Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Exclusion Zone

An adventure by Stella Condrey, level-agnostic
Written for Mothership
   Trifold time once more, now with Mothership as our system of choice. This is also a hexcrawl, although I should note, since I ranted about this last time, that the map is not spread across multiple folds. Rather than numbering keys or anything, the hex areas each have a different set d10 of dire omens and menacing encounters, along with a table (again d10) of dreams that each party member gets handed at the outset. The scenario ends when you come into contact with a massive heart that personifies the sentiment that “war is bad, maaan”. This makes me wonder if we’re even seriously looking at an adventure module.
   So I think we all agree the adventure is the thing that happened, right? It’s not what’s meant to happen, it’s not a plan, but rather the outcome of a whole series of choices (many of them stupid) made by the players in sequence, affected by random chance of the dice or cards or whatever else your system uses. That’s freedom, and a wise scenario designer exists not to design all aspects of the adventure, but to give clear and interesting situations that lead to interesting choices. These tables…well, there are sequences of events that can happen, but with nothing concrete or set, up to and including geographical distances (all hexes take 8 hours to navigate but are variable length). This makes the whole thing feel like adventuring via magic 8-ball plus a book of madlibs. But, y’know, grimdark.
   Uh, what I liked was, uh…the fact that the d10 tables go from 0-9, instead of 1-10? That’s good information organization when you’re using that vile non-Platonic solid for table randomization.
   What can be improved beyond my mega-gripe of “make it concrete”? Well, there’s also the substantive critique about your horror scenario design; namely, you need to intersperse light with the dark. All the encounters are some mixture of uncanny, weird, gross, or horrific, albeit delivered with such a hammering lack of subtlety that I cannot imagine any players actually getting freaked out. There’s a lot of “stumbles up” language where the PCs are witness to a scene, not something to interact with. Occasional oddities just added for flavor are fine on a table, but when you also don’t have navigational, timing, logistics, etc travel choices to make, then it all feels like a Disney theme park ride without any of the janky charm.
   The best use case for this one, I hate to say, is as a bleak but instructive warning for what not to do when designing an adventure. It’s also useful to depress a table of people, less due to content, more due to boredom. The heavy-handed nature of the MESSAGING might be useful to military recruiters or jingoistic war boosters, delivered as it is both awkwardly and somehow also thoughtlessly.
   Final Rating? */***** less because it even deserves that single star and more because there are products out there actively reprehensible, this is merely a waste of time and yellow ink. 

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