Russian Roulette

Game: Russian Roulette
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Series: Judge Dredd: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 8th, November 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 5/10   [ Perfectly acceptable ]
Total Score: 5
Average Score: 5.00

Russian Roulette is the second of the three-part Kazan Gambit scenario set for Judge Dredd.

As with the first book, it’s 32 pages long and comes in at just under $10. You do really need to have read the first in the series, The Sleeping Kin, to get the most from Russian Roulette.

If you’re the sort of GM who can take either a scalpel or axe to a pre-written adventure then I think you’ll be able to get juicy bits from Russian Roulette but to run it as-is you’ll need to plug into the prequel.

This review will contain spoilers.

Previously the characters have discovered that East-Meg / Russian / Soviet agents have become active again in Mega-City One and are busy following out orders for a war which finished ages ago.

The local “Sov” immigrant population are both restless and perhaps riddled with these re-activated sleeper agents. A Sector Chief Judge decides the best thing to do is move the entire community to an abandoned factory. Huh? If you’re not familiar with the Judge Dredd setting then that’ll sound weird to you and you should expect it to sound like an utterly weird idea to your players as well. It’s typically 2000AD though.

The Judges are basically fascist. The fascist image will be reinforced because once they’re inside the factory (but after the player characters have moved off another job) the whole lot of them will be gassed to death. This wasn’t according to the Sector Chief’s plan but is a direct result of a corrupt Judge and a City-Def unit. Um. It doesn’t make the Judges look so clever.

One of the East-Meg ancients manages to escape Mega-City one, being chased by the players but despite their best efforts manages to transmit the launch codes required to shower Mega-City One with a hail of nukes. Whoops. Does he? This is a pretty big issue to take out of the players’ hands, especially if they’re actively engaged in trying to stop it.

The first scene deals with the characters getting involved in a scene that quickly becomes an attempted robbery.

You can’t but not the bad timing of the would-be robbers as they wait until there are four Judges hanging around before springing into action. This encounter can drag out into quite a complex bit of hostage-taking if the characters don’t get to grips with things but all the game mechanics for things like ricochet shots are safely ensconced in the text.

There are links here to be made to the previous goings-on in The Sleeping Kin if the players make them – but it’s not that important.

The next two scenes deal with moving the Sovs into their new home; whether they like it or not. It can get quite messy here, if the Judges choose to fight their way through then lots of d20s will bounce on the table but the Sovs won’t have much of a chance.

Scene four is all about how the Sovs react to their new home – they don’t like it. The GM will have to decide just how the characters discover that racists from the neighbouring block have already been hassling the immigrants.

There’s a bit of a weak link here. If the players decide to actually check the factory before shoving an entire population into it then you’ll also have to decide whether or not they’ll find all the gas too.

Scene five deals with the Judges moving through an entire tower. This is way more interesting than dealing with the Sovs. There are all sorts of crazy stuff going on here; cyborgs, dangerous toys, lemon-like aliens with teeth and others.

I think you’ll be able to use the events in the David Duke Block in any Judge Dredd game. Of course, in the version that holds strictly true here at the top of the Duke David Block is the corrupt Judge Trebell. A corrupt Judge could be a major crisis of confidence for the players.

As it is, I think either the opening speech from Trebell will convince the players that he’s right and the Sovs aren’t true Mega-Citters and therefore not worth the bother or he’ll just pull his Lawmaster, start blasting and thus flick at least one of your players into kill mode.

Scene 6 can be tricky. This is where the PC Judges will come back to the old factory where they’ve moved the Sov immigrants to and find them all dead. If the Judges never go and investigate the problems in the neighbouring tower block and have been standing guard over the place then there are some suggestions on how to lure them away.

The scene is written so that the Sovs are all melted by the acid gas one way or another. It seems an unnecessary bit of railroading to me. The plot works just as well if the Judges find the acid gas canisters before they go off and they save the citizens. There’s a bit of investigation next and it’ll turn up lots of dead ends.

Thankfully the setting is kind to situations like this is and if the players don’t manage to get the investigation going on the right lines then an NPC can hit on the next clue. It’ll be tricky though because a corrupt division of the City-Def force was responsible for the mass-murder.

All this is just the first of three “Progs”, each Prog is composed of a similar number of scenes. The following scenes are a little less detailed than these ones but there’s an awful lot of action-packed into the 32 pages of Russian Roulette.

The second prog in its various scenes will deal with the Judges running around City Bottom as they hunt down the rogue Citi-Def squad. One of the best things in the previous adventure The Sleeping Kin was the way it in which it helped showcase the scope of Mega-City One and this time around its Russian Roulette proving how wonderful the setting is.

The City Bottom is best described as an urban dungeon. The place is a maze of passageways and corridors filled with mutants, monsters and all sorts of robotic nasties.

In a latter scene in the second Prog, the judges will come across a Danger Leap Arena. A Danger Leap is one of those weird and deadly sports that are illegal in the dark future of 2000AD. If you can imagine people leaping over a great big pit – just to prove that they can – then you’ve got the basics of the Danger Leap.

The final prog of four scenes will see the Judges up in space. The synopsis at the start of the book had been really worried about this prog – it sounded as if that no matter how hard the players tried or the players did that they’d be outwitted by the East-Meg agent.

In fact, the adventures in space are better than that. Yet again the space setting might be a brand new feature for the players and continues the Kazan Gambit’s good record for getting the most out of the setting.

As it happens the East-Meg agent will have the launch codes sent despite what the players do but it’s not because the PC Judges failed to stop him. The players can bring down the Sleeper Agent if they’re good enough and its tempting to change things slightly so that the agent had a second mission just so there can be some small victory for the players at the end of the scenario if they do manage to defeat him in combat.

The nuclear missiles end the book, behind the scenes of the scenario the agent has already beaten the Justice Department’s computer systems and transmitted the code.

Russian Roulette doesn’t hang together as nicely as the Sleeping Kin does and perhaps more worrying it railroads the players rather more. On the other hand, it manages to pack an awful lot into just 32 paged, giving the impression of a much larger book.

The division of the book into three programs with six, four and four scenes each means it’ll also be possible to squeeze in encounters between each program and turn the scenario into something near campaign size.

It ends on a cliff-hanger though and that’s always risky. You might well want to wait for the final book in the series before starting this one.