Robot Viking

Parking in Madik can be a real pain.

Milk Run is an introductory adventure for the Alpha Omega RPG. It’s a great way to jump into this post-apocalyptic world, with some nice story hooks, some mystery and a ton of cinematic action. The name might be a little misleading, though.

There’s something I need to mention about Milk Run before I say anything else. It’s a great adventure, but it’s central premise (and title) are going to provide some hilarity for players and GMs alike. Whenever something is called a milk run in a work of fiction, you can be sure the seemingly simple operation will suffer from some complications that make it far more difficult than originally thought. So it won’t be any real surprise to anyone that this adventure achieves excrement/fan interface fairly quickly.

The hilarity stems from the fact that the mission, as initially described by the guy hiring the PCs, is about as far from a milk run as anything I can imagine. Enter a walled city, infiltrate a security firm, enter their vault and steal a highly valuable package. How is that a milk run? Plus, he reports that the city has gone dark and nothing has been sent from it but desperate distress calls for the last few days. That’s not the complication – that’s presented to the players at the outset! So whenever the NPCs give each knowing looks intended to subtly clue the players in that Something Might Go Horribly Wrong, you can’t help but laugh.

Aside from that, Milk Run is a rambunctious horror/action plot. The PCs are hired for a mission, they take the mission, mission goes south fast, PCs have to deal with a chaotic situation and escape alive and possibly very rich. NPCs are given full stats, GM information is presented in clearly defined sections, and there are plenty of “GM read-aloud” paragraphs, which I find make a GM’s life much easier when they’re well-written (I’ve had some bad luck with Gygax-written real-alouds that described how the PCs feel; the ones in Milk Run are good).

In addition to the core plot, there are a few branches a GM can use if the PCs go off script. Understandably, not every possibility can be covered in a published module, so some of the branches are, “Welp, you’re pretty much on your own here, GM. Good luck!” You also get a couple of new monsters, some details about a walled city called Madik, a cool ingress/egress vehicle and some very nice color maps of pretty much every area encountered in the course of the adventure. A set of pre-rolled characters (with excellent full-color illustrations of each one) make this an ideal way for gaming groups to try out Alpha Omega. The motivations of the NPCs and the truth behind the events are kept mostly “off-camera,” so GMs can adapt the story to fit their own campaign if they want.

You can score a pdf copy of Milk Run at DriveThruRPG for $5.

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4. Alpha Omega: a Unique Vision of a Bizarre and Fascinating Future
5. PHB2 Class Review: Bard On the Run