Hi guys, looking for some opinions/feedback on a short adventure i ran a little while ago to get myself and my group used to the game. i'm asking because i'm getting a new player soon, and i want his first adventure to not be informative, but not too crazy/

The PCs were sent to a hive on Sepherus Secundus and put up in a 'hotel' of sorts. (excellent lodging for the rich and powerful when they don't have a place of their own in the hive. the noble character payed for this, he refused the standard safe-house) There they met with a senior acolyte, who gave them their orders. they were to run surveillance on a noble who recently acquired some contraband books on xeno-botany, and owned a very large chemical processing plant in the middle hive. For the most part it was them shadowing him from his house to the shipping yard and then his plant. it was dull as dirt (as i intended) until they lost his trail in the middle hive on a "toll" road operated by some thugs. My noble assassin found the toll insulting and shot one of them in the face, and they rest of them killed the other. Their next attempt was infiltrating the noble's house as staff. the tech-priest got creative, the noble posed as a butler, and my other guy pretended to be an archivist. here they found out that the books were inherited from a dead relative, and hadn't even been catalogued yet. (they destroyed the books) still thinking this guy was seedy, they followed him again, and ran into the bruisers for the gang that ran the "toll" road. (massive fight, nearly killed them all). in the end, there was no heresy and the nobleman's dodgy behaviour was him sneaking away to have a gay affair in the middle hive 'slums', and there wouldn't have been a fight if they'd paid the **** fine.

I'm wondering if this was a bad way to introduce the game to some of my players? as at least 2 of my players now don't pay attention to clues because, as they say, "it might not even matter, and there might not be any heresy. if this villain turns out to just be gay i'll kill you"

i was trying to impress upon them that not all assignments are glamourous and full of demons and heretiks, and that as the lowest ranking operatives the inquisitor had, they'd keep getting ****-jobs like confirming information and preliminary investigations until they proved themselves. (they proved themselves pretty quickly after that)

Their is only one thing bad about it: YOU PICKED THE WRONG WORLD!

Sepheris Secundus is a pseudo-medivial world with NO HIVES!

Simply, move the whole thing somehwere with a hive. Like Scintilla or Sinophia

I like it, shows the "boring" nature of some assignment very well and I have to ask did your players let down their guard as nothing happened?

gaah, sorry. not sepherus secundis. i meant scintilla, i just finished another adventure on sepherus secundis, and i can't get that name out of my head.

they did let their guard down, quite a bit. they don't really do that anymore

My 2 cents: I suppose there is something to be said for going the John LeCarre route (i.e. spywork is 99% boring) rather than imitating James Bond (mad scientists! laserbeams!), but I know I would be disappointed with that approach as a player. If, the the course of the 'dead end' investigation, the party stumbled upon an actual heresy not suspected by their Inquisitor, I think that might have been more satisfying to your players: stressing that some leads go nowhere and some suspects are innocent, while still allowing them to 'save the day'...

Heidrich Krauhausen said:

I did the same thing in another game system where my PC's had to act as Courier for their group. 4 or 5 games of boring traveling to sites, before someone tried an ambush and robbery of the team.

@ Adeptus - well, by the guidelines on p.186, a challenging+ investigation test can take several days, so this would certainly support the 99% theory - it's just that in RPGs, that is usually considered "downtime".

I too would be a bit bored by a game focused around showing that much acolyte work is boring, sure its true but not so fun to play.

I've often told my players about all the boring stuff they've been up to, e.g. you've spent the last 8 weeks helping the local arbites search a swamp for a lost heretical tome. You didn't find anything. You did however spend 2 months camping out in a mosquito infested hellhole, eating recyc rations, sleeping on the few bits of ground that aren't entirely water logged, it was incredibly tedious, very humid and very boring. You now hate swamps.

And then they'd be whisked off to do something more interesting and the plot begins.

i should probable point out here that this whole adventure took 1 session, and it would have been a lot shorter if they hadn't picked a fight with the local thugs.

picking fights with NPC's is a bad use of time, but i agree with the others, you should not give your players COMPLETE dead ends, unless they have another lead to immediatly pick up on... it never feels satisfying to end a mission with 'and nothing bad happened, and everything was ok.' the players want to be the heroes, and go in and rip evil a new one somehow, giving them a dead end mission to convey realism sounds like a great idea to me, but players just aren't interested in realism when it comes to relevant plot things, but the instant you begin making your own technology they expect realism..still sounded like a cool mission..