I'm not going to keep you in suspense. I just know the first question you're going to have about Stampede of Justice (Hiromi Cota, Violet Green, Eddy Webb) and yes, there is a stampede. Though it's arguably not "of justice." A Nazi causes the stampede in order to stymie the player characters. Maybe the PCs can turn it around, cause it to backfire, make it serve justice in the end, but that's not a suggested outcome or anything. It's more like wishful thinking on my part and the rules of the game don't explicitly forbid it . . .
Although, don't let the thoughtless instinctual behavior of these innocent creatures fool you. This is the most overtly anti-Nazi adventure I've ever read. My historical ignorance was enough that I thought "why are they letting the German American Bund off the hook" when I saw that the villains were "The Friends of New Germany," but it turns out that the Friends of New Germany weren't fictional off-brand Nazis. Rather, they are the exact same organization, the Friends just rebranded to the Bund in 1936, and this book is set in 1934. Score one for research. I officially Learned Some History from this book.
The most notable thing about the adventure is that it's based around a fake newspaper clipping from the core book that revealed that, in this timeline, aviation pioneer Bessie Coleman survived the plane crash that killed her in the real world. The clipping was specifically about an integrated airshow that was sabotaged by racists, where Coleman survived an attempt on her life (this is an entirely fictional incident, not related to her actual death, which just appears to have been a tragic accident). Stampede of Justice has the PCs investigate that attempted murder, revealing the Nazis' plan to gain influence over Houston's oil fields using their agents in The Friends of New Germany (this plot is only slightly exaggerated from real history, where the leader of the Friends was tried for being an unregistered foreign agent).
And that description is basically all you need to know. You follow clues, get in a firefight, avoid a stampede, and eventually corner the Nazi mad scientist in his lair. It ends with the suggestion that maybe these events were tied to the Rational Experimentation Group (which acts as a facilitator and source of capital for mad scientists the world over). That could, potentially, be seen to dilute the evil of the Nazis by shifting it onto a more cartoonish fictional organization, but honestly it just feels like a conspiracy myth arc. Like there's no way you're going to investigate the Rational Experimentation Group and come to the conclusion that they're not really Nazis. Maybe a little too genre in an adventure that has hitherto been plausible alt history, but that's just a matter of execution. It's easy to see how it could work.
The only part of the book that I'd call a flaw is the sidebar that talks about the setting's racism. It's not that it's a bad sidebar, but the last line - "players should not be forced to roleplay discrimination and racism during this adventure" - strikes me as just a little bit disingenuous. They're taking something that is generally true for the game of Adventure! as a whole - that roleplaying in the pulp 1930s doesn't have to mean depicting the trauma of characters from historically oppressed groups, you can just focus on the fun sci-fi/fantasy elements of the setting - and they're applying it to a specific adventure that could only exist because the option of "not roleplaying discrimination" was consciously declined.
Even setting aside the fact that the villains are Nazis, the driving force behind the whole adventure is the fact that Houston is a segregated city. It's about the jim crow system's deputizing of white vigilantism to punish a successful Black woman. In order to enter the venue, the PCs have to make their way past protestors who object to the very idea of an integrated airshow. How are you supposed to depict that without "roleplaying discrimination?" Yes, the players should not be forced roleplay discrimination, but the way you accomplish that is by telling a different story entirely. Adventure! has a million of them. They could have written a jumpstart about the mole people stealing cattle or Baron Zorbo holding the oilfields hostage with his fleet of airships and still had the sidebar pointing out that Houston was a segregated city and reminding players of how optional the racism is. But, instead, they decided to tell a story where the racism was load-bearing. That requires a different approach.
I suppose the sidebar could have meant that nobody should be forced to roleplay explicit racism, and that we can use veils to include this material by referring to certain events with abstract statements rather than in-character dialogue. Yes, the story is about racists who commit a racially-targeted crime to achieve their racist goals, but you can engage with those ideas from one remove. Using "Nazi" as a general shorthand for those kinds of behaviors instead of going into detail leads to more a comfortable, light-hearted game.
However, if that's what they meant to say, they could have just said that. I have to figure it's more a matter of the right hand not knowing what the left was doing.
Still, as flaws go, it's pretty minor. Overall, Stampede of Justice is about as much as you can reasonably from a jumpstart. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the jumpstart format just isn't for me, but it definitely has its place and it's absurd of me to complain about it when nobody forced or tricked me into buying these books in the first place. The only reason I own this thing in PoD is out of an irrational desire for completionism and my knowledge of the Trinity Continuum does indeed feel more complete (if only by a small amount) than it did before. So what else is there to say but "good job."
Ukss Contribution: This one is tough because the adventure is filled with cool characters, but the thing that's cool about them is the way they resist and defy systems of discrimination that Ukss doesn't have. So I guess I'll just go with Arjun Kelly's giant wrench:
I know there are ludicrously big wrenches in real life, but that thing looks like it's pushing the bounds of plausibility. It must weigh 100 pounds, at least. Either that or it's a normal 60-inch pipe wrench and Arjun is just a tiny little guy.
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