Next campaign: Dawn of Flame, or Threefold Conspiracy?

[jaspirian]

Hi,

One of my Starfinder groups is ready to start a new campaign, and I've been thinking about running Dawn of Flame for them. Recently I started reading through the Threefold Conspiracy, and found it quite interesting (only reviewed the first book.). I realize that the Threefold isn't all out yet, but do you have any opinions on these campaigns? Dawn of Flame feels very sci-fi heavy vs. threefold.

Would love to hear from someone that's run these campaigns as to how they were received by their group.

Thanks.

[Steve Geddes]

We’re just starting the fourth book of Dawn of Flame and it’s been one of the best received APs I’ve ever run. I would thoroughly recommend it.

The “hooks” have all seemed obvious and logical to the players, which is often an issue with my group. There’s been a decent mix of adventure types and they’ve all been high quality. There is a mild “giantslayer problem”, imo - namely that if you know what campaign you’re in and build your PC to be fire-resistant and excellent at damaging fire-based creatures then I suspect it would be very easy. As it is, my group didn’t do that but have rarely been troubled except right at the end of book one (which had only three PCs, no healer and they ran out of healing serums).

I’ve cut out ship combat - we unfortunately have one player who doesn’t like it, two new players and a fourth who is excellent at optimisation, rendering all starship combat a formality beyond about tier six. Other than that, I’ve run the books as is and they’re really into uncovering the mystery.

I definitely wouldn’t run the Threefold Conspiracy yet for one main reason (I plan to run it next though):

Having run APs for many years I think it is always true that your game will be better if the DM has at least skimread all volumes of the AP before beginning the first. Different groups have their own peculiarities and even in an AP that’s widely regarded as good, there may be events/assumptions/themes that won’t sit well with your group. Knowing about those ahead of time means you’ll be able to plan accordingly.

Major Dead Suns spoiler:

I liked Dead Suns and it was a good fit for our group....except for the central premise of book six. My Players were never going to come up with the idea of boarding the superdreadnought and crashing it into the doomsday weapon. Furthermore, if I’d presented that to them as an option they would have mocked it and come totally out of the story. I quite like the concept, but it just isn’t their cup of tea.

My solution was implemented at book one when they got the sunrise maiden - I gave the computer an AI module that was sarcastic, critical, snide and very, very annoying. This worked quite well and the optimiser in particular got very upset (in a good way) when every tier he rebuilt the ship minus an AI module and then due to some weird bug, it’d pop back in to criticise his choices and generally pepper their starship actions with abuse.

Book six, when they were no doubt going to decide that “the adventure must want us to go out in a blaze of glory, so let’s attack” my plan was for the AI to loudly ridicule them and point out that clearly the “obvious” course of action, were they real heroes rather than morons, would be infiltration and stealth....I’m not sure that they’d have bought that as sadly we TPKed during book four, but I know that had I just got to book six and dropped it on them, it would have ruined the story for them, right at the climax.

[Steve Geddes]

I remember another change I made - there’s some casino games in book two that were quite seriously mis-mathed, imo (or I totally misunderstood them!)

Spoiler:

I made the poker game much harder and allowed all the cheating options to be repeated. Otherwise the best PC strategy by far is just to send in the high skill players to automatically double their money every session and avoid all the games of chance, which is pretty dull.

[jaspirian]

Hi,

Thanks for your thoughtful response.

It is unfortunate that you had to cut out ship combat - all my groups have really enjoyed that aspect of the game (to the extent that they want more and more of it.)

[Steve Geddes]

Barring the one guy who doesnt like it we've enjoyed it well enough. But after about level six, PC ships are so overpowered relative to AP encounters that its hardly worth it anyhow.

There was a memorable event onboard and the whole concept of sundiving is pretty cool, so the ship stuff is there a bit. The combat encounters are just narrated though since there's negligible tension.

(We ran one campaign to level 20 and by tier 13 I just stopped advancing our ship. We picked out the toughest ship in the CRB (tier 18 from memory) and just wiped the floor with it - never got close to getting through our shields).

[The Artificer]

I would suggest Dawn Of Flame. I haven't used it yet but it has good content and is completed and ready to run.