Starfinder (Drift Crashers Adventure Path pt. 1 of 3)

The Perfect Storm

Spoiler Free

[EDITORS NOTE: If this is your first experience with the Starfinder Roleplaying Game, you may want to consider starting with my previous review of the Core Rulebook. It is also part of the year-long Drift Crisis event, which starts HERE. -dc]

Last week we took a look into the pages of the Drift Crisis sourcebook. That’s more than just a sourcebook, though. It’s the jumping on point for Paizo’s massive year long event in the Starfinder universe. I said in that review that it emulates “The Snap” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a single, all-affecting, event with truly omnipresent ramifications. Drift Crashers is the first published Adventure Path exploring this post-Drift universe and multi-verse. None of this is really a spoiler, and you can read my Drift Crashers review (and hopefully have) plus here’s the official website blurb about part one of Drift Crashers: The Perfect Storm.

The Drift Crisis has begun! When the Drift—the dimension that allows starships to travel faster than light—suddenly crashes, all the starships in it are hurled to random locations in the multiverse. Among these starships is the Marata, whose crew find themselves stranded in Hell, their starship now boasting a strange new artifact with the power to travel anywhere in space and time. Soon they’re literally running from the devil, crashing through parallel universes, coming face to face with strange versions of themselves, and finally reaching an apocalyptic future where everyone they know is dead. Will they ever find their way home again?

This starts as a level 1 adventure, so naturally, your group will need new characters. The Adventure Toolbox includes “Chosen of Chaos”, which is a very flavourful name and stuff, but I wish they had just called it the Player Guide, which is actually how it’s referenced on page one. It would also be nice to have mentioned that those same ten pages are available, for free, on the Drift Crashers landing page labelled as the “Player Guide.” That means the GM can send it out ahead of time, to help their players think about the characters, and team, they want to build together in a session zero. This AP is a bit different than most, with a lot more action, a lot less downtime, and even less opportunities for commerce. Letting players know that much, at least, is important for enjoyable gameplay so that they can plan around potentially sparse resources. 

The Players Guide section also includes some modifications for the player’s starting ship, The Marata, but other than any mods you can just pull out any level 1 starship you feel like. Paizo has a few starship Flip Maps or you could slap something together out of the Space Station Flip Tiles. There are 12×12 grad maps (60’x60’ in 5’ scale) for a couple of the “important” locations in the ship, but even those are noted as just a suggested starting point for those maps, not something set in stone – or any other physical or metaphysical material one might find in space. There are stats for a Level 3 ship inside the front cover and a set of deck plans for that ship inside the back cover, but I wouldn’t use those maps for the Marata as they maps are 6-8 squares (in the same 5’ scale) at the widest points, with those same specific spaces being smaller still. That honestly feels like a weird mistake in labelling the scale somewhere, and that’s all I’ll say about it… for raisins.

I said that Chosen of Chaos is part of the Adventure Toolbox, but technically it isn’t; it awkwardly precedes it. Again, it would be less awkward if it was labelled Player Guide, but whatever. Moving on to the Toolbox proper, we get Blood of the Planes. This is a brief article about Planar Scions. Starting on the second page of this article we are presented with Specific Lineages that a Planar Scion may come from and Alternate Racial Traits for them. What it doesn’t have is any information on what the h*ll a Planar Scion is! Not even a reference notation that more information can be found in Alien Archive 2, pg 98 which took me WAY too much time to find by digging around the online SRD pages. (I’m not writing this in my office and therefore lack my normal library that I would have spread out all over the table I’m working at.) Within the Specific Lineages list, they do have proper notations, so I should also point to the six-part Dawn of Flame Adventure Path as having more information on Planar Scions, although we haven’t reviewed any of that. One of the notations actually leads us into the Alien Archive section of the Toolbox, which contains eight new creatures, including a Ganzi Planar Scion. I also want to point back to the Drift Crisis sourcebook that includes a Spectra Scion template which I think is just a matter of Spectra Scions being a type of Planar Scion that isn’t labelled as one.

Finally, we get the Codex of Worlds entry; this time for the planet Ergodia. Described as a “gigantic world of towering trees, expansive oceans, and high altitude peaks all inhabited by monstrous, though rare, colossi.” It is also a fascinating neutral territory for trade posts despite the ever-potential danger of Kaiju attacks. Not only does this location sound cool as heck, but now I really want to see more of the planet’s massive inhabitants and compare them to those that ravaged the relatively nearby planet of Daimalko.

You probably noticed I skipped over the adventure part of this Adventure Path, and you’re right. All I’m going to say, and I’ve breezed past most of these points already, is that this adventure hits the table at an intensity of around 9, and cranks it up from there. Overall I think this is going to be an absolutely gonzo ride, but there were a lot of points that said “if the players didn’t already XXX” and my brain reacted with “Dur… I wouldn’t have even remotely thought about doing that thing.” This happens, of course, since a well designed adventure should reward forethought and ingenuity. But there were way more occurrences here than I felt completely comfortable with having that reaction to.

This was the first Starfinder Adventure, and one of the few Paizo published adventures at all, that I’ve had doubts over how well it would flow on my table. It felt to me like it overlooked an unusual amount of something somewhere in there. In saying that, please don’t take it as me saying I’m not super excited to see where this goes, because I am! I’m curious to see how this flows into the Drift Hackers AP that follows it, and how the Drift Crisis gets resolved next year.

There is a Drift Crashers landing page at paizo.com/store/starfinder/adventures/adventurePath/driftCrashers.
As the event moves forward, you can recognize all of our Drift Crisis content by the logo to the right, and click the link to find it all.

You can find everything Starfinder, and all things Paizo, online at paizo.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/paizo.