A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement 2d6 SF Adventures, Vol. 1

2d6 SF Adventures, Vol. 1 is a bundle product from Michael Brown containing ten short, no frills science fiction adventures. The adventures are intended for use with Traveller or similar 2d6 system, such as the Cepheus Engine. The full price for the supplements if purchased individually is $8.00; the bundle reduces this to $5.60. Nine of the adventures are reduced from $0.75 to $0.53; the tenth from $1.25 to $0.83. Each adventure, bar one, is a single page, lacking even the promotional cover, which is done in a style intended to resemble that of supplements from the original Traveller game.

Breakout! is a scenario set in space. The players have a ship, and they are hailed by a prison barge that has suffered a prisoner breakout. The laws of space require the players to respond and help, and they need to board the ship and suppress the riot. There is a simple, deliberately incomplete, map of the barge.

Emblem has the players delivering supplies to a scientific outpost on a primitive planet, in time to intervene in a barbarian attack. The scientists have found a Precursor artefact, and the barbarians believe it is a sacred object that has been spoken about in prophecy. The players need to defuse or otherwise end the situation.

Girkekaashur sees the players hired to deliver a book, the titular Girkekaashur, from one star system to another. This is not what it seems; although the book is genuine it is not being sent by a man to his fiancée, but is actually from one agent to another. They are spying on a crime syndicate, which has unfortunately become suspicious, and the players are probably going to have to fight it.

Memoir is planet-based and has the players be present when an aircraft carrying a witness against a criminal gang crashes near them. The government agent on board dies, but asks the players to fulfil his mission and take the witness to safety. This adventure has a simulated chase, with rules.

The Celsius Agenda is, a bit oddly, in a landscape format. The players are hired to recover a stolen file by a company; there is slightly more going on as the company is doing work that is locally frowned on. They will have to find and deal with a pyrokinetic before the police track him down, and there are three adventure hooks for further adventures as well.

The Coursing is the adventure that had the higher price; this is because it’s a two-page adventure, not a single page. The players have gone a hunt, being short of money, but the hunt is a cover for the leader to kill his wife and her lover by hunting them down. It is assumed that the players will also be targets, after refusing to hunt the two. There are a number of encounters that can prove useful, as all possessions are removed from the hunted first, and descriptions of the NPCs.

The Defiled has the players being asked by a tribe on a primitive world to clear out their temple from the beasts which have taken it over. This adventure has a rough map of the temple – a crashed spaceship – and presents a moral, and possibly legal, dilemma for the players, as the beasts are actually intelligent.

The Prometheus Index has the players hired by a teacher, on a world where the majority of the population is kept deliberately ignorant, to infiltrate a fortress and steal a database that could be used to help violate this edict. This adventure comes with a map which has been adapted for this use. Both the risk and the rewards are quite high.

The Xero Option has one of the players, or perhaps an important NPC, afflicted with a rapidly fatal illness. There is a cure – the titular xero – but the problem with the cure is that it’s used, along with a number of common materials, in making an explosive. Consequently, it can be hard to get hold of. The players have to steal some from a violent religious cult. There is a plan of the cult’s house and there is the potential for more consequences if the cult tries to take revenge in the future.

Voice of the Bygone is essentially a rescue. The players are asked to escort a group of people to an off world transport. The newly victorious fundamentalist government is destroying all media that doesn’t meet their, extremely restrictive, standards. The people the players are escorting have a strong oral tradition; they may not be media, but they preserve knowledge the government wants to eradicate. There is a simple, incomplete and unlabelled, amp of the town they need escorting from.

The style of the supplements does alter a bit, being either two or three columns of text, with the occasional map in some of them and sidebars of information being common. No errors were noted in the text. The maps, when they are included, generally serve their stated purpose.

These are exactly what they claim to be – no-frills adventures. Many of the adventures lack anything in the way of stats, although there are occasional references to the 2d6 dice mechanic or items. They are, as a result, fairly system-agnostic in nature; a GM could convert them to another system with a minor amount of work, as long as they know how 2d6 dice rolls work, which isn’t hard to find out. This is an excellent bundle of adventures that can be slotted into science fiction campaigns without too much effort. 2d6 SF Adventures, Vol. 1 do the job they are stated to do, so click here to buy them.