Thoughts on Across a Thousand Dead Worlds

 

I got turned on to the Kickstarter for Across a Thousand Dead Worlds (AATDW) a while ago.

I was looking for a procedurally generated solo scifi experience. An almost-final draft pdf of the core rules just dropped about a week ago (446 pages!) and I've been looking through it and I really like what I see. I knew there was scifi horror, but I didn't figure it would be like Roadside Picnic crossed with Dungeon Crawling in Space with Cthulhu-like Stress and Emotion rules and Vault-Tech-like dystopian corporate humor. 

So, the central conceit is that human asteroid miners found a hollowed out asteroid with alien ships in it. Lots of them. Each alien ship can house one, three or five humans and they take their passengers to one of a series of ancient alien sites somewhere in the galaxy by warp speed. This travel takes weeks that may or may not extinguish all of your food/oxygen supplies. If you are going to a previously unknown alien site you don't know how long it is going to take. Also, there could be time dilation problems given you are using totally mysterious alien warp tech.

If this set up sound somewhat familiar, it may be because you have read Gateway by Frederik Pohl. I was not aware of this connection until I started posting about AATDW, and I was informed by forums members on a traditional games board about the scifi story. To me, Roadside Picnic was the closest scifi I had read that has similar themes to AATDW, so I will make comparisons between the game to that book. 

When the characters arrive at the alien site destination, it's like Roadside Picnic, except with more radiation and no Anomalies. It turns into a horrifying dungeon crawl (generated by random tables) where characters look for ancient alien scrap and artifacts while encountering still active alien security systems, terrifying slavering aberrants and/or biomechanical experiments. The point is you never know what you are going to get at one of these sites. I don't see why a particularly devious GM couldn't introduce physics bending Anomalies a la STALKER and pass them off as mysterious alien weirdness that no one understands. Depends how deadly you want to make the expedition.

Players need to manage their Stress and Emotional state or else they can go crazy and turn on their fellow explorers...or maybe the plan is to be the last one on the spaceship with the Monty Haul of artifacts. Be careful who you take with you! When you get back to the space station of the megacorp that sponsors these expeditions (Karum Station), you rest and recuperate...and pay corpo taxes through the nose which motivates you to take the next expedition to make money/get out of debt.

The human explorers of the alien sites are called Deep Divers. If a Deep Diver dies or goes missing on an expedition (you hope they are dead) the Deep Diver's loved ones will wear a black blindfold over their eyes for 24 hours. As I recall the rpg book said this was a custom taken from an Earth custom in the Philippines where the eyes of the corpse of the deceased were covered with black cloth for a day. Given that the Deep Diver community usually don't have a body for the dead or missing the tradition has migrated to relations willingly blindfolding themselves.

One of the cool things in Across a Thousand Dead Worlds is that the random tables tell the story for a particular site. For example, in Karum Station, the main space station around the asteroid hollowed out by the aliens, at the Red Asteroid, the main bar for Deep Divers exclusively, you may encounter a blindfolded person lead around the bar by her Deep Diver team. Also, there is a very expensive to maintain but free to visit garden of Earth and Mars flora on Karum Station. If you party too hard on the space station, an option on the tables may have your character waking up by rolling over on a very expensive flower bed in the garden. The designer of the tables really took the time to integrate details and make things thematic.

Character creation for Deep Divers starts with six primary attributes familiar to anyone who has played Dungeons and Dragons.  Attribute checks or skill checks are rolled on a d20, plus the relevant attribute or skill, with the objective to get higher than a total of 20 to succeed. Positive and negative modifiers also apply to that roll. For some situations determined by the game master, degrees of success matter.

Combat can take place on a hex grid or in zone-based combat. As a brief overview, combat involves spending stamina to take combat actions that require you to roll a d20 to try to bypass the target’s constitution to cause a wound.  

AATDW is a one to five player game.  A scenario of Mothership, Alien or Dead Space could be run with these rules and fit right in with the theme and tone of the rpg. 

There is a little bit of the idea from Red Markets that Deep Divers are pushing themselves for just one more job. However, unlike Red Markets, AATDW is not designed to be a grinding poverty simulator. But it would be easy to make it one if you wanted that kind of game. In the game world, Earth was turned into a massive landfill thanks to climate change and corporate greed. You all know the drill. Player characters usually have backgrounds in some terrifyingly grim down and out job like an Algae Farmer, Ocean Sweeper, Plastic Miner or Blue Collar Worker. It's not all grim and grime all the time though. You could start out as a Celebrity (a glorified blogger on Earth or Mars) or a Hedge Fund Kid (looking for excitement or a legitimate way to make a difference for humanity) if you wanted to (and want the stat bonuses for those backgrounds).

I like how the alien creatures that characters can encounter are handled. Creatures are classified into Types, for example Guardian or Synthetic and they have a Role that determines their combat behavior and statistics. Roles are sort of a melding of actions and goals, for example Roles can be Brute, Lurker, Ranged, Swarm or Psychic.

This creature classification reminds me of the Fantasy Flight Rogue Trader bestiary (Warhammer 40K) Koronus Bestiary which classified randomly generated aliens by the ecological niche the occupy (predator, herd beast, scavenger, swarm, etc). In fact, I would use that book as a sourcebook for generating lesser aliens or xeno-hazards in the main alien sites. In terms of other books to use with Across a Thousand Dead Worlds, I would also break out Kevin Crawford's Stars Without Number supplement Dead Names for lots of additional tables for ancient alien ruins.

I'm really excited for its full release and to play it with my group or solo.  There is a preview pdf of AATDW here at Black Oath Game’s website.