By Ben Gibson Coldlight Press Starfinder Level 3 (ending at level 6) > Why am I here? Where is here? >Power core lost. They took it. They took my eyes. >Agents to sleep. Batteries low, shutting down. >Drifting now. Listen. Wait. >Awake in the night sky I wait for those who will follow. >I will be free.
This 24 page Space /SciFi adventure features the party tracking down information and then exploring a derelict ship now controlled by an emerging AI. It’s got that Ben Gibson WIDE scope, which also means it’s more of an abstracted outline than reveling in the specifics.
We’ve got this ship that an ai has emerged on. Other ships shoot at it and abandon it, lifeless. An escape pod gets loose with a dude in it that is devoted to the AI, taken over by it. He lands on a planet. A hermit there find his pod, and him. He hides the pod, recognizing the AI threat, and turns the dude, a clone, over to his clone family that squats in a portion of a space station a couple of systems away. You’re hired to infiltrate the dock the clones are squatting in to find the location of the life pod, to track it back to the location of the derelict ship … to salvage it. Or let the AI free. Or bow up the ship. There are several people with agendas that you could get involved with. I think we can all see the three acts here: space station dock, life pod planet, and derelict ship. And it makes sense then, I guess, that you are popping from level three to level six at the end of the adventure.
SciFI is hard, I think. Everyone is running around with level 36 wizard abilities. ANything and everything could happen. And the worlds seldom feel “lived in.” Let’s add in to this the scope of a Ben Gibson adventure. He tends to write some rather sandboxy things, with general places and situations described and then the DM left to take the party through them, using the bits and pieces provided as some guidelines for the adventure. This leaves specifics in the lurch, for most parts of it other than major NPC’s/rivals and the final dungeoncrawl in the derelict ship … which gets a traditional room/key but isn’t going to win any awards for “Avoiding Abstracted & Generic SciFi Ship Descriptions.”
The first act is the infiltration of an abandoned dicking pad section of a colossal space station. It’s controlled by The Eddies, a clone family that look and think like Eddy. Very nice detail there; scifi elements, a but of humor, a bit of advantage. Good Job. This might be similar to a typical raid mission in D&D. You try to find a way in. This is a little handwavey for me in this adventure. Several options are mentioned but I think I continue to butt up against the possibilities inherent in SciFi. Once inside you bribe people or avoid bots or fight them and the clones until you find the information you are looking for. Which could be from the compromised clone. You could also get hired by another clone to find/do something about the derelict ship. Descriptions are on the terse side and there’s some variety here. That’s going to be a theme throughout the adventure; good variety. People to talk to, competing agendas, and sometimes a green slime in a biohazard locked room or a mini black hole in the physics test lab. The third act is going to be a variation on the first one. Instead of a raid you are, possibly, exploring the derelict ship. More NPC”s inthe forms of frozen crew or androids, along with booths and hostile fungi. With a hostile AI always lurking, wanting to get back to your ship and out to the wider galaxy. A fact that you may not be aware of. Again, good variety of interactivity, with some “air gapped” ad “compromised” computers providing some puzzle-like things in order to get the ship back online, if you wish. And, again, a kind of cold scifi room description … which is less description and more “here whats going on in the room thats weird.” Note, again, how I summarized this as an outline lacking specificity? “A simple conference room, on the whiteboard was written “What is going on with them?” , erased, but still barely visible.”
The second act is full of factions, on a planet. You’re there looking for the clones life pod, hidden by a hermit. There are a couple of settlements and, like, six factions? All looking for the life pod. And some willing to gut you and some willing to be truthful with you. This is a VERY handwavey section, with the DM needing to improvise almost everything, from locations to possabilities. The factions make it fun, but, also, it’s VERY loose.
Ben does a pretty good job with writing tersely, when it comes to the actual play parts. You get some longer descriptions for things like factions, to explain motivations and how to play them. And there is almost no specifics. A typical room descrciption might be: “Logistics Office: This tight office has a single dead man within; Jerl Knobbs, the chief bosun, was hiding from the fighting outside before the missile strikes and resultant vacuum breach. He suffocated to death, not before severing the office’s connections to the mainframe.” So, not much description and a focus on whats going on. Along with some wrong cross-references here and there, which are frustrating.
It’s an abstracted SciFI adventure. Aren’t’ ALL scifi adventures abstracted? Is it possible to write one that is not? I shouldn’t review them until I figure out how to review them.
This is $4.60 at DriveThru. The preview is nine pages, more than enough to get a sense of the general and room writing styles.
https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/359726/awake-in-the-night-sky?1892600
The first act is the infiltration of an abandoned dicking pad section of a colossal space station”
So it’s a 70s style sci-fi space station with the requisite orgy room. Venger would be proud.
“…with the DM needing to improvise almost everything, from locations…”
In the past I’d have been hyped to run this based on the rest of the review. I have run otherwise good adventures that required me to come up with my own locations and dungeons. (Qelong being the worst offender – I got a whole good campaign out of it, but why were major locations keyed on the hex map without being worked up? Everyone who ran it must have duplicated the work; or else they didn’t run it, which would explain the gap between positive reviews and actual play reports.)
But, having done it in the past its a deal breaker now. I’ve got other options.
I wonder how many of these unfinished adventures are written by GMs who are good at improv, or at least flatter themselves that they’re good. I was looking into no-prep GMing years ago, and the unstated, Step 2: ??? before “Profit!” seemed to be “just be good at improv lol.” But no direct discussion of the benefits of prep and how to approximate them. I can imagine someone who GMs only by the seat of their pants sitting down to write an adventure, doing only what I would call the easy part, and calling it done.
With the final spaceship worked up it sounds like this isn’t the worst offender. But it reminded me of the ones I’ve ran that I’m not revisiting.
I’d recommend looking at the preview. Both the docking spire and the derelict ship are fully worked up, the asteroid is mapped too although if you really want to come up with added bases that would be yours I guess. It’s why I make solid previews.
It has to be the tersest writing ever to fit 3 level ups into a 24 page adventure. That’s Keep on the Borderlands level of density.
That or most stuff is “skipped” but assumed to give a lot of XP.