A Starfinder Society Scenario designed for 11th- through 14th-level characters.
Famed demoscene artist and vidgame designer, Lecti, has extended an invitation to a team of prestigious Starfinders to beta test his latest full-immersion virtual reality vidgame at a trendy local arcade. Dive into the vibrant virtual world of Tortoiseshell Cove and play as colorful squox intent on nurturing the perfect farm! But when the vidgame makes a sudden genre switch, the lines between simulation and reality become blurred, and real lives are put on the line.
Content Warning: This scenario contains horror themes, including possession. Before you begin, understand that player consent (including that of the Game Master) is vital to a safe and fun play experience for everyone. You should talk with your players before beginning the adventure and modify descriptions of the narrative as appropriate.
Written by: Rigby Bendele
Scenario tags: Nova
[Scenario Maps spoiler - click to reveal]
The following maps used in this scenario are also available for purchase here on paizo.com:
Not sure what the reason for Jelatinator's 1-star rating was below, but personally I don't think this scenario deserves that.
Combat: When I ran it for an effective party of 6 PCs (all high tier), the combats were not particularly difficult.
GMs: on the second-last combat:
There is not a whole lot of room to maneuver in the space outside the door of the security room so if your PCs are all clustered up in there, your caster NPC probably needs to do a few flash teleports to get out of the melee PCs' grilles.
Roleplay: PC engagement with and concern for the NPCs should be encouraged. (Pretty easy to do with Xiffany.) The "you're inside the game" trope can be played up, especially on VTTs, and the players seemed to enjoy that aspect. And yes, squoxes are cute.
GMs: about going into the game:
Pets should go in too: they're either a class feature that the PC shouldn't be deprived of (e.g. mechanic's drone), or they're inventory which explicitly goes along.
Skill checks: There's a dedicated skill check section in addition to checks interspersed within the "game".
GMs: watch out for this part:
The "escape" skill check section can be very difficult for certain types of PCs. Failure has pretty poor consequences and if a player starts getting the idea that they can't succeed, this will not help the atmosphere at all, so be very open to creative solutions. Remember that at this level, PCs have all kinds of cool gear and abilities; no reason to not allow them to be used if it's at all plausible.
Other thoughts: The striking thing about this scenario is how utterly divorced it is from the normal business or ongoing crises of the Society. There's still a lot of stuff happening out there in the world, and even Starfinders can get caught up in real-life badness outside of their regularly-scheduled missions. That fact is brought into sharp relief at the end. I liked that touch--it caused some feels.
There are fewer moving parts and less GM interpolation called for here than for most Nova-tagged scenarios and so I'd say this is relatively straightforward to run. If anything, I would have expected more work. Total runtime was 4 hours. Overall, I'd say it's a solid adventure; maybe not my favorite ever, but perfectly serviceable.
Since logsig specifically called out my review, and gave this scenario 5 stars despite pointing out flaws leads me to believe they are just trying to counteract my review. But anyways, here's a short explanation why I didn't like this scenario at all.
1. The theme really didn't click with me as a high tier scenario. The VR video game has been done by Paizo quite a few times already and every iteration has been better than this. This seems like well-tread territory at this point, and for a high-tier adventure, I was hoping for something more original and unique. At this point, your character should be a high-ranking Starfinder solving big society problems, not playtesting a new video game because they got a random invite.
2. If you are a video gamer or have a good computers skill, you can do just about everything better than everyone else. Doesn't matter what the problem is, you can just hack away all day. There are even parts of this scenario you can just skip if you do a computers check.
3. Once the game switches (not a very big surprise), it throws some severe penalties at you that stack more and more if you fail. We had some characters who could not make it past the first obstacle even by rolling a 20 because of the first penalties. There is also no way around the obstacles, you either make it or you don't and you're stuck, slowly adding more and more penalties and damage. If a PC doesn't pass, there are less PC's attempting the subsequent obstacles. You'd better hope you have an operative or a vidgamer to pass the all the various obstacle skill checks singlehandedly, because otherwise there's a very good chance you'll get stuck at one. This is just flat out bad scenario design. Several different things could be manipulated here to make it better: no first initial penalty; passing an obstacle on success or failure but taking penalties or damage on a failure; having just one PC succeed in order to move everyone past; etc. Though they shouldn't have to do this, I'd encourage GMs to alter this section heavily.
4. Combats were not particularly difficult or interesting, but that may work in this scenario's favor due to the abundance of penalties from the skill-section.
Maybe this adventure will strike a chord with others and they will enjoy it, but unfortunately for myself and my group, we did not have fun with this one.
