Sunday, October 22, 2017

Star Wars Adventure Review - The Game Chambers of Questal

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: The Game Chambers of Questal


Author(s): Richard Kern 


Published: June 1990


The Pitch: The Rebels come looking for an old friend on a planet run by a Moff who loves to play games with his adversaries.

Summary: An adventure that's part James Bond, part "A Most Dangerous Game", part dungeon crawl and, on the whole, less than the sum of its meager parts.




In-depth review with SPOILERS after the jump!


The Story

The Rebels come to Questal on the trail of their friend and fellow agent Tyree. Questal is a planet on the Rim that's tightly under the Imperial control of Moff Bandor. Turns out Bandor has a machine that can generate fear and, not only does he use it to keep his citizens in line, but he also terrorizes his prisoners by running them through a maze of deathtraps before executing them himself. The Rebels not only have to save their friend, but destroy the fear generating machine to truly topple Moff Bando's regime.

The Design

This adventure, instead of starting in the middle of the action, opens with another fairly standard Star Wars adventure opening. The Rebels run into a customs inspector looking for a bribe, and then the action starts when they have to stop a rampaging Trompa (a non-Hoth version of a Wampa) from smashing its way through a parade.

A lot of the material leading up to the Game Chambers feels very perfunctory. There's a hunt for Tyree's R2 unit at a used starship dealer, not one but two parties the Rebels must infiltrate for info, and even an ending after the game chambers where the destuction of the fear machine boils down to a couple of Technical rolls and then calling it a day.

As for the titular Game Chambers? They're kind of disappointing. Even mixing in some colorful bounty hunters to goose the players along, the traps are just okay. They feel more at home in a James Bond movie or one of those episodes of Star Trek where a god-like being messes with Kirk. It also doesn't make sense that the fear machine is accessible from the tunnels where prisoners and Rebels are routinely shuttled to their dooms. Deathtraps and pulp go well together, but there's too much going on here for it to feel fun rather than a railroad of logic puzzle stations.

Canon Compatibility

Tyree and R2-D0 return from Rebel Breakout, the adventure in the original RPG book. There isn't much time for anyone to reminisce, because Tyree is deeply enthralled by the fear machine and D0 is suffering from some memory problems.

Special Modifications

The rampaging Trompa feels more like the action opening we're looking for. The sooner the players get to the Game Chambers the better, so using this as an Imperial breakout session might not be all bad. Otherwise, put an NPC that means something to the Rebels in the Tyree slot and you should be fine.

At the beginning and the end of the mission, the Rebels are told they aren't getting any help from the Alliance, which feels like stating the obvious. There's a lot of page count devoted to Moff Bandor's luxurious mansion of evil so it seems like a shame not to use that for the big climax. Bandor comes off like a Bond villain throughout the adventure, so after the players escape the Game Chambers, let's turn the ending into a Bond movie. The Rebels come to the rescue and there's a running gun battle between the Rebellion and the Empire as our Rebels chase Bandor through his mansion looking for the fear generator.

Also, that fear generator is some kind of lost Sith tech that Bandor found, because he doesn't seem smart enough to build something like that.

Final Thoughts

This is another dungeon crawl adventure that seems like it's not quite getting the tone of Star Wars right. I'd be much more likely to swipe elements from this adventure to use in my campaign than run it straight up, because some of the individual elements are fun.

Rating: 2 out of 5 Death Stars

No comments:

Post a Comment