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I'm feeling drift crisis felt pretty underused. Like majority of the factions or npcs introduced didn't even show up in any of adventures during the year.
Other thing I'm thinking is that "If paizo is starting to think that maybe they should do more adventures with bigger impact on setting", they probably should have used drift crisis book to canonize pre drift crisis aps since they likely knew they would choose drift lanes to be canon and thus be obviously outdating the old aps ^^; Like I get idea that "well clearly majority haven't played them yet, so let's try to encourage them to play them even if they use drift crisis with this handy article of how to incorporate drift crisis into aps", but it just feels like nah they should have just canonized them instead to me x'D
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The circles of SF groups I know didn't really touch it.
meh
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I'm a pokey fellow so I run my Starfinder games on a years-long delay between publication and reaching the table. I know where the Drift Crisis falls in my road map, but it's (theoretical) years down the line from where I'm at now.
That said, while I liked the concept (and that the overall changes pre- and post-Gap were not drastic), I'm a GM who chooses to run published adventures, so I don't imagine really ever engaging too thoroughly with more than one or two of the Drift Crisis' plot hooks. For GMs who like to trailblaze with their own material, however, I can see it as a treasure trove.
The published adventure material we did get is generally fun, but it's a shame that it's mostly a bunch of loose threads that don't connect to each other. (Again, a double-edged sword that could be great for other GMs.)
In my perfect mind castle in the sky, Drift Hackers would have been a high-level AP, leaving the mid-levels open for PCs to experience the year-long Drift Crisis itself. And, I dunno, maybe I wish the Starfinder Society scenarios had formed a mini-arc rather than being a sampler platter, but if the opposite were true, I can see myself wishing for the sampler platter instead.
But overall, as a mild setting reboot, it gets the job done.
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I play Starfinder by play by post, so the delay in getting to new material is very long. The current 4-hour-long scenario I'm playing in is about to hit two months of gameplay. I'm saving the AP for when I find a live group. But hope to start the Drift Crisis scenarios after this game or maybe Drift Crisis case files.
Some of the adventure seed ideas look fun. I'm thinking of running the first book of the attack of the swarm and then having the PC's unit transferred to The planet Pritinzo for the Swarm salvation adventure seed, to keep the battlefield feel of Fate of the Fifth going.
I got a few homebrew ideas I want to do with the drift crisis. One is to use the drift crash to create a bubble in the draft, trapping world fragments to create a setting similar to savage worlds Slipstream. The other is a group of shirren special forces. Using the disruption the drift crisis caused to the swarm, the PCs return to the shirren home world to see if there's anything culturally that can recover, rescue any shirren left behind, and see if it would be worth it to try to retake the planet. Then retake the planet and then run a Horizons of the Vast-like adventure to start rebuilding shirren settlements.
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I think it was hamstrung by Paizo severely reducing the amount of Starfinder Adventure content. As it was, outside of an Adventure Path (technically 2 but by the barest technicality) the rest of the stories Paizo told in the Drift Crisis were kind of dancing around the edges of it- Before the Storm was pretty good, and I do think would make an excellent first session in any Drift Crisis themed campaign.
I think ultimately the problem I had was, as a society gm at least, the crisis only felt like a crisis when the scenario was tying into it. Otherwise it was business as usual. I'd have liked to have seen Season 5 tying directly into the Drift Crisis, maybe focused around, if not a resolution, then some kind of amelioration. That ties more into my general frustrations with Season 5 though, which felt kind of lacking an identity compared to previous seasons.
I will confess that I was disappointed that the big multi-table SFS event tied to the Drift Crisis ended up engaging it very little. Yes, the entire scenario is triggered by the Drift Crash, but past that inciting incident it's pretty much just an isolated shipwreck scenario; the Drift Crash could be replaced entirely with all manner of phenomena capable of knocking ships out of orbit without impacting the meat of the adventure. (For example, for a GM free to revamp this material for a home game, the scenario could be repurposed as taking place during the Scoured Stars incident.)
Other thing I'm thinking is that "If paizo is starting to think that maybe they should do more adventures with bigger impact on setting", they probably should have used drift crisis book to canonize pre drift crisis aps since they likely knew they would choose drift lanes to be canon and thus be obviously outdating the old aps ^^
Why would a handful of drift lanes connecting a handful of planets outdate anything in an AP? I think there was a Thurston interview last week that the Veskarium has three drift lanes now, and that's relatively a lot. None of those have to go to locations of relevance to an AP, or even to locations we've heard of before.
There's a forthcoming SFS scenario that puts a drift lane near Triaxus that connects to a secret location revealed in the scenario. Triaxus isn't part of an AP, my guess is the other side isn't, either, and I wouldn't be shocked if this is the only Drift Lane in the Pact Worlds.
I've seen a tremendous amount of Underpants Gnomes logic anticipating Drift Lanes that are somehow going to solve all their dissatisfactions with the Drift but there's no plausible way to get from here to there.
1. Set up a handful of Drift Lanes linking a few planets with 7 day fixed travel time (instead of 10.5 or 17.5 average with considerable variability).
2. ???
3. Somehow I don't still use regular drift travel for 99.999% of travel from any random point a to point b.
Drift Lanes are a tool for setting up specific match pair stories/conflicts between the (rare) connected systems that now have an economic reason to develop closer ties, they don't change anything about the bigger galactic picture. A drift lane just gives every ship traveling between the linked locations an effective Drift Rating of 2.5 with no random component (vs the Vast; compared to Near Space it's even less important).
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I was mostly talking from perspective of "setting assumptions have changed so much from original starting point of ap that more time passes harder it will be to place ap at "any time" rather than any mechanical changes(like its completely possible that none of planets in vast visited in ap are connected to any planets with drift lanes so its not like there would be small bumb in travel speed either)
(also devastation ark more or less canonizes threefold conspiracy already so its not like they haven't slowly moved to that direction)
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Well have to see what the final drift lane mechanics are, but at the end of the day, you still go from one place to another. The big difference is for normal drift, the travel time is unpredictable, and the hazards are more random. With drift lanes, you know how long the trip takes, and the hazards might have been planned in advance such as pirates setting an ambush. I don't know enough about the AP to know if how you travel makes a difference. Which APs do you think would be most affected?
I hate big setting changes in the middle of an edition (because it creates compliance issues with before-times adventures), and would prefer stuff like this to happen as an exciting new direction for a new edition . . .someday.
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Which APs do you think would be most affected?Its more principle of thing as said, like longer time passes and big setting affecting things happen, more things will happen that aren't taken in account with previous aps and that creates nagging feeling on back of my head x'D
That sounds like a symptom of Cannontitis. That usually gets worse right before a new book gets released, but it tends to go away by playing an AP or two. :)
This makes me wonder how Paizo tracks lore to keep things straight, Paizos makes some of the deepest lore of any game. With or without the drift crisis, that will get harder to keep track of over time. The biggest change the drift crisis left us will be the map in Ports of Call. I wonder if having a map will help track Cannon going forward or if that will add something new to keep track of.
Besides sales, the two biggest factors determining the life of a game are likely how well the mechanics and lore of the game hold up over time and still have room for more ideas to be explored. Even with the drift crisis, the lore seems intact and still has tons of room for growth.
At the end of the day the drift crisis was a traffic jam that led to the creation of some new roads and a road map. We didn't lose any planets over it or have lots of important NPCs die.
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My above traffic analogy was just meant for how it affects canon lore long term. If I were to make a traffic analogy for the event itself, it would be more like...
Hacking cult finds a way to move the Bermuda Triangle to LA during rush hour. Your honda civic merges with a VW bus before you are forced to take a detour through North Korea, the Australian outback(50 years in the future), and France(back to the current day). You take a road trip to the International Space Station. You find NASA is having an internal culture war also caused by the hackers. You get scuked into the movie Tron and defeat the hackers ending the traffic jam and reuniting NASA. Landing in Japan you take the newly created highway that tunnels under the ocean to back to LA. When you get home you discover Google Earth has updated its map images to include new roads. In time life goes back to normal. Altho many people died during the traffic jam, none of them were important enough to be on TV or in a movie, so no one knows who they were. Rush hour in LA still sucks.
Will drift lanes have an impact on Paizo keeping lore coherent between past and future products, seems like a good question for Paizo's rule and lore team at Paizo Con or an online interview. If you find or suspect problems it creates for lore future or past it wouldn't hurt to point them out.
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The DRIFT CRISIS book itself is really solid, and a great example of Starfinder being a more 'experimental' line than Pathfinder. I've added parts of it to my THREEFOLD CONSPIRACY game, and I'm setting my ATTACK! AP during the Drift Crisis. I love the homebrew seeds, and if were into that style of DM-ing, I'd be working a few of those pretty hard.
"Fixing" the drift mechanics is good. The SFS-scenarios I've played for Season 5 have all been great (note, I've only played a few). I might propose that my group run DRIFT CRISIS FILES after we finish up ATTACK! (hopefully at the end of this year, early next year)
I dunno what else to say, as I haven't yet played DRIFT CRASHERS/HACKERS. Good stuff.
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It was too transitive. I played/am playing the AP's, but they could've had all the references to the drift yanked out and played perfectly fine imo. You don't go anywhere except Alluvion in Drift Hackers, and Drift Crashers messes with alternate timelines and mirror universes. None of them engage with the sourcebook they were supposed derive their motivation from.
And once the new splat is released and the drift lanes are "canonized" it's probably rarely going to see much action except by someone doing a multi-year plot.
If Starfinder had the budget for 12-APs-a-year then you probably could've gotten a good six-parter out of it where you're jumping from system to system, solving the problems of governments turned upside down.
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If Starfinder had the budget for 12-APs-a-year then you probably could've gotten a good six-parter out of it where you're jumping from system to system, solving the problems of governments turned upside down.
or a fully built out AP from one of the seeds in the DRIFT CRISIS book, where you aren't solving the crisis, just dealing with the outcome.
I really like some of those seeds, like the Azlanti v. Vesk, or the Absalom in Chaos ideas.
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Me too, especially the one that's a little like Horizons of the Vast (or Kingmaker , if you need more name recognition :P ) but at Absalom Station instead! Starting out in the Armada as people in the right place at the wrong time helping to organize the refugees into a community and eventually becoming leaders themselves before venturing into the Station's Ghost Levels to carve out space for a new home!
I wanna play that so bad (I wanna play ANY Starfinder so bad, but it feels like the only ones on these boards right now are SFS scenarios and campaigns that started years ago)!
