This is a fun little romp through a backwater planet, where the player characters are caught up in a situation where their good samaritan actions put them smack dab in the middle of a criminal underworld war, and some industrial espionage dirty tricks. The Bronze Case is presented as an "aside": the PC's ship is undergoing maintenance for a bit, and one thing leads to another, and they're helping a beautiful secret agent courier the epynomous bronze case to an undisclosed destination. Gangsters. Spies. Corrupt Cops. Car Chases. Road trip!
The Good: the adventure is very come-as-you-are. There's no major plot rails here. If the PCs mess up, they mess up and they might have some explaining to do to the local constables, but they're Travellers, and they'll leave the port on their starship soon enough. If they are more successful, they'll have made friends with some corporate espionage assets. The NPCs are statted-up using the new Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition rules, and are given some basic personalities. The GM is given some tips on running car chases using the aforementioned rules. There are some fun little encounters to run, and some low-powered combats to fight, all with some pretty solid worldbuilding context.
The Not So Good: The Bronze Case is very come-as-you-are. If the PCs do not buy in and be good samaritans, rather than amoral murder-hobos, there is no adventure. There are ways to address this problem, but nothing is mentioned in the write-up. There are a couple of places in the adventure where there's a little bit of railroading, but it's all in good fun, and can be avoided, with a bit of GMing. As well, there are plenty of adventure hooks to thread by the end of the adventure, but nothing is brought up: by the adventure's end, there could be a criminal organization with off-world ties that has it in for the PCs. And the industrial espionage angle is not followed up either. Lots of adventures can be spun off of the Bronze Case, but there are no follow up scenarios suggested.
Fixing the buy-in: Instead of having the players choose to be good samaritans in order to run the Bronze Case, the PCs might already have the main NPC friend in the adventure as a contact in their list. This way, they're doing this contact a very big favour, and have motivation to go on the adventure. Most PCs will not have all their contacts named and fleshed out. This is a great opportunity to introduce a new contact for a player whose character hasn't been able to leverage their contacts into an adventure, or an asset yet.
I'd also suggest fleshing out the highly corrupt, yet very in-your-face security forces and criminals on the planet in question. There are plenty of good RP opportunities that are glossed over between the PCs and a variety of shady characters, and possibly including an NPC police detective tasked with handling/containing the PCs and their adventure would make for another interesting layer for this adventure.
Rating: [4 of 5 Stars!] |