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Old 09-18-2017, 10:17 AM
Project_Sardonicus Project_Sardonicus is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2013
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I remember buying Prime Base years ago and thinking,
Is that it?
Then putting it down for ages picking it up again and thinking, no really that's it?

Which is annoying as a UK MP fan, for years I had thought it was unpublished and this was like some treasure trove.

It suffers from 2 maladies of supplements of the 1980s.

1 The Abandoned Hole.

GDW Traveller was notorious for devising abandoned bases, temples and even starships. Which players would stumble around trying to solve a usually fairly pedestrian mystery and avoiding some fairly minor threats.

2 The Get out of here Guardians.

Seemingly every early D&D scenario had a city with level 3 guards and a level 6 wizard working for the local lord. Who's sole job was to make sure heroes got themselves out of town and raided the local tomb and didn't make any trouble.

Hence the Phoenix Team e.g. "who'd have thought the Project had Chuck Norris, Dutch and their combined special forces just to boot us out of our nice new Prime base!"

So basically a scenario where the players turn up half naked and injured after fighting giant lizards in a swamp. Before exploring a big empty tomb by match light and then if they finally find the secret, getting kicked out by Delta Force is probably one of the least entertaining scenarios of all time.

Which is even more annoying when you bear in mind; The Starnaman Incident and Damocles were easily some of the best post apocalyptic dungeon scenarios and worked so well.

My view keep the maps and ditch everything else. Maybe Damoclese has been run by the degenerate descendants of the survivors, perhaps a care taker crew woken up a 100 years ago.

The idea of the base being laid siege by some serious big bads like Krell or Sciens would be great.

But you know trust your team will want to leave of their own free will to rebuild the world. And not hang around to help the Phoenix teams clean up ala a 1980s montage.

nb I've always felt that the Morrow Project staff who wanted to man Prime Base would be a little screwy anyway. Volunteering to watch the world burn alongside all their friends and family (well most of them). Not well adjusted people, if a few survived in freeze tubes and ran the place. I think they may end up like those crazy Human's in one of the old Planet of the Apes films who worshipped an atom bomb...
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