Published on

The Spinach Inquisition in Space

Author

The long-running multi-universe campaign I play in, the Spinach Inquisition, started out with Starfinder in 2017. I mentioned this campaign yesterday when I was talking about ship combat encounters. But it might be fun to provide a summary of the campaign.

Overall, we quite liked Starfinder. It had some problems with spaceship combat, but it was a really cool setting. This was my first experience with Golarion, and it's got so many cool little oddities, like the elves being space aliens:

The history of the elves is an ancient one. Elven historians debate whether their race originated on Golarion or on Sovyrian, a continent in southern Castrovel, but archaeological evidence points to El, the oldest city on Sovyrian, to be far older than any evidence of elves on Golarion. They likely emigrated from Castrovel to Golarion in the late Age of Serpents and had no contact with the declining serpentfolk empire that had once ruled a large part of Golarion.

We ultimately moved away from Starfinder 1e not because we didn't like it, but because it was 2017-2019 and Starfinder was still new. We'd played through a lot of the interesting material, and our GM wanted more off-the-shelf stuff to work with. After the first bit, I think this was entirely a homebrew story, which is a lot of work to put together.

The Team

The party was mostly made up of Gowena/Popo, Junk/Billy, Volkas, H4NZ, and Theo. Two of the players had character changes: Gowena didn't like being a solarian very much, so she swapped to a skittermander. Junk retired after our main quest and we replaced by Billy Naise the Mayoglide Maxx sale-rep when we visited a space resort.

We had Zith too, but the scheduling didn't work out, so Theo obliterated him with the main cannon on a starship pretty early on.

I can't find the tokens for H4NZ and Volkas, but H4NZ was a german android and Volkas was a big ol' Vesk fella.

Junk ended up being an iconic character. He was a psychotic ysoki operative that loved garbage, violence, and bodily fluids. Whenever we were in the ship, he'd be doing something to upset the janitorial staff. He also tore a man's junk off once, when the gang boss was trying to steal a cat.

Volkas was a vesk's vesk: big ol' fella with a bunch of swords and the desire to stab them into people. When Popo showed up, he was here "investigating" the disapperance of Rose, Volkas' "wife". Popo thought Volkas ate her, but was never able to prove it. Volkas never admitted to being married.

H4NZ was our hacker, and he met an unfortunate fate during our ultimate battle. He hacked into the mainframe to steal the custard recipe, but the terminal was trapped, and he got hit with some brutal feedback that corrupted some of his systems. For the rest of his life, he'd hallucinate custard everywhere.

Theo

I was Theo, a space lawyer inspired by Saul Goodman. I set up a website during character creation, but I let the domain lapse since that was a years ago. For this blog post, I've converted the site from a PHP app into static HTML and restored it, for your viewing pleasure. He had a Twitter too, which has been converted too.

He was a technomancer and generally non-violent, which was kind of awkward sometimes! Theo could hide really well, but it wasn't until higher levels that he started getting big AoE spells to drop on foes from invisibility. He'd usually try and put the squeeze on enemies using Legal Jargon, and let Junk or Volkas do the violence if that failed.

Before getting the big spells, he'd generally sneak around to get behind or above enemies, then do something to daze them, trip them up, or drop a conveniently-located palette of goods on their head.

One of Theo's clients, Mrs. Mary Smalls, was a hook into the Trucs Bout à Bout Incident at an Absalom brothel, where the party blew open a conspiracy to rob an old woman's trust fund set up to take care of her cats.

The Quest

HappyCo was a confectionary company led by Mr. Happy, and their most important product was Tofinkle, a frozen custard treat popular across the Pact Worlds. The party received a bunch of job ad spam from HappyCo, and everyone eventually went to their job fair.

HappyCo needed a team of fixers who could go into the field and correct a situation using overwhelming violence. So after a quick simulated job interview-slash-mission, we were hired!

After resolving a few minor situations with the Cult of the Devourerer, Mr. Happy met with us and assigned us a momentous task: in order to step up custard production, we needed to retrieve the core of something called the "stellar degenerator" from a ruin deep in the Drift. This seemed like a very normal thing for the CEO of a custard company to ask for, so naturally, we agreed.

I don't really remember much from the Drift. I know flying the ship in was challenging, but we managed to extract the core from a super-weapon that killed stars and brought it back to the custard factory.

The Betrayal

Mr. Happy was very pleased with receiving the stellar degenerator core. He paid us, and we went back to Absalom station to spend our hard-earned credits.

Then Mr. Happy unveiled his Grinstar by blowing up the moon Kalo-Mahoi, declared himself Emperor Happy, and demanded the Pact Worlds submit to him.

The party had not expected this turn of events at all, but were a little pissed off about being used to create a super-weapon instead of more custard. They decided to work with the Pact Worlds to assault the GrinStar and destroy Mr. Happy.

Assault on the Grinstar

The campaign's ultimate battle was the assembled Pact armada engaging HappyCo's forces over the moon. The party, along with an "elite" team of Pact special forces, were inserted into the Grinstar while the epic battle to control space raged.

There's a whole detailed account of the assault available over here, if you're interested.

The highlight was at the end. Mr. Happy was defeated and the party seized the stellar degenerator core, but he escaped to fight another day. When the core was removed, the Grinstar's self-destruct sequence engaged, and the party made for the exit.

Much earlier in the campaign, the party had been captured by some Eoxian soldiers and put into a livestream'd battle arena. We had to fight for our lives and escape. The Eoxians thought this was all very funny, but we had some lingering anger.

So on the way out, only the party knows the Grinstar is about to blow. We see the Iron Rictus docking as we're boarding our ship. This is the Eoxian who captured us, and its presence indicates the Pact fleet had won the space battle and was now able to land troops uncontested.

The party looked at this giant fucking asshole and his stupid spaceship docking. And then looked out through the docking bay's forcefield at the huge armada closing in on the Grinstar. And then back at the Eoxian asshole.

Theo shook his head to everyone, and they understood: no, no warning, this fucker can blow up with HappyCo. The party boarded their ship and departed, leaving the Iron Rictus and the entire Pact armada to explode with the huge grinning spacestation.

And that is what happened! This was a very Theo moment: we can avoid any legal liability and get our nemesis blown up. Win-win!

But this has some horrifying implications for our instance of the Starfinder universe, since a couple years later, the Swarm invades the Pact Worlds. It's metagaming, obviously, but I know the armada would be needed to resist all the bugs. We never quite got to that point, so eh, problem for future us.