Customer Reviews

The Killing Jar (Alternity Sci-Fi Roleplaying, Dark Matter Setting Adventure)

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The Killing Jar, by Bruce Cordell, is the only published adventure for 5th-level Dark*Matter characters using the Alternity role-playing game system. This review contains spoilers. I indicated changes I made to the adventure with the PLAYTEST tag.

The Killing Jar begins with the player characters' (PC) car stolen. An alien beast is loose in the car, known as Clostridium Cnidarae, and specifically Cnidocytes. This bizarre organism is both a bacterial infection as well as a creature, a jellyfish like monstrosity that slowly converts its victims into similar creatures.

PLAYTEST: And here we have the first problem: couldn't they come up with a better name than "Cnidocyte?" Mothmen never get a similarly scientific name, so it's odd that the narrative chooses to stick with the clumsy term AHD uses. All the terms are defined up front in a Lexicon of Terms, but I would much rather have the text explained as it pops up in sidebars throughout the adventure. Flipping back and forth to the Lexicon is a pain.

After tracking down the origin of the beast, they discover the thief's corpse in a forensics lab and are ambushed by agents of American Home Devices, the creators of the cnidocyte.

PLAYTEST: AHD was an actual web site that unfortunately no longer exists. This is one of the first modern adventures I know of that actually used the Internet in this fashion. Fortunately, the pages are reproduced in the book, but they would have been better served as a web supplement you can download. Agent Balance, the mysterious Man in Black hunting the PCs, has an email that also no longer works : [...] (note the Lovecraftian shout out). The forensics lab encounter is the most atmospheric and creepy in the book.

Jane Scarborough, the research scientist, accidentally uncovered the illegal bioweapons research with the cnidocytes and fled, but not before being infected. She followed rumors of a race of beings known as Mothmen (get it? That's why the scenario is called the Killing Jar...they're experimenting on Mothmen!) who could defeat the cnidocyte plague, but succumbed before she could contact them. Following her trail, the agents learn of an American Indian mask that lets them communicate with the Mothmen, and ultimately track down the research lab itself in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

PLAYTEST: The scenario specifically makes a point about railroading the PCs - the theft of their car may irk some players, and the adventure provides an option of the agents to get an anonymous tip about someone else's abandoned car instead.

From there, it's all running and screaming as the cnidocytes escape the experimental labs just as the agents arrive (of course). Evidence leads to an even more powerful cnidocyte, the Residuum and source of all the other cnidocytes, deep beneath the earth in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky. The agents arrive just in time to defeat the huge beast with the help of the Mothmen.

PLAYTEST: I replaced the raid on Dawn Biozyme from the Cthulhu Now adventure At Your Door with the raid on AHD Pharmaceuticals, which is much more detailed.

Occasionally, monsters show up for no discernible reason. There's two guardian spirits that make sense, a set of calcified mummies that make less sense, and a robotic dog that's both ineffective as a guard dog and fairly ridiculous. A real dog infected with cnidocytes would be more effective.

And yet the main beast, known as the Residuum, is barely fleshed out. It's a giant monster with mind-blasting powers, but its motivations and origins are left blank. In fact, the adventure's wrap up seems a bit rushed - we shift gears from a room-by-room description for each chapter in the adventure to a randomized summary of the caves, with the opportunity to find "d4 arrowhead artifacts."

Do we really need a random number of arrowheads to be found? And why does anyone care if they find arrowhead artifacts? My guess is that these artifacts might be useful in communicating with the Native American-esque Mothmen later in the adventure, but there's no reference to any of that. In fact, the Mothmen just help the PCs - there's no actual negotiating necessary.

PLAYTEST: I replaced Mothmen with Mi-Go, and replaced the Residuum with a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath (with the understanding that Shub-Niggurath is the true "source"). I used the negotiating procedure from the Delta Green scenario, Night on Owlshead Mountain.

The Mothmen become Native American analogues instead of creepy otherworldly beings, going so far as to offer the PCs a "ghost vest" to wear in their fight with the Residuum. They're a little too accessible and not creepy enough.

PLAYTEST: The finale with the Residuum is followed up by another firefight with Agent Balance and his men, which seems like a waste. There's an entire boring journey in the caves that would be better served as a place for a shootout, with the Residuum fight being the last "boss battle" of the adventure. I changed it around.

Overall, The Killing Jar has a lot of promise, but its execution isn't always polished. Still, with its full color maps and use of interactive media, The Killing Jar was a cutting edge product in its day and it shows...especially in the form of the robotic watchdog, the Mark XXIII AIBO.

The Killing Jar is great. The players will be kept on their toes the entire time. They won't believe where they end up, yet one part leads clearly into the next. It's chilling, suspenseful, and downright weird.

This adventure has taken the Dark Matter setting out into a great horror/conspiracy! This is the BEST near future RPG setting EVER. This adventure and game setting will put the Alternity RPG on the map! I can't wait until they release a CD ROM game utility. Way to go TSR/WOTC!