SFS #3-06: Rise of the Vault Lord

[Matt Duval]

Creating a thread in case anyone has questions to make sure I see it in a timely manner. :-) Hopefully it's fun!

[Terminalmancer]

Thanks Matt! Looks like fun after my first read-through. Might have some questions after I'm done prepping.

[Shafan the Driver]

In the stat block for Encounter C in tier 9-10, is there a typo in the HP for Vradak? I would assume it should have a zero after it.

(Also, this looks like a lot of fun to run).

[Matt Duval]

Sankai77 wrote:

In the stat block for Encounter C in tier 9-10, is there a typo in the HP for Vradak? I would assume it should have a zero after it.

(Also, this looks like a lot of fun to run).

Yea, it should be 110 HP. Vradak should be identical to their subtier 7-8 version which does have the correct HP. Must have gotten clipped at some point in the process.

Hope you have a good time with it!

[thistledown]

Played this last night in high tier. Very glad the GM ran it as written with only 11hp, because he entirely forgot to use the golem's Collapsing ability. We were getting worked over hard the entire very-long fight. Started off badly because some characters went off to work on panels leaving the rest of us to fight, and we kept failing will saves to attack Vradak. So when someone finally made the save and he just dropped we were astonished but very grateful.

Once I found out the golem was supposed to be Collapsing, I was pretty pissed at the GM though.

[Matt Duval]

glad the two errors somewhat cancelled out for you though I'm sorry to hear it marred your experience. The ravenous wights, unliving magefire, vradak, and golem all have custom abilities, so very important to read those stat blocks closely if you're prepping this one.

Hope the rest of the adventure was fun! No reviews or PbP I've been able to find yet, so very curious how people are liking it.

Edit: It was also brought to my attention that the EAC/KAC for Keticama on the high tier appears to be incorrect. my understanding is it should be the standard Alien Archive blue dragon on high tier, with EAC 24 KAC 26, but it looks like there's a typo and someone entered it as 14/16.

[Terminalmancer]

Hm, I never followed up!

TL;DR: was a lot of fun. Combats were easy, maps were awkward fits and I made some modifications to make things make sense. Overall, it went well. I'll write up a review tonight. Unfiltered stuff here, I guess. Editing is hard!

A small organization thing:

I probably would have appreciated having call-outs in each section for what could have been investigated, rather than having a sidebar at the very beginning. That might've just been me, though. Too many concussions means I like having things right in front of me, and don't like having to remember stuff from ten pages ago.

Area 1:

What, may I ask, was the motivation behind Profession (weaver)?

Funny, if related, story: I misread "weaver" as "basketweaver" and put a couple dozen baskets all over the map. Figured out my mistake, and ran with it anyway. I'm hoping it doesn't mess up some sort of in-joke or future reference, because it was easier to communicate and also hilarious.

I got a very Vault-Tec feel from the skittermander training video. This GM, at least, appreciated it.

As far as the combat went, this was the hardest combat by far. The party didn't have a lot of options for dealing with invisibility--there was a mystic with See Invisibility but they didn't have much of a way to make anything invisible visible again. The d100 was perhaps the hardest opponent they fought.

GMs, please note: invisibility protects you from lasers!

I did, in the end, goad a PC into getting mind-wiped. They used what used to be their max ranks in Medicine to make a Profession (Underwater Basketweaver) day job. (I mean, if I was going to misread the profession skill, I might as go all the way.)

There weren't many questions about the guiding intelligence. Starfinders are so incurious!

Area 2:

The spaceport encounter was one I found very confusing--the magefire burns through the hull, presumably far to the north, but it has undetermined environmental effects that incapacitate civilians hiding in the bathroom? I could extrapolate, but a little more detail here would've helped.

There's a door notation on a wall between two doors to the north-east, but the enemy spawn point was very very far away from it? I wasn't sure what to do with that. And there were no door notations for the other two doors?

I ended up fudging a lot to make everything line up, at least to my understanding. I ended up photoshopping a pair of walls with open passageways, one on the left and one on the right, so that the players would have doors they could see and target. I also had zombies enter from the top center doors. As far as the environmental effects went, I thought maybe the intention was that the hole the magefire burned would depressurize the area of "the station"? I'm not sure if that was the plan, but it worked pretty well.

The magefire build was magnificent. It seems like nearly every Starfinder opponent either shoots people with laser rifles, or punches them in the face, and an opponent with an interesting ability was a pleasant break! It didn't get enough combat support, though. It was very, very fragile and those ghouls were not enough to distract the party.

Area 3:

The stadium encounter worked all right. I modified the stadium map, adding a bit of a bridge to the entrance. In practice it didn't do much, though, and if you're running this I'd tell you it's probably not important to represent visually.

The glyphs didn't accomplish much. Without having a geographic limit to where the PCs needed to be to hack them (there was a check, but the party generally rocked it) it was just an action-sink for a couple of PCs. whole "make a check to remote hack the glyphs was easily made and both of the glyphs were hacked pretty quickly. I'd considered making remote hacking less obvious, but without having any particular visible trigger points, I felt like it was something I had to be more explicit about. The map didn't have anything approaching exposed cabling, and putting together art to represent it ended up being untenable with the amount of time I had to prep. (There aren't a lot of appropriate images of cabling that I could use to modify the map!)

In terms of the combat, having the philosopher worm hang out in the middle of the map made him an easy target; I interpreted that as having it in the middle of the map, in a bad spot. I'm not 100% sure that's what was intended, but it made the most sense?

the giant golem was exceedingly vulnerable since it had very little mobility. Nothing else was much of a challenge, and even the golem didn't quite do enough damage to get through anyone's stamina.

All in all, everyone had a good time, scenario's solid, the one complication is that it took a bit more work to prep the maps.

[Matt Duval]

@Alex Wreschnig

I'm so glad to hear it was fun! Thanks for leaving the review :-)

weaving:

The weaving is a reference to Demolition Man and the rehabilitation conditioning from that movie. :-)

organization:

Yea, the info possibly would be good to have also there, though there are always word count concerns. My thinking with the sidebar is the GM can copy it out and have the info on the side in a notepad document or other reference. Good to know what people's preferences are for the future.

area2:

The magefire is supposed to burn through the ceiling directly above the center of the room. The hull breach and debris then cause problems for the civilians.

There's three doors on the north side of the room that are the wight spawn points, with the starting wights in the noted locations. The magefire then opens up a hole in the ceiling that more wights pour in from. Sorry that wasn't clear from the annotations. :(

I'm so glad you liked the magefire. I went through a lot of iterations on the design and I was pretty happy with the final result :-)

How was it managing the wights? Was the number of them unwieldy or did it go ok running that many enemies?

area3:

The main limit on hacking at range is the computer the PCs have to do the remote hack with. If they spent the credits to have the ability to hack from a distance, more power to them :-) Plenty of opportunity for the guns blazing PCs to show off. This gives a reward to the more skill-focused PCs to shine in combat and contribute.

The enemy start locations are pretty broad so lots of flexibility for the GM to adjust to give Vradak more cover from their troops. The room is also brightly lit so the Lurker in Light gets the benefit of its natural invisibility, which should hopefully freak out the PCs a bit. My practice was to have Vradak in back, the golem form front and center, the two bruiser enemies protecting Vradak, and the assassin enemy lurking to the side to invisibly get to the PCs' back line and start tearing up the squishies. Vradak's advance command helps to set that up. A lot of goading from the Vault Lord can encourage the PCs to rush into melee, which is right where the enemy wants them. Generally speaking, there's a lot of tactical leeway for the GM in this one with some very smart enemies in Area 1 and Area 3 who will try to use their abilities to maximum effect.

The golem slow speed is very much a built-in weakness to compensate for its jacked stats, which are significantly higher than its CR should normally allow. Clever PCs can definitely take advantage. :-)

Edit note: I am definitely curious what GMs find challenges Starfinders in combat though. If I get the chance to write more encounters, especially with the Vault Lord, I want them to be memorable!

Everyone having a good time is all I can ask for. Thanks so much for the feedback!

[thistledown]

I was playing on this pass, but my GM was complaining about having too many things to keep track of in the spaceport and arena. Hopefully I can stay on top of things when I run it.

[Terminalmancer]

Matthew Duval wrote:

@Alex Wreschnig

I'm so glad to hear it was fun! Thanks for leaving the review :-)

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How was it managing the wights? Was the number of them unwieldy or did it go ok running that many enemies?

** spoiler omitted **...

You're welcome! I'm trying to be better about leaving reviews...

Thank you so much for that breakdown--I have to say, that was not how I took that map's setup at all. I'm not sure the final product really communicated the setup well, but it also might just have been me?

I took the wight starting boxes for indications of where the wights would spawn from the doors, and so we had a door southeast, a door southwest, and one of the loading passages was labeled as a door, so I put the other one up there. The scenario didn't really mention wights starting on the map so I didn't put any there!

Sounds like I went pretty far off the reservation. Oops.

With easy access to ways to target multiple wights, the wights weren't really an issue--only a few of them even got to take a turn--but maybe you shouldn't read too much into my session...

[loki.the.mischievous]

I'm running this scenario on Saturday in Fantasy Grounds Unity, and in the course of my prep work tonight, I came across something I have to question.

Enemy:

When it comes to the Unliving Magefire in each level range, EAC is higher than KAC (vs. the standard of being the opposite). Is 19 EAC/18 KAC accurate for the low range, and is 23 EAC/20 KAC accurate for the high range?

[Matt Duval]

@Joel Hager

enemy:

Yes, it's intentional. I imagined it as being more resistant to energy weapons than kinetic weapons due to its magical origin.

[loki.the.mischievous]

@Matthew Duval

Thanks. I figured it was, but I also figured on checking the numbers, given what was said in a prior post about AC being off.

[CorvusMask]

Matthew Duval wrote:

glad the two errors somewhat cancelled out for you though I'm sorry to hear it marred your experience. The ravenous wights, unliving magefire, vradak, and golem all have custom abilities, so very important to read those stat blocks closely if you're prepping this one.

Hope the rest of the adventure was fun! No reviews or PbP I've been able to find yet, so very curious how people are liking it.

Edit: It was also brought to my attention that the EAC/KAC for Keticama on the high tier appears to be incorrect. my understanding is it should be the standard Alien Archive blue dragon on high tier, with EAC 24 KAC 26, but it looks like there's a typo and someone entered it as 14/16.

I was also really confused about that, glad I checked GM reference thread xD

I was also really confused about second encounter, (especially since only one of doors was marked on map), but I did understand eventually that idea is that there is large amounts of wights on map already and each (or one with four players) of three doors spawn more of them per round infinitely until sealed.

I'm actually still confused about whether the starting wights are supposed to be split among three groups or if the third starting one in middle is meant for unliving magefire when it appears :'D The map isn't really clear when it just says "undead starting location", would be more clear it it was "wight starting location" and "unliving fire's breach point" and such.

[Mr. Bonkers]

I'm going to run this soon, and after reading it a more cosmetic question arose: what does the golem actually look like? Is it a collection of stuff that appears vaguely humanoid, or does it have the appearance of the lord itself?

I know this doesn't matter mechanics wise, but story wise it might matter.

[CorvusMask]

It's collection of holographic projector shards in shape of the Vault Lord as far as I understood the text

[Matt Duval]

"A vortex of swirling metal flies into motion: a thousand, thousand lethal shards that recreate the visage of the Vault Lord, looming over the stadium."

As Lehto says, it's the vault lord creating their own image out of the broken holoprojector and the other materials scattered in the room from their minions accessing the power core. The construct is a variation on a junk golem. So short answer, yes, the golem looks like the Vault Lord. :-)

It's also clearly a construct, so in case the question is whether the PCs would think they're fighting the actual creature they saw in the holo-projection - no, it's not that good a facsimile.

Sorry for being a bit-long winded; wasn't sure of the story rationale behind the question and trying to anticipate. I hope that helps and you and your players have a great time :-)

Edit:
Regarding the spawn points and Area B.
-The starting 10-15 ravenous wights should be distributed between the three areas marked "undead starting point".

-Additional wights spawn per the hazard at the three sets of double doors at the top of the map. You can see three areas with a counter and two sets of doors behind the counter. That's where the corridors are the wights are running in from.

-The unliving magefire enters at the center "undead starting point" location. That area now functions as another wight spawn location as the magefire burned a hole in the station that undead outside can enter through.

I hope that makes that clearer. Sorry it's been giving people headaches.

[BigNorseWolf]

Unless.. the vault lord IS a construct with a holographic paint job....

(Hey. Not the weirdest thing in salvations end by a LONG shot...)

[Mr. Bonkers]

I see, very well. I got confused with the word looming, which gave me the impression that the image was created above the arena itself (as some sort of omnious projection), with the golem being a seperate entity.

But, one and the same. Thanks for the clarification (and all other clarifications so far).