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Archives of Nethys

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Chapter 4: Running Starship Campaigns / Starship Adventure Seeds

Take the Job

Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 144
Sometimes, money and fame are the best motivations. The following adventure seeds involve the PCs taking lucrative jobs to stop an immoral scientist’s experimentations, freeing hostages from a dangerous cult, or quietly tracking down an illegal fleet of racing starships.

The Case of the Missing Racing Ships

Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 144
Though starship drag racing is a nuisance to the Pact Worlds, authorities often overlook it in favor of investigating more serious crimes. When a gang’s fleet of racing starships goes missing on Absalom Station, law enforcement is happy to call it a total loss and close the case. One of the gang leaders is convinced that the disappearance was planned, however, and hires the PCs to look into it further—discreetly, of course. The PCs are tasked with going undercover as drag racers, but they find themselves in over their heads when they learn that the dangers of these starship races go well beyond what they bargained for. This new world is essentially a brutal professional sport, with harsh rules and terrible consequences when those rules are broken. Who stole the starships, and what has happened to them? Was it revenge enacted by a rival racing gang? Or is it all an elaborate ruse in order to trap the PCs in a compromising position?

Free the Cult’s Hostages

Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 144
A Vercite Drift Cruiser transporting wealthy sightseers to Bretheda has been hijacked. Members of the Cult of the Devourer have taken credit for the attack, calling for corporate ransoms and the immediate release of several cultists imprisoned throughout the Pact Worlds. The hijackers’ leader, a ryphorian calling herself Vash, has also declared war on the “rampant commercialism” that the cult believes corrupts the natural chaos lurking inside individuals, chaining them forever to a societal construct. If the cultists’ demands are not met, the hijackers have threatened to detonate the vessel in Bretheda’s volatile helium-hydrogen atmosphere.

Aside from a wealthy human palladium magnate from Castrovel named Reece Jorenby and his tiefling paramour Rylah Zee, the exact identity and number of hostages aboard are unknown. Efforts to pinpoint the Drift Cruiser’s location have been unsuccessful. Vercite officials also suspect a lashunta former Steward aided in the takeover of the ship. The Pact Council has pledged a strike team of Stewards to storm the vessel and neutralize the hijackers, but a swift recon crew is needed to make initial contact and help pinpoint its position (rumored to be somewhere in the Diaspora at present). However, several corporations with ties to the known hostages are refusing to meet ransom demands, instead banding together to hire the PCs (for a ludicrous amount of money) to retrieve the vessel and hostages.

Stop the Rogue Scientist

Source Starship Operations Manual pg. 144
Dr. Juvarn, a discredited osharu scientist, has reportedly gone into exile somewhere in the desert wastes of Akiton. Long accused of conducting prohibited genetic experiments (though he has always claimed innocence), Juvarn managed to escape justice by accepting early retirement from his employer, the multiplanetary corporation Zenith Solutions. Over the past two months, however, several residents near Hivemarket on Akiton have gone missing or died under mysterious circumstances. Others report that the native ikeshti have begun to behave strangely, feasting on dead flora and babbling like children. Even more unsettling, Eoxian Cairncarvers have taken to patrolling the Kaviri Plains, forming a tight blockade southeast of the Edaio Rift.

Akitonian representatives are pleading with the Pact Council to intervene, but word around Absalom Station is that available resources are spread thin and these disparate reports have yet to rise to the government’s attention. The peacekeeping Stewards, however, believe Dr. Juvarn might be developing a new xenobiological weapon for the Corpse Fleet and have secretly offered compensation to any starship crew able to skirt the no-fly zone and apprehend the fugitive for “procedural questioning.” A lucrative contract, sweetened with several bounties on Juvarn’s head, has just become available, and the PCs stand to gain much from accepting it.