Pyramid Review
Armada X
Published by ThreeSixty Publishing
Written, Designed and Produced by Mark Bruno
Price: $3
Deep7 has carved a niche for itself with the 1pg series of mini-RPGs. Each is designed to cover a particular genre using just a single page of rules, another page of advice for the GM on running said genre, and a number of scenarios, all of which come as a PDF Adobe Acrobat file. Now a second company, ThreeSixty Publishing, has entered the fray with something not that dissimilar. This is the OneShot Mini-Adventure Pack, which is designed to give a single evening's worth of gaming as a break from the group's extended campaign. To fit this concept, everything in a OneShot pack is intended to be fast, including character generation, rules and mechanics, and game play. Backing this up is a set of pregenerated characters, a campaign setting, and a set of scenarios.
The first OneShot Mini-Adventure Pack is Armada X, a science fiction setting that takes place in the not-too-distant future. It comes as a 20-page 824 kb PDF document that is quick to download and store. The layout is tidy, with an easy-to-read text style. Although some color is used for the layout, it can be printed out in black and white without loss of detail. The only illustration given is that of a star map, but Armada X does not suffer from this lack of art and it does keep the document size down.
Character creation for a OneShot game should take no more than ten minutes, and can probably be done in half that . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: November 15, 2002
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