Adventure Review: Lucky Flight Takedown (Cy_Borg)
Monthly Freebie: HOLLOW UNIVERSE campaign starter!
Thank you for being patient with the delay on this issue! I was finishing up a number of freelance gigs and moving from Indianapolis, Indiana in the United States to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada! It was a very long, very stressful road trip, but we are here safely now and having a blast!
Last issue, I opened the Missive with my first full game review, and this month, I’m going to do my first adventure review: Cy_Borg’s Lucky Flight Takedown. So let’s set some basic parameters, and get to it!
Rules of an Adventure Review: I have to have read the adventure in its entirety, and I have to have played it at least once (as a GM) more or less in its entirety (that is to say a single session of a campaign-length book wouldn’t count)!
Goals of an Adventure Review: When it comes to adventures, I want to be excited, intrigued, and inspired. Additionally, I want to have quick and easy access to all the various references and structures it is safe to assume a majority of tables will encounter when playing through the adventure. As a low or zero-prep GM, “sight readability” (the ability to pick up and run and adventure without standalone notes, prep, etc.) is really important to me. For my reviews, I’ll be highlighting the unique aspects of an adventure that stand out to me (in both positive and negative ways). If I brush over or ignore something entirely, it’s because I found it to be standard/typical.Disclaimer: When I am writing an adventure review, it is inextricably connected to my specific play session. In some ways, this review will be as much a discussion of the text itself as it is about my interpretation of that text at the table, our specific roll results, and my players specific approaches and reactions. While this all may seem obvious, I put it here to make clear this review (like all reviews) is subjective and should be treated as such.
Solid Core, Missing Motivations
Rotblack Sludge, the introductory adventure for Stockholm Kartell’s MÖRK BORG, is one of the system’s most well honed and easy to pick up and play adventures. It’s a particular highlight as an example of “sight readability" which is to say the ability to come in with zero prep and read the adventure quickly and easily for the first time during play.
Attempting to follow in those footsteps is Lucky Flight Takedown, the introductory adventure for Cy_Borg, Stockholm Kartell’s relatively recent cyberpunk take on the now well established MÖRK BORG framework. I got a chance to run my home group through this adventure recently and while we had a great time, I came away from my time as the GM struggling to connect the setting and the text/presentation of the adventure. The main issue: a casino is not a dungeon (typically).
The structure and layout of Takedown is very similar to Sludge in that it gives you an overview and total map of the adventure and then, going through room by room and breaks down the details, who or what is inside, etc. Along the way, it sidebars things like NPC info and special item or enemy stats right when you need them (which I love).
What it doesn’t do is provide a particularly meaningful incentive or situation for the players to make quick decisions, play risky, and generally lean-in to the chaos that makes Cy_Borg (like MÖRK BORG before it) really shine. The largest reason for that is simply that an operational casino, as raucous or as dangerous as it may be, is not the same kind of overall environment as a trap and monster filled dungeon. This location is one filled with random citizens and open for business nearly all hours of the day. As such, the PCs are able to come in, take their time, do extensive recon, dip out and come back several hours later, can step away to prepare elsewhere in the city,
etc. Dungeons typically have an immediacy to them simply by the threat of danger (and the established reasons for the PCs to be delving dangerously to begin with). Here, the incentive of deleting a neighborhood’s debt, held on the casino’s living server, and possibly bringing down the house all together doesn’t have a ticking clock component to it, other than one I as the GM invented during play. The only time limit placed on it by the adventure is two days which is TONS of time for player action, to the point of almost being no time limit at all.
The above spread, featuring a number of random events (along with standard reaction rolls), definitely helps to infuse chaos into play, if the rolls cooperate, but chaos isn’t always a driving factor towards the player’s end goal or actions. NPC details (see Nikora and Wattana at the bottom of the picture above) are very sparse, sparser than I’d like especially for a game largely featuring human altercations and relationships, requiring a lot of the GM if the players approach the NPCs to inquire about the situation, try to ally, etc.
Part of this disconnect may be a misinterpretation on my part and the part of my players as to the style of game you are meant to run in Cy_Borg. Maybe the game is intended to be a purely run n’ gun bloodbath style of game, more so than we wanted. All of us were playing it as a high stakes heist but one filled with humans, not monsters (mostly).
Traversing the space was more approachable, dangers could be more safely assumed, and social norms made it fairly clear to the players where they could and couldn’t traverse so things like the mini maps on the page and room to room breakdown are still appreciated but much less valuable here than in a traditional dungeon.
What would have helped me connect the dots between the environment and the setting was:
Greater NPC breakdowns (like those in Mothership’s Pound of Flesh, for example), telling me who a person would ally with or fight against, what their primary goal was, etc.
A sensitive timeline giving the players maybe just a few short hours at most to pull off their heist else a slew of bad things inevitably pop off. If the take X amount of time before acting, Y happens.
Once my players had fully prepared and the action popped off, the adventure went well. The structure of the adventure working well, but it was in the setup and building tension moments that I felt the adventure was more unreliable as the GM.
In the end, my table still had a great time playing Lucky Flight Takedown, and as an experienced GM, I was able to create this missing scaffolding well enough during play. On a fundamental level, the adventure was a success, but I couldn’t help but feel the text and presentation pushed back and left me hanging from time to time during our session. It’s structured very similarly to MÖRK BORG’s Rotblack Sludge, and while I think that’s intentional (and in some aspects——very good), the change in setting and the larger differences between a fantasy dungeon and a cyberpunk casino (as well as the various abilities Cy_Borg characters can bring to the table) left me desiring more.
FREELANCE SLOTS AVAILABLE
If you are a creator in the space and would like to have me join your project, I have several freelance slots available over the next few months.
Currently, I have openings for the following projects:
1 Adventure Writing Slot
2 Editing Slots
1-2 Development Slots (depending on project scale)
Additionally, I will be raising my rates on November 1, 2023. Getting a project planned and on the books now secures you at my current project rates!
For a look at my full freelance portfolio and my contact information, check HERE.
MISSIVE EXCLUSIVE
This issue’s freebie is a campaign starter for a weird sci-fi setting: Hollow Universe!
The universe is not endless. It is not expanding. It is hollow.
After hundreds of years of faster-than-light travel, we found the edge of everything, and it was a new world unto itself, vaster than any humanity had ever discovered. The universe is hollow, and all of creation has lived inside of it until now. Now, we are on it. Exploring its inner walls. Searching for what comes next.
Download the full-quality files (as well as printer friendly versions) HERE!
This three hex starter was inspired by this blog post which recently came into my feed. That post along with a Twitter poll inspired me to make something sci-fi but weirder than usual and that brought me to the Hollow Universe. I really liked creating for this and I would like to do more with it in the future, as time allows.
MORE COOL STUFF
Last weekend, I got to run some of my upcoming bunker escape thriller adventure for Spicy Tuna’s upcoming Mothership 1e book: OUTSOURCED. It was my first run Wardening in a while and I was happy to be joined by a killer crew of other Mothership creators. Check out the actual play in the video above and check out the campaign HERE (which is LIVE right now).
Outer Rim Uprising by The Lost Bay Studio and featuring two in-universe pamphlets created by me and Nyhur (as well as a huge amount of great stuff from other Mothership creators - all centered around rebel uprisings across the galaxy) is coming soon! Hit the Kickstarter pre-launch link HERE to get notified once the campaign goes live!
I got to table at GenCon for the first time as part of Plus One Exp! If you stopped by the booth, chatted with me or picked up any of my adventures, THANK YOU! It was really invigorating to get to meet everyone and be in that games-loving atmosphere for a while! If you missed it and want to grab physical copies of any of my stuff, you can still do that HERE.
Disaster Tourism’s GUILD: Sword and Magick for Hire is now available along with Adventure Diary #0 which includes my adventure, The Tomb of Mother Vix, of which I am still very proud and great adventures from Luke Gearing, Stella Condrey, Amanda P. and the Disaster Tourism crew. You can grab it HERE.
Speaking of Disaster Tourism, I did some extensive dev work and editing on their new mini skirmish game, ALTAR SHOCK. It was really fun to develop something looking to bring the Unreal Tournament mayhem I loved in my youth to the tabletop and for me to get outside of TTRPGs for the first time. Check it out HERE.
There’s a new publisher in town, and it’s being headed up by Jarrett Crader, one of indie TTRPG’s greatest background creators. Jarrett has edited hundreds of great books in the field and has a killer launch lineup for his new press. Check it out HERE!
See you next month! Thanks, as always, for your continued support! - Christian
This is the kind of TRPG info I live for. Nuanced and packed with information leaving me with the desire to PLAY. Thanks!