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Looking for minis for this adventure? Here are some printable cartoon minis.
I also created one-page cheat sheets for Pregen abilities that you can print. We laminated them back-to-back with the pregen character sheets to make an easy reference guide for our players.
Operation Seaside Pregen Cheat Sheets
Happy Free RPG Day!
Hmm
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Contributor
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Now, let's talk about this adventure. It was pretty good at what it was supposed to be, a big bug hunt.
I rather liked the five pregens. Although they came with some of the usual pregen errors (notably when it came to grenade reflex saves), all five characters were colorful, entertaining and functional. The pregens skewed towards combat, which was appropriate because this adventure was very combat-focused.
Some nice touches included the mission letters in the navy blue sidebars. It was a little weird having a Free RPG Adventure where the pregens did not know each other, but that gave us a chance to have them all meet up together.
The adventure flow was a little weird to me, in that the party was not sure why they should play games in the carnival when they had an adventure to do, but I encouraged them to play the games and they had a fun time with it. The Tunnel of Love was especially entertaining, as I gave the party no instruction of what to do while in the Tunnel of Love, but did ask my players what they were doing. The two who went in, Valimina the human solarian and the Jasacus the envoy, explained that they were using the time to get to know each other better as buddies and comrades. Valmina complimented the envoy's interview style, and the Jasacus complimented the cool solar weapon, and so I described the tunnel raining down holographic hearts, playing "Can you feel the love tonight", and giving them a fabulous light show as the waters took them faster and faster through the ride, ending with their very welcome prize.
We started on the Midway, went on to the ship, and then I had their contacts urge them to search the Maintenance tunnels to finish clearing swarm out of the areas.
Even with decent amounts of roleplay and sound effects, my run time for this adventure was 3.5 hours.
All the combats were fairly straightforward with some fun monster abilities, but were fairly short. My party had a good time squashing their bugs. I was glad that some of the swarm creatures could be one-shotted, and that some were considerably scarier. I had to ask my party for trigger warnings before describing some of the swarm creatures and making nasty bug noises while playing them. The fight in the engine room was pretty epic. The solarian loved going Supernova in the middle of all those swarm eggs.
There were some nice gear drops in this one, so you'll want item cards, but I will note that the party that I had made their way through the adventure using almost none of the items.
My main complaint with this adventure were maps. Why did we have that huge map for Maintenance Tunnels when there was only one encounter that happened there? I wound up drawing a single circle for the encounter space with some short tunnels leading off it, and labeling it 'Ye Olde Maintenance Tunnel'.
The map for the midway wasn't bad, but I wound up subbing in the Starfinder Flip-Mat: Amusement Park instead of drawing the map. The flip mat was a pretty good substitute, especially since there is a ride off to the side that looks a bit like a toppled ferris wheel.
I did draw the starship, but it offered nothing special that could not be duplicated by one of our pre-existing starship maps. If you are short on prep time and looking for a map substitution, I suggest Starfinder Flip-Mat: Sunrise Maiden as a substitute.
