Adventure Presents (Shadow from the Vault)

SPOILER FREE

If you are a regular player of tabletop roleplaying games, you’ve had a night where things are different. People can’t make it. Extra people show up. The regular Game Master is sick. Maybe you just need a one-shot adventure to cleanse your collective pallet. That is where Adventure comes in. The Adventure series are short length games that almost anyone can pick up and run with little to no preparation.

While I promised a spoiler free review here, I nevertheless want to give a potential spoiler warning. What you and I each consider a “spoiler” may vary. I will do my best to be as spoiler free as I can, but please forgive me if I cross gently into that territory. I normally get around that by quoting the description of an adventure from the back of the book. But there is no such description here beyond “A replaying game of professional criminals and “a high stakes heist in the deep of night”. As of this writing, I couldn’t even find Shadow from the Vault on Rebellion Unplugged’s website. Not even on the Adventure Hub website which has useful assets from some of the previous Adventure games.

Super mysterious, doncha think? 

The six Protagonist characters have been hired by Feodora Tchernevskaya to steal a mysterious gem called The Black Star from Yuri Oukranikov. The Tchernevskaya and Oukranikov families have been sworn enemies for generations. So, when Feodora learned to supposedly elderly Oukranikov had smuggled a priceless gemstone out of a KGB vault during the fall of the USSR, she had to have it at any cost. This is where the adventure begins. With a dungeon mansion-crawl heist. The Protagonists need to get past dogs, guards, and cameras to get into the mansion and find the vault holding the Black Star. That’s just the first chapter…

That’s just… the first.. chapter…

“What comes next?” you may ask me. Go on, look your screen dead in the screen and ask me. 

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HA! NO SPOILERS! Sorry. All I’ll say is that there are 2-3 more chapters. Whether there are two or three more chapters, and what that potential third chapter entails varies wildly by what the Protagonists accomplish in the two previous chapters. It is a legitimate possibility that the third chapter simply doesn’t happen. I can’t really decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a realistic thing. There’s still plenty of playability regardless of how the story comes to a close, so I wouldn’t worry too much. 

“How do you play?” you may ask me. Go on, look your screen dead in the screen and ask me. No? Not falling for that again? Well, I’ll still tell you. The Adventure system is super streamlined. All the core rules are available online (albeit formatted for different adventures) for free. There are only 6 pages worth of rules, so you could easily print extras out. There are also another 2 pages of Shadow from the Vault specific “Special Rules” that are intended for the GM to handle and reveal as the characters’ actions dictate. Arguably, the most important part of the rules are character sets and how they affect tests. Protagonist Characters have four Ability Stats (Toughness, Agility, Smarts, and Wits) ranked 1-4. To make a test, the GM determines how hard a test is and what Ability is needed to be rolled. The player then rolls three standard D6s and compares it to that stat. If it’s 1, they removed the highest die. If it’s 2, they remove the second highest die. If it’s 3, they remove the lowest die. If it’s a 4, they keep all three dice. Add up the remaining dice, and if it beats the target set by the GM they succeed.

Conflicts are handled only slightly differently, in that the Characters involved both roll the same Ability stat and regardless of who initiated, the loser takes damage equal to the difference of the two rolls. That makes total sense to me, if you have Toughness 1 and take a swing at a Toughness 4, you’re most likely going to get your butt whooped.

The Adventure series is in the midst of changing formats. Older issues like Tartarus Gate and Tiny in the Tower were formatted to pull sections out of the middle of the magazine. Shadow from the Vault is perfect bound with everything for the players perforated to pull out of the magazine without the leftovers getting loose and falling out themselves. That’s important, since roughly two-thirds of the magazine are torn out for the players. Also torn out is a mini-screen to help the GM track the Protagonists’ movement around the mansion, without the players seeing. 

I’m a GM who likes having more information, not less, so I don’t think I’d love running this adventure, but with the right GM, it would be an epic dungeon mansion run. Everything you need to play is included in the magazine. A good GM could probably run this with little to no prep work and any player could play it without a second thought. I showed the rules to a younger, inexperienced, player and they understood the basics immediately, it’s that straightforward.

Affordable and accessible, Adventure Presents is a great option for groups looking to try something different without a big investment of time and money. Shadow from the Vault is written by cosmic horror legend, Kenneth Hite, so you know that the whole thing is a wild ride.

You can find Rebellion Unplugged online at rebellionunplugged.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/rebellionunplugged.