contraterrene

I want to post some reviews, in part because I have a lot of opinions and in part because I’m between games and could use a way to engage with the hobby in the meantime.

A lot of these will focus on Mongoose and their 2e adventures, which is unabashedly where my attention is focused these days. This is partly because I think they’re pretty decent products (albeit often with a few asterisks attached!) but also because I really, really love Charted Space.

I’ve always been a setting nerd. When I was a kid, I picked up a copy of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting – the one in the big gray box – and spent months poring over every page, spreading the maps out and devouring every contour of the geography. I like having a big world to explore and play with, and Charted Space is maybe the biggest setting on the market. Of course, most of the worlds are nothing but a UWP, but that’s part of the beauty; Charted Space has a number of important touchstones that make it a cohesive setting while leaving an incredible amount of open space for individual refs to make their mark.

I’ll eventually wander further afield – particularly when I talk about solo gaming and products related to it – but my bias with my reviews will be toward what I’m reading and using, and that’s mostly stuff in Charted Space.

Traveller runs in a number of modes where the ref might need support; solitaire prep (including worldbuilding), focused prep (i.e., plotting). Ideally both sides are fun; an adventure should be fun and interesting to read, and it should be fun and interesting to run. Ideally the first goal serves the second.

Generally, if I’m pulling an adventure off the shelf, it’s because I need inspiration. Many of my campaigns have been run entirely off the cuff; the dirty secret of DMing (or refereeing) is that some of the best campaigns come entirely improvised out of the refs imagination alone. But that well is not infinite, and it isn’t something most people can do without a bit of a learning curve.

So that’s where I see published adventures stepping in. An ideal adventure is a bit like the GMing equivalent of a Blue Apron mealkit; yeah, you could make some lasagna from scratch, but sometimes its a weeknight and you’re tired and you just want to have a home-cooked meal. They’re for when you need to borrow some inspiration, have a bit of scaffolding, and grease the gears when you just need to get something to the table. To be a good read when I’m between campaigns is a strength for me.

Thus, a good adventure in my mind needs to be entertaining to prep, which means interesting to read. A lot of current design space these days steers toward the minimalistic – and that’s fine, I’ve run my share of Apocalypse World hacks and played 50+ sessions of Ultraviolet Grasslands. In fact, I’m likely to run Mythic Bastionland as one of my next campaigns, which takes a very minimalistic approach to things (and is quite beautiful and atmospheric, to boot).

Minimalism has a place in the world. But there’s something to be said for a published adventure with some plush padding, a bit of sumptuous backstory for the Ref to have in their back pocket, to be an enjoyable read, to deploy complex and interesting ideas and give tools to make them bloom. Call this the balance of reading and running.

Similarly, the adventure needs to be entertaining to players. It needs a strong hook – especially because this is a “canned” product, it needs to be something most groups will be interested in and have an easy time fitting into. It should also have a few unique twists, a little bit of stink on the pitch to draw the players more deeply into the scenario. Call this the balance of hook and sinker.

The current Mongoose adventures are all set in specific locations in Charted Space, which is fantastic in that it definitively grounds things and forces the authors to be a bit specific. For me, however, a good adventure is suitably portable, such that it can be picked up and moved around, ideally without a catastrophic amount of work. This combination comprises the balance of specificity and portability.

The last big area I like to consider is how well the adventure hangs together. Is the background material relevant? Does the author make reasonable assumptions about how the PC’s react? Is their adequate rules support for the activities within the adventure? Does it allow for player agency and a diversity of outcomes? Call this the balance of cohesion and agency.

These balances and their influence on the quality of an adventure is a portable one, I think. One of my most prolific and successful campaigns was Delta Green, in which I ran almost every published adventure up through Gods Teeth (and I’m likely to circle around to Impossible Landscapes eventually!) – and these adventures nail the balances almost universally. Every adventure is wonderfully specific in its locations and themes (but not so much that you couldn’t move things around), are fantastic reads with great writing, and run great at the table. More than half of what I ran (including Extremophilia, Future/Perfect part 1, Operation FULMINATE, and particularly Last Things Last) ended as abject disasters, while a rare few (including Sweetness) were precious successes, and others (Music From a Darkened Room) had ambiguous, uncertain conclusions. I think a good Traveller adventure, for me, will look a lot like these.

For scoring purposes;

Hook/sinker

Read/run

Specific/portable

Cohesive/agency

Attaching numbers to these categories is an arbitrary exercise, but I have a quantitative bias and I like comparing things. I assign stars to all my movie reviews, I might as well put some numbers down!

As to what I’ll review first? Well, someone was asking about Errant Lightning over on Reddit earlier – looks like a good a place as any to start!