{"id":9102,"date":"2024-04-13T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-13T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9102"},"modified":"2024-04-03T10:40:57","modified_gmt":"2024-04-03T14:40:57","slug":"awake-in-the-night-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9102","title":{"rendered":"Awake in the Night Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Ben Gibson\nColdlight Press\nStarfinder\nLevel 3 (ending at level 6)\n\n\n> Why am I here? Where is here?\n\n>Power core lost. They took it. They took my eyes.\n\n>Agents to sleep. Batteries low, shutting down.\n\n>Drifting now. Listen. Wait.\n\n>Awake in the night sky I wait for those who will follow.\n\n>I will be free.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s got that Ben Gibson WIDE scope, which also means it\u2019s more of an abstracted outline than reveling in the specifics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve 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\u2019re 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 \u2026 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SciFI is hard, I think. Everyone is running around with level 36 wizard abilities. ANything and everything could happen. And the worlds seldom feel \u201clived in.\u201d Let\u2019s 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\u2019s\/rivals and the final dungeoncrawl in the derelict ship \u2026 which gets a traditional room\/key but isn\u2019t going to win any awards for \u201cAvoiding Abstracted & Generic SciFi Ship Descriptions.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first act is the infiltration of an abandoned dicking pad section of a colossal space station. It\u2019s 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\u2019s some variety here. That\u2019s 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\u201ds 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 \u201cair gapped\u201d ad \u201ccompromised\u201d 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 \u2026 which is less description and more \u201chere whats going on in the room thats weird.\u201d Note, again, how I summarized this as an outline lacking specificity? \u201cA simple conference room, on the whiteboard was written \u201cWhat is going on with them?\u201d , erased, but still barely visible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The second act is full of factions, on a planet. You\u2019re 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\u2019s VERY loose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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: \u201cLogistics 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\u2019s connections to the mainframe.\u201d So, not much description and a focus on whats going on. Along with some wrong cross-references here and there, which are frustrating. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s an abstracted SciFI adventure. Aren’t’ ALL scifi adventures abstracted? Is it possible to write one that is not? I shouldn\u2019t review them until I figure out how to review them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/preview.drivethrurpg.com\/en\/product\/359726\/awake-in-the-night-sky?1892600<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/awake.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9102"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9104,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9102\/revisions\/9104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}