PROFESSOR UJINKA, I PRESUME [HERE BE SPOILERS]

[Sheelba]

Does anyone have any suggestions for running this section of Secrets? It recommends the Labre and Kinson enter via the front door and the boathouse respectively but that makes little sense as the entrance via the boat house is both awkward (looks on the map like you would need to jump over some water or at least clamber around a bit) and takes you into the house via the utility room which leads into he same room the main - and only other - entrance leads to. It also suggests the players can deal with this threat buy being highly mobile (climbing in and out of windows) and that the baddies will flee when they see they have completed their main mission. So, given the absence of working firearms for my party the baddies are likely to be able to run in and check on Ujinka and leg it. As they just shot her through the window it makes sense for them to try to make their way to the room they saw her in. It also makes sense that they have checked floor plans before their visit, although a search of a few rooms upstairs might be plausible. So a simple rush in, potentially having a close questers fight with travellers who have pulled melee weapons off the walls and a smart exit seems the order of the day.

Does anyone have any suggestion how to spice this up or friendly pointers where I am missing something?

 

[john_q_traveller]

When our group ran it the difference in arms and armor between the PCs and the enemy characters kept things pretty spicy as it was (my character very nearly died). We did depart from the story as written quite a bit (something we did frequently and to a large extent) because we were able to keep Ujinka alive. We also decapitated our asailants and put their heads on ice in order to put them into a deconstruction chamber that we happened to have on our ship in order to extract their memories.

I should probably mentioned that our characters were already well established by the time we started SotA, and we had done quite well for ourselves. We were probably abnormally well equipped compared to most groups (though we were completely unarmed and unarmored at that point).