Adventure Site Contest 3: Chipped Saucer

​Written by Daniel Hicks
For ACKS, levels 4-6
Crashed UFO
Possible Hooks/Rumors
 A ball of fire fell from the sky and felled many trees.
 Green wolves with three jaws are hunting cattle and melting fences.
Surrounding Area and Exterior
An 800’ long line of fallen trees ends with 200’ of shallow ditch, the ship, 100’ across and half (15’) above the dirt, at the end of it.    
   Of all the adventures released during the TSR era, perhaps none cast a more controversial shadow than Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. In the gonzo beating heart of the hobby’s earliest days, having a crashed alien spaceship fit the vibe completely, and most of the early players didn’t find it all that weird or contradictory to be fighting robots and scrounging ray guns with their knights in shining armor and robed wizards. It’s a tradition that’s been carried forward for a long time; even the historian’s own ur-megadungeon, Arden Vul, is heavily built around a wrecked spaceship. But there are those who prize realism and verisimilitude over gonzo madcap craziness, and for those people, mixing sci-fi into their fantasy induces anaphylaxis.
   That’s for the stolid and stodgy AD&D simulationists, however. This here is an adventure site for ACKS, and as we’ve learned from the adventure site contest here, ACKS means wildly imaginative gonzo sites of high-strangeness and imagination. Take your simulationism somewhere else, Tylenol-boy, ACKS is for the gamers. Our story is that a flying saucer crashed for [reasons] and now the acid-wolves it was holding are melting the local’s livestock. Go loot it/kill the aliens/maybe accidentally blow it to bits. Have fun.
   Nothing is as potentially weird and wild for your adventure as a crashed alien spaceship. You have the chance to have weird non-Euclidean geometries, strange teleporters, wild rooms. You’re unconstrained by what is normal, what is stolid, what is Earthly. Um. This ain’t that, this is a flying saucer, so it’s a disk. And that disk is flat, so only one level (drink). There’s nothing wrong with the layout for a quick exploration, but it’s certainly not taking full advantage of the premise’s potential.
    Well, how about our monsters? Weird cool alien stuff right? Well, sadly, all our sentient aliens died either in the crash or in the triple jaws of the acid-hounds, but at least there are alien critters. Well, reskinned hell-hounds, with acid instead of fire. And nano-swarms which are basically reskinned specters. Once again, fine for battling on Tuesday night’s session, but nothing that really takes full advantage of the strange.
   Traps and hazards and obstacles are all zappy-bits that you’d expect (and locks are picked at a -4 because tech). There are two states to encounter the UFO, at first with power still at full, zapping attempts to cut into the hull and fully lit, or later when everything is in standby. I like how thief Deciphering skill is used to figure out alien script. I really like the fact that clumsy medieval-era PCs are very likely to accidentally blow up the entire ship before or after uncoiling all the engine’s platinum wire…that’s a good bit right there. Everyone enjoys playing “caveman in the F-22”.
   Now obviously we can’t give them that whole flying saucer, but what about the other loot? Well, the weird alien jumpsuits are worth something for their material and there’s an Alien Thomas Kincaid painting worth a little cash, but the most exciting items are the nano-regeneration patches (kinda, they’re basically just nice healing potions), the engineer’s eye (x-vision item usable once a week), and of course a ray gun. The ray gun is a little weak, unfortunately…either 1d12 damage on the deadly setting, or a single round’s incapacitation when set to stun. Very nice that it have both settings though.
   Use of this adventure site will really depend on your game’s tone. As always with this kind of gonzo, appropriateness will be highly table dependent. If a UFO crash fits, or for that matter doesn’t not-fit, then sure, toss it in for a half-session poke.