I’m a huge fan of Blades in the Dark, and I was very excited for Deep Cuts, a major expansion designed by the game’s original creator, John Harper, with additional design and writing by Sean Nittner, Pam Punzalan, and James Mendez Hodes. I backed the crowdfunding campaign for the book and, once I held it in my hands, I was immediately sucked in and read the whole thing cover to cover.

Then I settled in and started doing some deep thinking about Deep Cuts.

The book can be roughly divided into two parts: The first adds a bunch of new material to the post-apocalyptic steampunk setting of Doskvol. The second radically revises the rules of the game, effectively offering a sort of do-it-yourself kit for assembling an ersatz second edition of the game.

SETTING

The setting material is a goulash of goodness. Blades in the Dark is, of course, designed to be a modular, sandbox game, and Deep Cuts is basically just expanding the toybox full of goodies that you can drop into your game.

Innovations provide a selection of new equipment, including rare items like a Bolton Autocycle or a Sparkrunner Rig that could easily become the target of a score or an Acquire action. I really like the presentation of most of these items as new technology in the setting itself: Part of the steampunk aesthetic is that technology is marching forward. You can take this stuff and feed it into your campaign one or two items at a time, blaring it as headline news, lightly seasoning it as background detail, or framing it up as a surprising new threat in the middle of a score.

Squeezed into the middle of the Innovations section is a whole new calendar that renames the six months of the year. This really reflects how Deep Cuts is just a semi-random collection of stuff John Harper created for his home games. There’s not a single, unifying theme or thesis here. It’s really just a guy saying, “Hey! Look at this cool thing I made!”

Next up are twenty-five new Factions. If you’ve run multiple campaigns of Blades in the Dark over the past decade (as I have), then these are a welcome breath of fresh air. You and your players may have become intimately familiar with the Crows and Red Sashes, but now you can frame up whole new starting situations with factions like the Ink Rakes, Ironworks Labor, and Rowan House.

My only reservation with these new factions is that so many of them are “infrastructure.” The firefighters, cabbies, and railworkers are an important part of the city, but a multitude of faction goals like “modernize the guild” and “formalize their union” really underline that they’re more bureaucratic functionaries than sources of adventure. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of good meat in here, too, and perhaps inspiration will strike and turn stuff like the fire brigade’s PR campaign into your campaign’s Chinatown.

Also tucked away in this section is a 30-year plan to expand Doskvol, pushing out into the ghostlands and adding four new districts. This is an incredibly cool concept, immediately driving all kinds of internecine strife while also providing a long-term scaffolding for evolving the setting in a game that encourages time-skips and decompressed downtimes.

Heritages and Backgrounds then provide a wealth of new information about the wider world beyond Doskvol, while also giving players new structures for adding depth and color to their characters. Did you come from a family of Blood Cullers or Lockport Scummers? Before you joined the crew, were you a roof runner or a farmhand? Being able to flip through these sections and have concepts like “refugee occultist” or “electrochemist from a family of lightning couriers” leap off the page is delightful. (In fact, the only thing I might do differently is put them on random tables so that players looking for inspiration can just roll-and-combine.)

THE CAMPAIGN CATALYST

SPOILERS FOR THE DEEP CUTS CAMPAIGN FRAME

Wrapping up and also tying together the new setting material is a campaign frame: Fractures in reality have connected Doskvol to another reality. Strangers from this other world are slipping through into Doskvol, bringing with them strange technology and magic. Others are vanishing from this world and passing into the other. Factions are slowly beginning to learn the truth about what’s happening and are secretly moving to take advantage of it.

This is a fun concept with (if you’ll pardon the pun) a lot of dimensions to be explored. Harper weaves it into faction clocks and NPCs, then fleshes it out with mission profiles for every crew type. Combined with the structures for emergent play which are the backbone of Blades in the Dark, this all primes the pump and gives you almost everything you need to introduce the Others and hit the ground running. It is, very literally, a catalyst — something you can inject into your campaign and initiate a run-away chain reaction.

The only problem here is that Harper wants to leave the precise nature of the other world up to the individual GM. He offers several possibilities:

• Victorian Earth
• Mirror Universe
• Demonic World
• Time Travel
• Lady Blackbird

Or any number of other possibilities you might imagine.

On the one hand, it’s great to offer this kind of flexibility. On the other hand, the practical effect is that nothing attached to the catalyst can have any kind of specificity. It, by necessity, ends up as just vague handwaving and a few encouraging, “You’ve got this!” cheers shouted to the GM.

For example, the members of Rowan House are secretly descended from the Others. Does that mean they’re demon-spawn or that their grandmother was from 1810 London? It’s a radical difference. And because the book can’t give you an answer, they end up being… nothing at all. Deep Cuts has to avoid making strong, interesting choices over and over again.

So the catalyst is a really cool idea and it demonstrates the broad outlines of how you could implement big, widespread events like this into your Blades in the Dark campaign. But it also leaves you with all the hard work of making it playable.

SYSTEMS

At this point we transition to the back half of the book, which is loaded up with dozens of changes to the core mechanics of Blades in the Dark. To be clear: Very little of this is new mechanical systems. It’s almost entirely changes to the existing mechanical systems.

Let’s deep cut to the chase here: I did not like this section of the book.

There are a few interesting nuggets buried in here, but the vast majority of the material makes the game significantly worse. If a second edition of Blades in the Dark were published with these changes implemented, I would not play it or run it.

Let’s break down a few examples.

EFFECTS & CONSEQUENCE

Let’s start with something I really liked: On page 101, Deep Cuts includes a unified Effects & Consequences table providing escalating adjectives and mechanical effects for Limited, Standard, Great, and Extreme effects. (For example, a standard effect of Intimidated might be downstepped to a limited effect of Hesitant or upstepped to a great effect of Afraid or an extreme effect of Dominated.)

This table is incredibly useful, particularly for a new GM trying to wrap their noggin around the concepts of position, effect, and consequences.

LOAD

I also liked the expanded system for Load, which not only finesses the handling of exceptionally heavy objects in the system, but also uses Load as a way of managing encumbrance gains and complications during a job.

HARM

John Harper saw that some players in actual play videos would forget to apply the penalties from Harm to their die rolls, so he produced a revised system in which Harm has no inherent mechanical effect. Instead, it becomes a tag system that the GM can choose to invoke to create complications, reduce position/effect, or… apply a penalty to the die roll. When the GM chooses to invoke the condition, the player gets to mark XP.

Ugh.

First, I’m not generally a fan of dissociated tag systems where the reality of the game world only meaningfully exists when someone arbitrarily chooses to “invoke” it.

Second, the response to players being unable to keep track of a dice modifier for their characters should NOT be, “Well, I guess there’s just no choice but to require the GM to keep track of every individual wound suffered by every single PC and also be responsible for invoking them in way that’s fair and effective in some nebulously undefined way.”

This is part of a long trend in RPGs of making the GM responsible for everything that happens at the game table. I strongly feel that the entire hobby needs to break away from laying this immense burden on the GM’s shoulders, not needlessly multiply it.

TRAUMA

This module lets the players mark XP if they use their Trauma in a way that creates a problem or complication for them during play, which is a great way of reinforcing it as a roleplaying prompt.

Trauma is also modified so that it’s no longer permanent, with options given for recovery. This, obviously, blunts the core game’s relentless march to character retirement, which makes it a nice option for groups that don’t want as much character turnover. Another module gives options other than prison time for removing the crew’s Wanted Levels, to similar effect.

Personally, I think there’s a significant drawback here: The original game created a low level of character churn, which systemically encouraged players to create multiple characters. This, in turn, put the narrative focus of the game on the crew, rather than the individual characters, and diversified the player’s experience and interactions with the game world. Moving away from this also means moving away from one of the things that made Blades in the Dark unique and distinguished it from other RPGs.

ACTION

Which brings us to the Action module, in which Deep Cuts overhauls the entire core mechanic of the game.

And, frankly, Harper makes a dog’s dinner of it.

Take Devil’s Bargains, for example. In the original game, the GM could offer a devil’s bargain: The player could gain extra dice on an action roll by accepting an additional cost — collateral damage, Harm, Coin, sacrificing an item, starting a clock, betraying a friend, adding Heat, etc. In Deep Cuts, on the other hand, the term “devil’s bargain” now refers to any time the GM requires the players to make a roll. But also the extra dice thing. And also you can offer a devil’s bargain to let them skip the dice roll entirely.

A useful term of art is turned into a mess, while at the same time trying to position it as a central axis around which the game turns.

This all ties into the new concept of Threat Rolls, which essentially replace action rolls. When using this new core mechanic, instead of setting position and effect, the GM simply sets the negative consequence that will happen on a failed roll and then tells you what action rating to roll: On a 6+ you avoid the consequence. On a 4/5 you suffer a reduced consequence. On a 1-3 you suffer the full consequence.

This whole mechanic essentially waves a white flag at those who want to run Blades in the Dark exactly like D&D (with the DM telling the players what to roll and what the result will be). Good for them, I guess. But, once again… Ugh.

I’m just not interested in Blades in the Dark being turned into generic mush.

DOWNTIME

Deep Cuts also heavily revises the Downtime system. This is more of a mixed bag.

On the one hand, there’s a cool new Debt mechanic and new rules for using Banks. The new guidelines for Heat — which take a base rate based on Tier and then modify it by Target, Chaos, Death, and Evidence — are also great, along with the supporting guidelines for modeling actions to reduce or mitigate the Heat from a job.

There’s a similarly revised set of guidelines for Payoffs. These are also useful, although it’s worth noting that they significantly increase the amount of Coin the PCs will earn per job.

On the other hand, there’s stuff like the new Entanglements system, which is designed to remove random dice rolls. The overall effect, though, seems to greatly flatten the experience: Outcomes become predictable and routine. There are no surprises and no variations from one Downtime to the next. It also removes a lot of the procedural content generation aspects that make Blades in the Dark such a fun sandbox engine.

CONCLUSION

I don’t like Deep Cuts.

I loathe the mechanical changes. They’re disastrous and, honestly, pretty depressing. It’s always sad to see a game heading in the wrong direction, and that’s even more true when the game was something truly special like Blades in the Dark. If the book was limited to its mechanical content, I’d probably give it an F-.

However, almost half of the book is the new setting material, and while that has a few duds and some missteps, there’s a ton of useful stuff in there that will definitely enhance and expand your Blades campaigns. Therefore, with the book only costing $25, I think dedicated fans can just barely justify picking up a copy for the setting material alone.

GRADE: D

Designer: John Harper
Additional Design & Development: Sean Nittner, Pam Punzalan, James Mendez Hodes, Allison Arth, Sharang Biswas, Sidney Icarus

Publisher: Evil Hat
Cost: $25
Page Count: 128

Review Originally Published May 21st, 2001

One of the first scenes in A Knight’s Tale is that of a crowd chanting and stomping their feet to Queen’s We Will Rock You while watching a medieval jousting tournament. Throughout the film – telling the story of a young peasant who dons armor and competes as a knight while falling in love with a princess – rock music will appear again and again, along with other anachronistic elements such as: Geoffrey Chaucer using WWF-style language while acting as the knight’s herald; a medieval dance which transforms itself into a dance party; and a host of modern colloquialisms.

When I was leaving the theater, I heard the couple behind me utter the following:

Girl: I liked it.
Boy: Yeah, but the music wrecked it.
Girl: Yeah.

These two people, my friends, are idiots. The music in A Knight’s Tale does not ruin the movie. To the contrary, the music saves it.

Let’s get one thing straight: From a certain point of view, A Knight’s Tale is cliched, trite, and predictable. From the moment you see the previews you already know everything which is going to happen in this film: The main character is going to succeed brilliantly as a knight, he’s going to win the heart of the princess, the bad guy is going to get beaten, and there’s going to be a happy ending.

End of story. Done deal.

But the minute that crowd starts stamping its feet and chanting We Will Rock You something magical happens: A Knight’s Tale imbues itself with what I can only describe as an ineffable energy – an excitement which permeates every performance, every scene, every moment.

Perhaps the only analogy that really suits is that of the roller coaster: Before you ever get on the roller coaster you know exactly what’s going to happen – you’re going to go up, you’re going to go down (really fast), you’ll probably do a couple of loop-de-loops, and then you’ll end up right back where you started. But you still get on the roller coaster because the ride is fun

The ride in A Knight’s Tale is fun. Sure, you know where you are every step of the way. “Oh,” you say, “This is the scene where the handsome young knight makes a fool of himself in front of the princess, and she is bemused.” Or: “This is the scene where the villain establishes himself as superbly talented, but cruel and heartless.” But at the same time you’re enjoying yourself.

The real key here is that A Knight’s Tale isn’t trying to fool anybody. We Will Rock You is, quite simply, the filmmaker’s way of saying: “Look, you know and I know you’ve seen this plot a dozen times. But, look, I’m not taking myself too seriously here. Kick back, relax, and let’s have fun, okay?”

The couple behind me probably thought this movie was historically accurate except for the bizarre musical numbers. This movie ain’t for them – they don’t get the joke.

And, of course, most of use have already heard from the historians who are so tightly wound up that Shakespeare in Love gave them a aneurysm. This movie ain’t for them, either – they couldn’t get a joke if it can labeled with a disclaimer.

This movie is for people like you and me, who can kick back and enjoy something on its own terms. For us, this movie is pure fun. So go grab yourself a ticket, a bucket of popcorn, and a large soda.

Style: 4
Substance: 4

Director: Brian Helgeland
Writer: Brian Helgeland
Distributor: Sony Pictures

A Knight’s Tale is like a fine wine: Every time you come back to it, you can savor it in new ways.

This movie review came out of the same gestalt as my previous review of The Mummy Returns: I was moving a forum discussion into a review. At the time I considered doing more of these film reviews for RPGNet, but I ended up drifting away from them instead. Checking the Reviews page, it looks like it’s been a hot minute since I did a movie review here at the Alexandrian, too.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Original Review Posted May 21st, 2001

A MOMENT OF SYNCHRONIZATION

To get us off on the right foot, let me explain where I’m coming from right up front:

I like The Mummy. I like it a lot. I think its a great film. It’s unique mixture of pulp adventure, horror, and self-aware satire result in a couple hours of rip-roaring fun that’s tough to beat when you’re just looking to relax and enjoy yourself.

So when I look at The Mummy Returns, realize that I’m looking at it with the eyes of someone who truly enjoyed the first movie.

On the other hand, I know quite a few people who hated the first movie and swear that The Mummy Returns is not only a lot better, but a great movie. Personally, I don’t see it – considering that there is nothing remarkably different about the style, approach, or plot-type of The Mummy Returns — but that’s what they say.

Also note that I have seen the movie twice as I write this.

ANALYSIS

Note: I will be discussing some elements of the plot of The Mummy Returns. Expect minor spoilers for the film’s premise and significant spoilers for the original film.

The Basic Premise: The Mummy Returns takes place several years after the first movie. Evelyn and Rick have gotten married and now have a son. Evelyn’s gotten a little bit tougher, Rick is pretty much the same, and their son is a mixture of their best qualities. Rick and Evelyn discover the “Bracelet of Anubis”, which will awaken the Scorpion King – who (of course) is destined to destroy the world. Meanwhile, a group of evil archaeologists is working to return Imhotep (the titular mummy) to life once more for their own nefarious purposes.

Sequels are widely considered to be the domain of suckdom. This is because they generally fall into one of many traps:

1. If two characters fell in love at the end of the last movie, have them separated and bitter at each other at the beginning of this movie.

This is one of the classic “we have to do the exact same movie all over again” traps. In the first movie you have a love story between these two characters, so now you need to have them hate each other so that you can tell the exact same love story all over again.

The Mummy Returns, fortunately, avoids this problem altogether: As noted, Evelyn and Rick are married – and they are happily married to boot. Stephen Sommers wisely takes the course of “been there, done that” and moves onto fresh territory, choosing to develop the relationship rather than tear it apart and rebuild it.

2. If there was a funny gimmick in the first film, repeat it here. Only make it bigger and more impressive.

Another “we have to do the exact same movie all over again” trap. Unfortunately, Sommers steps right into this one: For example, you’ve got a 360-degree shot of a circle of bookshelves falling like dominoes in the The Mummy; so in The Mummy Returns you’ve got a 360-degree shot of a circle of pillars falling like dominoes. Fortunately, Sommers seems to get these all out of his system in roughly the first fifteen minutes of the film – and from that point on you can settle down and actually enjoy the film in its own right.

Note that Sommers also employs the flip-side of this trap: Using the established elements of the first film to create bigger pay-offs in the sequel. For example, the first film firmly established the threat of the mummy. Rather than making the mistake of trying to rebuild that threat, Sommers simply takes it at face value – and then proceeds to heighten the stakes so that the foundation of the first film is just a place to build from. Basically, Sommers manages to defuse most of the potential bombs by having the characters acknowledge them – using the repeated motifs both for comic relief and to establish (and re-establish) character.

I also don’t have any problems with Imhotep using variations of his powers (most notably, a transplanted sandstorm effect). Those are established powers, and as long as they’re used in the service of the story, it just makes sense.

3. Flashback to scenes from the original film, but show stuff you didn’t see the first time.

Sommers does this – but he makes it work. I won’t say any more because I’ll tread on the film’s central plot points, but suffice it to say that Sommers makes this work better than just about any other film I’ve seen.

4. Bigger, better, more expensive!

Sommers also goes in for this – but he doesn’t fall into the trap of simply repeating the first film with a bigger budget. He uses his bigger budget to tell a much bigger epic – but one which is distinctive from the first in many ways.

The only drawback I detected, upon watching the film a second time, is that several of the larger special effects shots look rushed – and don’t hold up very well to repeated viewings (ie, when you are taking the time to look at the background elements of the shots). The ending, in particular, suffers from this (unfortunately, because the first time through the ending is fantastic). This is unfortunate, considering that the special effects in The Mummy really hold up well to repeated viewings.

THE VERDICT

One last pet peeve: The airship just doesn’t work for me. It does one too many impossible things – and I need to forcibly prop my suspension of disbelief up at several points.

The Mummy Returns avoids the typical pitfalls of a sequel and delivers in a big way: Sommers uses the foundation of the first film to build a terrific second film, rather than simply rehashing what had already come before.

Outside of the repeated gimmicks of the first fifteen minutes and a few special effects shots which aren’t quite up to snuff, The Mummy Returns more than delivers exactly what its supposed to: A fun, pulpy adventure flick.

Have fun.

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Director: Stephen Sommers
Writer: Stephen Sommers
Distributor: Universal Pictures

This review was born out of Discourse™. For some reason, The Mummy Returns became a hot button topic on RPGNet back in 2001 and I used this review to summarize my thoughts. It was an early example of me getting tired of repeating myself in forum discussions and writing something more permanent that I could just point people towards as necessary. This, of course, is basically the entire foundation on which the Alexandrian is built (giving rise to articles like D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations, the Three Clue Rule, and many others).

If memory serves, this review became something of a hot topic in its own right, as people debated whether or not it was “appropriate” for RPGNet to publish non-RPG reviews. This is, oddly, also something that’s been revisited at the Alexandrian. I’ve not infrequently had people tell me they were upset that I’d posted something other than RPG content on the site. In this case, of course, it boils down to the Alexandrian simply being a place for me to post my stuff. All my stuff. A lot of my writing is about RPGs, but from the earliest days of the site there has also been politics, Shakespeare, media reviews, history, and all kinds of stuff.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

Go to Part 1

Airlock is a series of systemless SF horror adventures created by James Floyd Kelly. I grabbed the first four in the series with an eye towards using them in my Mothership campaign.

All of the adventures in the series are two-page trifolds. The presentation is fairly standardized and they’re all designed with white text on a black, star-speckled background. The result is evocative, but not very friendly on the printer ink. (I actually jumped through some hoops to invert the files before printing them.)

(You may notice that the Mothership logo appears on the cover images for these adventures on DriveThruRPG, but they are definitely systemless and do not use Mothership’s mechanics.)

AIRLOCK #1: THE SIGNAL

The PCs are sent to pick up two data technicians from an isolated, long-term data vault being run by the Kars-Sundar corporation. When they arrive, however, they find one of the techs dead and the android survivor acting erratically. If the PCs investigate, they’ll likely discover that Abbi, the android, was corrupted by a distress call received by the station.

The concept is straightforward enough that you should be able to hack a playable experience out of this one, but The Signal is near-fatally flawed by its continuity being all over the place:

• Kars-Sundar is shutting down the long-term data vault… except then it isn’t any more.
• When the PCs find Abbi alive and Steven missing, Abbi tells them her fake story of what happened… unless it’s a significantly different fake story that’s only implied elsewhere in the adventure?
• As the crew arrives, a radiation storm will knock out the comms and prevent Abbi from exposing them to the Signal… but also she plays it for them when she first meets them.
• Is Abbi’s goal to reach the origin point of the Signal or is it just being randomly destructive and murder-y?

This adventure is supposed to have a direct connection to Airlock #2: Distress Call (which ostensibly takes place at the location where the Signal originated), but it turns out this just creates even more weird continuity glitches.

I’d like to say that all of this makes The Signal a kind of grab bag that a GM could pick elements from build their own version of the adventure. But it’s really just a vague, barely usable mess that becomes more confusing the more time you spend trying to unravel it.

What I want from an adventure – whether one I buy or one I prep myself – is rock solid continuity. I want to know exactly what the situation is, so that we can then inject the PCs into that situation and play to find out the result. So this one misses the mark pretty wide for me.

GRADE: D

AIRLOCK #2: DISTRESS CALL

Following some dubious experiments, the AI core of the Fractal Dream has taken over the ship and killed the crew. Unfortunately, this leaves the AI stuck in space, so it sends out a distress signal to lure in some suckers (i.e., the PCs). Now Katie, the AI, needs to take over the PCs’ ship so that it can escape.

…which would make sense if the crew of the Fractal Dream had managed to disable the ship’s engines before Katie took over. But they didn’t. Instead, shutting down the engine is something the PCs are expected to do.

Maybe the intention here is that Katie is just pretending to be stranded to lure in the unwary? But this would seem to contradict other sections of the text and it’s all very vague. In fact, the biggest problem here is that a lot of Distress Call is just waving generally in the direction of an adventure.

This also means that there’s a lot of blather on the page. For example, there’s four different paragraphs scattered around this two-page trifold, each explaining how Katie has broken free of her programming, is no longer bound by her safety restrictions, and so forth.

But because so much space is wasted on blather, it also means what should be the actual meat of the adventure is short-shrifted. For example, there’s a bit where Kelly writes, “Katie has plenty of offensive weapons – shocks via metal surfaces, electrical overloads, temperature control, and many more.” The adventure would be considerably better if a lot of its blather was placed with actually giving Kelly a concrete, fully realized toolset of fun, dynamic actions the GM could deploy in response to the players.

What’s here isn’t really a firm foundation that you could use to build a playable version of the adventure. It’s more like a quick sketch of what a blueprint of that foundation might look like.

Expect to put a lot of work into this one.

GRADE: D-

AIRLOCK #3: CRYO – SWEET SCREAMS

Cryo: Sweet Screams is a really frustrating adventure to use. (Or, at least, try to use.)

First, the scenario is incorrectly sequenced. There’s a section called “Running the Scenario” which is positioned, on the page, to seemingly be read last, but which has essential information necessary to understand large swaths of the rest of the adventure. But, upon closer inspection, it turns out that reading this section first won’t work, either: There’s no correct reading order here. It’s just a big jumble.

The scenario also promises the GM certain tools, only to fail to deliver on them. Take the “Cast of Characters,” for example. It would be super useful to have this authoritative reference for each character in the adventure,  but it turns out that every single character write-up lacks the essential information for the character (e.g., “she’s the bad guy”).

Once I untangled the adventure, though, what I discovered was something that seemed hopelessly overwrought:

The PCs are sent to intercept and redirect a medical intervention ship whose comms array has been damaged.

But that’s not all! The corporation is also reprogramming the ship’s android to get up to mischief, and that obviously goes awry and causes the android to start acting erratic (as androids are wont to do).

But that’s not all! The android isn’t the real bad guy. The real bad guy is the human member of the crew, who has ALSO been infected with a (biological) virus that makes her a psychopath.

Even if you want to roll with this “it’s viruses rewriting personalities all the way down” premise, though, Cryo: Sweet Screams has deeper issues.

The crux of the adventure is, “Durden will slowly exhibit strange behavior once he wakes.” But what is this strange behavior? No idea.

Later, if the PCs watch the news and learn that the vaccination program at the ship’s last stop was botched, “this news will trigger actions in Durden and Talisha.” What are these actions? No idea.

Furthermore, the medical ship’s shuttle “will have some issues that need to be addressed by the crew.” This is, in fact, stated no less than three times across the six panels of the adventure, and the idea is that this will give the PCs something to do while the unspecified “strange behaviors” are happening.

But what are these tasks the PCs are supposed to do?

No idea.

GRADE: F

AIRLOCK #4: DEAD WEIGHT

I’ve concluded, after reviewing dozens of these adventures, that the trifold format is a tricky one. Creators really don’t seem to understand how to organize their information. The front page is often used as if it’s back cover text (which is kind of waste of space in a format where space is quite limited), and then, once you flip open the trifold, it’s a complete crapshoot which order you’re supposed to read the other five panels in.

Some creators seem to have decided to just wave the white flag and simply not include any sort of orientation for the GM. For example, no matter where you begin reading Dead Weight, the text will always just blithely assume that you know what a GH3 is.

If you, too, are wondering what they are, after trawling the text and reassembling the scattered bits of information thrown around with wild abandon, I’m fairly certain the answer boils down to, “A large tribble with legs and teeth.” The GH3s breed incredibly rapidly, and will quickly overwhelm any station or ship they find themselves on, rending every bit of flesh they can find along the way.

As another example of the white flag being waved, take the NPC named Mitchell. In one section he’s been placed in cryosleep. In another, there’s an offhand comment to him “having his own programming.” From this, I assume you’re supposed to conclude that he’s an android, but the adventure never actually says that. There’s a lot of this kind of stuff scattered around the text, creating countless booby traps and lacunae.

Taking a step back, the scenario hook for Dead Weight is that the PCs detect an intermittent signal coming from an abandoned space station which has drifted into deep space. When they board the station to claim the salvage rights, they awaken the GH3s, which have survived in a state of advanced hibernation.

The core premise seems to be that the PCs will conclude that it’s impossible to kill the GH3s faster than the GH3s reproduce! They’ll have no choice but to flee and/or blow up the station!

… except the reality is that the GH3s double their numbers every 8 hours. That’s quite aggressive for a biosphere, but rather less terrifying to a PC with a flamethrower. (In contrast, an ochre jelly in D&D is terrifying because it can split multiple times per round. If it, like the GH3s, split once every 8 hours, it would be considerably less intimidating.)

In fact, this is another example where it’s difficult to understand how the time scale of this adventure is supposed to work at the table: What are the PC supposedly doing during the hours and hours of time the GH3s need to become a meaningful threat? This is something you might be able to solve by prepping some time-consuming guidelines for how long it takes to effectively salvage the station – e.g., repairing thrusters takes 4 hours, etc. – but you’re really swimming uphill at this point to force this adventure into a satisfying experience at the table.

GRADE: D

Note: This adventure should not be confused with Dead Weight, an unrelated Mothership adventure written by Norgad, which I previously reviewed.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

There are a lot of problems with these Airlock adventures, and they’re pretty consistent throughout the series. The impression I’m mostly left with is that all of them are more like the concept of an adventure, each remaining, sadly, undeveloped in any meaningful way while the poorly organized trifold format is instead filled with vague, often directionless and repetitive blather.

I was really hoping that these were going to be great. I was very excited when I found the series, which has almost a dozen installments. I thought I’d found something that would keep my Mothership open table supplied with adventures for potentially months.

Unfortunately, I found these first four installments to be essentially unusable and I’ve given up on the series.

Go to Part 1

TURN BACK THE CLOCK

Turn Back the Clock by Kyle Tam is a thinly disguised roman a clef of Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The PCs receive a distress call sent from a ship thought lost for centuries: Mankind’s first expedition to Jupiter. It’s been knocked loose in time by the presence of the Star Child Flux Child. The original crew is experiencing Annihilation-like transformations, and if the PCs aren’t careful, they’ll similarly become lost in space and time.

Conceptually this seems really interesting. Unfortunately, it’s the execution that kills this one.

First, imagine adapting 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you aren’t really sure how to do that, so the structure of your adventure is just punching the Flux Child in the head until it’s “felled,” freeing you from the ship. But, also, that’s basically impossible because the Flux Child does 5d100 damage, has 20 maximum Wounds, and you forgot to include a Health score.

Second, I frequently found the text confusing. For example, “the crew is not technically in danger,” but they were currently fusing with the furniture and/or have pieces of their bodies falling off, plus they will shortly cease to be sentient. Hmm. I feel like I have a radically definition of “danger” than the author here.

Finally, there are more fundamental design problems here. For example, a core structure of the adventure is, “The longer you spend onboard the Charon, the more of yourself you lose. Each day, make a Sanity save or else roll on the [Distortion Table].” But the adventure is keyed as a pointcrawl with three briefly described areas.

This is a problem I frequently see in published adventures. I’ve discussed a similar problem in Running Background Adventures: There’s simply not enough narrative material to fill the time necessary to trigger this structure.

“Clarke’s Star Child does body horror” is a cool concept. But, sadly, there’s nothing on the page in Turn Back the Clock that I would actually use in bringing that concept to the table. This is a disappointing miss for me.

GRADE: F

The PCs are hired to pick up a secretive shipment from an automated shuttle. The only problem? An experimental combat drone – the Synthetic Predator 1^st Design, 3^rd Revision (or SP-1D3R) – has stowed away on the shuttle to escape the facility where it was being tested. Desperate for energy, it begins draining the power systems on the PCs’ ship.

This is another good concept with shaky execution.

Designer Nikolaj Gedionsen describes the adventure as “a claustrophobic game of cat-and-mouse aboard a failing ship where an intelligent machine predator turns the crew’s familiar home against them.” Which sounds great, but immediately runs face-first into a ship map that’s entirely linear. It’s hard to play cat-and-mouse on a balance beam.

The Plea also frequently relies on overriding or ignoring the core rules of Mothership. In my experience, this sort of thing doesn’t work because the players get frustrated at the bullshit “threat” that’s being arbitrarily thrust upon them.

The adventure includes its own mechanical superstructure in the form of a Power Drain system (modeling and tracking the SP-1D3R taking over and depleting the ship’s systems), but I have a difficult time believing it was ever playtested. The core of the system boils down to:

1. Start with 12 Power.
2. -1 Power when the drone connects to a system.
3. If the PCs power down a section, it can’t be Power Drained and also save 1 Power per turn.

The math just fundamentally doesn’t math here. Nonetheless, I’ve done several dry runs of the system using various interpretations of what it might have meant (did you mean -1 Power per turn? can the drone be attached to multiple systems simultaneously?) and it just doesn’t work.

All of these issues, I think, explains why a significant chunk of this adventure is a section called “The Vibe.” Ultimately, that’s a pretty good summary of The Plea: It’s a concept running almost entirely on vibes.

GRADE: D

TESSERACT

Pyry Qvick’s Tesseract initially threw me for a loop because (a) it’s called Tesseract (a cube extended into fourth-dimensional space in the same that a square is extended to become a cube in three-dimensional space) and (b) it features a bunch of non-Euclidean cube-shaped rooms. So my brain kept trying to make the adventure work as an actual tesseract… but it isn’t.

Which is OK. I mention this only in the hope it might help you avoid the same pitfall and get straight to appreciating just how cool this adventure is.

Things kick off in Tesseract like this:

Your ship passes a massive metallic cube. After a moment, your ship passes by a massive metallic cube. Again and again. Your navigation shows no progress made.

On the cube’s surface, a hatch opens.

Crawling inside the cube, you discover a dozen of the aforementioned cube-shaped rooms, all arranged on a map that makes it easy for you to run as the GM, but devilishly complex for the players to unravel. (If they ever do.)

The rooms themselves are consistently themed, but each one is varied and intriguing. In addition to the navigational puzzle of the non-Euclidean map, exploring the cube is also deeply satisfying because the rooms present an interconnected mystery that allows the players to slowly piece together what’s happening here (and, hopefully, undo it). This is very much the adventure that Turn Black the Clock wanted to be, but dropped the ball on.

Season to taste with the creepy cube-droids which infest the place.

The net result is a creepy, well-designed adventure I am sure will leave your players disoriented, paranoid, and thrilled.

GRADE: B-

Rather than the trifold modules we’ve been reviewing, Dead Weight by Norgad is a twelve-page micro-adventure.

The PCs are crewing a cargo ship when an alien artifact in one of the ship’s holds activates, causing all dead bodies in the area to rapidly accelerate towards. It starts with all the meat in the ship’s galley, which rips through the crew currently eating dinner. The dead bodies of the crew, of course, are added to the mass of meat and bone, which rip through the hull of the ship, causing lockdown and atmospheric pressure doors to trigger throughout the ship.

As the investigation and emergency repairs begin, a crew member mortally injured in the initial incident dies, inflicting more damage… and that’s when corpses start arriving from outside the ship. Can the PCs figure out what’s going on and jettison the artifact before the asteroid the artifact was taken from arrives and annihilates the ship?

The concept of Dead Weight is elegant in its horrific simplicity. The execution is simply beautiful.

Just look at this map:

(click for larger image)

Each of the vectors here show the trajectory of damage from the scripted meat projectiles, and you can see how simple it would be to draw your own vectors and immediately understand the resulting damage as events play out at the table. This map is simply fantastic as both a reference and a structure of play, and Norgad has also included player handouts (without the GM-only info) that you can print out for the players.

The ship key itself is equally polished: Nested descriptions make it easy to master the adventure, while creating satisfying layers of investigation for the PCs. Clearly delineated post-incident shifts in the room descriptions make it a breeze to keep the potentially complicated continuity and dynamic environments of the adventure crystal clear in play.

I have only one quibble with the whole package: It’s not immediately apparent why the adventure track ends with the asteroid 98-Gobstopper crashing into the ships. Careful reading suggests that the asteroid – composed of “banded layers of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and phosphorus, with some other trace elements” – is actually the compacted remains of the countless dead attracted by the artifact at the asteroid’s core. But it would have been friendlier to the GM to just spell that out.

This quibble, of course, scarcely detracts from the whole package. Dead Weight went straight into my open table rotation. I adore it.

Note: When you run your own session of Dead Weight, I recommend taking the time to frame up and play through more of the back story that sets up the First Projectile incident. These events are well detailed in the text of the module, but I think it will work better if the players actually experience those events for themselves and then see the payoff.

GRADE: B+

Go to Part 5: Airlock Series