Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Operation Last Roar of Polaris -Part One-

No scale provided.

​An adventure by RavensDagger, LL0 to LL3.
Written for Lancer
  As a man in my late thirties, of course I have strong positive feelings about MechWarrior. Unfortunately, as appealing as BattleTech is, the game seems to be like owning a boat or a horse, something people who make a lot of money do instead of being rich. The pitch for Lancer is all about being a copyright-free Mech Warrior in a TTRPG space so I’m all ears. Haven’t read the rules, but sure, lets see how the system does in itch.io freebie adventure space.
  First though, we find a few red flags in the document’s stats. Thirty-three pages, single-column, with a format editor credited, a bunch of artists credited, but…no playtesters. Editing was evidently for format, not spelling or continuity (my personal favorite was players typo’d to “platers”). Table of contents which tells us that “The Game” doesn’t begin until…page 14, almost halfway through. It’s nice-enough looking, and the art is uneven but charming, but once we do get to “The Game” it’s divided into a Prologue, three Chapters, and an Epilogue, which is a very “tradgame” setup, and there are zero maps in the main section. Finally, our setting is the Little Dipper, as a sector…which means that the author has no idea how stellar cartography works…a constellation isn’t a bunch of stars near each other, it’s an arrangement of stars based on how we see them from Earth. At ~130 light years away, Kochab, where the bulk of the action takes place, is far nearer to the Solar System than it is to Polaris (sector capital), at ~440 light years away. This is science fiction, please get the basics right.
  Our plot, and as “this is a Narrative Module” you can bet your sweet bippy that we’re on a railroad here so it’s only ever one plot, involves a lonely colony on a desert world (called the only planet in the Kochab system, which, by the way, in real life we already know contains at least one super-Jovian in the inner HZ), taken over by mercenaries off a rival corporation, doing, uh…something. No matter what the platers do, they crash land, get into a fight, investigate one of two sites, get into a second fight, and then investigate the final site, getting into a third fight. Maps for these mech battles are your job to figure out, GM, but no matter what happens the platers level up in the end.
  I hurt because I care. What I liked is the formatting and clean design of the module. I like the color and illustrations, gives some nice visual interest. I like the idea of a series of scenes in a sequence map, much as I would complain about the simplicity and the lack of choice mattering.
  Thus, what can be improved first is make interesting tactical maps. The combats are the only place in this entire thing where plater choices affect outcomes, which means those are where the game is actually being played…and that’s where we have handwavy situation descriptions without a battle map. Oopsie. Despite NPC profiles being lavishly described, with three pages for just five characters, the gameable content is low and could easily be improved by giving better motives and something for clever platers to work with in negotiations or interrogations.
  Also please get your astrogation correct.
  I have no idea about the average quality of Lancer adventures, so it may be that the best use case for this thing is indeed “play a Lancer campaign with it”. Personally, I plan to look at some aspects of the formatting and illustrations and hope to learn for my own publication adventures. Sci-fi adventures are, from experience, not a profitable venture but there’s always passion projects.
  Final Rating? */***** and a single regretful sigh. I was pulling for you, module. 

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Majoring on the minors.