You did the whole thing in one go! Wow!
The big twist for me is that last sentence of yours.
Ran this paired with another simple adventure and had loads of fun.
Favorite moment was when the players questioned a frogling outside of the town about 'magic inside the city'. He would describe various technical or aesthetic things (the watermill, horseback frog soldiers cantering along in their finery, tinsmithing, loans) and exclaim "is that the sort of magic you mean?" He conly got around to the curse on the fourth or fifth go.
I have no idea! Absolutely none. Maybe just do it?
Stan: I don't want to play this. There's no character sheet.
Kcnieman: There's no charsheet anywhere in the worksite? Mission Control says to check your auxiliary R-A-2 pouch.
Stan: What? No.
Kcnieman: Look on your right leg, bright orange stripe. Pull it and it velcros off.
Stan: No, I want to do D&D.
Kcnieman: The pouch has a clabber tie to untwist, then the packet unrolls. Charsheet is a pull out in the third case slot.
Stan: Stop.
Kcnieman: Okay.
"He's dead, you fool" was such a great line!
This game had its start, believe it or not, in recreating two things: The film trope where someone in a headset is guided through a heist by others AND 1970s astral spirit research where a researcher asks someone in a state what they see and where they are going.
The fit is there, sort of. I qualify this because in those stories things happen, and usually with economy and speed. Apollo 47 is Harley Warren saying "Okay, I see more steps. Corkscrew to the left. The walls are damper now. AHH, oh it's a root. A root touched me. <three minutes of silence> Hang on, the cable is tangled <two minutes of silence> The walls are pure dirt now..."
I'm making all sorts of negative noises but, dang, I'd love to listen to a half hour of people picking their way through cyclopean masonry and reminding each other ever five minutes to take a pull on the bottled oxygen and have you been marking the path properly?
Holy shit, they've ADDED SO MUCH since last time I looked!
There are thousand+ page mission transcripts! https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-rawtrans.html
I... I... It just doesn't feel right to include the manuals in the PDF. The game isn't about the manuals, it doesn't need the manuals. The book isn't about the game because it has the manuals. The book is about bloat and comedy.
They are two separate things.
The good news is that the NASA manuals for the entire Apollo series are on the NASA website, free for the downloading: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-LMdocs.html is just a sample. There's lots of pages like this.
I'm so glad to hear that! It's all part of the ruse.
The book starts out pleasant. It gives you a fun time, it listens to your stories, you watch tv together. It starts helping around the house and balancing your checkbook. Next thing you know it's wearing your favorite hat taking out a mortgage in your name.