First Impressions - The Burning of Carbex - Mothership (ZineQuest 3)

The POD version of 'The Burning of Carbex'

The Burning of Carbex was released as part of ZineQuest 3. As a product, it grew and now clocks in at 106 pages. I have the international version, which was printed through DriveThruRPG using print-on-demand. Written for Mothership, this is full of entertaining ways to kill off your player's characters, and is really a mini-campaign.

The characters are contracted to investigate a distress signal from the Angelus Fabrica station orbiting the planet Carbex. Carbex used to be a habitable garden world covered with forests, but a major fire occurred in the past, burning them all down and changing the atmosphere to a carbon-dioxide dominated one, unbreathable by humans. However, the resulting layers of charcoal provide a cheap and easy way of producing lots of useful chemicals such as activated carbon (used in filtration systems). There is a mining operation on the planet, and the Angelus Fabrica station processes and dispatches the products out. 

The initial investigation has the characters discovering what has happened to the station and hopefully rescuing the survivors. Naturally, something awful has happened (it wouldn't be Mothership otherwise) and it is pretty dangerous. There's plenty of opportunity for profit as well as opportunity to die horribly. Assuming the party are successful, they can follow the plot down to the surface to see if there are issues there, or travel after the last freighter to depart to check that out. They could even do both. 

There's an amusing appendix; one of the items you can find is an issue of a comic, The Adventures of Space Lieutenant, and the authors have run with it and given a full hundred issue outline. It doesn't really add to the adventure, but it made me smile. 

There are decent deckplans for the station and a starship, good NPC descriptions and the writing is clear and quick to parse. There's a mixture of black-and-white and colour illustrations, which are excellent.

Two minor niggles - there's a description of a sodium hydroxide tank exploding when punctured (although I expect that is just a short hand for the contents spraying out) and I suspect that they would be more likely to use opencast mining rather than a deep mine with the level of damage caused by the burn off of a world-forest. Both minor and easily handwaved or ignored. Hopefully, the players will be more focused on trying to survive when these come up.

I could easily imagine running this (and it would port into Traveller without much effort). I'm pleased with this product; I think that the authors have produced far more than I ever expected. Recommended.

The PDF is ~£7 and the book ~£16 on DriveThruRPG.

25 October 2021