u/ckobbe420

Good Morning Starfinder fans,

My group has almost finished chp 1 of Guilt of the Graveworld over the last 3 sessions and I wanted to do a [not] quick recap of what we experienced, how play went and what I changed before my memory gets too shoddy. My group has finished up the dungeon crawl in the asteroid, but hasn't left yet, but next session should be the end of chapter 1 and the start of chapter 2.

Quick refresher on the cast

PooToo - skittermand precog witchwarper trying to be an jackass style influencer

Skaven - ysoki shadow mystic devotee of Lao Shu Po who is a festival medic

Bubble in Flight - Barathu solarion comic book artist, wanderer and free spirit

Emec EM - vesk mad mechanic (mash up of mechanic playtest and inventor) drone inventor

Last recap they played through Battle for the Nova Rush and Emec lied to the group that he was entering the coordinates for Star Citadel Theodrane and shanghaied the group into the Adventure Path because he needed to pay off his debt to Clan Ulkrikka.

While traveling 4 days through the drift, the crew got to experience some downtime. PooToo tried turning footage of them taking care of the pirates into a money making posting on his vlog, but nat 1ed the role with Emec nat 1ing an assist and his not only made zero credits on his posting but got alot of very hurtful comments posted by people that thought his very real footage was AI. Emec tried to hack the operating system of the Nova Rush to get full ownership of the starship and got about half way through the various firewalls. Bubble in flight created a portrait commemorating the Battle for the Nova Rush as well as crafting a medpatch or two. Skaven created and posted a festival zine to earn a few credits.

The group also got to interact with and gain influence with Bimmy (Orocoran monk artist and in house drug cooker) and ME Pebble (pearl dragonet technomancer and master engineer of the Nova Rush). Coming out of the Drift near Iovan Station Alpha, the PooToo grabbed the helm and annoyed with the warnings from Captain Concierge (after two failed barrel rolls crashed the ship into asteroid) turned off the AI and failed a third piloting check before managing to doc a battered Nova Rush at the station,

The airlock encounter with the first set of scrap rats was fun with both groups lobbing grenades back and forth at each other and they made relatively short work of them, probably the funest part of the encounter was having one of the scrap rats climb to perch over the doorway and ready a Strike for the first person to step through, taking out Emec's robot drone.

While Emek stayed in the corridor trying to repair his robot (took 30 minutes in game because of multiple failed rolls) the party split and went into the exercise room. Skaven scavened some supplies from the room while Bubbles and PooToo played with the treadmill traps trying to keep up with the treads for a while before getting bored and wandering into the bunk room. [the trap was basically useless unless a pc critically failed and felt pointless, luckily my players leaned into the idiocy of it and had fun, but if I ran it again I would remove it and add some sort of low level haunt to reinforce the themes of the game and teach the players how to deal with that sort of hazard]

The cyberzombies on the bunk room were a fun fight with Bubble in Flight charging in and taking some serious hits before finishing off the first one, which promptly exploded on her. Emec heard the commotion from the hall and entered through the other door with his finally functioning drone and managed to get in a few licks as well. Despite me reading out the text that spelled out the explode upon death feature of the cyberzombies and that it could be disabled, the team ignored the warning and took out the second cyberzombie which exploded as well. This ended our first session on the station. Narratively the second explosion worked well since Emec's player couldn't make the next session and the damaged caused Emec and his drone to fall through a collapse section of flooring the closed up behind him...

Down one character, the team soldiered on and backtracked and entered the auditorium, but having just lost the only party member that spoke Eoxian had no idea what the hostile hardlight scamps were chattering on about. The team went back and forth with them before Bubble in Flight managed to rip the hardlight project from the wall and derezzed the last scamp. Bubble in Flight has a head wear fetish (currently she has two sets of goggles and a pirate eye patch all strapped to her bell) and immediately put on one of the silver crowns, failed the save and did not enjoy the barrage of mental images shoved into her bell, but while flopping on the ground from the shock did notice the laminated instructions under the chairs and everyone was then able to safely use the crowns to get the rooms information.

[Each of the next 3 encounters were changed in some way. I did not like the animated fire extinguishers, just felt random and off theme for the adventure and removed it in favor of adding a boss fight in the last room which i'll cover further down. I did leave the mundane fire extinguishers at the ends of the hallways, which became very important later. I changed the scrap rat visionary to a tool rat from alien core. I removed the green orbs from the arcane laboratory since the alien core lore made no sense for them to be there and replace with two zombie shamblers and a weak combusted from the corpses already in the room to reinforce the themes of the adventure.]

Our reduced team decided to go into the hydroponics bay first and rolled horribly on initiative, and while clustered at the door got hit by two scrap rat grenades, luckily when the tool rat popped up in the trash-pile and aimed its tactical arc rifle at the group it failed and later crit failed on its roll, shorting out the weapon. What followed was a grueling fight which at took down at least one of the PCs (memory a little hazy - we do shots on crit fails and there were alot of shots that fight - lol). Battle highlights include PooToo leaping into the water for added cover and then popping back up to grapple one of the scraprats with his stomach mouth and then repositioning the rat to the water to drown it. Bubble in flight went down and Skaven brought her back up, lacking time to re manifest her weapon she shoved two tentacles into the mouth of another scrap rat and ripped its head in half. A bit later the tool rat managed to use inject nanobots on her and dissolved one of her tentacles. Battered the group managed to searched the room a little after combat, but once one the group had to be dug out from under the collapsed trash-pile they retreated to their ship to rest and regroup.

It was fortunate they regrouped because after the possible TPK in hydroponics, the arcane lab ended up with at one point PooToo and Skaven both unconscious and Bubble in Flight down to 3 hp. The battle started with Bubble in Flight charging in and getting mobbed by the three undead, both zombie shamblers managed to grab her, but missed on their bite attacks, while the combusted's aura burned her. (honestly it was like a scene straight from a zombie movie) She broke free and retreated, PooToo was grabbed and bit before his zombie was killed. Skaven went down, PooToo retreated to the hallway and brought back the fire extinguisher before he went down. Bubble in Flight grabbed the extinguisher and failed utterly in her attack rolls, but managed to coat the entire area in foam retardant, suppressing the combusted's flame aura for a round, allowing her to slap a med patch on Skaven, who grabbed the fire extinguisher and killed the combusted by shoving the fire hose in its mouth and blowing out the back its skull with fire retardant. Thus ended our second session on the asteroid with the team retreating for another nappy nap.

All the players came into the third session knowing that we had one encounter left before they got to level up to 2nd level and get a free archetype, so we worked their choices in narratively when possible. Emec's player was back for the third session, so we did a quick narrative recap with just a few die rolls. Flashing back to Emec falling into a dark micro grave cavern with no atmo, he activated his environmental protections and turned on his comm's flashlight. He found himself in a chewed out cavern on one side of the asteroid with several asteroid louse approaching. He threw his robot on his back and improvised it into a jet pack with his drones flame thrower and managed to escape the louse. Following various tunnels he eventually found another cavern with a cocoon in it. He immediately flamethrowered it and killed the asteroid nymph in the cocoon who released a death scream that knocked Emec out. When he came to he rummaged through the cocoon remains and the spirit of the dead nymph animated her shards and they circled and then pierced Emec, embedding themselves into his skin in rocky constellation patterns, knocking him out again. When he came to again he realized that he his environmental protections had failed, but he was fine in space. [He chose as his free archetype a version of the Gelid Shard updated to be space related. For now it gave him the Cosmic trait]. Sensing the asteroid around him, he was able to spacewalk back to the ship and collapsed again.

All back together the team caught up, healed and headed back to the asteroid. At full strength the team made short work of the botnibs in the computer lab, although one of them almost made a successful deception check against Skaven claiming that they were just IT. They unlocked the command module and decided to rest again before heading into the final chamber. [Meta, they all knew they had just leveled up to 2nd level and we took a break to do that. Skaven chose the Scout free archetype, super useful with its initiative bumps. Bubble in Flight chose the Accidental Sharpshooter to shore up her complete lack of ranged ability] In the middle of the night Skaven gets a med alert from his come that PooToo has stopped breathing and his heart has stopped. Skaven tries two med checks and fails both, the first is cpr and he hears multiple ribs crack, then mouth to mouth and all he gets his the foul stench of death in his lungs. Everyone gathers, freaking out ensues. [I give a not to the player] PooToo sits up and asks why everyone is in his bedroom? More freaking out. Skaven realized the truth, Bubble in Flight slaps PooToo a dozen times with her tentacles as his mentions he's feeling a bit hungry for brains...[PooToo took gained the Zombie dedication]. Probably twenty to thirty minutes of solid role playing ensured that was all amazing. Eventually things settled down and the group headed into the last chamber.

[I really hated that the last room was just a corpse that dusted as they opened the door. Even though it was a slight lore break, I added a Mosaic Soul from Tales of the Vast to the room as the amalgamation of the elebrian souls that had been trapped here for millennia, all focused on the last survivor, their commander. I feel this helps reinforce the adventure themes and foreshadow much to come. Plus I wanted a difficult combat for a team not yet geared up for incorporeal creatures. It also gave Skaven who has been primarily a healer a chance to shine as the only pc that could consistently do damage.]

This battle ended up being a lot shorter than I anticipated, but that is do to some truly epic rolls this battle. After realizing that their usual tactics wouldn't work or were minimized due to the mosaic soul's resistance to physical damage the team adapted. The mosaic soul managed to blind emec and dazzled everyone else but Skaven the first round. Bubble took brunt of the damage, but managed to use here unexpected sharpshooter feature to hit something with a ranged shot for the first time in the campaign, and crited at the same time. While blinded emec activated his overdrive ability and after his drone's flamethrower failed on the mosiac soul hail maryed a stab attack from the drone. He crited and max damaged, doing a completely unexpected 22 points of damage (minus 10 for 12 total) to the Mosaic Soul with his robot. Both Emec and PooToo got to use new 2nd level abilities that let them heal Bubble in Flight, keeping her in the fight while freeing up Skaven chip away at the Mosaic Soul with his divine lance. Bubble landed the killing blow and as a reward she got to use her solarion abilities to condense the fading mosaic soul into a solarion crystal. It adds the ghost touch ability to her solarion weapons and for now we are calling it the Mosaic crystal.

It ended up being a great capstone encounter for the space station everyone agreed it was a great add to the adventure. Thus ended session three.

Anyone still reading this long a** post, thank you for getting through my somewhat rambling narrative and happy gaming.

Hello all, in our last session I threw a mosaic soul at my group and we encountered persistent damage for the first time.

I had always been under the impression that you take base damage and persistent damage from an attack and then it repeated every round, but when we reviewed the rules it seems that it doesn't occur until the end of the characters turn, so if the pc has already gone that round they would take the base damage and wouldn't take the persistent damage until the end of their turn on the next round.

I'm I understanding this correctly? For reference, here is the Persistent Damage condition...

>PERSISTENT DAMAGE

>You’re taking damage from an ongoing effect, such as from being lit on fire. This appears as “X persistent [type] damage,” where “X” is the amount of damage dealt and “[type]” is the damage type. Like normal damage, it can be doubled or halved based on the results of an attack roll or saving throw. Instead of taking persistent damage immediately, you take it at the end of each of your turns as long as you have the condition, rolling any damage dice anew each time. After you take persistent damage, roll a DC 15 flat check to see if you recover from the persistent damage. If you succeed, the condition ends.

If this is a case, could another pc step in to try and end the persistent damage condition before the original pc even took damage with the Assisted Recovery rule (i.e. PC 1 goes on init 20, fire elemental adds persistent fire dmg to PC 1 on init 15, PC2 douse PC1 with a fire extinguisher on init 10).

Creature in the new Tales from the Vast adventure anthology has the Flyby Furry action and my question is how would experienced GM's rule on this, one attack roll applied to all possible targets or separate attack rolls...

>Flyby Flurry [two-actions] The braantu flies up to its Speed in a line and makes a wing spur Strike against up to three creatures in the line. If the Strike hits, the creature takes damage and is off-guard until the beginning of the braantu’s next turn.

My assumption is an attack roll against each creature since it doesn't explicitly say a single to hit roll and that keeps its more in line with line effects that typically require each possible target a separate saving throw.

Follow up question. If each target requires a separate attack roll for the Strike, I also assume MAP would apply since it is not explicitly excluded, even though that penalty doesn't equate to similar line effect attacks that I'm aware of.