Starfinder Drift Crisis GM Diary: Episode 1

Hey there! I’m Alex Speidel and I’m the GM for the Starfinder Drift Crisis liveplay. My favorite part of DVDs growing up was the special features. We stan a blooper reel, and we would die for a “making of” featurette. So in the grand (and sadly dying) tradition of the director’s commentary, I thought it would be fun to provide some behind-the-screens information! Let’s see how much I remember from six months ago!

If you haven’t watched episode 1, you should go ahead and do that now here, because there will absolutely be spoilers in this blog post!

Plotting the Crisis

First of all, I must reveal that I was not originally tapped to GM this stream. That’s right, I’m the backup quarterback! Initially it was going to be GMed by another staff member whose name I shan’t reveal, but they left the company just as the initial planning was spinning up, so I got the call. Lucky me!

I spent a lot of time poring over the Drift Crisis hardcover for inspiration. I knew I wanted to flesh out one of the adventure seeds in there, and I ended up proposing three options to Aaron (who was not, at the time, my boss). One of them was the one we went with (“Lost in the Void”), but the other two I proposed were “Absalom Station Refugees,” which likely would’ve revolved around the PCs becoming community leaders in the Armada and possibly even delving into the Ghost Levels; and the “Compiler Worm” subplot of “When One Becomes Three,” which would’ve been a race-against-time survival adventure to escape a rapidly corrupting section of Aballon. If I ever get to do a sequel to this stream, you bet I’m digging up the Refugees ideas I had!

I’m glad we went with the story we did though; it was the easiest to keep contained to one location, involved getting to see the Drift Crash up close and personal, and had a really fun theme that the others didn’t bring. I think using the cruise ship as a touchpoint also helps people without a ton of Starfinder familiarity get into the stream; pretty much everyone has been on some sort of vacation like this or has a cultural touchstone, so I think that helps more than having to explain a big robotic city or something of the sort.

Characters and Plot

I’m going to tell you a great secret of the industry: opening episodes are the easiest ones to plan. All you have to do is two things: get the characters to introduce themselves to each other, and then provide a problem. You don’t even have to solve the problem if you run out of time!

In this adventure, I was gifted with four talented roleplayers, and I knew that as soon as I let them run wild with their characters, I wouldn’t need to do much for them, so I didn’t. I had scripted a short vignette with each of them, just some loose guiderails to introduce some characters I’d need later and get them where they needed to go, but otherwise I was fully prepared to let them run free.

I had written the “morning announcements” ahead of time, but I had the brain flash on the day of to have Chelsea’s character read them instead, which worked so much better as an intro! The brunch theme of “Delicacies of Old Golarion” was also a last-minute addition that I thought might provoke some fun nods to Pathfinder.

The Drift Crash monologue, however, was probably the first thing I wrote for the series. I knew that this was gonna be the big moment of Episode 1, the one that kicks off the whole shebang, the Chroma Conclave attack of the stream. I’m pretty proud of it as a result! If we’d done a proper trailer for the series I absolutely would’ve campaigned to use it as the backing track. Imagine it cut together with footage of reactions, some great lines from future episodes, oh man someone make this fan trailer for me, I don’t have time to do it and I want it to exist so badly.

I have to tell you that each of the players came to the table with a great character. We did a session 0 to talk about ideas, campaign themes, etc, which was super helpful to flesh things out. Very little about the characters changed between that first meeting and the final stream (although one of the players may have chosen their character’s voice moments before going on air! I won’t name which skittermander it was!) Our artist, Leonardo Santana, also did a fantastic job. This was the first time I’d gotten to order art for anything which was a lot of fun.

Other Random Thoughts

• Do not come for me for running the spectra wrong. Yes they’re swarms RAW, no I didn’t give them all their swarm immunities, if I did that we’d still be fighting them to this day. The rules are all made up, do what’s fun for your table!
• also don’t come at me for my greenscreen setup, I’m not a professional, I’m working with what I got!
• Let’s talk fashion! I spent a lot of time thinking about what shirts I was going to wear for this stream. You’ll see a very fun collection of nerdy t-shirts, but you know I had to rep the UPW in this first episode.
• Character intros are my favorite part of any liveplay, I regularly go back and rewatch them with the knowledge I gain later. Nothing like new character smell!

Teasers

Our PCs have just defeated some sort of incursion, and they’ve obtained a set of hard drives. What’s on them, and how is the ship faring? What dangers await them on a ship whose systems are failing? And most importantly, will our villain reveal themselves? Find out next week in episode 2!

PS I’m gonna try and hang out in the live chat for next week’s episode; unfortunately I already had another commitment this week. Hope to see you all there!