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Welcome back to the ramblings of a GM’s mind! Today we’re talking about episode 4 of our Starfinder Drift Crisis liveplay.
Let’s Get Spooky
“You should run. You’ll know when.”
That was the only thing I told my players before we hit record on episode 4. Yes I am a messy bench who lives for drama! But really, players are very bad at recognizing when the narrative is telling them to run away, so I figured it would help to give them a tip. I did have a undead-filled encounter in the event they decided to stand and fight (think some driftdead and cybernetic zombies), but I wanted to get a new flavor of encounter into the stream.
The PF2 chase rules are just a thing of beauty. So simple, so clean, but so much fun to both run and play. I lifted them wholesale here and built an undead chase scene that the players told me was very spooky afterwards! Horror isn’t really my genre, I am a big ol’ wimp, so I hope I did it justice.
By the way, if anybody ever wants to know why SROs are gamebreakers, this episode is a perfect example. “Oh, undead? I simply will ignore them as I am all metal and they can’t detect or affect me!” (this is not a read of Jim, he had such a good character concept that I couldn’t say no, but still. Make them Rare in SF2, Star Chamber!)
A Red Herring
It’s time to come clean. The drives the spectras dropped in the first episode are completely irrelevant. Every GM knows what it’s like when the players get way more interested in a random detail than you expected, and this was mine.
I thought it was a neat detail that excubas were data collectors and dropped drives when they died, and I wanted to include that. The whole idea behind them was that they had come to the site of a great disturbance to begin to investigate, but had gotten sliiiiightly corrupted by the Drift Crash and attacked instead. When the players picked up the drives, I panicked and tried to keep them away from computers until I had time to figure out what they might encounter. My “fun worldbuilding detail” nearly derailed the whole story!
I think this also shows the difference in storytelling between a stream like this and a home game. In a home game that wasn’t so meticulously plotted, I could’ve run with the drives and maybe turned it into a story of corrupted spectras attacking the Void Empress, leading to a confrontation with huge implications. But alas, instead I had to push it off as a problem to be dealt with later and get the players moving on the story I laid out. The idea’s there for the taking if you run this story seed for your players at home!
Break in the Action
This was the last episode we filmed before we took a break for a few weeks. Doing so afforded me an opportunity to rest, reset and figure out how to close down the stream. We got juuuuust about where I wanted to get in this first half, but I’ll be honest that while I knew the endpoint, at this stage I still didn’t have a full idea of how we were going to get there.
The break also gave me the chance to dig up some cool treasure for the players! I threw in the treasure room at the end of the chase on a whim, because everybody loves treasure, but I didn’t have shiny things in mind yet. But come next episodes, we’ll give them some nice stuff!
Random Thoughts
- Fun fact about the driftdead: I actually own the original art for the Marooned One! I bought it from the artist when I was first hired to hang up in my office. That, uh, didn’t pan out quite as expected, but I unearthed it when we moved and I’m working on getting it framed!
- This week’s shirt is a Strawberry Machine Cake shirt, which is a custom-made shirt I was given at Gen Con last year! Technically I traded some dice for it, but worth it. It’s technically, like, two sizes too large for me, but honestly you can’t tell. I wish I knew who had made it so I can shout them out but I have no idea; if you happen to be reading this, let me know?
- when will Paizo finally make us band t-shirts for our in-universe bands, literally everybody wants this
Next time on Drift Crisis, we’ve just reached a safe haven, but we’re not alone. Who are these nufriends, and what can they tell us about the situation above? And what fluffy horrors await on the next level of the ship? Tune in next Tuesday to find out!
Alex Speidel 