GM Notes: SF-0 Crash on Volturnus (Star Frontiers)

These are my notes on the Star Frontiers module by Douglas Niles, Mark Acres, and Tom Molday, and produced by TSR. I provide what I think a Game Master should look for when getting ready to run this adventure.

I do not own the rights to SF 0, Crash on Volturnus, or the artwork, those are owned by Wizards of the Coast.

[ForeverYoungKickboxer]

Awesomeness! This is the basis for the SF campaign that later merged and became my Gamma World campaign 25 years later

[coachlarry]

Wow, thank you for this review! Im really surprised that the introductory module would be so bad. Using your ideas I’m sure it would help. Thanks again for posting

[davidcrowe]

Check out page 8, the survival kits that the PCs get out of the lifeboat... it has a laser pistol, machete, some grenades and standard gear.... and there was a set of military skein suit armor for each of them in the storage lockers on the ship, waiting for them to loot them. I would suspect that the designers started each PC with the same gear so they wouldn't have to worry about knowing what the right gear to buy is... a D&D list is pretty self-explanatory, while the SF one is more exotic... what are the most common defenses, so what weapon should you buy? They don't say and starting players won't know!

And the vast majority of the SF adventures are in the wilderness on planets far from civilization. There were none set on a city outside of the choose your own adventure intro in the basic book. The rest of Volturnus, Sundown on Stormiest (Where you to an ATV with a mounted weapon!), Mutiny on the Elaneor Moraes, it was PCs vs Nature much of the time, D&D with high tech weapons.

[rologutwein]

Agree with a lot of your points! Love the video. And the thing with the pirates armed with clubs and whips is/was/and always shall be dumb. But to be fair, each of the survival kits in the lifeboat DID come with a laser pistol and 'powerclip', so... you could conceivably have the most basic weapon in the game with hardly any ammo. As an intro adventure, it is sorely lacking (as you pointed out so eloquently)—In fact, I think it would be a better challenge for a group of experienced players/characters who might be better able to survive without gear.

[chameleondream]

Good one Scott!
To Star Frontier's defense it often seems like at least every second or third Star Trek episode has crew members messing about in caves.
I still think, TSR knew they were up against Traveller and they thought they had found the chink in its armor - weak to non-existent artwork - so they truly went the distance to making the game look good (aside from the purple box which was a travesty) but the game itself was a bit of an aimless jumble.
Crash on Volturnus was impressive in that it gives you a whole world in a single module, but it contains monsters and the Expanded booklet contains more monsters and the Basic booklet contains monsters that can't be found in either (the laser reflective hydra).
If you think about the designers Mark Acres, Douglas Niles, and Tom Moldvay. These are the guys who worked on TSR's side systems like Gangbusters and B/X D&D. It could be they were under pressure from TSR to get these games done and on the market as quickly as possible. So yeah, mistakes were made, still had a great time playing them.

[MrCSeiberlin]

Agree, Crash on Volturnus is a bad intro adventure. It is however a 'common experience' for grognard SF players who played the game in the early 80s, so it does have a nostalgia factor going for it. And considering when it was written even the mainline D&D modules could be extremely hit or miss.

That said, I've ran this one when I was a kid in the 80s and played through it recently (twice!) via pbp on rpol. One game pretty much as written and the other heavily edited. The edited one was so much better as an intro, even with the railroady 'desert survival' segment. And as a side not there was an article in Dragon magazine called "The Volturnus Connection' which at least fixed certain story elements regarding the set up of the Volturnus series.

That said, to point out a few things you missed from the adventure 'as written'. The PCs are hired by Truane's Star gov't as a Search and Rescue team to investigate a missing prior expedition. They are provide with skeinsuits which are in the ships hold (not the weapons locker which is destroyed no matter what). The assumption is also for beginning or fairly new characters which generally barely have enough money for a very crappy pistol (usually and autopistol) so no big loss with the destruction of the locker generally. They have access to virtually any other piece of equipment they normally would start with (either on person or in cargo hold) which includes their professional tool kits.

There are no hints that the Serena Dawn is taken by pirate ships...no battle alert etc. Players just hear a noise out in the hall outside their cabins with a crewie getting taken down. The far more likely scenario is that the pirates were onboard the Dawn as passengers before the scenario started. Hence, poorly armed pirates (initially). As well SF is the child of 1970s science fiction where 'boarding actions' are fought with melee weapons and the like (lowering the risk of hull breaches). This shows up in spades in Traveller as well. The staging up in weaponry as you go through the Dawn is sortof stepping up the complexity of the game starting with hand to hand, then melee, then finally ranged combat but the Alpha Dawn box set had a few intro mini encounters in it as well (under the basic system).

If the players can take the bridge (with new pcs), there's either a lot of PCs in the group, or the players are cheaters (or the GM is fudging rolls outrageously). That encounter pretty does it's best to make it clear the PCs should retreat and get off the Dawn. Or it's going to kill half of them even if they are 'lucky'.

The railroad leads to the lifeboats but while they PCs make a dramatic escape with alarms & explosions (which damages the lifeboat leading to a crash landing), it doesn't actually say the Serena Dawn explodes or is destroyed. I assumed it was but the GM running the 'as written' adventure pointed out that fact when I made that assumption while trying to puzzle out some plot point. Just thought that was a weird little tidbit from the adventure.

The crashlanding does have a random chance of really screwing a PC or two with bad rolls but they should be able to grab the survival packs from the lifeboat. They contain various equipment and supplies that are normally out of the financial reach of starting PCs and ensures they have the basic survival equipment (beyond food and water). Key items include poly-voxes, toxy-rad gauges, the ever useful all-weather blanket, and vita-salt. Oh and each pack also includes a machete & laser pistol which makes the PCs depictions in the jetcopter artwork correct. Now it's possible the PCs somehow don't grab a single one of the 8 survival packs before they make their escape from the burning lifeboat but that is extremely unlikely imo.

The railroad continues in the desert survival section. The PCs are not going to die of dehydration in the desert as the Ul mor show up once they run out of supplies even if they don't hit the 'border' area which triggers the encounter. Some GMs might let 'rocks fall, everyone dies' if the pcs just decide to sit down and not move away from the crash site but as written lack of water won't kill them.

The caves imo are the worst part of the adventure. First off they are huge...it takes days to travel in them. Played as written they players could very likely die as dehydration if they don't run across the water areas in the caves. And they are a maze. Following the left hand wall trick will work but iirc they will have to backtrack twice. Overall a lot of the caves are just a giant dink down of player's stamina and resources. They are very likely to run out of power for their laser pistols even if they were fairly conservative with spending SEU in the earlier parts. The absolutely worst part of the adventure though the lava cave they PCs have to navigate by going from one giant crystal pillar to another. Even if they come up some clever ways to cross (using the methods suggested in the adventure) they are looking at multiple stat rolls to get to the other side. Statistically it is extremely unlikely for most normal PCs to make all those rolls even if they come up with one of the safer methods...if run as written with no GM fudging, if no one ends up dead in the lava your players are cheating cheaters who cheat. Cool set up for an encounter, awful execution and a 'save or die' challenge should never be in an intro adventure.

The rest is okay. The choo-choo ends with the rite of the quickdeath...one of the nastiest creatures in the Star Frontiers bestiary. It is possible to get lucky and get through it with no pc deaths however considering the PCs should have the advantage of 'economy of action' over it.

I give Crash of Volturnus a lot of leeway considering when it was written. However, if you are going to run this one today, you can keep the basic premise but I'd rewrite & edit a pretty big swath of it. The other pbp Volturnus game I participate in makes the experience a much more enjoyable one as a result (and the world itself is a great sandbox that you can center an entire campaign on)..