PREAMBLE: THE NEW FRONTIER
Drifting Gunslingers and ruthless bounty hunters, lawless frontier towns and put-upon sheriffs, cattle drives and bank robberies, cotton plantations and railway magnates, ranches and wanted posters, and an indigenous people fighting a losing battle against an encroaching, foreign civilisation come to bring their idea of law and order to a land yet unclaimed.
If you have read or watched any Western, you've likely stumbled upon a combination of or all of the above described tropes, characters and scenarios in one degree or another. The Western as a genre had an immense impact on media that cannot be understated – a good amount of modern literary archetypes, conventions and settings that we recognise as standard today find its codification here, frequently rubbing shoulders and overlapping also with Japanese Samurai movies - Seven Samurai inspiring The Magnificent Seven, or the western novel Red Harvest inspiring the later Yojimbo which in turn gave rise to A Fistful of Dollars.
As a consequence, even by the off-chance you have never, never watched a Western before, by sheer cultural osmosis, adoption of tropes, pastiches and countless imitations and descendants over the decades, you'll be able to recognise the archetypes.
It is an inherently romantic genre – as in, it romanticises a specific time period of history, conjures painterly landscape under the red dusk, instils wonder and wanderlust, a very specific kind of desirable fantasy, that of a lone wanderer armed only with his wits, a a gun and his own sense of right and wrong in the endless wilderness, where lawful civilisation is but a distant suggestion, and reality often bloody, but earnest and rewarding, if you have but the vim and vigour to conquer it.
That is not to say that people that made Westerns were blind to its reality. There is a lot of blood in the business of the expanding frontier, systemic racism and oppression, mass displacement of indigenous populations, inter-class conflicts, and the list goes on.
These days, the Western is seldom seen in its classic image of simple good vs. bad, but more of a revisionist style: gritty, full of hypocrisies and constantly wrestling with the tropes of old and the historic realities that have now become, if not common knowledge, at least much more accessible. But the spirit survives, tenaciously, and it has led to many a cross-cultivation of genres. The Weird Western for example, spices up its frontier with the subtly or blatantly supernatural, the Space Western has its desperados race across the stars and alien planets, Cattle Punk slaps a steam engine on everything, not just the locomotive, and so on.
So, this time around, we're doing something a little different. Fall of the Free Rim is a yet to be released point-crawl setting, designed for Shadowdark RPG and its sci-fi hack DarkSpace by Dan Kirshtein, also known as Lawful Cherry that currently has a kickstarter going for its first print-run.
I was given a pre-release copy by the author for review, and have to adjust the usual review a little for that – for you see, the pre-release copy does not feature any of the artwork, maps or final layout which I would usually also discuss as part of my review.
Some of the artwork that is going to be in the finished product has been showcased on the kickstarter page, however, and it is pretty gorgeous. We're getting colour on this one, too. Cult of ChromaDark represents - but you know how I roll at this point.
Art is one thing. What about the actual, written content?
Let's dig in.
PART I: OVERVIEW & MECHANICS
Fall of the Free Rim begins with a brief history of the moon Oster, described as the only inhabitable planet in the Free Rim. Its an okay place to live. Its surface is a blasted heath of dust and crags, while a twisted jungle grows in the caverns below, born of a mould-infested meteor1 that impacted the planet long ago and held within itself an ancient, semi-sentient alien super weapon.
From this subterranean jungle crawled forth an insectoid species that would speed-run evolution over the next few thousand years into the reptilian Kinkari, who'd become the chosen of the dormant super weapon and be granted extraordinary powers, chalked up to the planet itself looking out for the kinkari.
Meanwhile, on planet Earth, there's a trillionaire that ain't doing so hot2– an alien disease is afflicting one Santiago Alada, who in his mad fear of death, counselled a seer who prophetised him his rescue lying in a strange crystal found somewhere on the rim of space.
Naturally, Alada Jr., scrambles up an army of desperate humans with promises of a better life and freedom and off they go, on a merry mayflower expedition to colonise, plumb and strip-mine the planet of Oster in search for a cure for our poor trillionaire and naturally, come into conflict with the native Kinkari in the process3.
Cue the chaos.
To add to the Space Western feel, Fall of the Free Rim comes with a Quickdraw mechanic to simulate duels and shoot-outs: two characters in a quickdraw duel roll to hit with advantage at the same time. Any hit is treated as a critical hit, a critical hit is a double critical and two 20s on both d20s? Death. The winner of the duel is whoever is either struck dead or dealt the most damage.In case both duelists survive, initiative is resolved as normal, with both duelists placed at the top of the round.
Its a fun little gimmick, and I appreciate it being here. How exactly it meshes with the various DarkSpace classes, I am uncertain, for core SD, the Fighter and Rogue are going to excel here.
We are also given a table full of rumours for each faction to seed some hooks and motivations for the PCs. And speaking of factions...
PART II: FACTIONS AND KEY NPCS
Alada Corp, the Kinkari and the town of Chokehaven form the core faction triangle on Oster, hating one another with impunity and promising no ending in which one will not wipe out the other.
Each faction has its end goal for Oster and has their progress for it tied to rough tiers of play for the player characters – at Level 1, every faction is currently in the middle of setting-up, allowing the PCs to interact with and make a first impression for themselves. Around Level 3, the faction will attempt to make a major step forward, at Level 5, they will make a play for their endgame, all of which lead into the Undergarden, and involve some unspeakable horrors to be unleashed upon Oster and, potentially, the galaxy beyond.
There is, technically, a fourth faction in the form of the Ferals, which are tied to the big secret kept by the Kinkari, but they have no goal in of themselves.
Alada Corp is your standard, xenophobic, corrupt sci-fi mega-corp. They are here to colonise and plumb Oster of all its resources, are responsible for the sudden mass migration of humans to Oster, sparked the conflict with the Kinkari and are, overall, about as shagnasty as you can imagine it to be. There are some individuals who work for them that have second-guesses about if they are doing the right thing, but are in too deep to do anything about it, but overall, they are an expansionist, human-centric monolith. So, eat the rich.
The Kinkari are, naturally, a little miffed about the space-colonialism and are the other extreme monolith of a faction due to their hive-mind, and are unanimous in their desire to see Alada Corp wiped off the face of Oster, and Chokehaven, by extension, likely as well, since their previous chief, who had been building some rapport with Chokehaven, was murdered. One of their shamans is responsible for the existence of the Feral, having kidnapped humans from Chokehaven and surroundings to brainwash them into mad cannon-fodder to harass the town with.
Lastly, Chokehaven forms the middle-ground between the two, being not in direct and open conflict with either faction, but facing their own internal problems in the shape of a burgeoning dwarven gang propping itself up as a new miner's guild.
Each faction is given additional life through a variety of NPCs that are deeply intertwined with its ongoing goals: aforementioned trillionair and his charismatic, but deeply ambitious and cruel son for the Corporation, the shamans and chieftains of the Kinkari, each with their own grudges, strife and manipulations, and the people of Chokehaven, from its put-upon, torn-between extremes Marshall, the criminal and vengeful Cole, and the strange , poncho-clad L1-LE Units that aim to protect Chokehaven from ferals.
They all have their own believes, plans and secrets, that overlap or steer their respective faction goals. There are not many surprises with them – the Marshal, the trillionaire, the haunted engineer, the kinkari, they all fall into some form of sci-fi or western archetype that you have seen before, and shouldn't be too difficult to run as a GM.
PART III: OSTER
Fall of the Free Rim's point-crawl consists of ten locations, central of which being the town of Chokehaven, which will likely serve as any party's main hub while adventuring within the free Frontier.
The town has a few small adventure opportunities attached to its various shops and buildings: a road-side hotel has its staff infested with alien parasites, and a bounty hunter ominously greets the party in the saloon. It has the standard accoutrements of any frontier town and comes with a cast of colourful NPCs that breathe some life into it.
Outside Chokehaven, the plantation run by clones is harassed by giant bats, kinkari monuments framed by giant skulls dot the horizon and the reinked stables are struggling with some pests. Most of the adventuring to be done is closely tied to the factions – and some of the locations prevented here provide, at best, some lore and foreshadowing to future developments found in the Undergarden, but are not in of itself adventure hooks.
It is jarring that there are three out of ten total locations – one of which the players will inevitably clear at the very beginning of any campaign – which will end up as little more than set-dressing. The Undergarden itself, as presented in the document suffers similarly from being pretty underdeveloped, with only a single paragraph of actual, physical description given. The same goes for nearly every other location, too, but at least those had some bullet points with interact-able events and the like.
For the Undergardens, we know the reasons why exactly each faction wants to go down there, but all we really get about its dangers or potential threats are that its caverns are covered in man-tall grass and moss, and that there are man-eating insects stalking it. The word “hellscape” tries to do a lot of heavy lifting for the GM that has to improvise a dungeon out of it – and as the Undergardens are essentially inaccessible by the party and most other factions until they hit LV 5, that leaves you with only 8 real locations to explore. The faction end-scenarios attached read more like the bullet-point script of a video game cutscene for the most part – something to be described to the players, with an end-combat scenario to play out:
For the Adala Corp, Santiago links up with the alien superweapon and is transformed into a David Bowie – I mean, into a Star Man and threatens to devour the whole planet.
The Kinkari find their lost shaman Juntha down here, snap him out of his funk and rid the overworld of Adala Corp with an army of resurrected Hillbeasts.
Cole and his miners detonate a bunch of explosives in their search for the “true” underground, resulting in the man-eating insects swarming the surface and forcing the PCs to fight and run for their lives.
Cole Gizzard and his mining guild also lack any sort of physical presence on the map or in Chokehaven itself. Despite him being the lead antagonist to the Chokehaven faction, his “guild” does not as much as have a base keyed out on the map or in town itself, with only some faction rumours pointing the PCs to him having a house somewhere in town.
The random encounter tables, one for each major faction region, luckily alleviate some of this emptiness, and they are all fairly dynamic and themed according to the faction that rules a region:
The Wastes are filled with carrion bugs threatening lone wanderers, groups of Kinkari making their way toward one of their monolith posts, hunters wrestling with giant centipedes and a sneering reptilian attempting to start a duel with one of the PCs.
This particular random encounter table also features a potential instant PC loss in the shape of a band of Kinkari attempting to catch the hindmost PC and subject him to the Clush'thaw, their brainwashing method of choice, and turn them into a feral. I am split on this one – I don't mind the danger it poses, but I do mind that the rest of the party does not get the chance, RAW, to intervene in the attempted kidnapping. I also mind the non-standard DCs of 13 and 14 being used here.
Chokehaven, like any frontier town, is filled with scenes straight out of a western, given a sci-fi spin: a corpsman spits on a PCs boots to challenge them to a duel, deputies call for help as ferals raid the town, a pair of robots brawl their way out of a house and into the street.
Finally, the Reach is filled with the influence of the Alada Corps, harassing the PCs for a bribe, crucified Kinkari, escaped prisoners and a corporate convoy transporting captured citizens of Chokehaven.
Each table also comes with a Wandering Entity and Bounty Hunter entry, the former of which are utterly alien, hostile wildlife throwing a wrench into whatever scene currently undergoing.
But it does only that. Alleviate, not fix a rather small, undercooked set of locations.
PART IV: RUIN AT RENN'S TAKE
This adventure is explicitly written to be the players' introduction to Fall of the Free Rim, focusing on the destroyed fort of Renn's Take. The PCs are contracted immediately post pod-drop on Oster's surface by Alada Corp. The objective: retrieve the AI Prodigal from its core frame and deliver it, intact, to their base at Iron's Reach for 200 credits.
I, unfortunately, do not have a map for this adventure. So I'll be left to do some guesswork and abstraction.
One of the core mechanics of this adventure is the Sound the Alarm feature: the security system is still actively in place and the open area of the base under constant surveillance by an automata atop one of the towers. Every round the party is in the outdoors, they must succeed on a party-wide DEX check, with a total average of 12 in order to not be spotted. On a failure, the alarm is sounded, an automata is dispatched to their last known location, the random encounter chance increases and some of the individual dungeon areas will be affected by the blaring siren, with its monsters shuffling about to lay in ambush for the unsuspecting party.
The dungeon is otherwise a scavenger hunt – the PCs are encouraged to stick to the shadows and cautiously make their way through the individual areas, discover clues as to the location of Prodigal, dodge roach-like alien parasites, patrolling automatons and deal with other scavengers attempting to make off with the treasures before them.
Some areas require keycards to open, found in Sci-Fi tradition on the corpses of former Corporation staff, another time, you can identify the password to a computer terminal being scrawled as graffiti on a wall. I like it, it encourages your PCs to explore the environment.
There is some wonky things, however. One of the random encounters, for example, asks for what I can only describe as a “revulsion check” in the form of a DC 12 CON, as maggots shift across the ground. On a failure... your character is forced to move back 10 ft. Why? There are no such checks for any other monster aor even location across the entire book, not even with the man-eating giant insects mentioned in the Undergarden. Nor are there any of such in SD or its Space-Hack in general. Its a weird thing to consider your PCs able to deal with alien monstrosities of any kind, but a few wiggling maggots are somehow able to force them into a momentary, minimal retreat.
A potential ally can be found in the albino kinkari Wikker, who had been kept imprisoned here by the Corporation, while Prodigal itself, trapped within its own frame, warns the PCs before attacking them. Disabling it with a successful INT check will not only secure Prodigal, but also turn off the alarm and active security throughout the base.
The players may then decide what to do with their haul – they can bring it back to Adala Corp for a full reward and 1 XP, or sell Prodigal for scrap metal in Chokehaven for half the credits and 1 XP. If Wikker is with them, they may also choose to escort him instead to the Kinkari home in the Waste for 2 XP.
There's not a lot else to be said about the adventure, honestly. Most of the areas are quickly described, with some only holding a single automaton, damaged and barely a threat. There's never an empty room, as such, but unless the PCs have some really, really bad dice rolls, there's not much that's going to be a threat here.
PART V: CONCLUSION
I don't dislike Fall of the Free Rim, but I'd hesitate to shower it with praise. With only ten locations to the setting, you've got to make certain to use each location to its fullest potential, especially if you wish to make them span a campaign from level 1 to 5. Some of them receive more focus than others, with Chokehaven and Iron's Reach being fleshed out the most, while some, such as Taparini's Stable basically become one-and-done locations after handling whatever quests are attached to them, with not much incentive to visit again.
It has potential, I like Chokehaven as a location a lot, and it is where a lot of the focus for the setting went in, and the NPCs provided are grounded in Western archetypes, but given a neat little spin that will ensure ot make them memorable – I just wish there a couple more minor locations in and around it that provided some more adventure opportunities, or that some of the lore-only locations were given some conflict for PCs to brave before getting access to the information there. As it stands currently, Fall of the Free Rim feels strangely empty, even beyond it taking place in a dust bowl moon valley. Though it currently has about the length of the average Cursed Scroll zine, it feels like it has, at best, a third of its content.
Some more time in the kitchen would have been necessary to cook up this one.
The author has some stretch goals promised on their kickstarter that promise additional adventures and a mapped out and crawl-able Undergarden. They may just add what I feel the book is lacking yet – but I leave the decision to back it up to you.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lawfulcherry/fall-of-the-free-rim-a-space-western-setting-for-darkspace
1 Starring David Duchovny, Orlando Jones, Julianne Moore and Seann
William Scott and a cameo by Dan Aykroyd
2 Which is how you know its fiction.
3 Which is how you know its historic.
No comments:
Post a Comment