A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement One Thousand Alien Artifacts From the Frontiers of Space

One Thousand Alien Artifacts From the Frontiers of Space 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 53 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 explain that humans have only lived in the Sonora sector for the fraction of the length that aliens have and that these aliens have sometimes left artefacts behind, which may have use, even if they were once minor, and all have value to someone. It also explains that the precise details of the artefacts have been left to the GM.

Alien Artefacts is a d1000 table of artefacts. Each entry is short, describing what the item really is and perhaps a description of its appearance.

What Can You Do With Alien Artifacts? has some supplementary material. The first two tables are used to determine the artefact’s age, then there is a question as to why it was left behind and finally options to determine the item’s potential value.

Strange Ideas explains that these are merely ideas with vague descriptions and sometimes even vaguer ideas.

One Thousand Alien Artifacts From the Frontiers of Space in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and has enough sections that these would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a single column format and appeared to be free of errors. Bar the covers, there are no illustrations. Presentation is adequate.

This is as it suggests; essentially a list of one thousand ideas that could be expanded into an interesting artefact. Or perhaps a junk that is now valuable thanks to age and origin. There are no game stats for any of these, so they can be used with any system. The supplement is a list of idea sparkers for creating artefacts, rather than an actual list of artefacts. One Thousand Alien Artifacts From the Frontiers of Space can be found by clicking here.