Review 22: Against the Atomic Overlord
I know, I know, I just did a DCC review. The thing is, I ran a lot more of those modules over the past few years than adventures for other systems, so there was bound to be some imbalance. Anyway, to make up for it, this will be a particularly scathing review. "Against the Atomic Overlord" was written by Edgar Johnson with art by Doug Kovacs, Brad McDevitt, Stefan Poag, and Michael Wilson. This is a level 5 adventure for Dungeon Crawl Classics, and I ran it as such.
The premise of this one is pretty cool, which is why I picked it up in the first place; the party has been transported to the distant planet of Mezar-Kul for one reason or another, and find themselves caught in the midst of a war between factions in a ruined cityscape. From the introduction:
To succeed, they must navigate a warzone while avoiding its many dangers, find a potent weapon and bargain with its alien guardians, and slay the Overlord in its colossal metal fortress.
The next section of the introduction describes the adventure as a combination hex crawl and dungeon crawl that "follows a plot path, but also allows for sandbox play."
Awesome, right? WRONG! As it turns out, this was one of the most egregiously railroaded adventures that I have come across from Goodman Games.
Getting it to the Table
I will be perfectly honest-- this one was a bit of a nightmare to prep. Reading through it, each "area" above ground in the ruined city was actually just a series of programmed encounters, rather than actual places that you explore and move between in a sort of coherent "this is a physical place" sense of things. The "map" is essentially just a flowchart of encounters.
The adventure is written to open with two huge fights between two of the factions, and the only purpose of it is to show the players that one of them is bad and the other is good, and that they should definitely follow the good guys. Because high-level DCC makes combat take forever, when I ran it I just cut the second fight altogether, because it was meaningless.
The next part details the underground base of the good guys. The section begins with a note for the judge, saying that what follows assumes that the party followed the good guys willingly. If that is the case, they are led straight through the majority of the underground complex to meet with their leader. So, unless the party decided to attack or flee from the good guys (who saved their lives in the fight against the bad guys in the previous section), there is really no reason for there to be any details of areas 2-1 through 2-10, because they're going to get led straight to 2-11. All of the defenses, traps, and other things that appear in the approach to 2-11 will not matter unless the party is acting as an invading force, which is an incredibly unlikely scenario. To salvage at least a tiny bit of dungeon crawling, I changed the way that the opening section played out, with the party meeting the good guys at a pre-ordained spot because they were sent there at the behest of their patron, and then the bad guys ambushed them and killed the good guys, leaving only one clinging to life to say "bunker... to the north... ugh" before dying. Clumsy? Sure. Better than what the module gave me? Definitely. At least I was able to allow them to have some fun exploring a couple of rooms before the good guy patrol found them and brought them to the boss.
Once the PCs talk to the leader of the good guys, they're told to go find a powerful weapon (the Great Egg) which can be used to destroy the Overlord. Hilariously, the PCs are given a device that will tell them when they are heading in the right direction to reach the facility where the Egg is stored. It's hilarious because there is literally only one path to follow, with the occasional single-room dead ends directly off the main path. Preparing this part was easy because it was really just a string of room encounters that had no real stakes, especially for a level 5 DCC party. There is one truly dangerous encounter in the ruined stadium, but the party would have had to go out of their way to find it, and there was absolutely no incentive for them to do so. Finally, the party reaches an ancient monorail system, which seems a little on the nose for a railroad adventure. I severely truncated this part, because as written you are just supposed to roll for a random encounter at three stations on the route before reaching the main transfer station. Here, the party has the choice of following the device to get to the next plot point, or they can go a different direction to... five more random station encounters and then nothing. Sandbox!
Once they change trains and get to the facility where the Egg (nuclear warhead) is being stored, the party is again met by an NPC immediately upon entry and led to the important room, once again negating the need for any room details or descriptions in the rest of the complex because there is no reason to go into them. The NPC they meet is Da'brok, the leader of the third of four factions in play in this module. Exciting, right? Complex relationships and interesting interactions, right? WRONG! The good guys the party meets first have the ultimate aim of getting the party to trigger the egg to destroy the Overlord. Da'brok's ultimate aim is to... get the party to trigger the egg and destroy the Overlord, only he wants them to first cast spells at it to alter it to heal the world, which will still destroy the Overlord. (Side note: the fourth faction, as written, has absolutely zero impact on anything in the adventure. The leader, Vor the Teknikat, also wants to see the Overlord destroyed, but ultimately is indistinguishable in motivation from the first group. I completely omitted this faction from my run of the module, which was pretty easy to do because the only way I can see that a party would meet them as written is through random encounters.) This was such a wasted opportunity, as good faction play can be incredibly rewarding and create really interesting situations and dilemmas for the players to navigate. I changed things around a bit to lean into the Law vs Chaos aspect of DCC-- in my game, the initial good guys wanted the party to use magic to alter the egg in the direction of Law, creating a wave of energy that would wipe out the Overlord and level the remains of the city. Da'brok wanted the party to use magic to alter the egg in the direction of Chaos, which would create a wave of mutagenic energy that would destroy the Overlord and re-seed the planet of Mezar-Kul with a rapid burst of growth, making it green once more. This way, the players at least had an actual decision to make.
The final part of the adventure has the PCs take the train to the Overlord's fortress (a giant tank) and fend off waves of attackers while the magic users attempted to alter the Egg in one direction or the other. This was a pretty cool set piece, and was an actual challenge for the party because not all of them could be involved in the fight. Fun fact: the fortress has a cannon attack that only hits on a natural 20, and it did on the very first round. Eventually the Egg got pushed in the direction of Chaos (which was actually a failure based on the decision the party made), thus releasing the mutagenic energy. This culminated in a series of rolls on a fairly disappointing mutation table, with a whole lot of null results. This was actually an appropriate ending to this mess of an adventure, hur hur.
What Worked?
- Pretty cool set piece battle at the very end
- Good concept. This could have been a very fun adventure if a little more attention was given to making it an actual sandbox-- more on that later.
What Didn't Work? MEGA EDITION
- Hand-holding. I was frankly astonished at how little trust was put in the players, with entire dungeons made pointless by the fact that if the players followed the good guys, they would simply be brought to the next plot point immediately.
- Pointless rooms. As mentioned above, there are rooms that the PCs will likely never even see, and if they do, there is absolutely no purpose to interacting with them. For example, room 2-4 in the good guy bunker has an elaborate control panel that has nearly half of a page devoted to what happens if the PCs play with it-- there is even a handout detailing the appearance of the gears and levers. However, there is no reason for the PCs to play with the control panel. None. The only thing that can happen through interaction is that the PCs kill themselves, or the guards get alerted, at which point they'll just get whisked off to the boss unless the PCs decide to attack the people who saved their lives in the opening of the adventure.
- Sandbox false advertising. This was the real crime to me. Not only is it described as featuring a hexcrawl that allows for sandbox play, it also includes a map of the surface that is divided into hexes with a distance scale and some features:
The problem is, there is absolutely zero content to facilitate running any sort of overland exploration, nor is there any reason for the party to go anywhere else other than the path laid out for them. There is a mere quarter page devoted to "adventuring in the dead city" which features helpful things like "make retreat the only smart option", "the dead city is too vast to elaborate in this space", and "judges should include their own [encounters] if needed or desired." The only tool provided is a generic encounter table in the appendices. The party could travel several miles through undescribed ruins and have a chance of finding a "plastic shipping container (2x2x4') with handles"! There is also no procedure given for actually using this table-- a minor quibble for a veteran GM who probably has a preferred method, but imagine trying to run this as a new GM.
- Meaningless faction play. Three factions who vaguely want the same thing and one who is the mindless bad guy is not interesting. Another thing I cut out of my game was the fact that Da'brok has a "pacifism aura" that calls for a DC 30 Will save to resist, otherwise the PCs must think that Da'brok is a great guy and they should agree with him. Eugh.
Final Thoughts
This was a frustrating one to run, because I had to do a lot of work to make it playable and interesting. It was also frustrating because there were the seeds of many good ideas in here, but it was as though the writer had no idea how to make them into a good adventure. It was one of the most "on-rails" adventures that I've seen in a long time outside of WotC. The boring mutations at the end were just the icing on the cake-- I should have swapped in the tables from MCC or "Accursed Heart of the World Ender". Ah well.
You can find "Against the Atomic Overlord" in the Goodman Games web store, but I can't recommend it. Thanks for reading!