Chipped Saucer

By Daniel Hicks
Self Published
ACKS
Levels 4-6

Warning! Barrier Peaks is my all time nostalgia favorite. 

A spaceship was transferring dangerous exotic lifeforms for sale at another point. A defective containment unit released one avid Hund, which quickly killed those present and set about freeing its kin. The acid hounds killed or fatally wounded every passenger and member of the ship’s crew in short order. Unfortunately, this occurred while the pilot was making manual course corrections in the outskirts of this solar system and with the autopilot disabled the ship drifted off course for weeks. More recently, she ship has crash-landed, and

presents a hazard if approached.

This five page adventure uses about two pages to present about thirteen rooms in a crashed flying saucer. Basic descriptions, simple map, not much beyond the most basic of encounter structures. And, of course, too small for its theme. But, hey, it’s got more rooms than pages, so there’s that!

A classic flying saucer has crash landed, so imagine a circle layout, about a dozen rooms along the edge and one or to interior, with a circle hallway in between. It crashed because some Acid Hounds got loose. You’ll find all seven of those 3 HD dudes in the first room you encounter after entering through the hole in the side, the cargo hold. At some point you’ll also face a nanite cloud in one of the rooms. This is the extent of your actual challenges. Otherwise you find the door bracelets and collect the blasters and auto-heal patches. IE: the usual. There are more than a few missed opportunities here, like “The ship’s main reactor (‘captive-star’), centrally

located, has burned out, and cannot be restarted without the aid of a similar vessel.” You can self-destruct the ship from here, and you can loot some platinum wiring. But, no word on what looting the captive-star is/does. Sad. No green slime in the shower. No malfunctioning auto-doc. There’s just nothing involved at all going on in this. I mean, even combat, after that first room, except for the nanite swarm. You gotta have some shit to fuck around with in an adventure. Grave tubes. The jungle level. Wait, I’m describing Barrier Peaks….

These small page count adventures have a real problem with matching their theming to their size. The Lost City of Infintium! Two pages. The Endless Maze of Nilhelm. Four pages. If you’re going to theme your adventure to something that really needs more pages and has endless possibilities then you really need to make it more than the five pages, for example, that this one is. 

Descriptions here are sparse. “Shower’ A small area for changing clothes sits outside the two shower stalls. Two dials are in each shower: one to turn it one and off, one for water temperature (a range from freezing to brisk).” There are also some general notes in the beginning about lighting and doors, but no real evocative descriptions are present, even for the Acid Hounds.”Acid hounds have pale green skin and a tripartite jaw.” Ok. Drooling acid? Foaming at the mouth? Mangy fur? Allof the descriptions are very businesslike with little to inspire here.

The map, here, is not great. It’s black on white. The room numbers are in a light blue that doesn’t stand out real great. But also there are other notations on the map. B, P, b, c, 3C, C. These are quite dense, nothing which kind of bracelet gets you through a door, a sub-ro number and the location of bodies. Yes, you can figure it out. No, it is not the most cognitively easy thing you’ll ever look at. If you can light blue the font then the door codes could be in a different color, and if you can put symbols on the map then you can put body outlines on the map, all of which is easier to look at tell what is going on at a glance. 

There’s not really much here of interest, if anything.

This is Pay What You Want at DriveThru with a suggested price of $2.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/558966/chipped-saucer?1892600