Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…BugGrub Burger Files

​A dungeon by Porter Lyons, levels irrelevant
Written for CyBorg
  I wear my biases on my sleeve here, dear Crapshoot Monday reader. My dislike for Murk Burg, due to its garish colors and sizzle-over-steak priorities, is well known. Still, I won’t hold the sins of the father against the sons…Pirate Borg, despite the lineage, seems to be its own thing, even producing a few not-terrible adventures. CyBorg has a clever name going for it, at least, so I’m willing to judge it for itself.
  Whew lad. Not starting out strong here though, BugGrub Burger Files, you’re aggressively garish and ugly and hard to read. The art is random and distracting, the format is borked, and the room-to-page ratio (a dozen rooms, eleven pages) is exactly in the danger zone that usually means we’re somehow both over-written and shallow. Not promising. 

  Our story is probably what you think when you see the cover page. Insect-protein-based burger chain has a drug-smuggling cook among its employees, players are expected to find the drug smuggler, kill said smuggler, find the drug and the drug’s recipe, and survive an attacking cult of bug-worshippers who bust in at a plot-appropriate time. Details like who’s the target, where’s the drug, and what triggers set off the set pieces? Just roll it up before hand, lol. We’re ironically also informed that this is a “low prep” adventure.
  Before we get down to brass tacks, what I liked is the map’s design if not its presentation, it’s a pretty solid little cyberpunk restaurant/food production plant/shipping dock. Takes a while to grok, but once you do it all makes sense and the layout produces a decent mix of sneaking and firefight potential.
  This means everything else is in the ”what can be improved“ category. Besides the obvious problem of “adventure isn’t finished” that comes when such critical details are left to random chance, there’s also a horrible informational organization here that makes what few details the writer actually did bother to figure out hard to sus out. A bit more imagination would serve too, when a PC jacks into a training computer there’s a d4 number of outcomes that are basically “Pac Man or Second Life”. We get it, eating the bugs is gross and makes you sick if you eat too much. Most charitably, the author’s vision did not fully translate to the page.
  Best use case is probably to play this as a bit of content in CyBorg. Judging by this one adventure, players of the system exhibit neither taste nor sense, so of course a disgusting eye-hurting mass of indecipherable gobbledygook about eating bugs and dealing drugs will be right up their alley. If you ain’t that audience, you ain’t interested in using this project.
  Final Rating? */***** with a strong suspicion that this is also probably a stellar exemplar of CyBorg’s finest. Once begins to suspect that Pirate Borg is the exception.