Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Star’s Lash

​An adventure by Chris Airiau, levelless system.
Written for 5 Million Worlds Space Adventure RPG
  Whew boy, here’s another one-pager, but this time we are extremely not generic. I don’t know any details about the Five Million Worlds Space Adventure Role-Playing Game, outside of the obvious logorrheic affliction, but evidently 5MWSARPG is a near-Singularity hypertech setting with PCs called “Avatars” in accordantly powerful ships. There’s also mention of ancient “Serpent tech”, galactic councils of goodies and baddies, and “Space Leukemia”. For all that, it’s more understandable to me than last weeks’ ugly abomination.
  The direct plot for The Star’s Lash is that Space-Amish settled a red dwarf which was an active flare star being kept in check by an ancient alien device, device got meddled with and now star is flaring, which is miserable for the Space-Amish of course. The whole system is close to going completely to hell and when the players arrive the next storm happen in 1d10+5 hours (INTRODUCING RANDOMNESS WHERE NONE IS NEEDED AGAIN, 10-YARD PENALTY), lot of things are happening like a lightsail about to hit the ancient alien device, a debris field heading to the main system station, disabled training ships…it’s a good mix of stuff.
  What I liked is this tumultuous mixture of problems. Apparently this is a low-lethality system, the worst risk is sustaining a Wound and “Space Leukemia” so there’s not a lot of physical threat in the system but unless everyone plays smart there’s definitely going to be some civilians getting parboiled. For all the simplicity of the map I like how it conveys everything needed for the scenario run. Tiny mentions of the NPCs still contain light personality notes, just enough to run, so that’s well done. The author clearly knows at least enough astrophysics to not make me immediately mad, good on him.
  But boy howdy what could be improved would be adding another page, either with more verbiage or more likely with some graphical mind-map stuff like relationship diagrams. Adding physical threats would be a good idea, given the chaos of the system pirates or raiders or something wouldn’t go amiss. Pie-in-the-sky, but as nice as the disparity of the PCs having direct fast drives vs. the Newtonian travel with all other bodies in the system is it’d still be good to have relative directions and speeds for what’s in the area, particularly with timing mattering so much. Also don’t make the incoming flare a random timescale, this is a gimmie, come on.
  I guess our best use case is just to play this as a one-shot. Using the Five Million Worlds Space Adventure Role-Playing Game. Which, given that’s the objective, good on you. Sadly, not a lot of use for the parts unless you’re extremely hard up for a star system map?
  Final Rating? **/***** because it’s well done, but it’s too small unless you’re a real Five Million Worlds Space Adventure Role-Playing Game superfan.

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