Fly me to the Moon

By Kabuki Kaiser
Self Published
OSR
Hex Crawls - Levels 1-whatever. Don’t fuck up

Danger Will Robinson! The vibe here is how I would live my life if I could. So, you know, I don’t think this is a based review but I’m aware of my love for the vibe.

Fly Me to the Moon gives you the fantastique Moon stitched into a majestic hexcrawl where each entry promises sleepless hours of adventure and d’Amberville conundrums, a moose head of a Moon in 168 hexes compatible with everything OSR from Basic to Advanced.

This 169 page hexcrawl uses about 120 pages to present about 160 hexes to explore on the moon. This is a romantic moon, with every lunar pop culture reference present. Fanciful, it remind a hex crawl, presenting situations that the party can involve themselves in. And, thusly, like most hexcrawls, you must bring to it your murderous intent to play as is. IE: hex connections/an overall thrust are weak Which isn’t a bad thing is your group like to loot The Keep in B2 cause that’s where the most XP is.

I think perhaps we need to talk about three things here. The vibe of THIS hexcrawl and then what a decent hexcrawl is in the context of if this is a decent hexcrawl. What I’m not going to do this time around is cover the evocative nature of the writing and formatting. The evocative writing is fine to good and the formatting is plain, with decent cross-references present, and at about two paragraphs to a column per, written in such a way that it is terse enough and “front loaded” enough to run pretty on the fly.

This is a romantic moon, as is romanticism, mixed in with pop culture. Every type. Cheese. Verne. About a dozen different selenites, including the Selenites, from every incarnation fo media. And, yes, this includes Apollo, the mission. Romantic as in what I’ve always wanted The Dreamlands to be. 

In one hex you stumble across a hunting party. “The party consists of eight hunters led by Turambol, a petty lord clad in a star–studded pyjama, and accompanied by two court poets, both of whom ride zebras and strum luths as they travel. Turambol himself rides a white gazelle with long horns.” Fanciful, in places. If the moon has ever had a reference, in media or culture, dating back three thousand years, then it’s probably in here. And it’s going to have a fanciful bend to it. Think slim arcing towers, silver and blue light and so on. 

We have incursions from other lands. An ambassador from other words, or references to Emperor Norton. Dreamy, but with consequences. “The Rotunda of Earthly Mirrors, a monumental structure of slate and alabaster tipped with a metallic silvery dome stands atop the Mons Piton’s highest peak here. The rotunda is visible from afar, its silhouette contrasting with the darkness of space.” Thematically pretty much everything matches perfectly here. 

A few notes on mechanics before I move on to the nature of a hex crawl. The map is nothing, really. Imagine a black page with hex numbers in it. There’s your terrain. There’s a light background image on the map but it’s artistic. What “travel type” we should consider the moon is not noted, although there are some low gravity notes. Whatever “These basaltic plains lie buried

beneath silt, ash, and black sand” is/are. Except in some places we have wildflower meadows, cultivated fields, groves of fungi and a land of chasms and canyons and the Marsh of Rot. No clue man, we’re just handwaving that. These are ten mile hexes, but mostly flat, I think? There is a landmark or two on the map, but, really, a better job at landmarks on the map would have been nice, as well as horizon stuff, to get players moving from hex to another with “in the distance you see” type of things. A better version of the map would solve most of my bitching here, maybe with a couple of travel/vision notes on it. 

And then, the nature of a hex crawl. What is its purpose? Dread has you wandering around, looking, essentially, for lairs, which contain loot, so you can level. Wilderlands, being a more platonic example of a classical hexcrawl, contains loot hexes as well as things for the party to exploit, or to get in to trouble with. More of a situational encounters, in that there is a situation to interact with … while you still look for personal gain to exploit. This is going to fall solidly in to the situational category, as you will meet a wide variety of people and encounter a large number of areas to find some gain in, either through looting or through making friends. There are lots of ogres wearing bejeweled crowns to talk to, to reference a favorite situation of mine in other adventures. Stab the potentially friendly dude to get the XP? Make friends? 

And this gets to the reference to The Keep in B2 earlier. Are you willing to murder hobo this place up? That would be a more traditional Wilderlands way to explore. Taking each hex individually and exploiting it. You’re going to need a party in the right mindset. And this succeeds admirably in that. You can rescue people/creatures and do some tasks for others if you are so inclined, and you can put the place to the sword and gather the loot also. 

What is lacking here is an overall plot. And I’m using that word very VERY loosely. Interconnections between the hexes. There are a few of those, but they feel intentional and constructed in a blunt way. 

I want to take this hex as an example: “t’s that time of the year again! Once more, the Flying Broom Acrobatics Competition has gathered next to an antique blue marble amphitheatre rising from the cloudy Mare” The Selenians here are excited about this. But no other Selenian encountered will mention it. There is no overview of a larger situations/situations going on that a DM can sprinkle in here and there to make the place seem more like the realm of intelligent beings that it is. There’s a loose “my enemy is the aphid-lord, please help me kill them”  but no larger … geopolitical context? Not in politics, perse, but in terms of larger situations to embroil yourself in. And no summary, anywhere, to help a DM toss some things in. A page of this would have really helped, and perhaps a little more work on the hexes to help connect them just a bit more. Again, some of this DOES exist, but it feels isolated. So, read a 120 pages and take some notes. 

As noted, I like this vibe/theming a lot. It’s consistent. And it provides interactivity for a party willing to mix things up. As a view of the moon, in terms of theming and encounters, I would be hard pressed to believe someone could do better. The map/mechanics are a let down, and it would be a much stronger product with a little summary of situations to help the DM interconnect things more and/or a few larger situations embedded i a stronger way. 

Experienced murder hobos are gonna have a field day. 

This is $8 at DriveThru. The preview is listed as fourteen pages and although a few are blank pages you do indeed to get see several hexes and get a sense of the style of encounters you are to encounter, both in romanticism and in hex-crawl nature, so, good preview. 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/540802/fly-me-to-the-moon?1892600

A question came to mind during this. How do you handle “hidden depth” of resources? This happened in several places in this, and in other adventures as well. A platonic example here may be some mushroom that, if you kill, you could make their large caps in to umbrellalike things that act as feather falling. How do you telegraph this to the party? I mean when you encounter a note like “The spleens can be used to make an amulet of proof against poison.” Great! How do we know that? A simple DM note to the party, maybe during combat, that they seem to fall slower than they should?