SFS 2-24: Cornered Rat

[Iammars]

I'm prepping this for Sunday, and I'm very confused by the map on page 11. It seems like where the map tags don't match the encounter descriptions. (In particular, B5 is indicated to be a dead end in the description, but is clearly on the correct path in the map.) Do people have a working map and my copy is just bad, or is something else going on here?

[Hmm]

Oh that map drove me crazy. I had to blow it up, follow the paths, and try to figure out which way the characters turned. I wound up turning to BNW in order to double-check some of the turn directions because my dyslexic self was getting all turned around.

So... DON'T SHOW THE MAP TO YOUR PLAYERS.

Just use the mini-maps. Do you need the various turn directions? I still have them on my prep document.

Directions:

B2
TURN RIGHT

If they turn left and don’t make the hard culture, sense motive or perception check, boom!
[8d12 Fire Damage]
21 Reflex for half

Dead end, turn!

B3
TURN RIGHT Because Left is too small

Rat swarm!

Follow rats with Survival to B6, bypassing traps or encounters in B4, B5.
B4
TURN RIGHT

B5
TURN RIGHT
Hard Engineering, Survival
Easy Mysticism for Torag
Healing Potions.
B6
TURN LEFT

When sensors detect movement in the chamber, both doors seal, and five eye-shaped wall apertures open on the trap's initiative count to launch shadowy daggers at everyone in the room. The trap fires daggers for 7 rounds, unless all the eyes have been closed or destroyed. An eye has EAC 23, KAC 25, Fort +12, Ref +10, hardness 10, and 25 HP. Disabling or destroying one eye reduces the damage dealt by 1d10.

Disable with Average Engineering for 1 eye

[1d20+22 Daggers]
[2d10]
B7
TURN RIGHT LEFT RIGHT
A dead end
Hard Engineering to notice instability

[5d6 Bludgeoning Damage]

B8
RIGHT

Hmm

[BigNorseWolf]

Are you on discord? I have a picture that made it make sense to me at least

I just had the party spell out a general left hand or right hand rule or a follow a certain wall rule. Any rule seems to = will spend too much time in the maze, unless they follow the rats or ask directions past a few encounters.

[BigNorseWolf]

Oh, note to DMS...

Make sure you encourage people with luwazi rep to slot the ss luwazi faction boon

A lot of scenarios have encouraged slotting a boon because it would be thematic. This will lead a lot of players to just ignoring a standard "you should slot luwazi" warning. It has to be clear that there's something else involved here, even if you don't tell them what. At level 12 its likely to possible someones maxed out their luwazi rep and gone on to another faction.

[Iammars]

BigNorseWolf wrote:

Are you on discord? I have a picture that made it make sense to me at least

I just had the party spell out a general left hand or right hand rule or a follow a certain wall rule. Any rule seems to = will spend too much time in the maze, unless they follow the rats or ask directions past a few encounters.

Yeah I’m on Discord - Iammars#9056. I would love it if I could get your picture.

[Mikko Kallio]

Unfortunately, some info I wanted to include in the map is missing, and the labels may have some incorrect information —sorry about that! Thanks for helping out, Hmm and BigNorseWolf! :)

[Ascalaphus]

I'm having trouble understanding the drones - do they really just have only a pilot and a gunner action? Then why do they have a separate forward plasma cannon (5d12) and persistent particle beam turret (10d6)? Those damage totals are more or less the same, actually 5d12 is a teensy bit worse, and it's also got shorter range. So what is it even for? And what are the 4d8 missiles for if they have the same range as the 10d6 turret? And why does it even have +4 computers to science checks if there's no scientist on board?

Also, with regards to the traps in the asteroid. It's my understanding that normally you have to be specifically searching a space to have a chance to spot traps there. But this is a big asteroid, and there's time pressure. So are all the traps supposed to trigger automatically?

[HammerJack]

Does that gunner action say that it can't be Fire At Will? If not, there's no reason not to have 2 weapons.

[John Mangrum]

I understand wanting to focus specifically on Year 2's plotline, but it strikes me as a pity that the scenario doesn't include call-outs to Datch's Year 1 machinations as well. Especially since, for the PCs I'll be running through this (eventually), they'll have spent all of Year 1 unearthing the conspiracy, but will then have to mostly get sidelined in Year 2 due to leveling up.

I presume, after all, that Datch was behind:

1. Breaching the Lorespire Complex before the Scoured Stars expedition to rob the Society of vital information.

2. Hiring an assassin to target First Seeker Elsebo. (Although that is a bit of a blunt instrument, in hindsight, so I could be convinced it either wasn't her or was some kind of layered fakeout.)

3. The attempted Songbird Station massacre.

(The timeline of her grand schemes seems a little compressed as well, but that won't affect my game.)

[Ascalaphus]

I'm not really sure of that, because

various season 1 things:

The First Mandate assassination attempt happens before Live Exploration Extreme, which is supposed to be what triggers Datch to pick the Society as her ratspaw.

The dude on Songbird station speaks Azlanti, which Thurston said might indeed be significant.

I'm open to the possibility of there being another conspiracy.

[BigNorseWolf]

Spoiler:

The first hint we got of laolite involvement was in a facility Hiro sent us to. If those two conspiracies don't have a more overt link, the only really malicious thing Datch has done is kill six office workers.

tinfoil hat time:

Aboleths would have connections to azlant , the weird mormalaw cuthulu gates, the sensor absorbing basalt, and were possibly in space long enough to set up the space station with similar missile programing to the race that was playing with the weird basalt

[John Mangrum]

I'm with BigNorseWolf; there's a direct chain of events from The Commencement all the way to Cornered Rat.

My headcanon timeline of events (warning: long!):

Pre-Year 1:

First Seeker Jadnura announces his mandate to explore the Scoured Stars. As is his way, Historia-6 performs a wide-ranging search for info on the Scoured Stars, including covertly poking his nose into the private data of several major corporations. Historia-6 meets his match when his probes unwittingly brushes up against Datch's conspiracy to corrupt AbadarCorp, which is already well underway. {Data Breach}

Datch detects the data breach and decides the Starfinder Society is a threat. She reacts by having her Laoite minions physically infiltrate the Lorespire Complex and upload an unnervingly sophisticated, alien technomagical virus into Guidance. Guidance, unknown even to itself, is a mole for Datch all the way through Year 1 and right up to Data Breach in Year 2. Guidance performs the Cortex data breach and almost perfectly covers its tracks, secretly wiping the Cortex of all incriminating data that Historia-6 brushed over, plus warnings about the Scoured Stars, and uploading the stolen data to Datch's servers in Bluerise Tower. {Data Breach}

As an early stage in the Cortex data breach, Datch tests Guidance by having it create gaps in the Lorespire Complex's security systems; Datch tests these blind spots by having her minions steal a few random relics. Historia-7 (still going by Ceren), eventually detects the inexplicable thefts and brings them to Historia-6's attention. Historia-6 puts her under his wing and has her continue her investigation, which eventually leads to her promotion post-incident.

As a note, having Guidance be a mole all along may also explain some of its unexplained behavior in Year 1, including refusing to officially recognize Luwazi Elsebo's office or sharing the coordinates of Sangoro's Bulwark. Just little, subtle means of dragging its feet to hinder the Society. Guidance also spends all of Year 1 reporting to Datch's conspirators, feeding them the incriminating information that becomes the heart of Datch's multi-media "character assassination" campaign at the end of Year 1.

At this point, Datch has nothing against the Starfinder Society personally; she just set the organization up to die in the Scoured Stars to wipe them off the chessboard. Once the Scoured Stars incident wipes out 80% of the Society (including the her perceived threat, Historia-6) and leaves what's left reeling, Datch basically leaves the Society to die.

Year 1:

Through freak circumstances, a lone hacker, Ceren, breaches Bluerise Tower's data vaults and downloads a massive cache of data from several corporations, including AbadarCorp, Arch Energy Consortium, and more. Several of these corps have been "seeded" by the conspiracy and have data stolen from the Cortex. Historia-7 detects the breach, more or less just because he's paranoid and hyper-vigilant, and has a team of new recruits bring the hacker in to obtain the info (just to see what it might hold). {The Commencement} An AbadarCorp executive, Director Ebaki, also tracks the breach, but he is not part of the conspiracy. After the events of the Commencement, he contacts Historia-7 and works with her to keep Ceren safe in return for the Dataphiles deleting any data stolen from AbadarCorp's financial review department. {Bluerise Breakout}

Not long thereafter, First Seeker Elsebo holds a gala to announce her mandate: to mount a massive a rescue expedition to return to the Scoured Stars. Someone hires an assassin to kill Elsebo during the gala. And to be honest, the more I think about it, the less rationale I can think of for Datch to be behind this. The only motivation I can think of is that the Starfinder Society has already (quietly) established ties with Zo! Media at this point (Zo! having funded the Salvation's End expedition). {Claim to Salvation}

In the meantime, Historia-7 has been crunching the Bluerise Tower data and has discovered the files stolen from the Cortex, absolutely confirming her most paranoid concerns: that someone purposefully hobbled the Society on its way to the Scoured Stars. She focuses on a single corporation linked to the stolen data, the Arch Energy Consortium, which her analysis suggests is a shell corporation, arousing her suspicion.

Sometime after the gala, Historia-7 sends a team of Starfinders to infiltrate ARC's HQ, Brilliance Station, to grab data from the CEO's personal computers. {The Solar Sortie}

The stolen Brilliance Station data reveals that, yes, Arch Energy primarily exists to provide a framework for its nebulous "Board of Directors" to meet and plan. The Board of Directors use intense security to keep themselves anonymous, but gradually, through analyzing the metadata of meetings, suspicious events, and likely certain government files Historia-7 really shouldn't be seeing, she's able to triangulate the identity of one particular conspirator: Hira Lanzio. [Star Sugar Heartlove!!!}

In hindsight, we can discern that the "Board of Directors" consisted of Datch and her conspirators working within several other major Pact Worlds corporations. The Board of Directors is actively engaged in medical price fixing throughout all of Year 1, a scheme that only starts crumbling toward the end of Year 2. {Cost of Living}

Unfortunately for Historia-7, she meets her match in Datch's "character assassins," just like Historia-6 did. While Historia-7 is analyzing Lanzio's identity, the "Board of Directors" are also analyzing the Brilliance Station breach and independently determine that Lanzio can be identified using the stolen. So he has to go.

In the meantime, a seemingly unconnected yet crucial event takes place: Zo! finally pulls his schedule together and premieres Live Exploration Extreme!. The show is a massive rating hit. But more importantly, the night it airs, it bumps another, struggling vidstream off prime time. The schedule change causes the show's rating to spiral and soon results in its cancellation. Literally the only thing that matters about that this show is that Datch loved it. And now she blames the Starfinder Society for its cancellation. {Live Exploration Extreme!/Cornered Rat}

Now, the Society needs to die. Death by a thousand bites.

Datch sets a trap to both eliminate weak-link Hira Lanzio, to connect the Starfinder Society to a horrendous massacre, and, with any luck, to kill the specific Starfinder agents who starred on Zo!'s special! The Board of Directors orders Hira Lanzio to attend the Strawberry Machine Cake concert on Songbird Station and upload a virus to the station's infosphere just before the concert. Of course, they don't pull any strings to make that easy for him, and concert tickets are such a precious resource that Lanzio can only manage to secure a single ticket for himself at any price, forcing him to leave his usual phalanx of personal security behind.

The Board of Directors knows that Lanzio is being tracked by the Dataphiles. And both the they and Historia-7 know that once he steps on Songbird Station, he's a sitting duck.

Historia-7, Zigvigix, and their hand-picked team of agents attend the concert, initially unaware of the trap that has been set for them. Lanzio uploads the virus; as a specialist in corporate espionage, he doesn't care what the virus is intended to do, and he's paid very well not to ask. The virus, another iteration of the same technomagical code infecting Guidance, spreads throughout the station's systems in pursuit of two priorities: 1) Assassinate Hira Lanzio. 2) During the concert, exterminate everyone present: thousands of innocent people from both the Pact Worlds and the Veskarium.

Ideally, Datch's plan is to wipe out Songbird Station, taking two faction leaders with it. The plan fails, and even worse, the Starfinders get their hands on Lanzio (one way or the other). Despite this serious setback, Datch is later able to enact the other half of the plot, which is to insinuate that thousands died (or could have died) because the Starfinders chose this highly populated area as their battleground. {Star Sugar Heartlove}

Datch doesn't act directly against the Society again until the final moments of Year 1. Presumably, after the Songbird Station defeat, Datch withdraws to start assembling her multi-media character assassination campaign. In the meantime, the Society returns to the Scoured Stars, rescues Historia-6, resulting in the Dataphiles having... their own issues to deal with.

Cut to months later. Accused of crimes including terrorism and attempted mass murder, Hira Lanzio has in maximum security Stewards custody. Trained to resist interrogation, torture, and even magical probing, he hasn't spilled a single bean. The trail has gone cold. "Historia-7," stepping up her game, decides that Lanzio is keeping his mouth shut because he knows that once he starts talking, the "Board of Directors" will decide that he finally worth of the risk of breaching the Stewards to eliminate him, permanently. "Historia-7" sends a team of field agents (very possibly not using the same agent she's been working with all along) to finally get answers out Lanzio. Yadda yadda, Lanzio reveals a data vault that he helped the Board of Directors design. The team delved into the literal data vault and finally grabs some juicy details about the "Board of Directors" and their ultimate plan. Before taking a sabbatical, "Historia-7" uses the data to quickly piece together that a range of powerful interplanetary corporations have been conspiring to inflate medicinal prices in the Pact Worlds. {Data Breach}

Now, the Starfinder Society is a real threat, but Datch has already decided (ever since Live Exploration Extreme!) to finally bury the Society by making it the scapegoat for her own long game to corrupt AbadarCorp. It's full-on war, now!

Speaking of war, the Starfinder Society is completely caught up in the final stretch of its struggle to stop the jinsul menace. They finally win the day, but while they're off in the Vast, Datch pulls the trigger, launching a massive smear campaign across all media to tear support away from the Society. {Fate of the Scoured God}

At that point, we move on to Year 2, which plays out pretty clearly.

[BigNorseWolf]

makes sure not to move in the open or get into the same hovercar magelevator or starship as John Mangrum

[John Mangrum]

If my avatar changes to an apple and I stop posting, you know what happened.

ETA: Ugh, lookit all them typos.

[Poshkettle Tea]

Is it terrible that I immediately checked for the availability of apple avatars?

[Ascalaphus]

Okay, this isn't so much about being right for me now. The tinfoil theories are far to much fun to get stuck on being right :)

I see a couple of sticking points in John Mangrum's exposé.

take the red potion:

Dispassion said Datch picked the Society after Zo! cancelled one of her favorite shows. This is clearly a result of LEE!; the events of Claim to Salvation weren't televised. (Sure, it's possible Dispassion lied, but I don't think so. He's honest about everything else and this seems arbitrary to lie about.) In fact, bu the time of Claim to Salvation, the senior members of the Society are already stuck in the Scoured Stars, that's the whole point of the scenario; the iconics are a bunch of mercs hired for a mission because the Society is out of agents.

In The Solar Sortie we learn that the Society had been investigating various corporations even before the Scoured Stars, and that after they got there a lot of data both about the Scoured Stars and those corporations disappeared. Ceren found some of that data and that put the Society back on the trail.

I think that's what triggered the assassination attempt on Luwazi in The First Mandate - someone trying to cover their tracks.

In Star Sugar Heartlove we notice Hiro Lanzio speaks Azlanti. In Data Breach we find a pointer towards Laoite involvement and a lead on medical price-fixing. This trail leads on towards The Cost of Living, which while featuring AbadarCorp, doesn't have any Datch cameo. It's also not included in the list of evidence of bad things Datch has been doing that we find on the computer in this scenario.

So what's going on? Apart from Mangrum's interesting theory, I have some of my own.

Spoiler:

The "null hypothesis": originally the Azlanti were intended as hidden antagonists, because Star Sugar Heartlove!!! and the Against the Aeon Throne AP were happening roughly at the same time. But Thurston changed his mind and switched to laying the groundwork for the Datch storyline by the time of Data Breach. Lame theory, although it would tie everything together.

My pet theory is that there is a separate conspiracy, probably originating from the Azlant empire, which aims to destabilize and conquer the Pact Worlds. For that they need to weaken critical institutions that prop up the Pact Worlds, like the Stewards, AbadarCorp and the Starfinder Society. And its medical infrastructure. On the surface, the price-fixing scheme is intended to just generate profits, but actually, it's to weaken the Pact Worlds in case of a big crisis. Likewise, getting the Society out of the way weakens the Pact Worlds because they have a habit of being heroes.

It's possible the Azlanti conspiracy even encouraged the Laoite conspiracy: after their Scoured Stars plot to trap the Society failed, let's see if this ambitious little ysoki can do it instead. If she can turn AbadarCorp into a puppet for the conspiracy, even better.

Plots within plots...

[John Mangrum]

I do think "the secret plans for the metaplot changed along the way" is entirely possible.

[John Mangrum]

Somewhat on the topic of loose threads, a note on boons:

By now I think it's fairly well known that Datch's Dispassion, the boon granted by Cornered Rat that's intended to pay off in 3-00: The Last Bite, was cut from 3-00.

Orphaned Boons:

But as far as I can tell, two other "this may be important in the future" boons have also been orphaned:

The Conspiracy Knows You (#1-33: Data Breach)
Datch's Ire (#2-14: Data Purge) (Logistically, if Datch's Ire paid off, it should have done so here rather than in 3-00.)

I'm tempted to put Envar's Attention (#1-07: The Solar Sortie) on this list, though I acknowledge it's debatable.

If either of these "orphaned" boons came back and I failed to notice, please correct me.

[Terminalmancer]

Thanks for all the help--this thread was invaluable when I was prepping and running 2-24.

On another note...

Lau Bannenberg wrote:

Okay, this isn't so much about being right for me now. The tinfoil theories are far to much fun to get stuck on being right :)

I see a couple of sticking points in John Mangrum's exposé.

** spoiler omitted **

So what's going on? Apart from Mangrum's interesting theory, I have some of my own.

** spoiler omitted **...

3-00 spoiler:

I'm not so sure, based on a certain ex-Starfinder, that the Azlanti thread is over and done with! I'm all aboard the Azlant train...

[Kishmo]

Alex Wreschnig wrote:

3-00 Spoiler

I am also super interested in how the potential Azlanti stuff plays out, especially considering:

3-06 Spoilers:

we have a kinda-sorta reborn Runelord now in play, in the Vault Lord. My Old Azlant lore is a bit rusty, but if I remember correctly, all of the original Runelords were Thassilonians, not Azlanti, so the Vault Lord couldn't just show up on New Thespera and say "bow before me, my subjects!" (Plus with the whole 'human supremacist' thing going on, they wouldn't take too kindly to a giant brain waltzing in, I'd wager.) Still, it seems very in-keeping with the whole (Space-)Runelord ethos to declare "pfft, Space Azlanti have lost their way, I am the true inheritor of that history, I should sit on the Aeon Throne!"