A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Clean Up

Clean Up by Jospeh 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 23 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. Two pages are the front and rear covers, three the front matter and three the Open Game License.

The opening paragraphs explains about two political entities who have fought for control for the Sonora sector – though not stated, the adventure is set in the Frontiers of Space – signed a peace treaty a decade ago. One planet was bombarded into radioactive ruin and is surrounded by wrecks. The characters are being hired to dispose of the wrecks and other debris, and are given a new, experimental explosive to help.

Patron has details on the patron.

Complications are things that can go wrong or which are not known.

Udroos V has some details on the world.

Random Encounters and Occurrences has 2d6 tables for encounters in the system and random wreckage, and more detailed descriptions for three wrecks, plus a 1d6 table of other debris. There are also details of the ship and team belonging to the other polity who don’t want the characters to find certain things, a crew of salvagers and a pirate ship.

ZDX Compound has details on the new explosive, which has an occasional tendency to explode of its own accord.

Mission Completion Objectives are what’s needed to complete the mission. Though the characters are under the impression they need to destroy everything, only the three wrecked ships matter.

The final three pages of content have colour maps of the three ships.

Clean Up in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough with enough different sections that these would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a single column format and some minor errors were noticed. Bar the maps and covers, there are no illustrations. Presentation is okay.

As is common, some of the NPCs are covered in more detailed than needed, as just a couple of stat blocks would have done the trick. This is a straightforward though dangerous mission; not only are there rivals and enemies, the characters have an explosive that might accidentally blow them up, as well as the dangers of the wrecks and in space as well. There are many, many ways of the characters coming to grief. Having the players believe they need to clean up everything, but having victory being to only destroy the three wrecks and refusing to tell them seems pointless, given that they will not know they have succeeded. Clean Up is an okay adventure and it can be found by clicking here.