A Review of the Role Playing Game Supplement Sleeping Giant

Sleeping Giant by Joseph Mohr is a role playing game supplement published by Old School Roleplaying 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 24 page Pay What You Want PDF from DriveThruRPG. Two pages are the front and rear covers, three are the front matter and three are the Open Game License.

The opening paragraphs explain that the characters are approached by an officer of the Ilsuni Directorate who want them to head to a planet before the Olsonean Empire, an aggressive polity, can get its own operatives to recover potentially powerful equipment. The planet itself is surrounded by debris and many parts are radioactive following a war.

For the Game Master explains that the adventure is set in the Frontiers of Space but could be moved elsewhere and the target us a robotic walker that was used during an invasion. It’s described as a robotic tank; it actually resembles an AT-AT Walker, probably because this is a stock map of such inspired by Star Wars.

The Planet Ceqal IV gives some brief details and Random Encounters in the Ceqal Star System has a 2d6 table of encounters. Another 2d6 table has encounters on the surface. Complications lists the potential problems. The Olsonean team’s stats are given next. There are details on the former inhabitants of the planet and its current occupants before moving on to describe the fallen walker itself.

Requirements to successfully complete the mission are followed by stats for random inhabitants and a 5d6 table of random artefacts that can be found. There is a map of the walker and of the planet.

Sleeping Giant in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and has enough different sections that these would have been useful. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a single column format and a number of minor errors were noticed. Bar the maps, the only illustrations are the covers. There is no player friendly map of the fallen walker. Presentation is okay.

This is a fairly simple adventure of a pretty straightforward nature. The characters are to go to a place and there explore what is essentially a dungeon, looking for useful items whilst dealing with opposition, which doesn’t necessarily mean kill. Sleeping Giant is a decent little adventure and it can be found by clicking here.