Boarding Action by Joseph Mohr is a role playing game supplement published by Old School Role Playing for use with Cepheus Engine. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result.
The supplement is available as a twenty-three page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. Two pages are the front and rear covers, three pages are the front matter and three the Open Game License.
The opening paragraphs explain that the worst prisoners in the Sonora Sector – this is set in the Frontiers of Space – are held in a prison ship. The ship travels patrolled shipping lanes to avoid pirates, and recent problems with breakouts from prison planets – possibly referring to Break Out!, in which the characters did just that – have made governments nervous. The characters are hired to free a king of a planet that was captured by the Olonsean Empire. The prison ship itself is in the middle of a prisoner breakout when the characters arrive.
Information Provided by Ren Sun has the details provided by the patron.
Complications is things that the patron didn’t known. He hasn’t intentionally left anything out or lied – older adventures in this series regularly had patrons lying and giving misinformation, sometimes imperilling the job in the process; recent ones have started avoiding that, which is an improvement.
The X-434Z Prison Ship describes the ship. There is a table for random occurrences and then the ship is described with the NPCs at the various locations.
Coming to Help the Prison Ship has the ships coming to aid in quelling the riot.
Patron is the NPC who hires the characters.
Conditions for Success is simply rescuing the king.
There are two pages of maps of the ship.
Boarding Action in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough that these would have been useful. Navigation is poor. The text maintains a single column format and some minor errors were noticed. There are no illustrations, bar the colour maps, which don’t come in player friendly versions. Presentation could be better.
It does seem awfully coincidental that the prisoners on the prison ship managed to escape just before the characters arrived. That does change the situation; for one thing, it makes it easier getting onto the ship whilst the crew is distracted. On the other hand, there are a lot of armed and dangerous prisoners roaming free as well as incoming patrol boats. Characters also could free some prisoners who would pay them; that could well be a bad idea, though. Boarding Action is a decent little adventure and it can be found by clicking here.
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