GURPS PDF Challenge Review: Reign of Steel: Read the Sky

Next in our series, we come to Reign of Steel: Read the Sky, an adventure for Reign of Steel, a GURPS setting about a post-apocalyptic world conquered by murderous, super-intelligent AI.

The executive summary: this is good.  Very good.  I will definitely use it.  I also think it's the best work to utilize the space given to it out of any of the GURPS PDF Challenge books I've read so far.  It's not great. It won't blow your mind, and it has some issues, but it definitely has a place in your library as a work-a-day adventure for introducing people to Reign of Steel. It also provides some useful ideas for other games (especially GURPS Action).

The Breakdown

There's nothing to breakdown there's only one chapter: Read the Sky.  But that chapter is broken down into:

• An unnamed first section that lays out what the real circumstances are
  
• Setup (how to build your characters)
• Events: the adventure
• Aftermath: a teeny blurb on the consequences of the adventure
• Characters: the bad guys the party will face
• Locations: maps and some details on the areas in the adventure.

 The premise is this: A group of pirates led by one Samuel Axe fought with a Zone Zaire raiding party over the control of a small town called Tenby, and the pirates won. They've shut down communications to prevent rescue, and our heroes, unaware of these events, have been sent to investigate.

The adventure breaks down into three broad parts.  First, the trip to Tenby, which is interrupted by a "random encounter" bandit attack.  Then Tenby itself, which presents a mystery of what happened (The townsfolk will claim all is fine, and those aren't blaster marks, just an unusual choice in paint jobs, everything is fine, thanks for asking.  Try the mushroom stew, it's to die for.) and a possible combat encounter, and then the adventure culminates in a final confrontation with the pirates and, possibly, a single robot.

Musings

I'm not really one for using pre-made adventures, but there are a few that I've liked and made a great deal of use of.  This reminds me of one of those: "Fennerman's Furs."  It was one of three introductory adventures in the 2nd edition of the "Faserip" incarnation of the Marvel RPG. It was very simple, and followed a pretty straightforward sequence: an alarm trips in Fennerman's Furs, a fur store, you have to investigate to find out that there are thugs ripping the place off, and once you subdue them, a supervillain shows up in a truck and jumps the heroes for a final confrontation.  It was simple, straightforward, impossible to screw up, and taught me a lot about the basics of minimalist adventure design, which was invaluable for a highschool GM like myself at the time.

This reminds me a lot of that in that it's simple, straightforward and follows a very basic three arc structure.  It leads the players by the nose a bit, but it leaves room for flexibility.  It also provides quite some variety, all with a purpose.

The initial bandit fight highlights the danger of the world, provides some narrative spacing between "you have a mission" and "you arrive at the town" and acts as a warm-up for what's to come, which makes this a great choice for an introductory adventure, as it lets players get a feel for how combat will go.

The town offers a change of pace: the fix (getting Tenby back on the grid) is very easy, but things seem off. This is a point where the adventure can go wrong in a variety of ways: the players might miss all the clues, fix the thing and go home, missing the rest of the adventure.  They might screw up, eat the poisoned stew and get sick and die to the villagers.  They might bypass all of that, and then kill all the villagers and never realize there's another encounter beyond that.  However, the adventure offers more than enough clues and "hit your players over the head with a clue bat" options to get them to realize more is going on and to point them in the right direction.  A crucial one is the fisherman's wife who betrays the plan with a hastily passed note warning the PCs. This serves multiple purposes: it warns the PC of the poison, and likely ears the PC's gratitude (preventing unwarranted retribution) and gives a clue to the fact that the villagers are effectively hostages.  The adventure also insists on the PCs having a medic, which prevents the worst consequences of the poisoned stew.  Thus, this part of the adventure has multiple, meandering ways to get to the final resolution, and shores up potential faults with a few masterful touches and suggestions that might be so subtle that you'll miss their cleverness on your first read-through.

The final battle is a straightforward fight, but with the added heroism and complication of kids being held hostage, and a psycho robot that the bad guys can unleash on the PCs.  This section also implies that the actions of everyone involved could bring the wrong sort of robot attention eventually, and it builds Samuel Axe as a boatsman/wheelman, rather than a fighter, which means escape is quite a viable option, either leading to a chase, or to a recurring opponent.

The author even finds the room in all of this to drop some additional details, like robot activity in the area, details on poisonous mushrooms, and loads of maps, a few names and implied traits of the NPCs involved, and while it's light on stats, it does point to templates that the GM can use to flesh them out on his own.

I think my only real complaint about this adventure is that it's barely Reign of Steel. Yes, there's a robot in it.  One. Exactly one.  And yeah, it's post-apocalyptic.  But the adventure reads more like an episode of the A-team than Terminator: Genesys.  The adventure even has details for suping it up as a straight-up Action story, which is how I'd treat it! On the other hand, you can't really shed most of the Reign of Steel stuff either. The whole impetus of the adventure (getting Tenby back on the grid) and the robot, which is the adventure's capstone, require it to be Reign of Steel. I mean, with some work and thought, maybe you could peel out the Reign of Steel elements, or put more in, but it sort of occupies this weird grey zone of "Just enough of Reign of Steel to not be a generic Action adventure, but not enough to act as a good introduction to the world."

Still, I would totally run this.  I'd recommend it to you if you're at all interested in Reign of Steel or GURPS Action, or you just want to read a well-written adventure.  I think this is a great example of an introductory adventure for GURPS, and you could learn a lot by exploring the template it offers.