Galactic Funtime
Author: Shawn Metcalf
System: Stars Without Number
Party Size: 4-6
Level Range: 3-5
The Galactic Funtime entertainment center thrived, separating people from their money and replacing it with fun. Of particular note was their Build-A-Spider center, where sophisticated and underregulated genetic assembling technologies allowed for the creation of living pets resembling Soupy Spider, Galactic Funtime’s corporate mascot. These pets were harmless, unable to reproduce, and designed to perish within a week. Sadly, the miniature nuclear reactor the center had installed to handle the energy requirements started to leak without regular maintenance. The genetic material used mutated, and began producing spiders that were dangerous, had normal life spans, and could reproduce. Before the machinery broke down completely, spiders with more severe mutations were created. Now the building is overrun with them.
This reminds me of the setup for a Paranoia adventure. I loved that game's hilarious take on a post-apocalyptic world, but unless you had the right set of smart players and a DM with a well-tuned sense of humor and great pun delivery, much of the game's comedic value fell flat or went unappreciated. Jim Holloway's art was kind of perfect for it, too. I'm already rubbing my hands in anticipation.
Up front, I know nothing about the adventure system, Stars Without Number, but I have read good things and I am a fan of sci-fi RPGs (even though I've rarely had the opportunity to play in one). As my take is severely limited, I'm only dealing with the narrative elements for this review and will leave any rules or procedural questions alone.
A spacefaring party of player-characters lands on a planet, in the parking lot of a mysteriously illuminated facility surrounded by kilometers of darkened and destroyed city ruins. The facility turns out to be one of the franchise locations of a former (and popular) retail entertainment company. Characters may recall the company's soup-loving mascot and know that the kitschy memorabilia once sold here would be worth something to a collector if any can be found.
Hmm...the cars in the parking lot are all covered in webs. Weird, so is the facility. And hey, the Geiger counter is going off...
Surprise! Swarms of genetically-engineered giant spiders roam the site. Moving through the webs cuts party movement in half and warns the spiders, allowing them to zero in on the party's location. The boss-monster is Soapy Spider, Soupy's evil twin—a colossal spider, 6m across! He can control spiders and has average human IQ, though no language or cultural knowledge.
The interior is pretty much what you'd expect from a high-profile retail entertainment venue, though deteriorating and covered in webs. There's a restaurant and bar area, including the kitchen. The bar has a laser pistol under the counter. (Nice!) In the back, a gigantic videogame arcade dominates the rest of the interior. The arcade is lit up because Soapy Spider likes the bright colors and flashing lights. (Cute.)
Most of the games will be unfamiliar to the PCs, but if any player asks ’Do they have Pac-Man?’ or the like the answer is always yes, with 3000 appended. Pac-Man 3000. Donkey Kong 3000. Street Fighter II 3000.
This was a stupid, stupid joke, but it made me laugh. It's what the best Paranoia modules were good at doing, though they could never be quite this on-the-nose with product placement. I appreciated the dumb joke, and I know both groups of my players would find it amusing and insist on playing. Good use of meta to show your players a fun time.
The spiders here are smart and don't just attack players outright. They wait for someone to stray, or get distracted (perhaps by standing around playing video games). That's when they strike. Simple, effective order of battle delivered in two lines.
In the Build-a-Spider room, the characters can dismantle and remove valuable genetic engineering equipment, highly illegal but worth up to 25,000 credits to the right customer. Very cool if the party is willing to risk getting caught by the authorities.
Soapy Spider lurks in the generator room, where the nuclear reactor is leaking. If the players can figure out how to communicate with Soapy, they discover he just wants to be "free" of the facility, but his order-of-battle says if he is badly injured he will "flee." According to the map, he can leave the generator room through holes in the walls, and other collapsed walls allow him to leave the main building, so I'm not sure about the conflicting instructions or the idea that he is trapped somehow. Probably the characters should just go ahead and kill him.
The whole place is mildly radioactive (the generator room, more so). The party won't want to stick around, but if they kill all the spiders and load up all the merch, they'll have some decent booty in their hold. Treasure is in the form of things. Plastic credit chips with no value off-world except as a collectible (but no guidance on how much the party could get for selling them). Spare parts from the HVAC system. Highly-degraded but still edible foodstuffs (1.5 metric tons of it).
Boxes of Soupy Spider swag, old game consoles, and the genetic engineering equipment are the only things given monetary values; all the other item values are up to the referee I guess. Tech-wise, in addition to the laser pistol under the bar, there's a laser rifle (sans battery) in the warehouse.
_____
1) THEME
(How strong/consistent is the adventure's premise, flavor, and setting?)
The core concept here is a creepy spider's lair—a fairly one-note lair, at that. That's cool, though. I'm a fan of such things. The contrasting subtext of the place—a bright, colorful Build-a-Bear-style, nauseatingly-vapid "retail experience"—is what I was hoping would shine through here and make it really pop. There are little tastes of that sprinkled here and there throughout the writeup, but I want more.
Just little things to amplify the flavor, give the party more things to see and do, and provide a thematic counterpoint to the terrifying monsters that live here. Give the restaurant and bar humorous names; add some crazy robots roaming around or an animatronic country-spider jamboree; include more desiccated bodies and cocoons filled with skeletal kids in party hats; have the build-a-spider equipment go haywire and start adding extra spider limbs and spinnerets to the PCs. Stuff like that. Put the characters at the mercy of an insane palace of fun.
This adventure site isn't for everyone's tastes, but I don't mind goofball stuff in a gritty sci-fi setting. This would be a great site for a Metamorphosis Alpha or Gamma World game. I can tell from the writing that the author has a good sense of humor, and this concept begs to just go balls-out and embrace the ridiculousness. I'm giving points for going there, but I'm taking points for not diving in headfirst.
SCORE (THEME) = 3 / 5
_____
2) MAP AND ART
(How complex/useful is the map and/or art? How easy is it to grok the layout?)
I'm not certain why the arcade area is colored in medium green (perhaps to indicate the lighted area, though the rooms in the southeast corner are also described as lit, but aren't green). I would have shaded the darkened areas instead and left the lit areas white. Much more intuitive that way, and easier on your printer.
The map is perfect, just please tone down the grid.
SCORE (MAP/ART) = 4 / 5
_____
3) CLARITY
(How easy is the writeup to read/parse quickly? How well does the information flow?)
The text is in single-column format, left-aligned with wide margins on all sides. There is good line spacing between main sections but paragraphs are not spaced. Indentations help break up the sometimes dense text sections. Titles are given a larger font, and overall its easy to figure out where you are in the document (though it can take a moment or two to locate a specific detail in a paragraph that stretches across the width of the entire page).
Sentences are concisely-written and the right details are conferred. There are some issues with information order, but nothing egregious (for example, move the spider stat block and order-of-battle to the end so that the writeup moves immediately from the site's Background section into the exterior details section in which the PCs enter the scene).
SCORE (CLARITY) = 3 / 5
_____
4) INTERACTIVITY/INNOVATION
(How well does the adventure use the rules to create interesting play?)
Here's where boosting the theme would have helped the score in this category. Other than the chance to play some vid'ya games (for which there are no mechanics or benefit except for the brief injection of humor), the only thing to be done here is fighting the spiders.
Fixing the leaking reactor is an interaction, I suppose, but it carries no tangible benefits to the party. Salvaging parts from broken equipment is sort-of something, but it counts more as looting and doesn't require the party to do anything special to acquire the parts other than take the time. If you squint hard enough, you can add the opportunity to parlay with Soapy Spider as a possible interaction, but no guidance or contrivance to accomplish this is provided in the text.
This site is just begging for a few things to do.
SCORE (INTERACTIVITY) = 1 / 5
_____
5) MODULARITY
(How easy would it be to drop/integrate the adventure into an existing campaign?)
Galactic Funtime can be placed on a planet with the Tomb World tag.
I don't know what that is, but I can guess and it sounds awesome.
Without knowing how SWN adventures are structured, I'm going to assume this is usable for any sort of civilization with a commercial, capitalist society. The decrepitude of the facility requires some sort of post-catastrophic destruction and a fair amount of time should have passed to make the evolution of the place seem feasible.
A campaign with a slightly-cheeky sense of humor would be helpful, though a goofy setting can provide an effective contrast to grimdark sci-fi as well.
SCORE (MODULARITY) = 4 / 5
_____
6) USABILITY
(How much work will the referee have to do to run this adventure at the table tonight?)
You can 100% run it as-is, and it will play like a generic monster lair with a dash of consumerist nostalgia. If you want to juice this up into a Paranoia-style jaunt through a highly-thematic location, you'll need to give it some thought and add some more details. As written, though, it provides a solid foundation to expand the gag and create a more interactive site.
SCORE (USABILITY) = 4 / 5
_____
7) OVERALL THOUGHTS
I went into this with one high expectations based on the premise. The author got off to a great start but then failed to really push a strong theme beyond the basic concept. I still liked what the premise set up a lot, and the details are the right sort of thing, but none of it is completely realized. It feels more like notes on a scratch pad, with the details TBD.
FINAL SCORE = 3.2 / 5
No comments:
Post a Comment