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House Of The Rising Sun is a cyberpunk adventure for the JAGS game system. Both the system and the adventure (and plenty of others) can be freely downloaded from the author's web site. The adventure itself is listed as being “ALPHA” status (though its version number is 1.0) and is credited to the probably-fictional Alex Smithee – though I'd guess it's actually the work of the whole JAGS team.

I inserted this adventure into an ongoing campaign with generally very positive results. However, before I go farther, I should point out two important facts which make my playtest somewhat atypical. First: I did not use the JAGS system, and therefore, largely ignored the mechanical elements in the game, such as skill check levels and character sheets. Second: I didn't run this in a cyberpunk world; instead, it was an episodic campaign in my dimension-hopping game. Thus, some of the characters were from other worlds, times, and tech levels, and had abilities, skills, and attitudes that the writers didn't account for. I also had to adapt the “hook” of the adventure to get characters newly arrived in the universe into the story. I'll talk more about how well the adventure handled these challenges below.

Presentation

The adventure is presented as two PDF files, a 31-page file containing the main adventure and a 6-page addendum with JAGS character sheets. Unsurprisingly for a product like this, the presentation is sparse – just plain text. Even so, there's room for improvement in the style. More consistent use of fonts and styles would help guide the reader through the writing, in addition to making the document more interesting to look at, without much of an investment in time. Still, it is an alpha version of a freeware adventure, so this is a pretty small issue of little import.

Similarly, the document needs to be better proofread. Spelling and typographical errors are fairly common, and bigger errors (such as names changing in different places in the book, and incorrect section numbers) make it a bit tricky to focus on and follow the web of clues and events. This is even more important because the document provides virtually no organizational material – no table of contents, no index, and no overall summary. (Each section has a nice “bullet summary” set off by a box border, which is a very nice feature, but it wasn't obvious at a glance that that's what those boxes were.)

In all, the presentation and organization need work, not simply for aesthetic purposes, but more importantly, to help the reader follow and understand the content. It's not too bad when you sit down to read it, but it's considerably more difficult to find things you need in actual play. You always need to read and reread an adventure before running it, but for this adventure, you need to do more than that.

To their credit, the JAGS people (in particular, Marco Chacon, with whom I corresponded about this, both before and after the playtest) acknowledge these issues and indicate a desire to address them as time allows. I sent them some of my own efforts to this end (such as a flowchart I made showing the links between clues and events) and they plan to edit them into the document. So when I rate this adventure as “needs work” in the Style area, keep in mind, it's getting that work it needs.

One special note: since this is a PDF there's a great opportunity to be able to copy from it and paste into other places to make visual aids. However, unbeknownst to the authors, the document was created with copy protection in place. I was forced to retype large tracts to make certain props. Marco assured me they'll fix that in the next revision.

Summary

The characters are hired on by an unidentified company to retrieve some kidneys stolen from one of the company's employees in New Orleans. (He woke up in a bathtub full of ice... you know the rest.) There are a few oddities about their instructions for this job, but it mostly starts out looking fairly routine. Naturally, everyone expects it to turn out more complex, and it does, but not in the ways anyone expects. The trail leads to a group which experiments with strange, gruesome modifications to the human body... and then to the group that that group is terrified of, and disgusted by. Along the way, the characters get a good cross-section of New Orleans characters and establishments, and interesting encounters with horrifically modified assassins, desperate bureaucrats, drug addicts, medical professionals, drug-addicted medical professionals, organ-leggers, swanky nightclubs, filthy tattoo parlors, and the depths of human depravity.

Note that the adventure does not include a cyberpunk world, the better to fit into the one you're already using. (Since I wasn't already using one, I wrote up a few pages of notes about such a world. Strangely, a few of the incidental elements I included, such as the new form of Wal*Mart in 2016 and the pizza delivery service Imperfect Pizza (“factory seconds at deep-dish discounts!”), made almost as strong an impression on the players as the adventure did. But that really speaks more about my group than the adventure.)

It also includes minimal detail about New Orleans itself. Unless you're already familiar with it (and more than just Bourbon Street), I recommend getting an old copy of Fodor's New Orleans (past-year editions can be had cheaply, and a 1995 edition is just as good as a 2002 edition when you're running the game in 2016). I also asked my TiVo to record shows that came up in a keyword search on New Orleans, and found a few great travel-channel-type shows that described hotels and public places. This really helped me describe my New Orleans much more vividly. (As it happens, two of my players used to live in New Orleans, while I've never been there. That's a situation I usually try to avoid, but it worked out very well in this case.)

Comments

One of the main things that drew me to this adventure was, prosaically enough, the fact tht it included a few paragraphs about how to get your players into the adventure. Far too few adventures, including professionally published ones, address this question. And most of those that do, do so in body text mixed in with everything else. Making a clearly-denoted section just for this important question is a huge help in deciding if an adventure can be fit into your campaign. Furthermore, when running a pre-written adventure, working out how to get your PCs into it might be the single biggest chunk of work you'll have to do, so an adventure that assists you in that task is an adventure that makes your life easier. In my opinion, all adventures should have such a section prominently placed within the first few pages, as this adventure does.

As discussed above, this adventure could benefit considerably from a few organizational tools: a three-paragraph summary of the entire adventure on page 1, a table of contents, and a flowchart of clue connections. The connections between clues are fairly complex, but not overwhelmingly so; but some of them are slightly fragile, and a GM who has forgotten the connection between some of them could easily omit (or underemphasize) something important and dead-end the plot. Most of the time, there are multiple paths to the same conclusions, which makes the adventure resilient to the vagaries of PCs, but there are a few places where there's only one thing that leads to the next scene, and if the PCs miss it, you could be left scrambling to find a way to get things moving again. In at least one case, there's a necessary connection that isn't present (the PCs have no way to know that the Chameleon carries a map), so the GM will have to fudge something up. There's room for improvement here, though no more so than almost anything else out on the market.

New Orleans proved a very good location for a cyberpunk adventure. Its blend of new and old, its rich history, its association with debauchery and gritty street life, and its rich collection of striking visuals, really suited the cyberpunk feel, and enriched the sense of place. My group did a few, admittedly gimmicky, things to enhance this, like making po'boy sandwiches and red beans and rice to eat. (For a time I tried to come up with some music that would blend the rich jazz and blues traditions of New Orleans with the harsh techno buzz of cyberpunk, but in the end, I abandoned this attempt when it became clear at least one of my players would hate any result I could produce by this.)

However, in some ways the adventure didn't make as good use of New Orleans as it could have. Those prominent New Orleans locations it mentions are generally underplayed. The Fairmont Hotel is, for no reason I could see, renamed The Roosevelt; Pat O'Brien's is barely described, with no mention of Hurricanes; Generations Hall is depicted as a simple (if swanky) nightclub; and even Bourbon Street is only mentioned in passing. Of course, this makes it easy to move the adventure to another city, with few adaptations. On the other hand, I felt that there was a lot of New Orleans color that could have benefited the adventure that I couldn't find ways to work in. This wouldn't be a problem if you're using New Orleans as a recurring setting; you'll have plenty of time to have characters fighting through Mardi Gras crowds, sneaking onto riverboats, having shootouts in Jackson Square, hiding clues in mufalettas, and prowling through ancient jazz clubs off the tourist routes. But if this is your characters' only visit to New Orleans, they could easily come away feeling like they hardly saw it.

In a few places, the adventure suffered from the editing problems discussed above. For instance, near the beginning there's a prominent clue: the man hiring the PCs is glancing at his watch, which is counting down time, showing about 50 hours left. Surely this must have something to do with the job, right? But it's never mentioned again. Similarly, he implores the PCs not to collect the kidneys if they find them, but just to call him; but no provision is made for what happens if they follow these directions. These and other similar issues suggest that changes were made in the adventure, and no one went back and fixed everything pointing to bits that got removed or altered. It's easy enough to paper over these gaps, assuming you notice them beforehand, but it's work the GM may not want to do.

Inevitably there will be questions the players ask that aren't covered in the adventure. No one can avoid that. HotRS does nearly as good a job as possible at this; only a few things came up that my players asked or did that the adventure didn't account for. This is all the more amazing considering that my group wasn't a cyberpunk team, but a dimension-hopping group from a wide variety of worlds (including a spellcaster from a steampunk world, a cat burglar from several decades into this world's future, and a prostitute from the 1920s in an alternate timeline's New Orleans). Clearly the authors are used to players that do the unexpected, and instead of trying to head off every avenue, they simply provide a coherent and complete “situation”, and let the GM match bits of it up with the PCs' actions.

The adventure carries a warning on the front page that it's intended for mature audiences, and this warning is warranted. It's not because it's full of sex (in fact, even though a prominent NPC is a prostitute, sex really never enters into it) or violence (like that would stand out in a cyberpunk adventure!). It's because of the highly visceral, powerful, and often disturbing imagery. This is definitely a Cronenberg flick in adventure form (and Cronenberg gets a cameo in a virus named for him, in case you missed the connection). There are people in this adventure that take twisted delight in doing truly repugnant things to the human body, usually the body of unwilling victims. We're not talking about people using whips and vivisection knives – these people are very skilled and talented at biotech, and love to use their talents. Several scenes take place in what amounts to their “museums” showing off their past work. Some players might be squeamish and turned off by this, so you might want to do a few spot checks. Those who can take it (and I suspect most players would be included here) will find the imagery very powerful – in a good way. Several scenes (most notably Phobos and the Mourners – but I won't spoil the surprise to say what they are) really creeped them out.

The adventure is well paced. There's a good build-up of tension. Early scenes are basic detective work, and the gradual realization of what's really going on, and just how twisted are the people involved, is timed well, for maximum effectiveness. This is a very tricky thing to pull off, especially to do without it seeming forced.

The story's climax didn't work for me, and I'm sure it wouldn't've worked for my group, so I altered it significantly. In emails on the subject Marco confirmed that they'd tried several versions of the ending, and weren't completely happy with what they'd ended up with either. I tailored my altered ending to my group, but that might not be so easy for your group. Unless the JAGS folks rewrite it, you might have to do so yourself.

Incidentally, Marco was very helpful and communicative by email about this, and expressed a great deal of interest in my notes and comments. You certainly can't expect that kind of touch from a published product, and even most web-published freeware doesn't offer it.

Other Notes

I felt that this adventure had a very cinematic feel (in particular, a Cronenberg film feel), so to emphasize this, I “cast” every significant NPC role. And since it was all in my imagination, I blew my film's budget on the most amazing cast ever, and wasted some big actors on small roles. My players gobbled this up. In some cases I took the “obvious” casting for a few characters and switched them around – and the results were all positive, giving me a new perspective on a few of the NPCs that added depth in areas that probably no one consciously noticed, but which I'm sure registered.

I also experimented with some interesting props. A few bits of text that the players were to get on a computer screen I retyped onto an old, retired PalmPilot, which I handed to the players, and made them pass it around to read it in turn, just as their characters would. I also made a few “audio aids” representing voice mails and a voice mail menu system, by combining recordings done for me by some acquaintances of my wife with samples ripped from AT&T's text-to-speech demo web site. This was very effective – especially when, several sessions later, the PCs realized they'd missed a clue in one of those voice mails.

Conclusion

This adventure really had a good impact on my group, and didn't require a huge amount of work on my part to run. There's definitely room for improvement, primarily on editing. But the heart of the adventure is solid, and the issues and themes explored are those that few adventures play with. This is especially welcome in the cyberpunk universe where the common themes (betrayal, megacorp corruption, etc.) are so well-trammeled.

House Of The Rising Sun
House Of The Rising Sun Playtest Review by Frank J. Perricone on 13/12/02 Style: 2 (Needs Work) Substance: 4 (Meaty) Though it needs editing, this is a well-developed, rich adventure with interesting plot twists and lots of work to help the GM. Product: House Of The Rising Sun Author: Alex Smithee (that's what it says) Category: RPG Company/Publisher: JAGS Line: JAGS Cost: Free Page count: 37 Year published: 2001 ISBN: none SKU: Comp copy?: yes Playtest Review by Frank J. Perricone on 13/12/02 Genre tags: Science Fiction	House Of The Rising Sun is a cyberpunk adventure for the JAGS game system. Both the system and the adventure (and plenty of others) can be freely downloaded from the author's web site. The adventure itself is listed as being “ALPHA” status (though its version number is 1.0) and is credited to the probably-fictional Alex Smithee – though I'd guess it's actually the work of the whole JAGS team. I inserted this adventure into an ongoing campaign with generally very positive results. However, before I go farther, I should point out two important facts which make my playtest somewhat atypical. First: I did not use the JAGS system, and therefore, largely ignored the mechanical elements in the game, such as skill check levels and character sheets. Second: I didn't run this in a cyberpunk world; instead, it was an episodic campaign in my dimension-hopping game. Thus, some of the characters were from other worlds, times, and tech levels, and had abilities, skills, and attitudes that the writers didn't account for. I also had to adapt the “hook” of the adventure to get characters newly arrived in the universe into the story. I'll talk more about how well the adventure handled these challenges below. Presentation The adventure is presented as two PDF files, a 31-page file containing the main adventure and a 6-page addendum with JAGS character sheets. Unsurprisingly for a product like this, the presentation is sparse – just plain text. Even so, there's room for improvement in the style. More consistent use of fonts and styles would help guide the reader through the writing, in addition to making the document more interesting to look at, without much of an investment in time. Still, it is an alpha version of a freeware adventure, so this is a pretty small issue of little import. Similarly, the document needs to be better proofread. Spelling and typographical errors are fairly common, and bigger errors (such as names changing in different places in the book, and incorrect section numbers) make it a bit tricky to focus on and follow the web of clues and events. This is even more important because the document provides virtually no organizational material – no table of contents, no index, and no overall summary. (Each section has a nice “bullet summary” set off by a box border, which is a very nice feature, but it wasn't obvious at a glance that that's what those boxes were.) In all, the presentation and organization need work, not simply for aesthetic purposes, but more importantly, to help the reader follow and understand the content. It's not too bad when you sit down to read it, but it's considerably more difficult to find things you need in actual play. You always need to read and reread an adventure before running it, but for this adventure, you need to do more than that. To their credit, the JAGS people (in particular, Marco Chacon, with whom I corresponded about this, both before and after the playtest) acknowledge these issues and indicate a desire to address them as time allows. I sent them some of my own efforts to this end (such as a flowchart I made showing the links between clues and events) and they plan to edit them into the document. So when I rate this adventure as “needs work” in the Style area, keep in mind, it's getting that work it needs. One special note: since this is a PDF there's a great opportunity to be able to copy from it and paste into other places to make visual aids. However, unbeknownst to the authors, the document was created with copy protection in place. I was forced to retype large tracts to make certain props. Marco assured me they'll fix that in the next revision. Summary The characters are hired on by an unidentified company to retrieve some kidneys stolen from one of the company's employees in New Orleans. (He woke up in a bathtub full of ice... you know the rest.) There are a few oddities about their instructions for this job, but it mostly starts out looking fairly routine. Naturally, everyone expects it to turn out more complex, and it does, but not in the ways anyone expects. The trail leads to a group which experiments with strange, gruesome modifications to the human body... and then to the group that that group is terrified of, and disgusted by. Along the way, the characters get a good cross-section of New Orleans characters and establishments, and interesting encounters with horrifically modified assassins, desperate bureaucrats, drug addicts, medical professionals, drug-addicted medical professionals, organ-leggers, swanky nightclubs, filthy tattoo parlors, and the depths of human depravity. Note that the adventure does not include a cyberpunk world, the better to fit into the one you're already using. (Since I wasn't already using one, I wrote up a few pages of notes about such a world. Strangely, a few of the incidental elements I included, such as the new form of Wal*Mart in 2016 and the pizza delivery service Imperfect Pizza (“factory seconds at deep-dish discounts!”), made almost as strong an impression on the players as the adventure did. But that really speaks more about my group than the adventure.) It also includes minimal detail about New Orleans itself. Unless you're already familiar with it (and more than just Bourbon Street), I recommend getting an old copy of Fodor's New Orleans (past-year editions can be had cheaply, and a 1995 edition is just as good as a 2002 edition when you're running the game in 2016). I also asked my TiVo to record shows that came up in a keyword search on New Orleans, and found a few great travel-channel-type shows that described hotels and public places. This really helped me describe my New Orleans much more vividly. (As it happens, two of my players used to live in New Orleans, while I've never been there. That's a situation I usually try to avoid, but it worked out very well in this case.) Comments One of the main things that drew me to this adventure was, prosaically enough, the fact tht it included a few paragraphs about how to get your players into the adventure. Far too few adventures, including professionally published ones, address this question. And most of those that do, do so in body text mixed in with everything else. Making a clearly-denoted section just for this important question is a huge help in deciding if an adventure can be fit into your campaign. Furthermore, when running a pre-written adventure, working out how to get your PCs into it might be the single biggest chunk of work you'll have to do, so an adventure that assists you in that task is an adventure that makes your life easier. In my opinion, all adventures should have such a section prominently placed within the first few pages, as this adventure does. As discussed above, this adventure could benefit considerably from a few organizational tools: a three-paragraph summary of the entire adventure on page 1, a table of contents, and a flowchart of clue connections. The connections between clues are fairly complex, but not overwhelmingly so; but some of them are slightly fragile, and a GM who has forgotten the connection between some of them could easily omit (or underemphasize) something important and dead-end the plot. Most of the time, there are multiple paths to the same conclusions, which makes the adventure resilient to the vagaries of PCs, but there are a few places where there's only one thing that leads to the next scene, and if the PCs miss it, you could be left scrambling to find a way to get things moving again. In at least one case, there's a necessary connection that isn't present (the PCs have no way to know that the Chameleon carries a map), so the GM will have to fudge something up. There's room for improvement here, though no more so than almost anything else out on the market. New Orleans proved a very good location for a cyberpunk adventure. Its blend of new and old, its rich history, its association with debauchery and gritty street life, and its rich collection of striking visuals, really suited the cyberpunk feel, and enriched the sense of place. My group did a few, admittedly gimmicky, things to enhance this, like making po'boy sandwiches and red beans and rice to eat. (For a time I tried to come up with some music that would blend the rich jazz and blues traditions of New Orleans with the harsh techno buzz of cyberpunk, but in the end, I abandoned this attempt when it became clear at least one of my players would hate any result I could produce by this.) However, in some ways the adventure didn't make as good use of New Orleans as it could have. Those prominent New Orleans locations it mentions are generally underplayed. The Fairmont Hotel is, for no reason I could see, renamed The Roosevelt; Pat O'Brien's is barely described, with no mention of Hurricanes; Generations Hall is depicted as a simple (if swanky) nightclub; and even Bourbon Street is only mentioned in passing. Of course, this makes it easy to move the adventure to another city, with few adaptations. On the other hand, I felt that there was a lot of New Orleans color that could have benefited the adventure that I couldn't find ways to work in. This wouldn't be a problem if you're using New Orleans as a recurring setting; you'll have plenty of time to have characters fighting through Mardi Gras crowds, sneaking onto riverboats, having shootouts in Jackson Square, hiding clues in mufalettas, and prowling through ancient jazz clubs off the tourist routes. But if this is your characters' only visit to New Orleans, they could easily come away feeling like they hardly saw it. In a few places, the adventure suffered from the editing problems discussed above. For instance, near the beginning there's a prominent clue: the man hiring the PCs is glancing at his watch, which is counting down time, showing about 50 hours left. Surely this must have something to do with the job, right? But it's never mentioned again. Similarly, he implores the PCs not to collect the kidneys if they find them, but just to call him; but no provision is made for what happens if they follow these directions. These and other similar issues suggest that changes were made in the adventure, and no one went back and fixed everything pointing to bits that got removed or altered. It's easy enough to paper over these gaps, assuming you notice them beforehand, but it's work the GM may not want to do. Inevitably there will be questions the players ask that aren't covered in the adventure. No one can avoid that. HotRS does nearly as good a job as possible at this; only a few things came up that my players asked or did that the adventure didn't account for. This is all the more amazing considering that my group wasn't a cyberpunk team, but a dimension-hopping group from a wide variety of worlds (including a spellcaster from a steampunk world, a cat burglar from several decades into this world's future, and a prostitute from the 1920s in an alternate timeline's New Orleans). Clearly the authors are used to players that do the unexpected, and instead of trying to head off every avenue, they simply provide a coherent and complete “situation”, and let the GM match bits of it up with the PCs' actions. The adventure carries a warning on the front page that it's intended for mature audiences, and this warning is warranted. It's not because it's full of sex (in fact, even though a prominent NPC is a prostitute, sex really never enters into it) or violence (like that would stand out in a cyberpunk adventure!). It's because of the highly visceral, powerful, and often disturbing imagery. This is definitely a Cronenberg flick in adventure form (and Cronenberg gets a cameo in a virus named for him, in case you missed the connection). There are people in this adventure that take twisted delight in doing truly repugnant things to the human body, usually the body of unwilling victims. We're not talking about people using whips and vivisection knives – these people are very skilled and talented at biotech, and love to use their talents. Several scenes take place in what amounts to their “museums” showing off their past work. Some players might be squeamish and turned off by this, so you might want to do a few spot checks. Those who can take it (and I suspect most players would be included here) will find the imagery very powerful – in a good way. Several scenes (most notably Phobos and the Mourners – but I won't spoil the surprise to say what they are) really creeped them out. The adventure is well paced. There's a good build-up of tension. Early scenes are basic detective work, and the gradual realization of what's really going on, and just how twisted are the people involved, is timed well, for maximum effectiveness. This is a very tricky thing to pull off, especially to do without it seeming forced. The story's climax didn't work for me, and I'm sure it wouldn't've worked for my group, so I altered it significantly. In emails on the subject Marco confirmed that they'd tried several versions of the ending, and weren't completely happy with what they'd ended up with either. I tailored my altered ending to my group, but that might not be so easy for your group. Unless the JAGS folks rewrite it, you might have to do so yourself. Incidentally, Marco was very helpful and communicative by email about this, and expressed a great deal of interest in my notes and comments. You certainly can't expect that kind of touch from a published product, and even most web-published freeware doesn't offer it. Other Notes I felt that this adventure had a very cinematic feel (in particular, a Cronenberg film feel), so to emphasize this, I “cast” every significant NPC role. And since it was all in my imagination, I blew my film's budget on the most amazing cast ever, and wasted some big actors on small roles. My players gobbled this up. In some cases I took the “obvious” casting for a few characters and switched them around – and the results were all positive, giving me a new perspective on a few of the NPCs that added depth in areas that probably no one consciously noticed, but which I'm sure registered. I also experimented with some interesting props. A few bits of text that the players were to get on a computer screen I retyped onto an old, retired PalmPilot, which I handed to the players, and made them pass it around to read it in turn, just as their characters would. I also made a few “audio aids” representing voice mails and a voice mail menu system, by combining recordings done for me by some acquaintances of my wife with samples ripped from AT&T's text-to-speech demo web site. This was very effective – especially when, several sessions later, the PCs realized they'd missed a clue in one of those voice mails. Conclusion This adventure really had a good impact on my group, and didn't require a huge amount of work on my part to run. There's definitely room for improvement, primarily on editing. But the heart of the adventure is solid, and the issues and themes explored are those that few adventures play with. This is especially welcome in the cyberpunk universe where the common themes (betrayal, megacorp corruption, etc.) are so well-trammeled.