Void Station 57

Void Station 57 is the first in Dark City Games' "Legends of Time and Space" line of adventures. Like their other adventures, it is inspired by the old Metagaming Microquest adventures. Unlike those others, it's a science fiction adventure, not fantasy. It uses its own rules system "the Legends of Time and Space", but is fairly simple to adapt to other rules systems, including Gurps and Classic Traveller

It comes with an adventure booklet (28 pages, digest sized), a hex map, a sheet of cardstock counters, and a small rules pamphlet.

The Adventure Itself

The players are the crew of a tramp freighter on a backwater trading route. Since there are no star systems around, there is a refueling station in the middle of the void, because most starships don't have the fuel capacity to make it all the way across. (Sort of like driving through Kansas in a muscle car)

But as the player's starship approaches the station, they notice that it seems to be derelict. Which is not a good thing, because without getting more fuel, they are stuck. So the PCs have to dock and try to turn on the power, get the ship refueled, and leave. But to do so, they have to contend with what made the station derelict, which is not so easy.


While I don't want to spoil things, they have to face just about every sort of nasty thing you've seen in movies involving derelict starships. Okay, not quite that bad, but the station has a lot of different problems.

Since it's meant to be like those old Microquest adventures, it can be played like a regular module (that is, with GM and players), or it can be played solo - like those old Fighting Fantasy books, albeit with you controlling multiple characters.

Basically you start out at entry 001 in the book, then read the paragraph, and are given a choice of which way to proceed. Like if you search the place, go to paragraph X, if you go left, go to paragraph Y, if you go right go to paragraph Z, etc.

Sometimes you run into hostile enemies (and so you have to run the combat), or have to do something that requires a skill check. Occasionally you pick up plot words, which basically are used to keep track that something has happened to either advance the plot, or PCs have acquired something notable. (If you've ever done programming or written text adventures, basically they are flags)


As you play, you piece together the cause of what happened, through the descriptions of the rooms you explore, and from objects left behind by the now dead crew and visitors. You also have to keep track of oxygen use - some parts of the station have no breathable atmosphere, either having been breached or deliberately emptied.


Although it's a "programmed" adventure, there is also a keyed map of the station which makes the adventure easy to run as a normal module.


It's set in their own setting, but is reasonably generic. Seems to be human dominated, but not human only. Space travel seems reasonably common, but not super-cheap. It does have something of an Aliens vibe to it.


The Rules

It comes with a small 4 page rules sheet. Very simple rules. Characters have 3 stats and a few skills. In order to succeed at a task (like in combat), they have to roll under the relevant stat (or stat+skill level) on either 3d6 or 4d6, depending on the difficulty (usually 3d6).

Damage is applied to a character's Strength statistic. Armor stops damage.

As mentioned, it's pretty simple to adapt the adventure to Gurps and also converts extremely easily to Classic Traveller. The latter has a few more stats and the skills are differently named, but the stat and skill range is pretty much the same and I found that you can actually convert on the fly easily enough (only tricky thing is some skills in this start at 0, others start at 1).

The rules are fairly comprehensive (I mean, there is only 4 pages), including rules for character advancement, but it's a bit skimpy on equipment, something of a staple of a Sci-Fi game, although it does have a half dozen or so weapons.

I should note that they have the rules for this (and their fantasy series) on their website, on the left hand bar.

Looks/Appearance

While it definitely has a nostalgic feel, it's quite nice looking. The layout is crisp and clear, with consistent use of formatting (bold, italics, and the like). Seems to be well proofread. They picked nice, easy to read fonts.

The art won't "Wow!" you, but I've seen worse from much larger companies (and in much more expensive products). Although the cover art is quite good, actually. The map of the station is functional and easy to read.


Final Thoughts

I found this to be much easier to play than the other Dark City Games adventure I have - The Island of Lost Spells (a fantasy module) - part of it has to do with no magic making combat much simpler, but also the structure of the module was better. Less page flipping, room structure was simpler, and a keyed map of the space station was a big help. The latter is also very helpful if you don't want to play it solo, but run it for other people.

I also really enjoyed the adventure itself. It's a pretty clever setup, which oddly I don't remember seeing before in an science fiction module (though I guess there aren't all that many science fiction modules compared to fantasy ones), and some of the small details in the descriptions are really evocative and make it believable. I was really surprised at how immersive it was - you really feel like you are exploring a derelict space station.

Although the page count isn't as high, it also omits the somewhat lengthy shopping phase of "Island of Lost Spells" which seems to have resulted in an overall longer adventure, or at least the exploration phase of the adventure is longer. So I'm giving it a 5 for Content. On the other hand, the counters are smaller, and the map isn't as nice as in "Island of Lost Spells" so I'm bumping Style down to a 3. Overall, though, A-