Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
In lieu of a traditional starter set for Starfinder Second Edition, Paizo released a Deluxe Adventure called Murder in Metal City. Unlike the Pathfinder Beginner Box, this adventure box isn’t designed to be a complete introduction to the game without external resources; it lacks a standard set of dice and a lite version of the rules. However, it is assembled to serve as a starter adventure for level 1 player characters (PCs) as a way to get people comfortable with the system.
Starfinder Murder in Metal City Deluxe Adventure Overview
The Murder in Metal City Deluxe Adventure box ships with a load of content that makes it relatively easy to pick up and play if you already have a base knowledge of the Starfinder Second Edition system. A 64-page adventure details a story on the machine planet of Aballon in which the players are quickly roped into solving a murder mystery of a local community figure. The adventure makes up around two-thirds of those pages, clocking it shorter than Paizo’s standard adventure path book length. The backmatter contains an NPC gallery, information on Tech-based faiths, details on relevant locations in the story, and additional bestiary-style entries of the included creatures.
Players don’t need to worry about rolling up their own characters if they don’t want to—six pre-generated character sheets are included—but don’t feel like you have to select one of them if you’d rather flex your own creative muscles. Each pregen has its own representative token. There are 108 small circular tokens to keep track of players, NPCs, and monsters on the double-sided Flip-Mat map. The last items of note are the investigation handouts and visual aid cards showing NPCs and gear.
The box for the Murder in Metal City Deluxe Adventure is much larger than it needs to be, and actually contains a box inside it to fill up the majority of the interior space. Between the adventure and all the extra fixings, everything fits in a half-inch of the box. The rest is filler. It’s a marketing ploy to make the box stand out on the shelf, but it was a bit of a disappointment to see that most of the box is dead space.
I’m also a person who has reviewed a veritable ton of Paizo’s products, and the overall production of this ‘deluxe’ adventure feels to be a lower quality than what I’m used to. The handouts and pre-generated character sheets are all very thin paper, similar to what you might print mass-market flyers with. Instead of tokens with stands—which were included in the Pathfinder Beginner Box—the tokens are small circles that sit flat on the map, without any of that three-dimensional pop. Even the Flip-Mat feels thinner than previous releases, and it also doesn’t feel like it is wet or dry erase compatible.
Starfinder Murder in Metal City Deluxe Adventure: Coast in the Machine
Quality of the physical product aside, I do find the included adventure—Murder in Metal City—to be more than adequate for an introduction to Starfinder Second Edition. It has plenty of combat, although things seem to be skewed slightly easier in favor of giving the players some experience under their belts. Experienced players could find the combat encounters too easy, but the adventure is short enough to easily ramp up difficulty within or concoct a more difficult continuation of the story after the prewritten content is completed.
Paizo went above and beyond to make things easy for the Gamemaster, which earns praise from me as a forever-GM. There are GM Tip sections sprinkled throughout the Murder in Metal City Deluxe Adventure, granting insights into things such as how to run chases, how to run certain enemies based on their intrinsic motivations, and how to deal with failures. Most of these tips are front-loaded in Chapter 1, slowly introducing mechanics piecemeal, which is my preferred style of learning.
But if the basic chase rules aren’t enough for aspiring GMs. Paizo also includes rules references for the complete set of rules and modifications, which are usually going to be found in the Starfinder GM Core. I also appreciate the bold text whenever a Handout is referenced, making it more likely that the GM will remember to show that to their players.
Although the adventure is relatively short and linear, it does serve as a good mix of everything that Starfinder offers and plenty of room to roleplay. There are also some interesting, and unexpected, themes that crop up during the story. Players will not be starved of their agency, that’s for sure: there is also sufficient direction provided for potential ways that the story can continue once Paizo’s portion is complete.
The Murder in Metal City Deluxe Adventure takes the Starfinder Second Edition system out for a joyride, allowing the players to figuratively cruise along in a space convertible while showing off the various subsystems that set the game apart from other tabletop roleplaying games. By including pre-generated characters representative of the six classes from the Starfinder Player Core, it all but ensures that every player will be able to play a character with qualities that interest them. Despite a perceived lower quality of the physical components, this box set is ready to grab off the shelf and play assuming the group has a prefatory knowledge of the system.
With murder, mystery, and machines, the Murder in Metal City Deluxe Adventure combines noir elements with sci-fi tech in a way that shines the best light on Starfinder.
