secretagent wrote:
"I never got around to using or buying the following for some reason and was soliciting opinions on the following --any insights by people who have played them?"
Mr. Agent,
Phew! That's one tall order, but I'm silly enough to try. Here we go and remember, this is definitely IMHO!
Adventure 6 - Expedition to Zhodane: Starts off well, then fades so fast it's like dropping off a cliff. The PCs answer the wrong want ad on Utoland, get shanghaied into a belt mining operation, and must trade ore for little things; like oxygen.
Enter 'The Rock', a starship diguised as an asteroid. Aboard is a little girl in a low berth and a personality overlay machine. It seems daddy is an Imperial sociology prof the who studies Zho society. The intel boys gave him a nifty ship and a machine that cn disguise his mind from all those nasty Zho psis. Sadly, Daddy goes missing during a visit to a Zho world and Daughter jumps out.
Now the PCs need to track down Daddy and rescue him. Trouble is the adventure barely mentions where Daddy is, why he is in trouble, who has him, or any of those other 'small' details. You get deckplans for the Rock, a mystery, and the mind disguise machine. You end up writing 2/3rds of the adventure and must figure out how to get the Rock and the mind disguise machine away from the PCs afterwards.
The two times I ran this, both sets of PCs turned the Rock and the Daughter over to INI after using it to escape Utoland. They wanted nothing to do with the Imp-Zho intel shananigans.
Adventure 7 - Broadsword: You get nifty deckplans of the Merc Cruiser, plus a crew list much like Kinunir. The multi-scenario adventure that comes along with it has problems however.
The mercs are tasked with a few jobs on Garda-Vilis, a border world with an insurgency problem. The idea that a reinforced platoon of mercs could hope to affect a planet-wide insurgency backed by a Sword World armor regiment is laughable. It gets worse when the 5th FW kicks off and a Zho strike cruiser shows up. Suddenly, the unstreamlined merc crusier is able to LAND and HIDE on a planet with an atmosphere. D'oh!
This book has plenty of info you can use to write your own adventures.
Adventure 8 - Prison Planet: If you like prison movies, this one is for you. Beside the neat layout of an underground prison, you also get the staff, selected prisoners, and TWO different ways to make your way through life in the Big House. You can either become the Baddest of the Bad or the Brown Nose Trustee. Either way has it's benefits and costs.
There is a nice 'points' system so you can track your status all the while plotting your escape. I had one group of PCs split into two groups; Bad Asses and Trustees, so they could work all angles!
Again, you can plunder this book for ideas every time you need a prison.
Adventure 9 - Nomads of the World Ocean: It's Eco Warriors versus Nasty Corporation, but don't let that put you off. This one is great.
You get awesome ocean animals; some of which can be mistaken for islands!, wild mini-sub hunting scenes, an assault on a huge harvester, an intriguing Turkic-descended aquatic nomad society aboard city-ships, and even rules and a system to manipulate the political situation aboard the city-ships and gauge your efforts.
Get it, this one rocks.
Adventure 10 - Safari Ship: A servicable adventure that can be run in one session. The PCs are hired to guide and babysit a hunter for a megacorp. He wants to find a species he can name and the megacorp wants to buy his company. Throw in a partially explored world, an unknown sophont species, a few 'good karma' tasks, and you've got it in a nutshell.
GT: Planetary Survey - Denuli covers much of the same ground as this book.
There are also Safari ship deckplans (one of my favorite ships, a trader version exists on the web) and rules on how to track and hunt creatures. Again, lots of ideas to plunder after running the adventure.
Adventure 11 - Murder on Arcturus Station: Agatha Cristie meets Our Olde Game. If your group can really 'role' instead of merely 'rolling', it worth trying.
Adventure 12 - Secret of the Ancients: This one answered ALL the CT mysteries so people hated it! Go figure... It will take a lot of work for the GM to pull off, especially when the PCs finally meet You Know Who.
Adventure 13 - Signal GK: This one gets trashed in retrospect. No one had that much trouble with the mcguffin introduced here; the sophont chips on Cymbeline, until they were linked with Virus. Now Signal GK gets all the anti-TNE grief. Go figure...
The adventure gives you deckplans for the classic jump3 liner, plus a neat little intel operation along the Solomani Rim. Unlike the Zhodane book, every portion of the adventure is developed to the same level. You'll still need to tweak things to fit your group, but you won't have to actually write 2/3rds of it!
Plenty of variety here too; skulking about on the wrong side of the Cease Fire line, sneaking your charge back across, dodging assassination attempts, feverishly trying to fix a sabotaged liner in a decaying orbit over a gas giant, even a geological expedition.
My groups enjoyed it. Forget about Virus and your group will like it too.
Double Adventure 5 - The Chamax Plague/Horde: Among the best of CT! Picture a desolate planet, a missing survey party, and a horde of... THINGS! Things that your players will learn to loathe. If they've been itching to see just what autofire on that LAG can do, this is the adventure!
Run them in order too, your group will love it. In the first, they can learn about the Chamax. In the second, they can use that knowledge to save a world. This isn't just some shoot-em-up either. There's a mystery to solve and a hanging plot point any GM worth his salt can milk for years of adventures.
Double Adventure 6 - Divine Intervention/Night of Conquest: Both very good, although the latter sort of leaves things hanging.
In DI, the players engage in a bit of a dungeon crawl. Not to loot mind you, but to leave something behind. There's a nice deckplan of a floating palace and a few nifty tech mcguffins. Again, plenty of plunder for the GM.
In NoC, the PCs find themselves in the middle of an invasion. The twist is that bad guys are human and the good guys are aliens! Both races are covered in GT:AR4.
The PCs must bug-out from a banquet and then skulk their way across an alien city to the airfield where their ship is. They must dodge various patrols of invaders while watching the clock. As the clock ticks, the patrols become more frequent as the invaders' grip on the city grows more solid. What's more, the invaders are trying to get into the PCs ship.
If the PCs can get to their ship, the invasion is pretty much done for. The humans arrived in dirigibles and their follow-up force is aboard steamers. The PCs Marava-class far trader can make mincemeat out of all of it. Trouble is; once the PCs leave what's to stop the humans from trying again? That part is left up to the GM, but it could be a campaign in itself.
My advice regarding these adventures? Get them all in the Reprints, even if you don't care for a particualr adventure, there's still stuff to plunder in each and every one.
Sincerely,
Larsen
For the record I concur with all of the above descriptions and value-judgments. Adv. 9 and DAdv. 5 are definitely the best of the lot (and two of my very favorite CT adventures), Adv. 8 is probably 3rd (though your players have to deserve it, otherwise they'll be resentful), but they're all worth getting, especially via the convenient reprints. If I had to choose a worst of the lot it would be either Adv. 7 (because the best part is the deckplans and those are a straight reprint from JTAS 8) or Adv. 12 (because the adventure itself is a boring train-ride and the 'secret' is revealed again in AM5 -- and the MT Imperial Encyclopedia and the GT rulebook -- so it's probably not even much of a secret to your players).
