James Ward's DARK OUTPOST

[Finarvyn]

If you wander over to RPGNow and look for the Eldritch Ent game company, you can find several cool looking old-school RPG products. One of those is DARK OUTPOST, by Jim Ward. I bought DARK OUTPOST a while back and love the way it reads. (Haven't had a chance to play it yet, however.)

It details a space station divided into nine sectors, much like the levels in METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA. It gives history, hints on how to GM the artificial intelligence of the space station, information on each sector, and so on. It's an 88-page PDF and would appear to be very compatible with METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA (or MUTANT FUTURE) with minimal effort to convert.

I don't want to give away much about the contents of the outpost, but the module has some really cool critters in it, some nice B&W line art illustrations inside, detailed maps, and is generally well written in Jim's excellent style that mixes cool ideas with humorous situations where you can kill characters in a hurry if they are careless.

When I finish my current DCC campaign, I can't wait to run my group through this! ;D

[Alex]

Sounds like he's productized the MA adventure he ran last year at NTRPG Con. It was loads of fun! That game and one the day before were my first introduction to MA.

[Finarvyn]

And at the moment it's on sale. I think it was listed at $19.95 and on sale for $9.95.

Jim also says that he is hoping to sell a special limited-run printed version eventually.

[Craig J. Brain]

I can't make it to the US, so my chances of getting one of the hardback copies of this at a convention are slim. So, I bit the bullet and purchased a POD version from RPGNow. I've read through the pdf version and think it is a terrific adventure, but I am looking forward to running the adventure using a print copy

Craig J. Brain

[Alex]

I beg your pardon? I thought you work with/for Jim at WardCo. Always two there are: a master and an apprentice. So why is it so new to you? And can't you take a document to an Aussie printer to make you a hard copy?

[Finarvyn]

Well Craig works pretty closely with Jim Ward, but I think mostly on Metarmorphosis Alpha projects. (Dark Outpost is a somewhat generic scifi scenario, and not technically a MA product.) I don't think he has any connection with Frank and Tim and Eldritch Ent.

I assume he could go the local printer route, but that kind of denies Eldritch Ent the chance to earn a few extra bucks on the product. I know I bought print and PDF copies to support EE as much at to have copies of them. :-)

Also, there are a couple of print options. A paperback copy of this was on sale at GenCon and I assume also from other sources. Craig was mentioning a hardback special edition printing. EE was doing only a small limited-run printing of special hardbacks.

[Craig J. Brain]

Marv is correct. I work with Jim on Metamorphosis Alpha stuff for WardCo. Dark Outpost is an Eldridge Enterprises product for generic sci-fi, but it is very MA friendly

I have to say RPGNow do a pretty decent POD product. The binding on the softcover of this and Stars Without Number looks like good quality, but the hardcover version I picked up of Thousand Suns is really impressive.

Craig J. Brain

[angelicdoctor]

I picked up the Limited Edition copy of Dark Outpost. I absolutely love this adventure and see that it can easily be adapted into MA, Gamma World, Star Frontiers or even Star Wars.