Review 37 - Desert Moon of Karth
I've been trying out a lot of different systems in the past couple of years in an attempt to get through the huge pile of them in my bookshelf. This endeavor is not made easier by the fact that so many great hacks get written for each base system. This is further compounded by the fact that there are so many great adventures out there too! One nice thing is that you end up with a pretty wide pool of adventures and systems to choose from; and with a little work, you can run pretty much anything with anything. This week is no exception-- I'm talking about Desert Moon of Karth, which was written by Joel Hines for Mothership, but I ran it with Monolith.
I've written about my conversion method before, and have even spoken further about the Monolith system in previous posts. In short, it's a sci-fi hack of Cairn. The core Mothership system has never really clicked for me, but the adventures I've read and run have been fantastic, so it was a natural choice for conversion.
The basic premise of Desert Moon of Karth is a nice location-based adventure that allows you to present your players with a situation and let them explore it as they desire. Karth is a wasteland that was once green and verdant, and the only reason it's populated now is because there is a valuable substance that comes from the fossilized remains of an alien life form that once thrived here.
Getting it to the Table
The booklet itself comes in at about 25 pages, and it is densely packed with information. So dense, in fact, that it did take me a little while to be able to grok the adventure to the point where I could get it prepped for play. The author manages to fit four factions, nine locations, two dungeons, wilderness exploration mechanics, drug addiction mechanics, a NPC generator, a bounty hunting generator, duel mechanics, a bestiary, artifact tables, loot tables, NPCs with desires, fears, jobs, and secret agendas, and an adventure timeline into this thing, and sometimes it was difficult to remember where a particular thing was located in the book. I ran this online, and the PDF definitely suffered by not having a sidebar index for quick navigation. I give full props to the layout for fitting so much interlinked information in, but I would have accepted a slightly higher page count with a little more focus on "pick up and play" usability.
All that said, when it came to actually starting the adventure, things began to flow quite organically. Random encounters and normal NPCs all lead to different parts of the adventure, so no matter what the players decided to do, more potential adventure hooks were uncovered. Along with this, there was a very helpful section titled "If the Players Do Nothing" that provided a timeline of events that change the situation on Karth, which helped this adventure really feel alive.
For prepping this one, I essentially made separate notes about the factions and their progress towards their goals as time passed. There is a handy chart that shows their relationship with each other, but it's way at the front of the book. It was also helpful to paraphrase the info we're given, pulling it both from the faction chart and from the relevant NPCs, as information tended to be split between each appearance of the factional NPCs. Overall, this one took a little bit more work than I prefer simply due to the density of the information and its tendency to be split into a few different places.
What Worked?
- Pointcrawl style map. It was laid out with the relevant points of interest connected by paths through the desert with the number of watches it took to get to them clearly marked on the paths. This was absolutely perfect to converting to a Cairn-based system, as the wilderness exploration rules are already segmented in that way.
- Everything is connected. It would be next to impossible to interact with an NPC or overhear a rumor or travel to a new location without uncovering at least one hook to another part of the adventure. This was the thing that made this adventure feel easy to run despite the density of the layout.
- So many things to do! With no real "plot" that the PCs were expected to follow, there was plenty of threads they could pull to uncover satisfying story elements.
What Didn't Work?
- Layout. I remain impressed at how much information was crammed into 25 pages, but locating a particular bit of it was sometimes difficult, especially during a session. A sidebar index on the PDF would have helped this significantly!
- NPC generator is just a list of NPCs. That's fine, just don't call it a generator!
Final Thoughts
This was absolutely worth the price of admission, and you could get several sessions out of it without the PCs exploring even half of the locations. There were some other mechanical gripes I had with it, but nearly all of them were fixed by simply not using Mothership!
You can get Desert Moon of Karth at Joel Hines' itch page. Thanks for reading!