Ad Astra
Ad Astra is an adventure and setting supplement for Mutant: Year Zero, written by Jens Alm, Martin Takaichi, Nils Karlen, and Kosta Kostulas and published by Free League Publishing.
By Aaron T. Huss
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Ad Astra is a campaign module for Mutant: Year Zero that breaks down into three parts. First, it is a rules supplement that includes mechanics for traversing space in spaceships and creating characters that call the space stations or spaceships home. Second, it is a setting guide covering the Jotunheim space station, Ad Astra spaceship, and our Solar System. Finally, it is an adventure that can be turned into a campaign using the additional content in this book and combining it with other books. However, it is only usable for adventures in outer space.
At the end of the Path to Eden campaign in the core rulebook, the players are left with multiple decisions after learning the secrets of the core setting. One of those decisions is to venture into space to learn more about the past and how the setting therein fits within the greater canon. After all, the war that led to the apocalyptic event was not relegated to Earth; it also included battles within the Solar System.
At its core, Ad Astra is meant to create a campaign using the included adventure and all the supplemental content, plus one or two other supplements for the GM. However, the included adventure seems more like what you’d find in a sci-fi game (it’s not too dissimilar to what I’ve seen in Starfinder) and not so much a post-apocalyptic game. The struggles of survival are there, but the adventure breaks away from the core design of Mutant: Year Zero, taking a slightly different path. Whereas the core rulebook focuses on the group’s home base and the zones that surround it, Ad Astra is more like hopping from one locale to another and the ship feels like little more than the mode of transportation. It’s a bit awkward to me and slightly breaks the game’s original theme, but it does allow the players to move beyond the original canon and see what else comprises the setting as a whole. To me, keeping with the Mutant: Year Zero theme would have involved a greater focus on the spaceship as a new home base amongst the stars and venturing out into the unknown, but always returning like they did planet-side. Interestingly enough, after you complete the adventure, you can create that type of game using the Ad Astra (spaceship) or another ship as your home base. Then it becomes more like an exploration and investigation (like a sandbox game) and less of a linear progression to overcome the climax of the game.
Ad Astra is an interesting supplement for Mutant: Year Zero, but I can see more potential and value using it as a setting guide than the included adventure. For example, there’s a surviving population on Mars along with the ruins that opens up for interesting gameplay on another planet. Or you can have similar situations on Jupiter’s moons. You can even have these same types of adventures within the floating space debris (spaceships, satellites, space stations, etc.). The good part for the GM is that the supplemental material and the adventure give you plenty of content to create those types of games as well. In other words, you can use it to run the adventure within, create a full campaign using that adventure as an overarching backdrop, or drop the adventure completely and just use the source material to create your own experience!
