Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…Zenith-47

y tho?

​A horror one-shot by Sam Bell, level nill.
Written for use with “any sci-fi or horror system”
  Happy September, everyone, and Happy Labor Day to those of you who get it off (so non-laborers). I’m doing a little mini-theme this month, “Sci-fi September”, where for the five Mondays of this month I’m reviewing science fiction adventures from my itch sewer-diving. Given I’ve added Traveler and Stars Without Number to my permitted systems in the next Adventure Site Contest, why not give a baseline?
  This was a stupid idea. Zenith-47 starts us out with a twenty-page “modular” horror adventure where details are “modular” (meaning changed based on table rolls) or tagged in brackets like [Generic Name] for the players’ ship. Oh and of course it’s horror, because that’s apparently the default sci-fi mode. Oh and of course no map is provided because mapping is hard. The list of recommended systems is wild, “Mothership, Ten Candles, Dread, 2400: Orbital Decay, Ironsworn: Starforged, Stars Without Number,
Scum and Villainy”. Format is a nightmare of bullet points with sub-options to somehow make SWN and 10 Candles both work.
  The plot, such as it is, is that space station Zenith-47 got hit by a solar flare which woke up the Big Bad [HAL, Xenomorph, zombies, mutants, Darkness, Living Magic Flare] who lures the players in to Inflict Horror Things On Them…hilariously, if the players turn down the call to adventure their ship automatically takes them to the station because Galaxy Mandate Rules force them to help the mayday. The modules aren’t mapped so by default you’re supposed to walk from one to another, experiencing bits of scariness, until the lab module where the [Big Bad] is confronted and [defeated by things] and then an escape pod just…happens? What a jumble.
  I don’t know what I liked, the experience of reading this product was its own little horror one-shot. There are occasional flashes of okay writing, where I think this would actually be a functional, if underbaked, little adventure if just one of the antagonists was chosen. But…
  What could be improved even in those cases would be more restraint. I don’t demand every horror scenario follow the TOMBS cycle but for the love of Pete a little bit of subtly wouldn’t go amiss once in a while. HAVING A MAP makes everything better of course, I don’t care about making it artistic, just a ball-and-stick space station diagram would do wonders. I could say an improvement would be to have a single horror element or antagonist be even slightly original but that’s just pie-in-the-sky wishcasting.
  Sometimes, the best use case for a product is as a cautionary tale to others. I can’t imagine anything gained from trying to use any portion of this module versus making a scary space station scenario myself using story cubes and stickle bricks. Which, trademark, is a great name for a new TTRPG system.
  Final Rating? */***** because it didn’t actively nauseate me. Misallocated hard work is always sad to see, best not to linger.

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Brb, writing an adventure for Traveler, StarFinder, WEG StarWars, Gamma World, and Lasers&Feelings.