My very wonderful Thursday night gaming group has a rotating set of GMs, and recently I’ve been the man in the chair. After a list of votes for system, the group settled on Stars Without Number, the Kevin Crawford love letter to classic Traveler. I was delighted, because I’ve always wanted to run the system, but the scope of the campaign wasn’t aimed at the interminable sandbox wandering that often has travelers travelling…forever. So why not add the other campaign frame I’ve long wanted…FTL.
FTL: Faster Than Light is a brilliant RTS roguelike from subset games. The premise, from Wikipedia: “[In FTL: Faster Than Light], the player controls the crew of a single spacecraft, holding critical information to be delivered to an allied fleet, while being pursued by a large rebel fleet. The player must guide the spacecraft through eight sectors, each with planetary systems and events procedurally generated in a roguelike fashion, while facing rebel and other hostile forces, recruiting new crew, and outfitting and upgrading their ship. Combat takes place in pausable real time, and if the ship is destroyed or all of its crew lost, the game ends, forcing the player to restart with a new ship. The player's crew intercepts a data packet from the rebel fleet containing information that could throw the rebels into disarray and ensure a Federation victory. The goal is to reach Federation headquarters, waiting several space sectors away, while avoiding destruction from hostile ships or by the pursuing rebel fleet.[3][4] The final sector ends with a battle against the Rebel Flagship, a multi-stage fight which results in either victory or defeat for the Federation.” Doesn’t this sound like a great premise for a TTRPG campaign? In the first session the players all came with their PCs rolled, and we focused on creating the main character…the ship. Le Renard, captained by a Québec-expy named Bennoit LeBeau, is a Federation-affiliated (but not direct navy) frigate with not only the five main PCs but with a dozen other NPCs, run as secondaries by the players at times, and a bone to pick with the rebels after the Federation fleet they were with was destroyed. Armed with just the location of the rebel’s mysterious Controller and half a tank of jump fuel, the players start by hopping into a strange sector with knowledge that the rebel fleet will be breathing down their necks in a matter days. The initial session was enjoyable, with the players finding a refueling station controlled by fanatical worshippers of the Controller, then their bluffing accidentally led to a pair of infiltrators checking out their ruined bridge for messages from the Controller…and actually finding a Federation comm pad, revealing their enemy status. A tense scene to run, with half the players actually at a dinner with the station’s leader, while the two remaining at the ship fought the spies. After this first session, I began to write recaps for the following sessions to read every time. These are what we’ve had so far: Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”: A tense standoff with the Lim 9 station administrator over Le Renard’s Federation affiliation ended in bloodshed, fortunately most of it the administrator’s. While beating a hasty retreat, Captain Lebeau and his two companions managed to hijack the station’s alert system, sending the crew scurrying. Dr. Jenny meanwhile secured the prisoner Jorge Jurgen, a hapless hostage…or helpful recruit? Blasting randomly at the station as they fled, the crew went for the inner inhabitable planet Grid after hearing of a crashed Federation scout there. Landing HARD on the desert planet, Engineer Reynolds set his crew to repairing as the command crew hastened to the wreckage of the scout, finding not just a black box with a rutter [basically a map needed to jump to another star] to another system, but also the faint tracks of the pilot Charles Danyiel, who’s terrible final message promised he would be seeking water in the desolate world. Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”: While making repairs and salvaging scrap on the desert world of Grid, our heroes discovered more dangers than mere dry heat, as Le Renard discovered when a massive earthquake rolled in less than an hour after Engineer Reynolds finished repairing the landing struts. Following the lost pilot’s tracks to an oasis one hundred miles away, the Captain and his crew discovered a primitive civilization led by a “chief’canic”, who worship machines even as their ancient terraforming gear winds itself down. The Captain’s initial attempts to ransom the lost pilot ended in failure but Chief of Security Slate Bulkhead made contact with a rebellious “under’canic” who offered to free the lost pilot if the crew could heal the machines of the Ancients. The crew are now within a vast ziggurat, as their engineer frantically tries to fix the barely-understood pretech machinery…and as sonic booms announce the arrival of the advance scouts of the rebel fleet searching for them overhead. Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”: As brilliant Engineer Reynolds fumbled desperately with the advanced terraforming machinery wracking the desert world of grid, the rest of the command crew discovered, and then fought an ancient robot guarding rare pretech deep within the facility. With the help of a grateful local, the crew used a combination of stealth and distracting medical miracle-working to rescue lost pilot Lt. Chuck Danyiel. Rigging the pretech terraforming stations to send out bursts of confusing static, the crew manage a thrilling escape from the six circling scouts, forerunners of the imminent rebel fleet. Leaving at flank speed, it is only within the confines of metaspace that the communications officer discovered a hidden message from one of the rebels, speaking of a desire to defect…and warning that the fleet was less that two days from the Makis System. Now in the famously neutral Glomar System, the crew are low on fuel but a little higher on hope, making their way to the system’s solitary gas giant to refuel and take stock of their latest destination. Previously on “The Flight of the Fox”: After taking a little time refueling while hiding on the dark side of the gas giant Glomar 1, the crew votes to make contact with the aging mining station in orbit around the world, where a committee of workers, having thrown off their bosses’ control, are up a creek without a paddle with nowhere to sell their refined fuel. The captain has convinced the committee to authorize Le Renard to find a smuggler contact on the system’s main planet of Glomar 2, where alien ruins entice a lively population of smugglers…and the ancient Mandate-era Perimeter Agency ruthlessly works to suppress export of the most dangerous maltech found among the bones of the aliens’ lost civilization. But that’s not the only wrinkle in this sticky situation; as Le Renard makes landfall, the sensors officer notes a pair of rebel scouts docked on the system’s station, including the drive signature of the hopeful defector. Will the crew find a smuggler for their hapless miners? Will they manage to find a rutter to leave the system along safer routes? Will they manage to evade the rebel fleet, which must be on its way… I’ll continue posting these recaps as the campaign goes along. If anyone is interested in terms both specific to Stars Without Number, or general concepts from the game, please, ask away…science fiction gaming is a very different experience, even though many of us have played at least some before, and it’s been a learning experience for us all as we play around in the system.
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A dungeon by Guilherme Gontijo, levels unlisted. Written for Bronze Hack Oh boy, a dungeon crawl for an unrecognized heartbreaker? And it’s a lavishly colored trifold? What joy. The only way to make this a classic Itch Trifecta is a completely unsatisfying node-diagram “map” pasted over a landscape. And no…we rather have a new, fresh, abomination before us, a blocky greyscale ascii-art map that somehow manages to ape the stylings of Rogue or Dwarf Fortress with none of the charm. A scale is given so it’s usable, but this is one very unique method of conveying information here, let’s see if it works for him, Cotton. The whole thing is written in an oddly chatty style, with many “lots of X” and “there’s a Y” turns of phrase, it’s a little strange and nonspecific. The plot of the crawl is pretty standard. Rich guy has exotic garden. Rich guy’s son dies. Rich guy makes pact with dark powers and returns son to life as monster. Monster eats stuff and takes over garden. Rich guy asks to clear garden to reclaim it. Son in human form mysteriously helps PCs. PCs accept quest or we don’t play D&…er, Bronze Hack, tonight. The challenges to overcome on the way to the titular Beast are all what we expect from that premise, whenever there’s anything specific (traps are just marked “trap” on the map, not detailed). Vine “walls” are presumably impassible, as are water squares? There’s pools that turn bathers to gold and back again, there’s random bugs and leopards to fight, there’s a backstory that the adventure is pretty optimistic players will find…and the Final Bossfight can be solved with a lute playing a song? What I liked about the adventure was the art, sorta, which being uncredited means I assume is AI-generated. The map isn’t completely hopeless in terms of layout, that’s good. I’m not sure if the backstory gets conveyed successfully but I do like the idea of the history of the site mattering in the final confrontation. Pools that turn people into gold are a fun thing to mess with, although the Inevitable Player Monetization Schemes are left unaddressed. That all seems negative but looking at what can be improved yields quite a bit that’s hopeful. A lot of things that are unclear, like the traps, could be settled with just a little bit more explanation. Things like “d100 bugs” or “d4 leopards” or “d100 coins” could be standardized into definite numbers, which helps. As with any mystery with clues at a TTRPG, multiple chances to gain access to the useful backstory bits would be wise. Couple those improvements with a little more thought on things like the infinite gold-making ponds and you have a nice little minidungeon. We live in this reality, however, so the best use case here today is to take the communicated vibe and/or the backstory-puzzle-situation to a better map and ignore what’s presented. Running this straight out would be a little dull but wouldn’t be torture. Final Rating? */***** as a less than inspiring first impression for Bronze Hack. Better luck next time. A set of dungeonlets by Brent Edwards, levels are for the unenlightened. …because yup, written for Cairn I’m used to experiencing familiar emotions when reading a Cairn adventure. Annoyance. Boredom. Ennui. Contempt. Bafflement. In The Barrows Hunger, Brent Edwards takes nineteen laborious pages over nine 1-5 room Dyson maps to induce in me an unusual emotion for the system…disappointment. Right, so we got nine little barrows, easily one of the least inspiring of the free Dyson maps…useful enough for your VTT if you’ve rolled a random lair result overland, but nothing that encourages exploratory play in each individual site. All nine are reimagined here as a set of fake burial mounds that are actually the nine heads of a vast buried hydra, six of which are dead, three of which are still semi-alive and are looking for meat, using their malleable claylike saliva to generate facsimiles of loot to entice tomb-robbers. A cultist worshipping the hydra runs a sad ramshackle “museum” of a fake fallen empire, telling stories about the nine rulers presumably interred with the barrows (surprisingly detailed) and encouraging the adventurous to get themselves et. This flash of admittedly complicated creativity is followed up by page after page of fake treasure and explosive spit monsters. As should be obvious what I liked are the bizarre flashes of creativity…most of the time. There’s something neat about adventuring within portions of a slumbering/dying/quiescent gargantuan giga-monster, that’s a good idea. The only two pieces of magical loot in the adventure are nifty, a linked pair of black glass daggers that attack together and especially the calcified lens of one of the hydra’s eyes that can be used as a shield, it grants views a split second into the future, imposing disadvantage on attackers. Now that is a magic item, whew. I kinda liked the museum curator/cultist guy…it’s kind of touching that he really does care for the hydra, desperately trying to help one of the dying heads by tending to it every night. The brief summary of the nine fictional rulers purported to be buried in the barrows isn’t just worldbuilding fluff, but clearly gameable as smart players will definitely ask about that. Good bits. There is, however, a long list of what can be improved that’s mostly the unpleasant stuff, and the underbaked stuff. I know it’s Cairn, where the levels are made up and the loot don’t matter, but the whole area is essentially a cruel bait-and-switch designed to inflict nothing but pain and disappointment on the characters. The adaptive hydra spit engulfs and hardens, and then explodes if cracked, all presented as just pure anti-player mechanics. Loot is terrible mostly, the only valuable bits really beyond the aforementioned calcified lens are from previously tricked adventurers. Feels bad, very choked. There’s a real lack of incident in the encounters, the bad loot is coupled with “screw-you” traps…trap-heavy dungeons can be good, but more telegraphing would improve the play a lot. Finally, that previously mentioned gameable background being better integrated in the barrows would be a huge improvement. Awkward to find a best use case here. The highly flavorful premise means the barrows are useless as independent lairs/sites, but the whole thing is a little uninspiring to play. Might be that the best takeaway is that “buried and dying kaiju as a dungeon” initial seed and then go write something with interesting cartography and better interaction. Final Rating? */***** makes it about average for Cairn but that’s about all that can be said. It’s been over eight months diving amidst the dire dreck deep in bowels of the itch.io TTRPG publication space. While I’ve found the occasional gem amidst the turds, the general quality has wavered from “uninspiring” to “insultingly abysmal”…although often the result is entertaining to review, if not to attempt to actually use at the table. While I’ve hardly covered everything, as time has gone on I’ve noticed some systems that spike intense feelings of nausea and dread, where you just know an adventure for the given system is going to be terrible. Meanwhile, there are other systems that give the struggling reviewer…if not hope, then at least mild interest that what’s been written isn’t guaranteed to be awful. For the occasional hopeful module-grabber that isn’t on a machoistic dream-quest to purify his psyche through agony, I figured I’d give a quick guide: “System Agnostic” Do not walk, RUN. This is a clear indicator of a passionless brainfart, released to make a quick PWYW buck, never playtested, never intended to be actually used. These are almost always spawned from a jam or a writing prompt, not a passionate idea. MARK OF TERRIBLE QUALITY. “For B/X” This is the Basic Mark of OSRness, sorry AD&D bros but most people playing, are playing B/X. It’s a fine system* for what it’s being used for, typically adventure sites that can be used in a casual ongoing campaign. It’s a mark of probable quality. *Actually have read/played this one of course, it’s good. “For OSE” Very common, typically going to be more regimented in its bullet-point formatting but of course being just B/X it’s a fine system*, there’s an outside chance of being playtested, although its often a cash-grab too. Designed for one-shots rather than campaign play. Mark of possible quality. *Actually have read/played this one, it’s good. “For Shadowdark” There must be a style guide for this one, because all Shadowdark adventures are alike in scope and scale (one single session, dungeon-based, loops in map mandatory). Exclusively one-shot scope. The cash-grab chances are decently high, but the style guide means there’s at least some chance of a decent little dungeonlet. Mark of possible quality. “For Heartseeker” This is a mysterious system to me, but multiple adventures written for it means it does have at least a dozen audience members. This is a fairly typical heartbreaker system in that it has very stylish, but very unimaginative, content. One-shots only, despite nods at assumed ongoing campaigns. Mark of low quality. “For Mausritter” Cute art will happen, as will incredibly generic adventures. I hope you like the thought of little mouse-guys having adventures, because the content itself holds absolutely nothing novel. Mark of low quality. “For the Vanilla Game” At least we can’t claim this is false advertising. Not idea what the system is like, but it seems to spawn very vanilla adventures. Nothing offensive, and with an idea of ongoing campaign play, but bland. Mark of boring quality. “For Heroes of Adventure” The most high-gloss “trad” adventures of these amateur efforts, these feel like classic efforts from the era of D&D 3.5…which, given the system*, makes sense. Scope and scale will be big, fine with multiple sessions, even happy to release a yearlong campaign. Written very long, always. Designed to be actually played, which is inspiring. Mark of possible quality. *Read and reviewed the system, it’s got some selling points. “For Vaults of Vaarn” Gamma World by way of ugly colors for its garish pages, Vaults of Vaarn has no sign to me that it was ever in fact played. The one-shot “idea” adventures produced here show a really rough style guide being worked from. Mark of bad quality. “For Into the Odd” Attractive to the worst sorts of artsy creators, there’s an unpleasant set of formatting and vaguely steampunkish art choices inevitably being made. Mark of bad quality. “For Cairn” Oh man, there are so many adventures for this, it’s a very active little cult. All the adventures are long and have a woodsy/wilderness theme, which is normally my jam, but there’s so much pretense dripping from every product, the “adventures” are self-important beyond belief even as they typically have the most bog-standard content imaginable. One-shots always because there’s no leveling setup. Mark of terrible quality, but not the worst because… “For Mork Borg” Oh man. The colors are going to upset my tummy, the font will be barely readable, and the formatting will be random…but the content will be even worse. Sure, it’s going to be edgy, but it’s also guaranteed to be a “14-year-old in a Hot Topic shirt”-level of edgy. Mark of terrible quality. “For Troika” Immediate nightmare. To see this is to know pain. This little symbol means the most nauseating, annoying, overwritten, underbaked, never-played product you’ve ever seen in your life. MARK OF SATAN HIMSELF. |
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