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

​A space hulk by Joseph Mohr, level irrelevant
Written for Cepheus Engine
  Heck yeah we got us a sci-fi adventure, I can’t wait. Cepheus Engine is the OG Traveler-like, so classic science fiction instantly recognizable to any Analog reader in 1979. And then, we look at the front cover and our ardor cools somewhat. It’s a space hulk adventure, okay, I’ve written one of those myself, but this is probably the single most common type of scifi adventure. It’s a dungeon, but in space. Sadly, so many designers stop right there and act like the “it’s in space” part relieves them from having to put in the good ol’-fashioned design work to make it a good dungeon on its gameplay merits alone. Twenty-two pages for twenty-two keyed areas with generous margins, front and back sections, and arty covers? Okay, we can work with this, it’s not automatic tripe.
  Our plot, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, is that there’s a company transport (the titular Goliath) that picked up mysterious biological samples and then went dark. The first team to investigate also disappeared. Enter the PCs. Also a rival company’s merc team. And yes, of course the bio-sample was a frozen alien creature who woke up and slaughtered everything. Mountains of Madness, you have much to answer for.
  What I liked beyond “it’s a sci-fi adventure” is the that the writer understands the psychology of Traveler-style players. A cargo hold full of valuable weapons packed in oil, a set of valuable logs and information in the space hulk’s computers, the hulk’s salvage value itself…none if this is the ostensible quest here, but you absolutely do need an answer when your lovely little loot-goblins start trying to steal everything not nailed down. A thumbnail sketch of the possible negative consequences of them annoying a space corporation with this behavior is nice too.
  You note I’ve avoided talking about the map thus far. The first of what can be improved is “gimmie a better map”. Just because you’re putting your dungeon in space you don’t get any excuse to avoid all the basic rules of good map construction. This is linear, choke-point-heavy, and boring to explore, without much thought given to how the party moves through it. This is made even worse with the very random/swingy random encounter setup with Thawed Alien Guy and Rival Merc Party…basically, scrap the map, treat it like an exploration exercise, and you’ll do it a lot better.  
  So…best use case is sadly “have a very boring space hulk session”. If it’s the very first time a bunch of fantasy players ever get to play sci-fi there’s a chance they’ll enjoy the novelty, but that’s going to wear extremely thin after a while. The loot is generic and the rival party is so-so, so those aren’t anything to swipe from the product. The alien might be worth looking at if you need to save about thirty seconds of game design time on the premise “plant alien that eats life force”.
  Final Rating? */***** with a single disapproving cluck. Don’t assume just because you’re dangling the word “space” in front of us that you get to avoid doing the work on nuts-and-bolts RPG design.