Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Retrospective: Shadows

Late last year, I wrote a post in which I enumerated my top 10 classic Traveller adventures, divided into two parts. Both parts were very well received and generated a lot of excellent discussion in the comments, which pleased me. However, reading issue #71 of White Dwarf reminded me just how few of the adventures included in my top 10 have been the subjects of Retrospective posts (only two as it turns out). This post is the first of several intended to correct this oversight on my part.

Shadows is the first part of a "double adventure" released by GDW in 1980. Double adventures were 48-page books consisting of two scenarios printed in a tête-bêche format in imitation of the Ace Doubles published between 1953 and 1973. You can usually gauge a Traveller player's knowledge of the literary history of science fiction by his reaction to the peculiar formatting of the double adventures. Those who look back fondly on the Ace series immediately understood what GDW was doing here, while those without any experience of them were often baffled. 

In any case, the other scenario included in this double adventure is Annic Nova, which originally appeared in the first issue of The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society. To call it a scenario at all is being generous. Even in its slightly expanded and rewritten format, Annic Nova is little more than the description of an odd starship with an accompanying set of deckplans and some unrelated library data. In all the years I've played Traveller, I've never made any use of Annic Nova, so that's all I say on it in this post.

Shadows, on the other hand, is a scenario I've used multiple times to good effect since I first encountered in 1982, as one of the sample adventures included in The Traveller Book. Like many early RPG adventures, Shadows had its origins in a convention tournament, in this case WinterWar 1980, held at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign between January 18 and 20, 1980. Consequently, it includes eight pregenerated characters, as well as a list of available equipment from which to choose before the start of play. It's also largely self-contained in its content and assumptions and playable within a span of two to four hours, depending on the skill and interests of the players.

The basic premise is that, while in orbit around Yorbund, the sensors of the characters' starship detect a strange structure on the planet's surface. The structure appears to be artificial, consisting of three hollow pyramid-like structures. Since there is no record of these structures – Yorbund is largely unexplored, thanks to its insidious, corrosive atmosphere – the characters have an opportunity to be the first people to visit the structure and learn its secrets. When the characters decide to bring their ship in for a closer look, it is fired upon by an energy weapon from the largest pyramid. The ship's computer estimates that, should the ship attempt to leave the area without first disabling the weapon, there is a high likelihood it could be damaged and/or destroyed by subsequent attacks. The characters are thus left with no option but to land and explore the pyramids in hopes of shutting down the weapon.

The initial situation is a bit heavy-handed, but that's the nature of convention scenarios in my experience. At least the characters don't lose their equipment and can undertake their exploration of the pyramids on their own terms. The pyramids themselves are well imagined and described, with plenty of information about their appearance, atmosphere, and lighting, in addition to many maps to aid the referee in his deliberations. The whole place is mysterious and obviously alien. In addition to technological hazards, such as inoperable doors and inexplicable machinery, the place is now home to several species of animals whose presence might hamper progress within. Yorbund is also prone to seismism and unexpected tremors are a further complication with which the characters must deal.

Shadows is sometimes called a "science fiction dungeon" and, on many levels, it's hard to dispute this. Dungeons & Dragons not only invented the concept of roleplaying games, it established the template for RPGs scenarios, regardless of rules system or genre. Many early Traveller adventures are little more than locales without any "plot." The characters are expected to visit some place on an alien world, poke around, and deal with whatever happens as a result – very similar to many dungeons. Shadows is unquestionably in this tradition. Where it differs, in my opinion, is that, unlike many dungeons, there is both an immediate purpose to the characters' exploration – disabling the energy weapon – and a larger mystery to be resolved – the purpose of the structure and its origins. 

In my experience of refereeing Shadows, it can be a great deal of fun to play, provided the referee makes a point of emphasizing the creepiness of the environment and the lure of hidden knowledge within. That's why I prefer to call it a haunted house rather than a dungeon. Think the derelict spacecraft in Alien rather than the Caves of Chaos and you're closer to the proper perspective on the scenario, I think. That said, Shadows is still an early RPG adventure, with all that entails, including many details undescribed and left entirely to the referee's own imagination. Whether you see that as a feature or a bug will, I suspect, color your feelings about Shadows. Given that I consider it one of my favorite Traveller adventures, you already know where I stand on this question.

17 comments:

  1. Funny, I've played through but never run Shadows, but used Annic Nova couple of times over the years. The "adventure" itself isn't worthy of the name but the ship is a good setting for other events to play out.

    In one case the PCs were travelling as passengers when their ship came across the Annic Nova and the crew decided to stop and investigate, which led to another group of passengers attempting a hijacking and several confused fights on both ships. At the end of it the PCs got a nice reward from the passenger ship's owners, a partial share in the discovery and salvage fees on the mystery ship from the thankful crewmen whose lives they'd (mostly) saved, and even a pat on the back and some future good will from the Navy for helping deal with part of an "inside job" piracy issue they'd been having. They also earned the enmity of the rest of the hijack gang, which came up later.

    The other time they were in their own ship, managed to recover the Annic Nova and sell the hulk to a research firm, and wound up accompanying an archeological expedition to my homebrewed home system of the ghost ship. That led to almost a year of poking around a dead world and various abandoned space platforms, stumbling over a smuggler's base, and finding some clues to the possible location of where the survivors of the world's former civilization might have wound up - but school ended before that went anywhere and we never came back to it owing to graduations and new shiny games.

    But as you said, it's a site or a curiosity, not even the bones of an adventure without doing the bulk of the work yourself.

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  2. I never really registered on what oddballs those Ace doubles were. There were hundreds of them over a couple of decades, but no one one else has really done anything like them since the 70s despite it being a striking format. There's a good quote about the way the editors paired up books to make a joke with their titles over on the wiki page:

    "It's a fond legend of fandom that if an SF editor got his hands on the Old and New Testaments, they'd be published as War God of Israel and The Thing With Three Souls."

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    1. Tor attempted to bring back the format in the late '80s, publishing a series of Tor Doubles as a way to get shorter novels into print. I only have one, Greg Bear's Hardfought backed with Timothy Zahn's Cascade Point, billed as "Tor Double No. 2" and published in November 1988. Wikipedia says that there were a total of 36 published between 1988 and 1991.

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    2. Huh, I never saw a single one of those in a bookstore around here. Looking at the list of titles I think I can see why they didn't do as well as the Aces, the individual stories are a strange mix of old (dating back to the 40s) and new (mid 80s). Must have been jarring to get such different styles in the same volume.

      Were they still printed inverted with twin covers like the earlier Aces, or did they give up on that the way the later ones did?

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    3. As the Wikipedia article makes clear, most of them were printed tête-bêche, though a few were not for various reasons. The one I have is printed that way, though it does mean that the UPC is annoyingly prominent on the Zahn cover.

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  3. It may sound crazy, but in the early aughs I repurposed Shadows and Shadows of the Spider Moon from Polyhedron to run a Spelljammey game of FATE 2.0

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    1. Honestly, I could see that working just fine. There is nothing in Shadows that couldn't be reskinned to fantasy without changing the basic scenario and tone.

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    2. Indeed the game was fairly successful, and all the players happy.
      The only issues we (actually I) had is that it was my first time running FATE and I had something of a hard time wrangling with the system.

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  4. Shadows is very haunted house-ish. I also ran Annic Nova, but it didn't really make a big impression. (Odd ship, salvage, moon on.) Of all the double adventures, I think Shadows and Chamax Plague were the ones that made the biggest impressions, though my players had fun with Divine Intervention as well. (Chamax Plague was so scary for them, though, that they semi-jokingly threatened to inflict harm if I used the Chamax again, so Horde was out....

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    1. Of all the doubles I think I had the most success with Chamax Plague/Horde, but most of my players when I ran them were big fans of THEM! so they were predisposed to fighting big bugs. :)

      Never did manage to find a copy of Mithril/Bright Face. I still know them only through reviews.

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    2. Really any serious Traveller fan should get the Classic Traveller CD-ROM at least. Then you have all the double adventures...

      Back in the day, I bought most of them, but I don't think I ever actually used them. I did start to use Shadows with a Roll20 campaign I ran for another player when the Traveller game we were in didn't run because the GM wasn't available. I also presented it to my play by post group but we didn't get there before ending the campaign.

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    3. Guess I'm not a serious fan, then. Funny that, I would have thought I was. Good of you to let me know, I won't make the mistake of squandering any more money on Traveller products. Only bought about 90% of GDW's stuff once already...

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    4. What don't you have? It may be worth getting the CD-ROM to get missing bits... Or electronic versions if what you have is a print collection...

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    5. @Dick McGee: Or, you know, you could take Frank's comment generously instead of ungenerously and understand that "should" is a recommendation, not a prescription or definition.

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  5. I used Shadows as a preface adventure to the current Classic Traveller campaign I am running, something to give the players (who had never played the game before) an idea what to expect. Worked wonderfully for both them and myself. I also plan on using Annic Nova at some point as a random starship encounter while fueling at a gas giant. I agree with everybody here that Annic Nova is a little thin as written, but with some added spice I think it has potential. I am going toss in a security robot protecting the ship long after the death of the original crew—basically: Maximillian from the Black Hole. That should ratchet up the tension. I also like an idea I read in a Marc Miller interview somewhere that the Annic Nova was supposed to be a prototype ship with jump drives that multiply each other's capability in some way, giving the potential for massive jumps far beyond Imperial standards. (Can't remember the details of his explanation.) Anyway, the value of such a ship would be huge if the players could first deal with the robot threat, then deal with the disease on the ship, then figure out a way to salvage the ship while in a decaying gas giant orbit with no power.

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  6. I remember the Games Workshop adventures "The Statue of the Sorcerer & The Vanishing Conjurer" for Call of Cthulhu were also printed in this unusual format. I'm not sure if there was a specific reason for doing so.

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  7. Glad to see some love for ANNIC NOVA here. Some of my earliest Traveller play involved the characters salvaging that ship and using it for future adventures. I liked the idea of the nacelles being both maneuvering engines and small craft so much I borrowed it for other designs in my Traveller game.

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