Fire Thieves (SJ-DC-LEGIT-SB-01)

It looks like this is it...
https://www.dmsguild.com/product/415683/Club-Diamond-SJDCLEGITSB02?src=hottest_filtered&filters=45470_1000027_45419_0_0_0_0_0

Hi, you were correct, the filename was wrong. Thanks for spotting it! As the filename is a minor mistake, I'll consolidate it for future updates.

Hi there. Does using the printer friendly version of the file (labelled PF) help the legibility for you?

Thanks for the printer friendly version. That was great for me, as I always print mods that I'm running.

*** MAJOR SPOLERS ***
(See below)

If you are thinking of purchasing this module, I recommend it... we had a lot of fun.








I ran it last week. The party's Bard carried the team.
The characters ambushed the Boson, charming him and convincing him they were new crew members and he should be polite and introduce them to rest of the crew... oh and give them his comm. badge and key card, so they can get around. (They had a bard rolling high Persuasion on top of the Charm spell.)
They were kind of excited that they might get through this without combat...That all worked great until they entered the anti-magic field and Charm dropped and Ghost Breaker got pissed at them for tricking him and attacked! :-p
They succeeded in knocking him out, so didn't have to kill him, and they tied him up and put him in the crate they ported into to hide him.

They dispatched Ghost Breaker, and then headed to Security, where they...See more used the cameras and found the Macguffin in the Forge.
They got a surprise round on the captain, successfully casting Hypnotic Pattern on him.
Then they got another little surprise when they grabbed it and alarms started going off everywhere!
They had locked the doors North of Security and the Forge, and since they and the Captain had the only key cards, the ship's crew was locked out from that direction.
They sprinted back to the cargo hold to jump out, only to realize they needed to lower the force field (I called it that instead of a door.)
So they all lined up on the edge and pushed the button next to the Boson's desk...
Only to see the force field start lowering from the top, instead of just disappearing... and only lowering 5 feet per round from it's 30 foot height!
So now they needed to fight three crew members to stall until the force field had lowered enough for them to jump out lol.
(The captain had come out of his Hypnotic Pattern, and I had Phoebe enter behind him from her lab after spending a few turns to go through the vent from her quarters.
I also had Crocodile come around from the Stores side. They had locked that door, but I gave him 3 rounds to get through it using his electrical skills.

It ended up being an exciting escape for the party!!
It was fun for them to have to fend off powerful adversaries without needing to actually kill them all.

The only awkward thing I ran into was that I was playing Crocodile as Medium sized for most of the combat, based on him not looking Large to me in the photo of the whole crew together. Late in the fight, I realized that he was actually Large per his stat sheet... which was relevant because the Bard had polymorphed into a T-Rex, and Crocodile wouldn't be able to grapple him if he was Medium. So I corrected that then, which honestly I shouldn't have, as the fix felt too much like I was changing the situation to help the opposition.
I recommend adjusting Crocodile's stat block to list him as Medium, not Large. That makes way more sense in the cramped ship space anyway. ;-)

So once they jumped out the cargo bay, they had Brenda pick them up from space in her ship. They gave her the Macguffin and got paid.
And then experienced Conclusion A.
They never found out what the Macguffin was for, in part because it didn't occur to me to fully describe their sense of it once they grabbed it and ran.
As a result, there wasn't any stress about handing it over to Brenda.

The party didn't get a chance to experience over half of the ship, but that was kind of cool too. Doing a snatch and grab vs. the standard dungeon crawl.
(I had heavily stressed in the planning stage that this ship's crew was very experienced, and would probably kick their butts if they fought them all at once, so they party wasn't tempted to go exploring for loot, etc.) ;-)

I'd also encourage you to change the prohibition on negotiations to state that it's still ok to negotiate if some of the crew has been subdued instead of killed.

Overall, it was a fun module! Thanks for writing it!!

PS. I put together the whole ship using Wiz Kids WarLock tiles. It looked great!! :-D
(Let me know if you'd like to see a picture of that. I don't see a way to upload it here.)

Thanks for the affirmation! It's a very open-ended adventure so it's great to hear about how different groups handle things, I appreciate you typing it out.
I think it's absolutely fine for them to not know what the MacGuffin does yet, stealing something without knowing what it is is a whole trope! It's a bit of a lore dump, but they'll find out more at the start of the next adventure if they play it.

Regarding Crocodile's size, their central orb is twice as big as the other characters' torsos and their tentacles are at least twice as long as their arms in the art. The area a creature occupies in battle is more of a measure of the size of their "combat stance" than their "vertical footprint". Two humans can easily fit within a 5ft square out of combat, but one can't easily run through that square if the other is holding a dangerous sword and wants to hurt them, I think it's the same for Crocodile who has a pretty large "arm span". I envisioned that Crocodile would...See more be at home on the ship because they are able to squeeze through the tight corridors by bunching up their tentacles when they need to be smaller and stretching them out to occupy more space when they need to be bigger.

I agree that the text in the appendix could do with an explicit reminder that "killed" is not the same as "subdued" or "taken out", like it states in the conclusion. I understand that when it comes to RPGs those terms are often ambiguous. Unfortunately, I was originally completely out of space on that page, and had to prune as much ancillary text as possible. (I forgot to add the reminder back in after I trimmed an entire section from the page). A note to future DMs: When the module says "killed" it means only dead characters, the module will say "taken out" or "subdued" otherwise.