itch.io

There's a finished(?) art&colour version up now, if you fancy a look at it as creator intended. I took your points about moving bits around, which I think does make it a lot more legible. There are probably a few pieces that could benefit from being placed differently, but the various chunks are so inter-related I suspect the 'correct' order might be somewhat open to individual preference. Having talked it out with a couple of other folks, I didn't include much in the way of a system/skill conversion guide, but hopefully it should be somewhat intuitive in the context of a more complete game/system.

Thanks for the notification. I see what the other commenter said about the B&W version - it has a great retro feel in grayscale. Weirdly, the file is much bigger without the colour - I guess the B&Wification maps a bunch of value translations rather just a grey colour.

Absolutely gorgeous, and a fun puzzle scenario to work through, as well as an interesting journey warping yourself to fit your environment. Way cool

Thanks for the notes! I'm in the process of completing and re-ordering it right now, so there should be a more functional (and prettier?) version up in either ~2 or ~72 hours.

I hadn't given much thought to the physical on-table arrangement of playing it printed. I guess it wouldn't be much extra work to add a page that can be cut into individual ID cards for each Longshoreman, with skills and a space for a portrait above or alongside their timesheet. Maybe a condensed version in as few pages as possible, and a 16-page page-breaked version arranged such that you can have all the separate leaves visible.

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.

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."

Lovely format, novel interaction with side effects as a game mechanic. Stakes are low(ish) but very personal, which is nice. Big fan.

Explaining how the Moves work before what they are(/are for) was slightly confusing - expanding that first sentence of section 3 just a little would help.

The invitation/instruction for the characters to directly subject themselves to the procedure during the heist puts a fun spin on things.

This is certainly personal preference, but I'm not a fan of such sparse guidance for readers or players - the flowchart style looks really cool and stark and the icons are a nice touch, but I don't like having to piece together the flow, and the limiting boxes make for dense blocks of text. The whitespace left due to the layout could have been used for explanation in a more pedestrian layout.

Feels like some of the 'feel' of the scenario (before the climax, at least) relies on the product description - info on the project page that isn't in the document. Maybe some of that could go under the title on the cover?

Well-detailed social adventure, a refreshing and interesting change for being solely in polite society. The mystery isn't too complex, but the layers of society between a stranger and the crime scenes read like it would be a good roleplay challenge.

Elegantly formatted, though a few more boxes and lines would help separate sections cleanly.

A handful of sentence fragments scattered throughout.

It would be helpful to state that the NPC Sources are your other adventures available on Itch, if you are referring to them as sourcebooks.

As far as things to cut - it's been mentioned below, but throughout the whole doument there is a lot of text, single sentences and clauses, that doesn't need to be included - suggestions to ignore X or Y, verbose-yet-vague descriptions, etc.

Not your average scifi, but a fun jaunt around an island beautifully presented.

The details are well-explained, but I'm not sure the links between locations or events are - I fear I'd be stumbling blindly around in the woods until things happen to me and eventually I die.

Side effects are fun, widely available, and only sometimes ridiculous - much like the 'monsters'.

Rounding out the 'supporting cast' to provide direction and information to players, and including some "you can see X landmark from Y location" guides to GM and players, would help make running this smooth and easy.

Straightforward premise with a nice new take on a 'friendly' doom AI.

Clearly delivered info and 'drive' for the players. Quite simple A>B>C progress, doesn't feel incredibly interactive (though managing the AI's threat level provides some), but extremely functional. I'm not sure if the empty rooms are to my taste, but they fit the setting.

Nicely presented - enough visual flare that it isn't boring to look at, and remains very readable.

Theme as set-up is cleanly deployed.

I really like the two phase escalation mechanic revitalising the room-crawl between the 'explore' and 'fix' stages of play.

I appreciate it would cramp the layout, but if Exploration is the second section header, I'd want to see a bit more divergence from the simple ring - significant access obstructions from Ready Room to parts of Research Ops, Security as a hardened point within the Comms room providing limited secondary access controls, Workshop has mechanisms to move heavy machinery around the station etc.

First up: I'd run this, and like chipsandsolstice said, I could probably comfortably run it now, having read it only a couple of times.

Cool, clear premise.

Small but varied locations, sufficient detail, good roll tables, easy to transmit story to players, good building horror.

Gorgeous cover art, dead creepy. Slick overall look.

Theme is central to the what/why, but very much in the background.

Picky crits:

I'm always a fan of including a summary for the GM of what/how/why happened, even though it's not strictly necessary here.

Page numbers would make it more parse-able digitally.

A handful of typos/omissions: HANDHELD CONSOLE (vital exposition?) is not bolded in the location description text. Power room desc ending cut off? Marking which rooms hold Hazardous Complications (not only which have Corpses) would be a helpful clarifier/reminder.

How many Androids? 1 crew listed on Manifest marked Disabled, but a heap in Cryo, more in Sub Bay... Are the cargo?  [Yes, they are cargo, it actually is clearly stated in the text.]

Is it necessary/helpful to have randomly-located corpses?  Seems like some 'should' be in specific rooms.

This is the shape of the project at Jam deadline time, so I think it would be unfair to other submissions to rate this one after more time organising and beautifying. I'm pretty sure I ticked the "be brutal" feedback box, and I've sub'd an unfinished project.

Re-ordering is high on the To-Do list, once it is feature-complete. Your suggestion is a helpful one; I'm obviously very close to it at the moment so it is good to get a guide on which bits of context are needed earlier to make later rules easily understandable.

The idea about guides for aligning the agnostic frame with specific popular systems marries with your suggestion that the equipment available is too undefined - I'll add a note to expand the intro/framing paragraphs to be explicit that there is a load of undefined space around the rules frame for the writer to make the world whatever they want. If it makes sense to be available, it is, but examples would also help.

The idea of the Longshoremen being ambiguously human is to steer you into the common side effect of siloed management being that they stop thinking of human resources as people. That's part of what the Health & Safety report and final summary is supposed to point at ("Did you stop thinking about your employees as people while chasing your KPIs?"), but maybe I've left that too ambiguous, if it's not coming through.

Thanks for the notes, there's good stuff to work with here!

I'm not sure I have good insight to offer, but I wanted to echo the people saying this uses the Love 2.0 prompt excellently, well constructed to frame everything well. Unfortunately, short of including a primer on CfB-style games and solo play thereof, I don't know that this could be easily made significantly more legible - it took me going to the Hardcase page, then a Brindlewood blurb, to clock that that was what we're doing here. I really like what I think are the natural conclusions to draw from the case though.

Very kind of you to say, thank you.

The terse style is appropriate in the context of a cyberpunk corpo briefing, but confusing as a GM aid. The order of information presentation contributes to that, as the mechanics and narrative situation feel like they've been chopped up and intermixed almost randomly. The mission idea is worth spending a few more words on to make it more readily playable - it could easily be reformatted to keep the two-page footprint and read more intuitively.

After a couple of reads, I think this would be a really fun short social session - but it did take a couple of reads to work out how I might actually run the thing, and I'm still not exactly sure what the mechanics are. I like the covert, time-limited and strictly non-violent set-up, a transit hub gives all three very naturally. The targets are a diverse and interesting bunch too, with nice roleplay prompts offered.

Great to have a bunch of accessible conflicting job hooks, with a lot of potential warmth and character (or nasty coldness) behind them - I can imagine really fun hiring scenes and negotiations, a nice blend of passion, greed, shame and pragmatism.

The feel of the bar is interesting, as are the characters that populate it - plenty of personality and motivations, feels easy to make it feel alive.

There are a few too many unnecessary details, for my tastes. What's the purpose of listing all the corpses in the water? As far as I could see it was Borg-y clutter. Similarly, the evasive street kids. Make it a guaranteed confrontation (not necessarily combat) as they protect their home and meager belongings - an obstacle and a human interaction.

It would be helpful to have all the overlapping detail marked on all the maps - the tunnel hatch marked in the basement, for example. I was losing track of where layers matched up on my first read.

The climactic hack and escape reads like it would be tense and dramatic, set to close the adventure with a bang.

Visually, everything clearly arranged and in a usable logical order, always helpful. Detail is mostly 'spent' well in the busy and interesting areas of the scenario I'd want the players to be interacting with the most too.

Very neat and cleanly presented. The sidequest is great, almost to the point that, were I playing, I'd want to stay on that questline more than finish the main job. I would have loved to see more concrete details, more of your world, rather than sticking so firmly to a system and setting agnostic construct - if I'm not a fan of adventure specifics I can cut or change details if I want, but this way I'm forced to invent them. Despite that nitpick, a great 'welcome to cyberpunk' job.

Many thanks for the crits. It was supposed to be a bit prose-poem-ish in places, which doesn't lend itself perfectly to pamphlet info delivery. You're right that the cyberpunk aspects are more in  in the background than rubbed in your face - I wanted to lean into the hopeful angles with (most of) what the player encounters, leaving the explicit cyberpunk aspects in the implied worldbuilding.