Bad Moon Rising Review, no real spoilers! Options

[Eugene]

Here's my quick review of the good and bad of "Bad Moon Rising." The basic plot is that the runners get hired to go to Hong Kong and track a drug shipment.

The Good: There's a lot of nice touches for the GM - from attractive NPC record sheets w/built in condition monitors to discussions of different approaches by players to reach goals (with plenty to do for hackers, sammies, and awakened-types). There's a Legwork section of increasing knowledge by # of hits like the Missions. Matrix hosts are thoroughly designed ala Unwired and include Alert Responses, security hacker/IC stats, etc.

You get a whole party of pre-generated PCs attractively laid out in case you want to do a one-shot. The PCs are competent (a pistol adept with 18 dice not including smartlink, for example), have histories, contacts, and relationships with the other PCs.

The story is clever, too - the way the drugs are being smuggled in particular is ingenious. There're also some mean tactics the opponents use that I'm definitely stealing (see p.11). I also like that, at least in one instance, there's a possibility that clever roleplay may avoid a fight if the players don't want one.

The Bad: "Bad Moon Rising" was originally written as a tournament adventure and this is still obvious. The intro section at the beginning still assumes you're a GM running it at a con. Various notes within the adventure refer to the pregenerated PCs (if <x> does this, then <y>). Part Two assumes that the runners' presence was detected in Part One and that there's a delay in their investigation of/or action toward a certain location. While I'm sure a good GM can work around it, and the way the adventure is written it's -likely- that events will occur in such a way as to allow a smooth transition to Part Two, it's still a bit of a weakness. Finally, the writers seem to feel that their tactics (p. 11, again) are -too- mean and hope that they don't actually work (Debugging, p.13).

The Verdict: It's completely worth the $4 you're going to pay. The adventure is quite good with few issues. And, if you've got Ghost Cartels, you'll get some extra mileage, too.

[Malicant]

That's more or less what I wanted to know. Thanks.