Terrible font choice. Excellent color palette, layout, and style. Ditch the weird symbols (pi, hash, gear, etc.) and just use numbers for easy table access. Kudos for including a printer-friendly B&W version.
Otherwise, solid adventure. I'll be running this.
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Headless System's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| How well are the themes utilized? | #2 | 4.167 | 4.167 |
| Overall | #3 | 4.125 | 4.125 |
| How stylish does this one-shot visually look? | #3 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| How well are design principles used to create a fun one-shot? | #4 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| How legible and easy-to-understand is this mission? | #6 | 3.833 | 3.833 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Which RPG system(s) is this for?
Mothership
How did you use the mandatory theme "Side Effects May Include"?
When a robot is modified to be a personal friend, it has the unwanted side effect of perceiving potential threats to its friend and uncaringly disposing of them.
Which hard mode challenges did you do?
Voices In The Void additional theme
We Aren't The First Ones Here additional theme
Single sheet adventure
ASCII-only
How harsh do you want people to critque your submission?
Be brutally honest
Comments
Edits to the entry have been disabled as voting begins, however I would like to provide a small update thanks to the wonderful critiques everyone has given. Here is the second page with the mentioned fixes to HANDHELD CONSOLE and the Power room for anyone interested. Once voting is complete I will be fixing it in the project files, so please check back soon! Thank you all for the wonderful comments and very helpful critiques!
Thank you so much for the read up and recommendations. I've fixed up the item highlight and repaired the readability of the Power room entry in an above comment, but will make the fixes to the project once it is editable again. For the hazardous environments it is meant to be assumed that basically anywhere without a "scripted" event like finding the monster or a body there is always a chance of something happening. Do you think it is a little too vague with just the Hazardous Environment Warden note paired with the chart?
It boils down to a preference thing, but if there are two 'classes' of rooms in about equal number, I'd mark both rather than only one. If every time I look at a map, it reminds me of one case, but not the other, then at a glance mid-game I'm as likely to see "nothing happens here" as I am to remember that "nothing = HazEnv event."
I can see what you mean. I'll play with it a bit, could add a little balance to the second page if every room title has a symbol on both sides.
I forgot to mention the randomized corpses in rooms, but the intention is to add some slight replayability and an extra opportunity for the monster to appear even if the players never interact with the smaller cargo room that acts something like a lair. I think corpses appearing in places that feel weird gives people more to wonder about, like why is somebody else stuffed in Conrad's cabin? Maybe the monster was hiding a body, maybe somebody got cornered frantically trying to hide, maybe the dice line up and put Conrad in there so it just makes sense. I can see how it could make for some awkward interactions though, like finding two sets of spare keys in the cabins or the first aid key sitting right next to the locked box, but I'm not sure how to remedy that without assigning every body to a room and doing away with the mix-up entirely. I guess that might just have to be left to a Warden's discretion to fudge some things for their own game, which I don't love, but I'm certainly open to ideas on changes to the topic.
Re: corpse locations: as soon as I hit post, I remembered these are people being hunted through a claustrophobic ship by a crazy monster, and they all probably have access to every room in the place. "Flee to wherever you can reach" is logically going to give you some 'illogical' hidey holes and randomly scattered items. Weird feeling is right. I don't think duplicated items is a big problem - the captain could plausibly have back-ups of any card/key, which scatters in the melee.
The replayability and sense of strange are totally sensible out-of-universe justifications too.
Thanks so much for the helpful review of the pages! I've added an image of the second page to finish up the Power room description in an above comment, but will be making the fixes to the project files once they are editable after voting. I was wondering if referencing a forward airlock was enough, but with your recommendation I will definitely add a better clarification with something pointing to the right-most airlock on the map. It was somewhat intentional to have text boxes uncomfortably close or overlapping slightly to lean into the feel of a console with error windows or alerts appearing, but I may have gone too far and made it just look unfinished or not gone far enough to really drive the idea home. If you have any thoughts on if I should push it harder with more flavor text getting cut off in other places or pull it back and just make it look cleaner in those areas I'd love to hear them!
86 days ago (+1)
I'll work on cleaning up the key, I can see how it could cause some extra searching for information. The cargo cutout is more just to show the layout of how walkways and containers are positioned in the room but I can absolutely see the mistake in using the same symbol as corpses, good shout on that and it will be remedied.
Thank you for giving it a look and some feedback, its really appreciated. I've also added some more printer friendly versions.
87 days ago(+1)
Thank you so much for the kind words. Makes me proud of my first public work and inspired to make more!
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