I never specified they were all D&D adventures, did I?
Sorry about the delay; I literally worked twenty hours in the kitchen yesterday preparing for two farmer's markets today, so I didn't get a chance to post. But despite exhaustion, I'm making this post so I don't fall two days behind.
Anyway, the Volturnus trilogy is for the Star Frontiers game. Or, for those who bought it after 1982, the Star Frontiers Alpha Dawn boxed set. Star Frontiers was a science fiction game that really hearkened back to the pulp science fiction adventure stories. Not the sterile, 'men with screwdrivers' stories of Astounding and Asimov, but the action-packed adventures of planetary romance, or E.E. Doc Smith's Skylark in Space and Lensman series. The stuff that inspired Star Wars.
The original Star Frontiers (and later Alpha Dawn) was not focused on spaceships at all; that wouldn't happen until the release of the Knight Hawks boxed set. Rather, it was more in line with the stories of John Carter of Mars, or Leigh Brackett's planetary stories. Spaceships did exist, of course, but they were abstract; they were ways to get to where the adventures actually were. Alpha Dawn was about Tatooine and Endor, not X-Wings and Tie Fighters.
As was customary for TSR's boxed set games of the era, an introductory adventure was included. It was SF-0, Crash on Volturnus. It came wrapped in a map of a part of a starship that was the transport vessel taking the PCs to another place; there's a pirate attack, and the PCs are forced to abandon ship. Their escape pod is damaged, and they crash on an unknown world, which is Volturnus.
The rest of the module involves finding a way to survive in the hostile desert environment, and the party will encounter the Ul-Mor, a primitive alien race that will take the party in and allow them to join the tribe if they pass a test. Before they get to that, however, they have to pass through an underground cavern complex, and of course there's an earthquake and they are separated from their guides, and have to make their way through the complex alone. TSR's dungeon crawling roots die hard, don't they?
So, they eventually pass the caverns and the test, and become part of the Ul-Mor tribe. This leads to the following adventures, where the party discovers a threat to the planet and must unite the other indigenous tribes of Volturnus, including the Kurabanda and the Edestekai, in order to fight off a Sathar invasion. They can also encounter two other races: The Mechanon, a highly-advanced robotic race, and the Eorna, who are evolved dinosaurs and are the remnants of an advanced technological civilization. Assuming the PCs can get these disparate groups to get along, they have a chance to fight off the Sathar. But it won't be easy.
So, what do I love about this series? As I said, it is a tribute to the pulp stories of old, and I love those pulp stories. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense; why are the Eorna so weak, or how did these different forms of life all develop sentience on this world? And you know what? It doesn't matter. Who cares? It's FUN. And it really captures the essence of what the Star Frontiers boxed set was trying to convey. It's not hard sci-fi; it's entertaining sci-fi. The science serves the story, not the other way around.
Plus, Star Frontiers was a great science fiction game for kids and teens. It wasn't nearly as hardcore as Traveller, nor did it have the philosophical depth of Star Trek. The goal was playability and fun, and it succeeded at that. I think it would have had a much longer shelf life had Gary Gygax not lost control of the company to someone who owned the Buck Rogers IP and thus canned Star Frontiers while it was just getting a facelift.
And that's it for this one. I'll get back to D&D again next time with another obscure but awesome adventure from Dungeon Magazine.
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