Deja Vu 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 28 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. Two pages are the front and rear cover, three the front matter and four the Open Game License.
The opening paragraphs explain that the characters notice a posting for a job. This involves working for an insurance company to look for a ship that has gone missing with a load of weapons (though it hasn’t exactly gone missing as the patron knows roughly where it is). Though not stated, the adventure is set in the Frontiers of Space.
The Patron gives some detail on their employer.
Complications are the problems and opportunities that will be encountered. The patron is mostly telling the truth.
Game Master Note explains that this adventure is based on the author’s definition of a temporal causality loop.
The Avalon has a description of the crew and ship that the characters are looking for.
The Other Ships in the Time Trap has similar descriptions of the ships caught in the loop; there are more than just the one the characters are looking for, with five in total. One of them, fortunately, has a means of breaking it.
Escaping the Temporal Causality Loop is how to break free.
Mission Objective Completion is how to succeed; naturally, escaping the loop is required.
Game Master Note explains how the loop’s nature makes fixing problems a bit different.
The final five pages of content has maps of five ships in the loop. There doesn’t appear to be a map of the Avalon itself.
Deja Vu in Review
The PDF lacks bookmarks and is long enough with enough different sections that these would have been useful. Navigation is poor. The text maintains a single column format and appeared to be free of errors. Bar the covers and colour maps, there are no illustrations. Presentation is adequate.
This is an unusual adventure in that it’s essentially impossible to fail, because every negative consequence is reset when the time loop resets, and the characters retain knowledge of previous loops (which has not had a good effect on the mental state of some). Think The Next Generation‘s “Cause and Effect”, but with memory of each prior loop. This means that working out what to do is really a case of trial and error, seeing what doesn’t work and finding out what will. Depending on the players, this could become annoying if they fail to solve the problem. Deja Vu is an adventure whose twist is that it is definitely solvable, eventually, and it can be found by clicking here.
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