Settle a planet and fend off the wildlife AND the friends you brought along the way in this Kingmaker in Space adventure!

Mechanics or Crunch- This adventure focuses on building and exploring a location. The problem with this and most other RPGs of this kind is randomness. Each hex has a random chance to happen there unless something is scripted. This problem can lead to you having way too many encounters to the point the book even says reduce the experience the players get. That feels a bit cheap. Couple that with the fact that there are only eight random encounters means players can get bored quickly with the encounters. There are scripted events and locations that do make things more fun, but be aware! It’s fun, but it can get a bit same-y for the fights. Most of the fun comes from the social and that is done well, but if a party just makes all murder hobos which are excellent in the bush, they will get decimated in town as they will be out maneuvered at every turn by the people they came to lead! 4/5

Theme or Fluff- Just like in the crunch, the story can get same-y if you are not careful. Depending on how players handle the world, they can spend tons of time just running around in circles exploring the same hexes again and again if they are slow. The town encounters and managing all the NPCs is the bulk of the story in this one. There is some toward the end showing the world is more than it might have seemed, but most of the time there is just town and other local claims to deal with as the bulk of the story. It’s fun, but this is an intro game that will help power level the characters more than dig deep into the story. 4/5

Execution- PDF? Yep. Hyperlinked? Yep. Solid Art? Yep. Good layout? Honestly yes. Paizo does books and adventures well. Paizo was a publishing company before an RPG company, and honestly that experience shows in a clean book that is easy to read. 5/5

Summary-There is a reason players wanted Kingmaker in space. You build a location and make it shine! This book sets the foundation for that, but like all foundations it takes time to set up. This one is a bit slow and honestly needs an expanded random encounter table as eight separate things is just not enough. Give me 20 or give me more set encounters in each place, even if they don’t advance the story! That right there would lift this WAY up in the ranks as even my players had almost memorized what the D8 meant for the coming encounter! The story that is here is fun and my players quickly learned to love and HATE some NPCs. That makes me happy as a GM. It goes almost without saying that I love Paizo’s bookmanship, so top marks there. It’s a good adventure that just needs a bit more for the random to keep things a bit more entertaining. 87 %

First thing here is that I have played this module as a player with 5 other Players and completed it.

I am currently GMing 3 other groups through this module right now, 2 just starting and one at the tail end of finishing it, so this is no read (not run or play) then post a review ASAP kind of thing. Those leave a lot to be desired I think, for me anyways, or those terrible one liners, "great fun" or "to hard" or one I just saw posted "stay away from".........

With that, I strongly beleave that as Paizo listened to us and gave us our "Kingmaker in Space" AP, it will get a full 5 stars from me (at least this starting module) from the get go, but it might not be for everyone, depending on the group and the GM specifically.

Positive +

* 1st Starfinder hexploration AP!!

* 25 named and interesting NPC Colonists to get some fun RP and interaction with

* Interesting events/encounters inside your Colony and out in the alien hex wilds the players will have to run into/deal with

* Building your very own space Colony subsystem`

* Multiple Factions that also have charters on this new world besides yours and you can choose from a list of official sponsors for your own Admin group

* Nice and colorfull Hex map

* A large variety of situations one can run into, not always solved by a laser blast :)

Needs work -

- Instead of a session 0 to just talk and make mechanical decisions with no player agency or NPC interactions, a much more organic approach would have worked much better. I had the party start in their nice Colony exploration ship in their bunks sleeping just before hitting orbit (nice to use maps provided in the AP is'nt it).

Then a couple of the named colonists woke 2 of them up with some hard won pointers. Then tipped off a meeting is to be held by their sponsor rep in an hour so get the other Admins up and have it all set up to score some points with this person from the get go. Worked wonders for character intro (as they were to busy with prep before hitting dirtside and just knew the other Admins (players) names only.

- The random encounters needed a lot of work to make them interesting, even using GEM was not much help. Elementals were just to bland so to spice it up a LOT more find interesting. Picking interesting creatures, weather effects and colony related encounters (IE a mis drop of supplies to gain resource points and items.

-To many empty hex's for my taste, and the placement seemed pretty strange til I picked up that there was to be an underground river system that was scrapped before final release (Thanks again Hilary for our forum chats!!).

- Admin (Party) motivation can be lacking at times so it takes a strong GM to guide them (ala Ezrand the sponsor rep) to keep them on pace for whats going on, building your colony and so forth.

- Wish there was more contact with other charters as that sets up other modules in the future quite well and not so out of the blue.

- No colony map.

- Credits can be hard to come by so every creature remains could be bought by dear old Ezrend for the parties Sponsor, and he could very well hand out bonus pay for discoveries made. That was a pretty glaring oversight not to have these things spelled out for credits and UPB rewards.

Overall I had a great time as a player in this and I am also having a blast GMing it for other groups. Just know that your GM skills might be put to the test to get the fullest out of this adventure for you and your group.

Great first module in the Horizons of the vast AP, do yourself a favor and pick this up if this theme type interests you and your players. Leaps and bounds above where we started with Dead Suns AP!!

Cheers

Tom (TRDG)

You have to do a lot of improv to make this entire AP line work. There were some pretty serious "how do people live day to day" questions that went unanswered until later AP's or even completely unanswered.

Some of the encounters can be a bit rough, but that's nothing new for a starter AP. I felt the loot was a little sparse, especially if parties choose to flee from random encounters or skip optional events.

Speaking of which --- if you do EVERYTHING in these AP's, your group will be overlevelled, without fail. You either embrace this, or you'll need to cut some of the content.

In addition - vehicles are easily procured and give you 6 actions per day. This can result in serious incongruous expectations between how many hexes developers expected you to get through per in-game month versus how many you'll actually get through. I am consistently finding that my group has spent less-time on planet than the AP expects, so sorta like the Kingmaker CRPG (ironically!) you may have to spend time "catching up" and having several months go by of nothing but charter turns with no activity on the part of the players.

Finally - specific to AP 1: radiation in Starfinder is pretty nasty at low levels. Poison damage is mandatory even if you pass your save, and acute radiation exposure is a poison. Unless your players get clever with a couple of the encounters and "kite" enemies, they may have an unpleasant time at level 2 or even level 3.