links between books (spoilers alert)

[numero42]

Hi, I'm playing this campaign by a well-established group that has already completed Dead Suns, Devastation Arc and Signals of scream.

I'm at the second book and the characters are wondering if there is a common thread that will lead them to the conclusion. I have already read all the following books quite well, but frankly I also struggle to find some kind of motivation to justify the advancement between the various books.

Something like the search for the Dead Suns or the source of the Signal (signals of screams). It just seems to me that they are a series of jobs where Kalistocracy or the golden league pop up every now and then. To finish then with the last two books with the comparison with the single "Boss".

For now, the various "adamantium Scale", the drift towards the submarine platform or many small jobs, seem to me to be fillers without a sequel.

Do you have any ideas about a type of bond and motivation to move forward? other than "work and get rich". Which can be fine for about ten sessions, but then it becomes boring in my opinion ...

very very ty for advices!!!

[Dragonchess Player]

Fly Free or Die is structurally and thematically a bit different than a "normal" adventure path. Basically, the party is not (primarily) "adventurers" but just trying to make a living as best they can with EJ Corp, the Golden League, the Kalistocracy, and most "legitimate" organizations burning them/shutting them out.

For advice, lean into the backgrounds and emphasize the NPC interaction to make what goes on "personal." The party's primary motivation should be to get back at the villains who do them and their friends wrong, rather than "save the galaxy/Pact Worlds."

[Leon Aquilla]

The thread tying everything together is the Oliphaunt. If that's not an interesting enough macguffin for you, you'll have to make your own.

[The Ragi]

It's way, way too random. The adamant scale stuff is outright silly, why in the world aren't they a R&D division of EJ instead? Give them a for profit motivation instead of vesk supremacy, though.

And EJ isn't built nearly enough in book 1 into being the "Ultimate Evil" to motivate the PCs' crusade against them. Getting fired shouldn't be enough to turn them into intergalactic space criminals. The company's wrong-doings are displayed here and there in the following books, but by then the party has already turned rogue (according to the plot).

It should go something more like this:
Book 1 - PCs botch some jobs so bad they get in trouble with the law, and EJ helps them getting arrested;
Book 2 - life in prison, revolt in prison, prison break
Book 3 - PCs try to use their trucker skills to survive out in the vast, but EJ sabotages them, tries to get them killed, tries to get them arrested again. PCs realize they will never escape the company

Book 4 - PCs strike back at EJ, sabotaging their new terraforming effort and their new experimental cargo ship, causing the company’s stock to collapse
Book 5 - PCs travel to veskarium, help competitors and company insiders in a very brutal civil war inside EJ (political and laser battles)
Book 6 - The company is in shambles, the PCs infiltrate the EJ HQ and fight the final boss and company CEO, Mr. Evgeniya himself - a massive vesk

Or something like that.

[Eric Clingenpeel]

Yeah the lack of consistancy is what caused my group to drop this AP. They started off not being Heroes, fine. Then they work for a rancher, then a law officer, then a thief. They didn't know whether they were supposed to be good guys, bad guys, or just trying to make money. There was no cohesion to it. I tried to figure out why they would even want to try and ship-jack the barge in book 4 and I couldn't find a way that made sense to get my group to follow the adventure path. This AP needs a lot of work before we'd play it again.

[Leon Aquilla]

Quote:

Then they work for a rancher, then a law officer, then a thief. They didn't know whether they were supposed to be good guys, bad guys, or just trying to make money.

The last one. Book 2 ran smooth as silk for my group.

[DJEternalDarkness]

I have to agree Book 2 lacked a lot of linking, BUT it kind of made sense. Party had no real idea about why someone would take their NPC of the week, or why the NPC of the week was strange, and when the Big Bad Boss did her monologue, the lowest Int character walked it and was like "Huh?" Which I thought was perfect for the scatter shot linkage in that book.

[Bowlingconspiracy]

I've been running book 2 as a book where the party build up their fledgling company in the veskarium while laying low for a few months after the theft of the Oliphaunt, and my players have been really enjoying the "new week, new adventure" theme. I've thrown in the side jobs too to add to that feeling. Coming up to the Adamant Scale part soon and I'm going to run it in the vein of the Cohen brothers' "Burn After Reading". The Adamant Scale are a super paranoid bunch of conspiracy theorists and are obsessed that the PCs are part of some major Pact Worlds plot against the Veskarium. Their secret base will be full of photos of the PCS, posts from their social media and lots of red string linking things together. The joke is that there is no conspiracy at all.