Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…The Sunsetting of Lutres 8

An adventure by Robotic Topologist, level nada.
Written for system neutral
  I don’t quite understand what this even is, I’m going to have to approach this forensically. It’s a one-page product, ostensibly an “adventure”, where the adventurers are hired by a power company (?) and are supposed to infiltrate a space station to turn a bunch of orbital mirrors (??) onto a star to send it into nova (???) and also maybe survive. Although the weirdly-formatted little thing does have objectives listed, there is very little setting information, or assumed system, or…anything. I’m very confused. I don’t have to have a twenty-page backstory but it doesn’t make a lick of sense for why there’s an adventure with the plan to nuke a star…we need that to be able to run anything coherent. “Do this or else we’re not playing tonight” should be a social implication, not the only reason for play.
  Some vague attempt at design happened here. The objectives suggest…some flow to the adventure (either reposition a mirror array or send a single H-bomb into the star, then run). A huge amount of the single page is devoted to three NPCs who have some play in them, able to either thwart or aid the players in their unmotivated quest. A timer of 5 cycles, whatever unit of time that is, gives us a ticking clock. Finally, a 2d6 roll in the end tells the players how bad they’re supposed to feel after winning their adventure I guess?
  Dredging  deep, what I liked is that there was at least some thought to a contingency plan for a second way to blow up the star (although it being a fusion bomb shows a dismaying lack of sense of scale). I like that one friendly scumbag guy who tries to steal stuff and delays things because of it.
  Obviously what can be improved is all of this. First improvement is to maybe not rely on whatever title generator spit out “Sunsetting of Lutres 8”, because this thing had to be derived from that title first, I refuse to believe this guy had a dream about an adventure where PCs blow up a sun and then this followed. All of that “title first, scramble to figure out later” is shown here with a confused mess of individually functionally elements that never actually cohere. I’d frankly need that rebuild before I could even begin to find other places for improvement. But for Pete’s sake please don’t pretend a single fusion bomb could blow up a star…just call it an Ultra Quantum Megabomb or something, not something that is 50’s tech.
  All this has us in the position where a best use case is alas as an abject lesson: DO NOT DO THIS. It’s unusable as an adventure and it’s not even all that useable for parts.
  Final Rating?  */***** the format didn’t fill me with rage and sorrow and it was at least short but there’s no adventure here. The adventure itself should have been sunset.

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