Firefly: Bucking the Tiger

This month's "Lost Episode" was the final pre-gen adventure from the "Echoes of War" series - oddly, this one didn't make it into the compiled volume of adventures and so is only available as a PDF, which proved a major pain when I elected to print the damn thing prior to use. Oh well.

Anyway, the game had four players: Emma (Book), Josh (Jayne), Phil (Mal), and a newcomer to this game, Daniel (Inara). Which was certainly a decent set of characters, although at one point Phil did need to slip into Simon's skin for one of the scenes.

This is a fairly complex and meaty adventure, and so I was always a little concerned about our ability to fit it in to the allocated time. As it happened, we ran over, but only slightly - everything was wrapped up by about 10:45 instead of the projected 10:30. But I did have to cut out quite a lot of the subplots in order to make it work.

When reading through this adventure initially, I concluded that it was probably the best of the "Echoes of War" series, and I'm inclined to stick with this assessment. In particular, I like the way that it has a choice of subplots that can be resolved, meaning that the adventure will play out significantly differently for different groups.

That said, I'm not terribly happy with the way the adventure tried to resolve the mystery - in hindsight, I still think they'd be better going with the "Three Clue Rule" and leaving it as a player challenge, rather than using a special Complication to determine when a given NPC reveals their secrets. But it wasn't too bad, and did at least resolve quickly.

All in all, I was happy with this adventure, and happy also to come to the end of the "Echoes of War" series. Next month's adventure is "The Knitted Jumper Caper" which should be a nice slice-of-life episode to end the year - this will serve as something of an "end of season" show, albeit one of those end of season shows where the major plotlines have been resolved and so it's more denouement than climax. Which is fine.

And then next year we'll launch into the "Ghosts of the Black" adventures, interspersed with some homebrew and some of the other pre-gen episodes (for Firefly or, indeed, for Serenity). But that's all for the future...