NASA’s D&D Adventure: The Lost Universe

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/multimedia/online-activities/the-lost-universe

NASA made an adventure module.

“This adventure is designed for a party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters and is easily adaptable for your preferred tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) system.”

And its 44 pages of mostly two-column text and a few images from NASA that don’t really feel D&D. Nothing wrong with that. But haven’t you guys learned your lesson about “system neutrality” ? I think this is just a charm against lawyers, but that’s no excuse. I’m do not fear WotC lawyers and neither should any other patron of the sciences.

You have to excuse an occasional interruption that explains why the hubble space telescope is a big deal or a list of old rocket scientists. Because that’s the point of writing this. Maybe I should excuse some other things too because this is probably the first adventure these poor NASA interns had to write but I elect to be mean.

This is a storygame module and I hate storygame adventures so what else am I going to say?

“The second part of the adventure is a journey
outside the city to nearby ruins, where they will
complete a skill challenge and encounter the
dragon that was behind the disappearances.
They must complete these challenges before
they can recover the researchers and get home”

Nobody follows NASA for game design or evocative prose, what do you expect? Just roll your d20 so we can go home. You’ve done my review for me.

The background lore is good. It’s a rogue planet and magic comes from zero point energy. Some mumbo jumbo on how the wizards solved the problems of not having a solar system. Consistently, the background info is completely serviceable and it could be a foundation for dozens of great adventures. This ain’t one of them.

What’s the adventure? A wizard has been spying on earth, but then a dragon caught him and now the DRAGON IS GOING TO STEAL THE BIG SPACE TELESCOPE.

Again, good setup, can you stick the landing? No.

The city is like a shadow on the wall of Plato’s cave cast by someone playing Planescape. List of NPCs are friends to make and they all offer snacks, they’re all elfs and half orcs with desk jobs and if you take the word “Dragon” out of the villains entry it’s just a big ugly librarian.

At page 13 “the adventure begins” and I say there was exactly the right amount of setup if half of it didn’t stink.

The adventure is heavily scripted. There’s two or three routes to move the plot along and hopefully your DM is also confident enough to go off script too. Because if you will have to do everything on your own from scratch. There’s also lots of read-aloud text. Anywhere the setup pleasantly surprises me the follow up just isn’t there.

Did I ever blog about how much I hate skyrim cops as a plot device? So even if the half-orc-woman police chief is total wife material, that’s irrelevant because A DRAGON HAS STOLEN THE GODDAMN HUBBLE TELESCOPE.

The bar scene is scripted to have a bar fight with 1d4 “guard stat block” NPCs. They flee at low HP, which is a good and realistic detail. Except, cool science fact here, the party probably has fireball, and that’s at worst a CR 1 encounter. Those guys won’t get a chance to run. It’s hard to balance fights, and to anticipate what players are going to do with high level abilities and playtesters can not help unless they are willing and able to break things. For example I have never made a level-appropriate adventure in my life. But this is still bad.

The priorities are too mangled up. Are we telling a story? Investigating a mystery? Battling a dragon? The text is more about playing house in an urban city with a bunch of overeducated yuppies than anything else. If NASA thinks that’s what D&D is you can’t blame them. Maybe I was too hard on Shadow of The Weird Wizard. That one had violence and tactics as a sport nailed. This is a choose your own adventure story, except a thousand times more awkward. That’s a scientific number too dude, the shame of playing this in public will not wear off.

Some science teacher out there is going to try to use this crap on innocent high schoolers, man. Thats mostly pointless, any high schooler who will be impressed by D&D already subscribes to NASA’s tiktok or something. Not checking if they actually have one.

They say your choice of system has stats for a young green dragon. I choose Ryuutama, the dragon is now your questgiver and we’re going to steal more shit from space, because I can’t pass up an opportunity to do a concept better than NASA did. Or you can kill the dragon so you can go back to the burgerpunk eden of Greenbelt, Maryland. That’s the bad ending.

One bar fight and one dragon fight really will take up the allotted four hour time slot in an ordinary game of 5e. The dragon can probably at least drop a character at levels 4-7 but PCs could ignore everything else.

The included overworld map has no scale but the only two points of interest are 30 miles apart. It’s only there because maps are obligatory. A dungeon map would have been more interesting. And if your system of choice has xp-for-gold you’re on your own trying to convert the value of the Hubble Space Telescope to GP.

To save this adventure would require building an adventure on it. This is the kind of thing you write before a first draft if you like a long development cycle. The guys who put us on the moon could have made a much better adventure. Stuff like this is offloaded onto drivethru RPG by the shovelful and inserting low-level science facts doesn’t help it stand out.