Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Orbital Debris: Chronicles of a Junk Moon

Gee, THESE suggestions sure add value.

​A hexcrawl by the “Junky Moon Crew”, levels irrelevant.
Written for Mothership
  New year, new Monday, same Crapshoot Monday. I’m in the middle of the review heaven that is processing Adventure Site Contest submissions, so let’s keep a balance by going to a huge surefire review hell. Orbital Debris is a massive 100-page “hexcrawl” for the so-far-so-dreadful Mothership horror sci-fi system. Twenty-two hexes written by a group with random different illustrators s well, complete with factions and monsters and appendices oh my. Editorial control for these things tends to be…lax, so I’m expecting uneven quality that averages D-. Joy.
  Our general setting is pretty much what we all expected when “Junk Moon” got into ye olde title. There’s an asteroid with a bunch of tractor beams and a warp core that jumps from system to system slurping up space debris, which obviously attracts treasure seekers as well as luckless crash victims. In addition to the enigmatic AI core there’s a bunch of Big-Business Political Cartoon “Tha Man” types, heroic punk rock scrap types, and crazy digging-mad post-apocalyptic cultist types. If you want to replace those very generic factions with other, individualized, very generic factions within “your own campaign”. It’s a little iffy how the one-shot aimed individual hexes will interact with these factions in an ongoing campaign, but that’s okay, we’re also not given much idea how a system optimized for horror one-shots is supposed to be a campaign play anyway. They gave us a “hexmap”, though, that clears everything up. Note that hex numbers do not match the order in which they appear in the module. 

---

Really makes yah think, huh?

​  I’m going to mine hard for what I liked here. I liked the art and the idea of the LYCHGATE, a mysterious gate surrounded by alien scrap that leads to psychic prison wherein rests a nascent cosmic horror, that will in turn be fought by a tumorous biohorror kaiju from another hex. That’s kind of neat. That’s it though.
  Honestly there’s so little here to enjoy that I’m a little at a loss of what can be improved. Most of the art is less “horrific” more “ugly”, doesn’t accomplish much as the table. It’s not going to do much to show that the leader of the “Executive Suits” is obese naked cyber-hitler. Trimming all the massive d100 tables into just the quality entries would help Mothership’s love of d5’s. I’d say more tight editorial control would improve things, but it’s hard to sculpt a marble statue from a pile of crap, despite all the content most of the ideas are trite, derivative, and/or direct referential humor. One hex has a bunch of junk neatly stacked by a Wall-E expy, how charming. Oh wait the contrast is so stark your PCs have to do a Sanity Save? Dispense with such things, imagine how that would play out at the table, and how any right-thinking group of players would immediately mock and/or pillory a DM who tried to pull that one.
  The biggest source of improvement would be trying to figure out how to play this whole mess, in fact. All the hexes are written at such a high level that any suffering DM attempting to run at a table would be forced to come up with the adventure himself, or at least 90% of it. No playtesters are credited in this publication, which is notable, this is in fact an ideas book, not designed to have gamers play the game. Which makes it a massive misallocation of effort.
  All this means the best use case for this one falls into the mainstream use case of most WotC and Paizo “adventures”, which looks like “hold the book in front of your face and hallucinate about a hypothetical game”. Which is a bigger audience that any playable-adventure market, don’t get me wrong. Just pity the poor goober not in the know who tries to actually run this sucker.
  Final Rating? */***** and that star is grudging. The moon isn’t the only thing here made totally out of a ramshackle hodgepodge of junk.

---