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Basically, Race for El Dorado is a lost world romance, where Roaring-Twenties heroes find a way into a secluded valley, complete with dinosaurs and the remnants of a native civilisation. Un-basically, it's a Dream Park supplement, which means that it's more like a script for a well-funded television show.
Dream Park
You'll need the Dream Park (q.v.) rules for the game mechanics, but there is a short section in Race for El Dorado explaining the setting: The Dream Park is a gigantic, multi-area, near-future amusement park. Using hologram projectors, virtual reality goggles, and high-tech animated puppets as well as actors, the directors can create a near-perfect simulation of just about any adventure genre and style &emdash; fantasy, science-fiction, whatever. Ordinary people pay to run in a Dream Park adventure (the game has apparently been written before the advent of casting shows), which is broadcast worldwide on TV.
So playing Dream Park is role-playing once removed, because you don't play a character in an adventure, but a character playing a character in an adventure. I don't have the book either, so please look up the reviews for Dream Park in RPG.net.
When the Ship Goes Down You Better Be Ready
The player characters' characters are pushed right into the action, struggling to get out of a sinking ship and make their way to a small Peruvian port town. Right away, they meet an important NPC who stays with them until the end, giving the GM a stick to prod the PCs with if they can't figure out what to do on their own. With all their stuff in Davy Jones's locker, the PCs are soon broke enough to accept a British expatriat's offer to protect his gold mine in the Andes from the German expat's ambitions.
The gold mine is conveniently placed inside a cave with one branch fenced off. Of course, the native workers think the whole cave is bad mojo. In an action-packed scene, the PCs are forced to flee into that branch, where they encounter a number of obstacles and assorted subterranean nasties.
On the other side, lo and behold!, they find one of the fabled seven cities of gold. After a number of challenges dodging hungry reptiles, helping damsels in distress, and making friends with the Yana natives, the PCs have to defeat the bully-boys who followed them into the cave and find their way back to civilisation, where they'll have to defeat the (rather petty) evil mastermind &emdash; with the help of the Yana.
Naturally, the cave collapses soon after.
The Underground Railroad
This is probably the most blatant flaw of Race for El Dorado, jumping into the face of every GM with a little experience. The adventure progresses along fixed tracks, and although the author lists a number of options at the end of each chapter, most of them are simply shunts that add or cut off deviations along the way.
What I can't make up my mind about is, whether this is good or bad. After all, this is not your mark-one role-playing adventure, it's Dream Park. And if I understood what Dream Park is about, drama is more important than the plot, meaning the PCs are to make the most of the story, work like cinema actors and make it real to the (NPC) TV audience out there. I think they are even expected to take unnecessary risks, the Dream Park being essentially a safe place (PCs whose DP-character is killed get to play villains afterward), if the plot pushes them in that direction, however linear and predictable it may be.
And predictable Race for El Dorado is. I'm not sure if the author wanted to present only a skeleton story and leave it to the players to flesh out the plot, or if he just plays with the readers' expectations. You see, the problem with predictable plots is that they are so predictable that you expect the author to give it a new twist somewhere, and it will come to you as a surprise if he doesn't.
Atmosphere versus Information
So the train-ride plot may be part of the atmosphere. I'm fond of atmosphere. I'd pick an atmospheric book over an informative one every time, if I didn't knew it was Wrong (lucky for SJG that I know). Race for El Dorado has atmosphere by the boatload, bringing the pulp-era cinema feeling to life. Most of this is due to the film poster-like cover and the cartoon-style illustrations, one on about every other page.
Especially cute I find the gratuitous non-nudity, i.e. the freqent pictures of bare-chested females where there is always something obstructing the view. This not only brings back the days when cartoonists had to dodge censors, but also today's movies that like to tease but have to remain PG-rated for marketing reasons. And I guess the same holds for Dream Park broadcasting.
On the substance side, Race for El Dorado is solid craftsmanship. Though the sans-serif typeface is so nervous and so tightly spaced that the letters seem to crawl all over the page, the author makes good use of boldface for highlighting. The book is copiously illustrated, maps and diagrams galore. There are six pages at the start delineating the adventure and giving advice on how to run it, as well as six pages at the end providing source material on the Yana natives and their valley &emdash; though I can't understand why the author boasts about it.
Moss tells us that you can throw away most other RPG adventures after you ran them, but that you can use the source material in Race for El Dorado even after you let your players at it. Pull the other one, buster, that's what I'm doing all the time, with just about every adventure.
Verdict
Pick it up, it's good. Even if you don't do Dream Park, Race for El Dorado has a lot to offer. A lost world romance for your next convention game, perhaps, and an armful of well-made background material, superior maps, and suchlike, even if the total amount of it and the linear plot doesn't warrant more than a Substance: 3 rating.
