Sunday, September 17, 2017

Star Wars Adventure Review - Scavenger Hunt

This is an ongoing series of reviews of classic West End Games Star Wars RPG adventures. I've run a few, read a few more and not touched a few since I bought them over the past 30 years. I'll look at them for a few different angles, including what I would change to bring the adventure to my table.

Adventure title: Scavenger Hunt


Author(s): Brad Freeman


Published: January 1989


The Pitch: The Rebels have to deal with the annoying Squib to set-up an ambush on an Imperial transport containing sensitive information that could seriously damage Rebel operations. The Rebels needs to visit an iconic location from the films and do the Sqiubs dirty work to get their cooperation.

Summary: This adventure has a lot of harsh design decisions through out as well as weird encounters with Star Wars elements and new elements that don't quite gel. There's some stuff in here that might be useful, but much like the setting, you've got to sort through a lot of trash to get there.




In-depth review with SPOILERS after the jump!


The Story

The Rebel base at Dankayo gets stomped before play and the Rebels are sent to recover a database from the location on board an imperial transport called the Elusive. The Rebels show up in Dankayo just in time to see the Elusive jump to hyperspace. Luckily, a ship jumps into the system full of the Squib, aliens that picked up the jump coordinates and are willing to part with this info...if the Rebels do something for them first. The Squib want a gravity well projector from a scrapyard system they call Paradise, and they need someone to deal with the Ugors that control the system. There's a lot of annoying alien hijinks about negotiations and bribes between the various species that involves everything from handing over weapons to cooking challenges.

It soon becomes clear that the gravity well projector is part of a piece of wreckage from the Death Star. This gives the Rebels a chance to battle the dianoga that somehow survived and even pick up Obi-Wan Kenobi's lightsaber if they survive one of the worst encounters ever. Once they have the gravity well in hand, it's a race out of the system being chased by the Ugors and pirates and a final battle where the Rebels use the gravity well to snag the Elusive out of hyperspace to blow it up.

The Design

The Squib take the annoying parts of the Ewoks(cute and fuzzy), Ferengi (greedy) and Gungans (awful space dialect) and mix them together int a toxic combination that would probably drive any game group to blow their ship out of space the moment they returned from the mission. That's not even counting the NPC Squib who is specifically written to mess things up with Ugors that accompanies the players.

There's a lot of time spent trying to force players into meetings and encounters without their weapons, which always smacks of bad design. Players love their toys and time spend wheedling, cajoling and tricking players to hand over their guns (followed by players doing the same to keep them) is usually better used in spending time doing fun stuff.

The callbacks to the dianoga fight and the reveal of the location as a Death Star chunk are fine, but this adventure has a notorious encounter with Darth Vader's closet.

No, you read that correctly.

It's set up as a jump scare where the door opens, they see Vader's helmet and cloak and the players are expected to react with blaster fire, Force rolls and even suggestions on blowing Force points. The whole thing turns out to be a storage area for a spares, and it all comes off like a huge "gotcha!" that seems to be fun for GMs who would never want their players to come back to the table ever again.

Canon Compatibility

Surviving the closet attack nets the players Obi-Wan's lightsaber that he died with on the Death Star. For a few rounds. Seems like a good trade off for a Force point and a few heart attacks at the table!

Special Modifications

For the purposes of education, let's say I was forced at blaster point to run this adventure. I'd probably change the Squib and the Ugor to something a bit more recognizable like the Toydarians and Ughnaughts. Instead of the gravity well, it would be a race between the Rebels, aliens and Imperials to find the slagged data center in the junk system. Perhaps one of the aliens stashed it in the Death Star chunk? Do we really need to  have a call back to the trash compacter scene?

Final Thoughts

My editor back when I reviewed movies once to me that reviewers earn their pay on the bad ones because the good ones are pleasurable. I remember the first time I read this adventure I stopped at the Vader encounter, cursed out loud and put this thing on the shelf to never again be looked at again. Rummaging through a junk system for a vital thing is a good hook, and the Death Star set piece has its moments, but this adventure doesn't have much to offer anyone looking to pick something off the shelf to run, nor pieces to use in a different adventure.

Rating: 1 out of 5 Death Stars

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