Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io… Seluna’s Veil

​A sandbox by Michael Shorten, levels moot...
BECAUSE IT’S WRITTEN FOR CLASSIC TRAVELLER, DUDES
  And now for something completely different. TRAVELLER? Heck yeah. This thing is an adventure in the classic spacegame sense of being a hexmap with sandbox content scattered around in the hopes of making an adventure out of what results…and then adds a plot pressure by making it a Battlestar Galactica (!) setting. The author is assuming a battlestar-led refugee fleet heading into the eponymous veil, a nebula region that helps them hide from the Cylons. This is actually not a bad idea for a sci-fi space campaign, with not only Battlestar Galactica using that as a plot driver but also great games like Homeworld or Faster Than Light embracing the “explore with a swarm behind us” premise. So, you have a sandbox with a lot of freedom, but also pressure of hostile chase fleets and hungry refugees giving direction and motivation. I won’t hate on it.
  The module is long, using twenty-five pages to detail the sector with a dozen of the hexes containing systems of interest. Appendixes for fleet crisis rolls, a timeline of threats, and random encounters while setting foot on the planets all add a lot more “adventure” to the sandbox, while the setting-specific stuff is helpful for anyone else using Classic Traveler to play Battlestar Galactica fanfiction campaigns. I think the author’s game is probably a blast.
  One aside, the author notes that “some” of the content has been generated and then heavily adapted from ChatGPT. He doesn’t outline what, but I’m pretty familiar with how AI likes to generate alien exoplanet biospheres, so I suspect that’s what it was used on. LMMs love speculative and generally boring exobiology, weird huh?
  Well, what I liked has to be more than just “finally something for Traveler”, right? Well, beyond liking the setting, the premise, and the high-level design, I’m going to laud the ambition here. The module’s size is actually pretty reasonable given that it is a ~6-12 session mini-campaign by itself. There’s a good understanding of how a player-run campaign ebbs and flows, with a good mix of sticks and carrots prompting action. The dice-rolled (ChatGPT) alien worlds are sometimes kind of nifty.
  The alert reader will notice some of what can be improved from the review so far…give us more specifics, dear module. Proper names are omitted for most of the content, which also encourages some very high abstraction for the random encounters and events. A lot of homework is needed to turn d6=4 and d6=1, “EVENT TYPE: TERRAIN/NATURAL, Terrain is especially (difficult/easy) to navigate at this time” into something resembling actually gameplay. There’s a lot like that, where you can clearly see the potential, but time, ever fleeting, is required to make the game happen. The one mapped feature in the module, a simple Dyson being used as an alien spire, is just five room descriptions…I guess actual encounters are to be rolled? Finally, I have no objection to using language model prompts for seeds, but a there are definitely places where more interconnectivities should have been added between systems.
  It’s when I examine the best use case that the module stumbles a bit. It’s a great zone for a very specific Battlestar Galactica-inspired campaign, but I don’t know if the region will really pop for the more traditional trade-and-exploration motivated Traveler game. It all hangs together pretty well, but if bits are extracted you start to see how generic it is.
  Final Rating? **/***** because while it’s a good overview, and the game played can certainly be fun, it’s going to make the user invest so much time that he maybe would rather make something tailored to his game instead. Sad, because a lot of potential was here.

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