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

​An adventure by Francesco Spedicato, level nill.
Written for the dread System Agnostic
  Trifold time again, this time with a black background so I guess its primary market is people who want to passively-aggressively drive up their workplace’s printer costs? Anyway, it does the bare minimum by having a node-and-line map of its nine locations and a thin but viable set of story beats and plot. Slightly abstracted location, but hey, there’s a d6 table that has adventure prompts and a d6 table with 10 entries for unexpected surprises. A threat track abstracts the increasing danger every time the players fail badly or waste time and if it hits 5 everybody dies. Our expectations were low and you barely met them.
  Plot is pretty easy to grok. There’s a mining rig located on a water planet, where prisoners are used to mine [something]. You (oh yeah, it’s second person baby) had to deliver mail to the warden, and while you’re there a pulsar pulse knocks out the rig’s [something] and now prisoners are escaped and everyone panics while the rig collapses. Wander the prison sectors, pausing occasionally at the odd parsing of Google Translate, and make it to your ship while enjoying vignettes of violence and terror. Charming.
  Given I’m in my late thirties of course what I like has to include the occasion charming ascii art piece, sure. There’s a few nice situations to wander in to, like prisoners trying to use a dump truck to force the jailors at the spaceport to stop blocking the landing pad. The initial Chambers-approved start is “prisoners break in to the room with zip guns”, that’s hard to go wrong with. Even though I would do more with it, a threat track/timer helps make the whole scenario nice and frantic.
  That’s it, there’s no more good. The first of what can be improved is the smallest, just do an editing pass over things. Secondly, more generally the rooms and situations are all stick, no carrot…some concrete gear would make all the choices a little more interesting, as well as some idea of rewards or push your luck enticements encouraging players to risk delays in this timed scenario. Of course REAL TIME RECORDS ARE ESSENTIAL…better to have a scale on the rig “map” and a number of minutes until the rig collapses, but that’s antithetical to the itch.io soul. A bit more thought on other hazards than “prisoners and panicky jailors” would also be an improvement, the scenario as-is wouldn’t be to hard to set on a twenty-first-century Gulf of Mexico or North Sea oil rig, and that’s not taking advantage of all that the genre has to offer.
  The best use case for this is then unfortunately just a rather dull one-shot game. This might be a passable session of Dread, although the horror is rather muted. Not much to steal for use elsewhere.
  Final Rating? */***** with a resounding “meh”. I need to stop looking cheerful when products with ascii art come across my queue, it’s always a disappointment. 

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