Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Edge of Terminator

​An adventure by Sam Joice, levelless (2D6 system).
Written for Orbital 2100
  Now for something completely different. Zozer Games made some kind of 2d6 system set in a near-future solar system, called Orbital 2100, with an apparent focus on hard science. I can dig it. The Edge of Terminator takes a tight four landscape pages (hyperlinked) to describe a sweaty repair mission on the titular edge of Mercury’s sunlight terminator. The writing is terse and strictly utilitarian, the scenario design is stark and simple, and the illustrations are minimal…but there’s playtesters credited, there’s an understanding about what’s needed to make a game, and so there’s an actual game to be played here.  
  There’s apparently a theme going on through this big scoop of sci-fi adventures, and that’s “solar flare”. Mr. Joice here knows how to use that kind of a keyword, though, and so our plot here is that an automated mobile mining platform on the planet Mercury was knocked out by a coronal mass ejection from the Sun, it’s the job of the crew of pregens launched from Hermes to get the platform back up and running before the planet’s slow rotation brings the platform into the burning sunlight of the day side. The suggested timer is 3 real-world hours, with a timeline of exactly how long everyone has after that before they die of heat. Each of the six pregens (extras are NPCs) has a secret extra goal, some more hostile than others (steal stuff, add a secret shunt, find the traitor, etc). Here’s your cute little diagram, now get out there, slugger.
  In case it wasn’t obvious, what I liked on this one is the focused minimalism. I grew up reading hard scifi stories written in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s so the genre is appreciated. The PvP is always a dangerous thing to resolve, but all the spice is in those competing secret goals, I like that everyone knows each other character has some other secret goal…sweaty paranoia is the name of the game, that’s good design for this kind of genre. The tight time limit is very good.
  What can be improved, though, would be to add more spice. Please. While everything essential for running the game is in here, there’s a lot of pressure being put on the players (or the GM if the traitors are NPCs) to make the chaos and turn an exercise of simple planning into a tense adventure. While the time limit helps add tension, there’s a missed opportunity for the worsening environment to add both potential complications and push-your-luck calculations…ideally, the initial diagnosis and work should be unpressured and the secret skullduggery a focus, while towards the end the dawn of Mercury’s burning day focuses everyone into a frantic race against the lethal light. The potential is there, just another page of complications and more timeline breakdowns would have this whole thing really pop.
  The best use case is of course to make this a one-shot using any Traveler-lineage game system. Not a lot of use for things-to-strip-for-parts, unfortunately.
  Final Rating? **/***** because there’s some work to be done to bring it to its full potential, but there’s a decent kernel here.

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