The seventh volume of Chris Powell’s Letters from the Dark series of zines, Lucky Stars is a fun bit of strange.  I enjoy a good genre transgression, and this one digs right in.  It’s clearly inspired by the classic module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, a module I very much want to run, either in Dungeon Crawl Classics or ShadowDark.  I suspect I’ll be raiding Lucky Stars for a bunch of material if I ever get around to it.

I believe this is the first volume to be in color, and on very glossy paper.  After a very amusing introduction, there’s a discussion of genre and some examples of how to use technology in your Fantasy game.  The list of gadgets provides some wacky stuff to throw your players for a loop.  (Warning: the rest of this paragraph is a tangent about my own GMing philosophy, if you’d prefer to continue with the review, skip to the next paragraph).  There is a design philosophy in the tech, which echoes that of Barrier Peaks that I don’t quite agree with.  I understand it and I understand why it’s there and why folks might want to follow it, but I don’t fully agree with it, and likely would not use it in my own game.  That is the punishing limitation on technology.  Often items, like a laser blaster or something, have only a very small number of uses and a fairly high chance of disastrous malfunction.  I get the idea.  But, I’m somewhat of the mind that there’s no point introducing a “game breaking” item if you’re not going to let it break your game.  Sort of like “shoot the Monk,” the reminder that the D&D Monk class has an action that allows them to dodge or catch arrows (I don’t know exactly, as I don’t play D&D) so make sure bad guys are shooting at them with arrows so that they can do their cool thing.  Players want to do cool, awesome, surprising, badass things, that maybe break the rules and definitely make them look good.  So, let them.  I’m not even saying that you shouldn’t put restrictions on powerful magic or technological items.  But when the limitations and restrictions are so severe that, as a player, I’d probably rather just pick up a piece of wood and use it as a club than try to use the ultra-tech weapon to vaporize a demon, then what’s the point of putting it in there in the first place?  Anyway, your mileage may vary with this sort of thing.  I’m not telling you how to run your game.  But I think if I put these items into my own game, I’ll cut back on the downsides, at least a little.  Just as an example, when I was running DCC, I gave a player a little ultra-tech tube weapon, sort of like the hollow tube those cultists had in the classic Trek episode, “Return of the Archons.”  It was very powerful, but had something like a 5 or 10 round recharge.  That essentially meant you could use it once in combat, but you could use it in every combat.  And then, if you did have a critical failure, as my player did, I could come up with a situationally appropriate result (in that game’s case, the PC was warped into another realm, where he found out he was a Halfling version of the Eternal Champion, and was able to return a session or two later in a flying ship and rescue his companions from a collapsing temple).  

There is a section on mutations, something that could come into play in the later adventure.  There are then several pages of monsters, including aliens and robots, as well as a custom robot creation system. 

The following almost sixty pages are devoted to the volume’s adventure, “Encounter at Korolev Pass,” with a few more pages set aside for a sort of adventure within an adventure, “Growl of the Grimlow.”  There’s a small town with a bunch of problems, and then the major site, The Zenith.  Between them, there are a whole bunch of encounters, some NPCs to deal with, and a lot of possible ways of sorting things out or not.  With a little tweaking, you could introduce a lot of wild things into this one.  Not that there’s any shortage of wild stuff. 

I don’t want a spaceship in my game of The One Ring or an Elf Druid in my game of Call of Cthulhu.  However, in the right game, I love seeing the arbitrary barriers between genres torn down so that they can bleed into each other in fun and creative ways.  Certainly, a great deal of classic genre fiction, including a lot of the “holy texts” of Appendix N, were not as beholden to contemporary ideas of genre classifications.  If you’re running a mostly straight-Fantasy game, this volume could provide an unexpected break from the norm.  Or, if you’re running the sort of wacky, pre-Tolkien/70s van art/Prog Rock sort of game I’d like to run, this might just be Tuesday.  If you want your PCs to explore a crashed spaceship, and you’d prefer more modern design and language, and don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for Goodman Games’s Original Adventures Reincarnated version of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks on the collectors’ market, this should fit the bill.  

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