{"id":9109,"date":"2024-04-17T07:11:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-17T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9109"},"modified":"2024-04-02T17:43:33","modified_gmt":"2024-04-02T21:43:33","slug":"the-lost-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/?p=9109","title":{"rendered":"The Lost Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Christina Mitchell\nNASA\nGeneric\/Universal\/Fantasy\nLevels 7-10?<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth\u2019s timeline. Only an ambitious crew of adventurers can uncover what was lost. Are you up to the challenge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This 44 page free adventure from NASA details the hunt for a missing team of researchers. It rivals a Bloodymage adventure for lack of comprehension. Yes, it\u2019s THAT bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I try to start reviews by saying something good about an adventure. No matter how slight, they usually have something that stands out. An encounter. A nice NPC. Something. Not this one. There is nothing here. Well, ok, there are some appendices on vacuum energy and red\/blue shifts that you could  read instead of a wikipedia article. Other than that \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The framing here is that you are people at Goddard, and make D&D characters, and are then transported in to those characters in a fantasy world. \u201cIt\u2019s the Dungeons & Dragons ride!\u201d Once in your new fantasy world city, you find out some people are missing. And get escorted by the town guard to their boss who wants you to find them. You then do the usual things or asking around, getting in a bar fight, and going to some ruins to follow an elf .. who turns out to be a green dragon. Yeah, you found the researchers! Do you want to stay in the new world or go back home?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The issues here are tha the designers don\u2019t know anything about designing a D&D adventure. I\u2019m not even talking about the \u201cdesign\u201d of the adventure, the plot, and how the dungeon foreshadows and such. I think I\u2019m pretty fucking generous in those regards You\u2019re not gonna make it in to The Best with a generic adventure, but I\u2019m not going to hate my fucking life. This thing, though \u2026 oh boy. The basic design mistakes, formatting an adventure and what to include and why, the lack of knowledge here is, I assert, with our dear departed mage of blood. And, even when this adventure puts critical blocking elements behind skill checks, I\u2019m not going to bitch about that. Should you do it? No. Does it show a fundamental lack of knowledge? Yes. But the DM makes the show go on. No, we\u2019re gonna ignore ALL of those, and every other bad design decision like that. Fuck the interactivity. Fuck the evocative text. No, we\u2019re giving this an adventure a pass on ALL of those. Yeah, none of them are present, but let\u2019s ignore all of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You know what? I\u2019m even going to ignore the NPC descriptions. Their long backstories. The trivialities that don\u2019t matter. Their blandness. The mountains of text used to describe them. No. Let\u2019s instead focus on one thing and one thing only in this one: wall of text.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This thing is absolutely ABSURD when it comes to wall of text. You know even the bible, in that whole begatting section, it has breaks. Some genius in the 1500\u2019s stuck in chapters and verse to break up the text. But this thing? Yeeesh ..<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, it has some paragraph breaks. And some offset boxes. But, man, a single page may have, like four paragraphs on it. And those paragraphs ARE the adventure. They are full of \u201cif the players do this then this happens\u201d and long sections of skill checks and combats, with little to no bolding or other ways to break up the text and draw the DMs attention to things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, you\u2019re gonna go download this and look at it and say \u201cBrycy boy, this doesn\u2019t look so bad!\u201d and you\u2019d be right. It doesn\u2019t LOOK bad. But I would assert that the worst formatting CoC or Vampire adventure is more comprehensible than the text in this thing. I find it hard to believe ANYONE ran this adventure from this text. Took the booklet, without having written it or worked it in layout for two weeks, and sat down to read it to try and run a game from it. And I\u2019m not talking on the fly. Just, read it to eventually run a game from it. I can\u2019t believe that ANYONE did that. Look man, I know the OSR is on the forefront of this shit, but this is, I don\u2019t know, a throwback doesn\u2019t even come in to play. It\u2019s SOmekind of throwback formatting\/wall of text combined with layout that doesn\u2019t know what its purpose it combined with the style and substance (or lack thereof) that tends to be in the forefront of modern playstyles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And no maps. Oh no. Instead we get things like this \u201cThe staircase, if your players choose to descend, goes down to a tunnel below that is far more easily passable than the area they just came through. As they reach the base of the stairs there is a landing with two arches, one is covered with a wall of blue flame and the other a wall of red flame.\u201d Obviously a red shift\/blue shift puzzle. But I swear to god, no map and attempting to describe the shit in text? \u201cIf they choose to descend.\u201d No, they sit the fuck around with their thumbs up their asses. \u201cIf the characters choose to breathe.\u201d might as well be the text. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I understand that certain things have to be done. I assume we\u2019re targeting new people, and such, and thus we can allow some of that \u201cgo to section B\u201d stuff. But the rest? Absolutely not. When people bitch that adventures are hard to run they are talking about shit like this. The purpose of an adventure is to be run and if people look at this and don\u2019t even try then it is failing to enable its primary purpose. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s free, from NASA:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/mission\/hubble\/multimedia\/online-activities\/the-lost-universe\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Christina Mitchell NASA Generic\/Universal\/Fantasy Levels 7-10? A dark mystery has settled over the city of Aldastron on the rogue planet of Exlaris. Researchers dedicated to studying the cosmos have disappeared, and the Hubble Space Telescope has vanished from Earth\u2019s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-do-not-buy-ever-2","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/lost.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109","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=9109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9111,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9109\/revisions\/9111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tenfootpole.org\/ironspike\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}