​Adventure Site Contest 2: Galactic Funtime

Written by Shawn Metcalf
Stars Without Number, levels 3-5
Spider-haunted mall.
  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.
  I was hoping for a couple more of these.
  Science fiction is my favorite genre, bar none, but one of the first things you have to learn as a writer is that Science Fiction is niche. Fantasy outsells sci-fi 10:1 from my own experience, and I think that’s similar in bookstores and gaming sales, even though I suspect sci-fi readers are more voracious than fantasy readers where the Venn diagram doesn’t overlap (which, to be fair, that’s a pretty big overlap, myself included). It’s also a lot harder to write adventures for, particularly site-based. It doesn’t matter if it's level 1 (or first-timers, for Traveler), you need to treat the area as a high-level adventure location, because tech means everyone can fly, shoot a gun, use binoculars and comms and sensors…there’s not nearly the limitations you see in early D&D. Space hulks are cool, I guess, but there are a lot of them.
  As an aside, there's something a little...chatty about how this one was written. Nothing overtly objectionable, but a breezy set of almost conversational interjections in the second person, e.g. "your players will ask to play the arcade games", makes for fine reading ahead of time but can mess up the user when the module is being referenced in play. 
  At least this isn’t a space hulk, I’ll grant. Instead, we have a ruined mall/Chuck-E-Cheese on a tomb world (fallen tech planet type) where a genomic hypertech version of Build-A-Bear has malfunctioned and made evil spiders that are swarming around in the radioactive building. Sort of an Eight Legged Freaks inspired post-apocalyptic Gamma World adventure, really. “Go there because it’s an active power source” is our hook.
  Map is a good-looking affair, nice clean key and icons, the art style wouldn’t work for a fantasy dungeon but it’s a nice sci-fi appearance. The choice to make the big middle room, the arcade, a green floor is usually the signal for grass, but it’s all indoors per the key. As is typical with a building, there’s a priority given to have the room flow make realistic sense over any particular exploratory interest, which is a bit of a pity on the gameplay side…normally the realistic building floorplan is helpful in heist planning, but this is a “monster-haunted-ruin”, so…shucks. Lack of elevation is a bummer too, not just for exploration but also because in a sci-fi location elevation and cover matter way way more in the firefights that gun-armed PCs prefer to get into. It’s also…small.
  I don’t know how efficient the playtesters were (this was playtested, good), but this location is a little bit…simple. My own SWN group would knock this out in a single session with some slack, and we play two-hour blocks. Go in, fight spiders of various size, try to not get too sick from the broken nuclear reactor’s radiation hazard, steal arcade machines for loot. A bit of dynamism is given to the giant villain spider Soapy (yes, the name is explained), he’s possessed of enough animal cunning to at least retreat and come back out when the PCs cut a hole in the roof to loot the place. That’s a potentially fun encounter.
  Fundamentally, there’s nothing wrong with this little site, I could see myself using it with a scrap-hungry crew scanning for value in a dead world, that’ll do, and it’s a decent ratio of danger vs. reward…I can just see other ways to add more scale and scope to it, so much like Bridge of Ptelemegesser I like what’s here, I just wish there was more of it. 

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