Chipped Saucer

Spooks ACKSliens

This is an entry for ACKS II, by Daniel Hicks of Fascinating Contaminated Luggage. It presents an age old D&D classic: a downed alien ship which your party Medieval (or in ACKS’s case, Roman) Fantasy guys get to go investigate. This juxtaposition has deep roots in the hobby and is very well represented in the canon of OSR and OSR adjacent adventure sites. However, these sites can be a bit hard to stick the landing with as it were, so let’s see if Daniel managed to do so.

The biggest thing to look for in a flying saucer type adventure is how easy it is to slot into a fantasy world without tipping players off too early, and I think that this adventure does a pretty good job of that. The main enemies behave as hellhounds and spectres, despite being of extraterrestrial and technological make. The two provided rumors are believably fantasy-esque, and I believe the materials the saucer is made of can be passed off at some sort of unknown dwarf metal for a bit. But as soon as players see the saucer itself (by asking for an exterior description), the jig is up. Which is probably fine. It’s serviceable.

Serviceable is also what I would call the map. This is a traditional saucer shape, and so is basically a single story tower, with all the issues that entails. However, this site does make up for that by a system of coded key-bracelets which grant higher levels of access to various places, so they can’t just kick in every door clockwise. There is also a fair bit of interactivity, especially for thieves who will need to be on the ball deciphering the alien script everywhere. Hopefully they prevent the party from dying a most embarrassing death by self-destruct. I do like the inclusion of a player and Judge map, with different markings even if the Judge one is a bit crowded.

The tone is a bit better than serviceable, we’ll call it good you get a feel for what the weird aliens were like. You can tell they lived in a very cold environment, and transported dangerous creatures. You can even find their bodies, presumably having died of heat stroke. The Acid hounds are really cool, acid dripping tripartite jaws. I imagine them has having a sort of green plasma fur for whatever reason. It’s all good.

The main issue I have with this site centers around the other centerpiece monster, the Nano-Apparition. It behaves as a specter, but can’t be turned but gains an energy damage weakness. I do think it’s a little strange that a hyper advanced nanite based ship drone can be waved away by a torch (since that is mundane energy damage). I also think that there should have been one that would help deal with the Acid Hounds in some way, because the ones that are here are functionally radiation traps. They mostly feel like an obligation, something that was only included because it’s classic alien tech stuff.

Treasure is good, the “Magic Items” here are technological in nature of course, but are given the proper Apparent Value(s). I particularly like the platinum wire in the reactor, though I question why there isn’t radiation leaking from it. Over all, pretty good site.

ACKSman’s Opinion

(As before, this section is not part of the overall contest ranking, feel free to ignore as you see fit).

So this is a saucer adventure for ACKS II, which is probably about as far away from ACKS thematically as you can you get. That said, I think it does a much better job of demonstrating that ACKS can do more than just fantasy Rome than my own entry this year. However, that comes with a major caveat which is the technological loot. This is going to cause issues for any Judge running them. Most of the items are presented without a spell like equivalent. The Hand Disruptor isn’t simply a reskinned wand, if functions as its own thing. This is good, as it goes, since I don’t believe that Mages should be able to recreate these things with magical research. However, this will cause player complaints, especially over the lack of Power Cells in the rest of the campaign. The Engineer’s Eye I believe a Mage could recreate a similar item, but not by simply dissecting the eye. They player would need to use their brain and determine that it was the spell X-ray with an activation cost of being a prosthetic. So I feel that the separation of magic and tech is preserved. All in all, very good little curve ball to through your players, provided you as a judge can handle the implications that aliens exist in your setting now.