Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Shade of the Lighthouse

A mission by Porter ''Cornylius'' Botterud, LL4
Written for Lancer
  Okay, Lancer, I think I have your measure by now. You’re going to be overwritten (twenty-five pages here for a one-shot), weirdly concerned with soap opera themes, and your battlemaps are going to suck. On the plus side your default format is clean, readable, and at least sanely organized. You’re going to be the very softest of Sci-fi on the Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, and you’re going to have writers fond of referencing other third-party products in their insular little community. As a good norm, you’re going to credit playtesters, artist(s), and editor. Basically these things are Pathfinder in Space Days of Our Lives, with a single nod to themes and how they highlight relevant social issues of the day (this one’s day was 2023). Plot is an ironclad railroad. I get what’s going on.
  In this adventure we have a looooooooooot of words devoted to describing something that I’m pretty sure you would get as an identical output if you fed ChatGPT the entirety of TVTropes and then entered the prompt “Gravity mishap on isolated research asteroid opens portal to a Dark Dimension”.  Maybe the love story where one scientist is trying to recover his lost spouse is slightly new, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this episode a few times before. It’s a bog standard investigation plot interrupted thrice for arena-style mech combat. Onboard the space station. How high are these ceilings typically, anyway? Anyway, there’s a lot of drama resolution and mechanically-determined social rolls that wind up to a minor bonus potentially in the five-page, four-stage final boss fight. Which, please note, you are bound and determined to get to because no other outcome than the super-duper bossfight is allowed to occur.
  Okay, I’ll be cheap and say to start that what I liked was the format. It’s clear, uses color strategically without being overwhelming, and avoids the temptation to muck up its pages with unattractive scrapped-together art. Whitespace is no crime. I also liked the clear enthusiasm for the final boss fight, the author makes it a dynamic multi-stage set-piece with clear markers for each phase change and radically different attacks and defenses each time, telegraphed reasonably well. There’s also an admirable exotic weapon reward that makes sense based on the story. I like the setup for either one-shot or campaign integration, although I would never integrate a railroad into my own campaign.
  But oh, what can be improved. The first two fights are not just railroads without consequences, but their initial setups are extremely contrived because a certain number of mech fights are expected in a Lancer adventure. The amount of effort expended in conversations and interactions that are ultimately meaningless due to the tight railroading is dismaying, so I guess the improvement there is “let your players have an effect on the plot”. The maps are also abysmal, both in artistic (non)appeal and in tactical interest. If your game is mostly concerned with getting into mech fights, make the mech fights interesting.
  I reckon the best use case for this is to inflict it upon your players. They signed up to play Lancer, that means they want to be railroaded from meaningless fight to meaningless fight while enjoying a semi-interactive set of NPC drama cutscenes in between. This is perfect for that desire, no notes.
  Final Rating? */***** because while it’s a perfectly executed ideal, it’s a bad ideal that should not be sought. Shame on you. Just invest in model trains.

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