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I absolutely love the genesis for this scenario, and it seems to be skillfully executed here. The opportunity for players to weaponize the tropes of 80s coming-of-age movies and Cold War anxiety as an in-fiction strategy is somehow equal parts compelling and absurd - which is a plus in my book. I amused myself just imagining a scene in which The Russian, suspicious after a tactical misstep from an agent, is thrown off the trail after a convincing monologue about how things have been weird ever since their parents announced their impending divorce and the house that they grew up in is being sold to a commercial developer.

If I had to nitpick, my only concern is that there's more ambiguity than I'd like for how the operatives are expected to uncover the truth about the swarm hive. I think the incorporation of clocks is fantastic and would keep things from lagging, but if the tightrope the players walk on is investigating this strange mystery while maintaining the ruse of being kids, there's plenty in the way of the latter but less of the former. I think having tables for generating tangible objectives (alien energy pylon disguised as a field goal post, the ad jingle for a local mattress company suppresses the swarms' gestation) would create connective tissue between Act 1 and Act 3.

Again, I love this concept. I'm thrilled that something delightfully twisted was born from a childhood memory, and I hope this gets brought to people's tables.

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Hey! Thank you for sharing the imagined monologue. That’s just the sort of cheesy, fun, trope-filled roleplaying I hoped people would get to experience with this adventure. :D

The point you raised is a good one, and it’s something I’ll try to tackle in the future. Perhaps each kid adventure should have at least one solid lead? Or maybe there’s a subtle clue all but guaranteed, with more solid or useful clues requiring lateral thinking and investigation. It’s definitely worth thinking about, and something I’ll try to work out when writing the example scenarios for the back of the PDF.

BTW, the ad jingle thing is genius. Do you imagine the suppressive nature as a sort of intentional supernatural/superscience situation, or would it be an incidental side effect, like the yodeling from Mars Attacks! (1996)?