drivethru | publisher

$11.99 / 50pp

released 2021-12-06

reviewed 2025-12-31

The Core sector is the heart of the Third Imperium, the seat of empire and an economic powerhouse, but even the Core has its backwater worlds. One such place is Adan, a dry, almost desert world with a unique ecosphere and a secret that few know.

Adan’s small hydrosphere is entirely located in a single deep sea called the Cleft. From that sea grows the Clench, a writhing mass of plant life that extends far into the desert, providing life-giving crops for the world’s six million people. Unfortunately, the Clench is dying and the only people who can help are a remote community of psionic exiles living in the deep desert. The people of Adan have come to terms with their presence, but a scientific team from an Imperial Research Station has come to the planet to find the psions and strip them of their psionic abilities using a controversial new technique. If they succeed, all of Adan might very well pay the price.

Errant Lightning includes:

• World and city maps of the exotic world of Adan
• The Scirocco, a tilt-rotor aircraft
• New psionic talents
• New vehicle designs that take part in a climactic battle deep in the desert

Spoiler free review

3.5 / 5 stars. This is a great adventure for a ref looking to run a longer adventure on a single world involving some classic scifi tropes, especially if the table is interested in psionics. It has some notable weaknesses, however, and might take a bit of investment from the Ref to really meet its potential.

The remainder of this review will address the adventure in detail and without regard for spoilers. If you’re planning on playing this adventure, read no further (but do forward this to your ref!).

Initial Impressions

So this is part of the Core series of adventures. I tend to prefer the frontier regions – most of my Charted Space action has been down in Tobia and surrounding areas. This adventure is set all the way over in Core sector, four whole sectors away, on a dusty backwater called Adan. It’s neat seeing some of the more center-of-the-empire locations being developed; Charted Space has always had a bias toward the Spinward Marches and other fringe locations. I’m curious to see what implications this more central-to-the-Imperium location will have for the adventure and the vibes around it.

Art doesn’t tend to make or break things for me (I came onto the scene with first edition Mongoose Traveller – some of the most atrocious art in any RPG), and this front cover doesn’t go either way for me. I appreciate the mildly campy damsel-in-distress pulp vibes, but it doesn’t tell me much about what the adventure is going to be about. Similarly, the two big named locations on the back of the book being “the Cleft” and “the Clench” immediately make me cringe. Maybe I have juvenile players, but nobody is going to take either of those names seriously at my tables. Not the end of the world, but it is making me furrow a brow going in.

Introduction & Referees Notes

I found the introduction a little bit too “zoomed out”, beginning with a description of the Imperium and how the core is comprised of industrial powerhouse worlds living next to poor, desolate worlds of little note, then some specifics about the Chanestin and Sylean conflicts that have passed through the region, making it a hive of scum and villainy as wars and trade conflicts have made life hard for the locals, and rebellion or unrest is always brewing. So while we’re in the core sectors, this is the Space Balkans!

This material is fine, but I feel like the intro should immediately give the Ref an idea about what the adventure is within the first few paragraphs. This material is useful background, but it belongs more in the Referee Notes section.

It does eventually work around to outlining the adventure… which begins by noting that this adventure could be moved around to suit the refs needs, including moving it to another sector or more populated world. It gets specific about what it needs; anti-psionic laws, a secret community of psions, a breathable atmosphere, low hydrographics. This is a fine and good thing to include in the adventure and I have an immediate sense of whether it’ll fit into my campaigns (Tobia, my main stomping ground, is a somewhat “wet” subsector, but Intelia seems like a fine candidate) but, again, little idea of what things are about.

Then some advice about how to include the PC’s. I found this section to be mostly boilerplate; it lacked specificity or a good hook. A strong opening scene with a patron meeting would have been a better choice.

Then we’re into the actual overview of the adventure. The Travellers get hired by a gentleman named Colport (the fellow with glasses swooning on the cover) to assist with a mysterious development project in (sigh) the Clench, a big mass of plant life growing in (groan) the Cleft, a small sea that is Adan’s only body of water.

This is work conducted in concert with a bunch of psychics living in the desert. Neat! I always love seeing psychics crop up in Traveller – their being proscribed keeps them from being too in-your-face, but a little bit of space magic is always welcome. On the negative side, this group of psychic fremen is called… The Community. What’s with the names here?

The adventure as outlined is a bit of cruising around the Clench (which does sound like a neat location, at least!), getting to know the locals, then being confronted with some mercenaries and villainous doctors looking to psychically sterilize The Community before eradicating psions throughout the Imperium. These genocidal sorts track down the Community where the Travellers will apparently use “hover chariots” to face off with “dune hoppers” to fight a bit of a private war. Then if they save the day, the Clench is going to do something it’s never done before.

This is a fun set of activities – and perhaps a bit more epic than some of the other Traveller adventures I’ve run. What I’m shaky on is getting the Travellers involved and invested, where’s their skin in the game, besides just not wanting to see a bunch of fremen presumably being depowered?

Next comes details on the planet of Adan. The map is available in the previews so I’ll show it in full here.

I really like the Mongoose style of mapping. It’s simple and clear, and the hex planet mapping is very satisfying. I’ve done a bunch myself and this is a pretty decent implementation, including useful details like scale (often & woefully omitted!), etc. This gives me an immediate read on the world and where things are located. Further, it doesn’t include any hidden information, so I can just plop this in front of my players; major thumbs up for this.

Next comes a write-up on the ecology of the world. It’s pretty good! The world is predominantly a desert, heated by a binary star system that makes life difficult. Most life congregates around the Cleft, the worlds single sea. At either end of this are two Clenches, areas of copious plant life, important both to the planets atmosphere (evidently their pollen helps lower the planets albedo?) and to the locals (who make their living harvesting the biomass).

This is why the Community matters; their telepaths and clairvoyants help rescue lost harvesters and find the best fruits. Apparently some of these tangles can be up to 50 meters tall, so I suppose having a psychic around to help would be pretty useful for when someone disappears into the kelp.

There’s quite a bit of detail about the day cycle on the planet, which runs over 44 hours and has a complicated structure due to the systems binary nature. It takes multiple 24-hour days for the suns to pass over the Cleft, which has implications for the locals, with either Clench growing whilst exposed to sunlight and retracting during the night.

Then there’s a rundown on The Community. Rather than my early impression of a bunch of fremen analogues, the Commmunity is composed of exiles from a diverse set of backgrounds. Refugee psychics that have found a niche and a home out in the desert. The Imperium is semi-aware of their existence but doesn’t take it seriously – more like a conspiracy theory.

Then we veer off to talk about Research Station Gamma, the source of the adventures villains, a husband and wife pair that I’m just going to refer to by their surname Brummac. The pair run an independent lab with Imperial funding. They believe that psionics are a disease caused by exposure to jumpspace… along with a bunch of conspiracy theories around Aslan and Hivers. Some details are included regarding their “cure” with the suitably menacing acronynm PRET, and their desire to test it. It’s also revealed that they’re massive hypocrites, as the husband of the pair a a psychic himself.

All of this is pretty good so far. Adan is an interesting world, and despite the awful naming conventions here I think this has some legs. A lot of it is going to depend heavily on investing the PC’s in the Community and the world enough to care about stopping the Brummacs.

the adventure, proper

Things begin with the Travellers arriving on Adan – we’re told to track the course of the suns starting from now as day 0 – presumably it’s going to be important to track where the day/night cycle lies. This is a neat concept and a good way to invoke the light and darkness rules, maybe? I always like an excuse to use the more esoteric rules like gravity and lighting conditions, so this is neat!

From the downport, the Travellers need to head onwards to the planetary capital and a meeting with one of the folks from the cover. I figure most parties will just take their air/raft – though I find myself wishing there was a more frequent incentive for Travellers to use local transportation, as there’s a great encounter table provided that will be totally missed by Travellers cruising around by air/raft. The table paints a picture of a hardscrabble planet.

In fact, I think I’d advise sprinkling in a few of those encounters either at the Starport or after getting into the capital, regardless. A lot of this adventure strikes me as the PC’s needing to have a bond with this world somehow; understanding the locals plight is a key part of that, no?

A nice little bit of color around the city, just enough in case the players decide to go off course and insist on doing some local shopping. I quite like the style of the city map.

Then we’re on to describing the trip out into the desert, led by Colport and his associate (and romantic partner) Jaymeen, the non-swooning combatant on the cover.

I’ll note again that the adventure provides no real motivation for what the PCs are up to, other than agreeing to some form of employment with Colport. Are they participating as security, brokers, what? So far this is what I would consider the adventures biggest flaw; this trip is going to take weeks and the mortgage payment on their Free Trader is looming, why are we flying hover chariots?

Now, admittedly, I want to have my Travellers flying hover chariots rather than just managing their cargo and passenger lists. But accounting for this factor is a major component of being a Traveller ref – economics drive adventures and motivate characters. The lack of a proper hook to motivate this job is a demerit.

Still, the scenery is pretty – and dangerous.

Traveling out to The Community is a small hex crawl – something I’ve never really done as a Ref but something I have plenty of experience with as a DM.

While hex maps are provided, the journey is more or less hard coded, with a set of four encounters. These range from encountering The Clench, including agricultural operations, a “cordon burst” where the plant life experiences rapid growth out into the desert, causing floods and chaos.

There’s a good bit of variety here; another good chance to put it into perspective that this is an old but struggling world, one that’s got plenty of tension just below the surface between laborers and supervisors.

Along the way, the Travellers pick up that Jaymeen is a psion from the Community.There’s a few moments where the PC’s might run into psychics doing small tasks, including Jaymeen using plant-powers to open paths.

Then its out into the desert. Some attention is made to the details of camping, again driving home that “day” here is 44 hours long, with the party bedding down in broad daylight despite the “late” hour.

There’s a bit of a scripted conversation with the NPC’s at this point, answering questions about their world, including directly confronting their psionic status, including a bit of backstory, including why our core NPC’s can’t get married – not because of their sexuality, but apparently because the locals don’t mind psychics unless they’re married? The adventure is ambiguous here, but I think it’s implied that the reasoning is with their powers, not their genders. We’re also introduced to a third psychic, Tanin, who can mimic peoples voices and (sometimes) appearances.

We get a few more details on The Community as well. I don’t mind the exposition being delivered this way; a clever ref might find ways to spread this material out a bit during the drive rather than dumping it all in a single conversation, but that’s trivial to improvise.

The section closes with a note that the Clench is struggling, even dying. A sidebar describes the secret of the Clench, which is that its plant life is detecting hidden pockets of water and is trying to reach them – and that helping it connect with those underground reserves may be the solution of the worlds problems.

Then we’re heading back to town. So this was just a camping trip? Again, the Ref is going to be hard-pressed if their characters have bills to pay and get anxious if they feel like they’re burning time (and credits!) to no end. Maybe I’m being harsh?

They return to the arrival of the Brummacs, who are menacing the city with a pair of mechs. Hell yeah! The timing feels a little off (like, did the party get hired as security because our NPC friends had an idea this was coming?) but the image of these obviously villainous scientists siccing their stompy/smoky mechs on fearful crowds of laborers has some juice; this’ll draw any freedom-loving Traveller into hating these guys, IMO. This dramatic intro concludes with the baddies ambling off to their camp outside town – a few notes about the PC’s confronting them might have been useful here.

There’s some good intrigue around the Brummacs and their authority – they claim to have an Imperial Warrant, basically a “yeah they’re cool” coupon from the Emperor. There’s plenty of space for intrigues in arranging a meeting with these jerks, or trying to undermine their authority via coming for their warrant’s authenticity. One of my favorite Traveller skills is Advocate – any time I can save the day by being a lawyer is one I’ll savor. Though even this won’t stop these guys, they’ll just go off the grid in prosecuting a private war against the Community.

Then we get a description of the PRET process to de-pscionicize someone. It’s not very nice, consisting of a three-phase “aversion therapy”. It turns out that not only are the villains jerks, they’re also bad scientists as their process requires Dr/Mr Brummac himself to use his psychic powers to run things. I’m sure the Imperium will be revoking his grants in no time!

Then a quick rundown on the villains process; beginning with arresting Colport or Jaymeen. I assume the PC’s are meant to oppose this in some way – the mercs the doctors have brought are described as being pretty brutish and unsubtle. I think I would recommend having one of the pair captured – setting up a confrontation and dealing with the overwhelming (but not impossible to overcome) forces of a mech batallion is great fodder for adventure. I’m picturing a little war in the streets of the capital, tripping mechs like ewoks on Endor.

Some attention is paid to the use of a sattelite to locate the Community out where the PC’s just went camping, another ticking clock.

This seems like a giant combat to run – I think it’s doable, but you’re going to have a lot of tap-dancing on the ref side to make this satisfying. Smartly, the combat is played out on a small-scale map, meaning that the hexes at the 1km scale – allowing vehicles to engage at reasonable distances and letting the battle develop across varied terrain. This includes stuff like sinkholes being marked out – the ideal terrain for flying defenders to lure walking baddies into various traps.

Part of the motivation here is that the mercenaries are attacking The Clench, burning plants and killing the organism. The finale involving our NPC friend with the plant powers is more implied than anything, but I’d certainly contrive to have a moment where the PC’s can cover their pal commanding the plants to triumphantly blast a hole in one of the evil doctors or the mercenary captain. It’s a shame this is almost entirely sketch – there’s some intriguing details here that imply The Clench was going to play a much larger role, only for the adventure to mostly just deliver a climactic combat.

Now I think this is a fine place to wrap things (especially with a big robot fight), though I do think some guidance for what less combative Travellers might get up to here would be a good idea. I’d also take your groups temperature here; are they going to be commanding this like generals, or participating as common combatants? Refs with parties that don’t care for detailed tactical combat will probably just want to devise some sort of setpiece – perhaps a commando raid to decapitate the enemy headquarters? Showing up with the local Marine Captain and a warrant for the doctors arrest?

The remains

Then we get a few pages of new psychic powers – plantomancy, counter-psionics, and mimicry. All suitably useful contributions to the rules. I don’t use psionics very often in my campaigns, but I’ll never complain about more diversity in powers.

Then we’re to the statblocks; I quite like the art style!

On the downside, the villains are statted here… and nothing else. We get their portraits, but no details on their personality, their relationship, nothing.

The remaining stats are for the mercenary soldiers the Brummacs employ. I noticed that the rank and file troopers have the same statline as their leader, Bronto (an incredibly good name, IMO) – including an eyepopping physical statline of 9/11/12. Personally, I would run the troopers as regular 7/7/7 types, while reserving the herculean endurance for their leader to serve as a bit of a mini-boss.

Closing Thoughts and Scoring

Overall I enjoyed reading this adventure and I’d be excited to run it. It fills an important Traveller niche in that it feels like it could easily be the kickoff to a campaign arc, with lots to do on Adan even beyond the events of the adventure. It wouldn’t be my choice to hand off to an inexperienced or harried ref; this isn’t something you’d want to run off the cuff without any prep, but with a little bit of investment you could make this sing as a 3-5 session adventure.

My main critiques are all pretty easily solved by an attentive ref; if you were thinking about running this, I would recommend;

• Building a strong hook to tie PC’s to seeing the whole conflict through – even going as far as making Colport or his partner a relative or close friend to one of the PC’s.
• Similarly, I would make sure to find ways to bond the characters to the world of Adan, particularly the Community and the Clench. If I ran this, the camping trip wouldn’t end so fast; we’d get out to the secret psychic base and get to see some cool stuff to get the players invested in laying their lives on the line to keep it safe.
• I’d spend some time fleshing out the villains into being appropriately bombastic evil guys, with Bronto as a sort of Colnel Quaritch and the doctors being actively evil – maybe to the point of subjecting the locals to painful PRET testing regardless of their membership in The Community. That’ll dial up the tension and make that climactic mech-battle even more inevitable.
• I would come up with new names for some of the more generic elements present here. I acknowledge that I might just be running games for friends with an immature sense of humor, but I’d argue that “the Clench” is a pretty boring name even beyond that. If you’re short on inspiration, I’d just give it a Vilani name of some kind, perhaps The Cleft Shakdas sea and the Clench Shiigin expanse?

My final critique is that the end of the adventure is weak; it feels like it could have used another 15 pages. There’s a bit about The Clench having a sort of awakening that’ll save the world if the PC’s can stop the mercs. This bit is cool and epic and has echoes of the bit in David Lynch’s Dune where Paul brings the rain. It deserved some expansion and a better tying together of why defeating these mercs might have that effect. A good ref might be able to do that, but it’s disappointing that the adventure leaves such a fruitful avenue unexplored.

Finally, I think The Community itself is drastically under-explored. You don’t get to see it “on screen” and that… feels weird, given that the characters are going to be expected to fight for its survival. Some time out there would do a lot. Similarly, I feel like the adventure could have offered something really special as a reward for taking on such a dangerous task, like The Community offering psionic testing to suitably heroic PC’s – though maybe they don’t have the capability, but give the Travellers a strong lead to a hidden institute a few systems over?

All in all, it’s a solid adventure with some great support for a ref looking to run a longer adventure. It feels a bit like it could be a fairly epic episode of Firefly, which is high praise.

Read/Run – 7.5/10, with a lean toward read. This is a solidly written adventure with a lot of good stuff in it, but you’ll want to invest some time in reading and taking some notes before putting it on the table.

Hook/Sinker – 6/10, with a lean toward sinker. This adventure has a very weak hook when it needs a strong one to keep the PC’s invested while facing overwhelming odds.

Specific/Portable – 8/10. Adan is a nicely realized world with good support for doing a little bit of open exploration. The setting is somewhat hard to export elsewhere, but there’s nothing that would keep this in the Core, this could easily get swapped over into the Trojan Reach without too much hacking.

Cohesion/Agency – 8/10. Once you get past the weak hook, the PC’s have a good amount of space to figure out how they want to address the challenges in the adventure, without too much scripting. At the same time, it feels like the villains have an agenda and there are some clear timers the Travellers will be working against.

Overall 28.5/40 or 3.5 / 5 stars.