This is an Appx N Game Jam submission and here are some of the reviews I received:

"Love how smooth this all works together, looks incredible, great execution of the theme."

"This feels like I could pick it up and play it tonight. One of the things that moved the needle on the writing rating for me is that the terse prose feels perfectly fit for the sci-fi race-against-time style of the module."

"I'll just say it's such a fun and snappy solo game with a lot of open ended  outcomes and a desperate and suspicious tone. I'm particularly a fan of the Schrödingers character where's until the end you could be one or the other, adding to the tension and uncertainty of it all."

"Suspicous, then clueless, then intrigued, then into it.

The amnesia works SO well in this. Very, very well done!"

I had recently played The Long Haul 1 and 2 and loved both of these solo Mothership adaptations. I felt like, given my strengths and weaknesses as a creator, this could be an adventure format I might be able to pull off well. So I started the Appx. N contest with the intention of trying to make a solo Mothership adventure, if possible. In case you don't know, Appx. N is the influential reading list that appeared at the back of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide in 1979. There is an annual game jam to make OSR adventures inspired by Appx. N style titles. 

The title I was given, Lappoy's Flying Fortress, was not what I was hoping for. The use of "Flying" in particular, with its connotation of being in the sky, not space, was frustrating. I initially shifted to working on a floating castle similar to Moon's Spawn in Gardens of the Moon, but got nowhere and abandoned it.

Looking through the Appx. N book list, I realized that the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny and HP Lovecraft were some of the only Appx. N literature I had read besides Lord of the Rings. While I love LotR, I have no desire to try to replicate an adventure there, and anyway didn't think I could make something that would stand out.

Picking back up the first book of the Chronicles of Amber, it starts with Corwin having amnesia and a mystery of him trying to figure out who he is while things get weirder and weirder around him.

I started by making some cover art of a fortress, photoshopping the top part of the USS Wisconsin battleship to turn it into a bristling star fortress. I turned it into a distressed paperback cover, which I shared, and the encouragement on Discord was very motivating. I started working on a map based on cruise ship maps but lacked the ability to make a 3D perspective cutaway.

I tried to come up with the multiple different characters the player character might turn out to be, and started to create a flowchart of decisions and outcomes, basically an elaborate choose-your-own-adventure. I wanted to make the players make moral choices which then determined who their character turned out to be. I also wanted checks, whether successful or not, to push the player toward a character outcome. This turned into an overly complex mess which I had no idea what to do with.

Then I realized the image I had used of the battleship wasn't free to use, and I decided to give up the competition.

Over the course of two weeks, I kept thinking about how to simplify things. I casually looked for free-use battleship images and found that the Naval History and Heritage Command had public domain images.

Then I played A Thousand Empty Lights, another solo Mothership adventure, and it felt like a lot of things snapped into place in my mind. It just so happened I was going to a weekend meditation retreat and would have a lot of free time away from my two little children, and I decided to use my downtime there to make a mad dash for the finish.

I simplified the outcomes to two characters and focused on making more interesting, weird shit for the players to encounter. I thought it would be fun to make the outcomes cheeky and play with expectations, so people could take intruder actions but turn out to be Lappoy, and vice versa, with the consequences that would entail. Hopefully that would result in more replay ability.

I loved the sparse, technical-manual style of A Thousand Empty Lights and thought that would be something I could do as well with my artistic abilities (I can photoshop and draw). I tried to make the image look like a schematic or blueprint (I think I had the Death Star blueprints in the back of my mind). This doesn't really tie into the adventure, but I thought it gave it a good aesthetic.

Once it was good enough, I started to solicit feedback and found out there were at least 40 typos, spelling, and basic punctuation errors. I also finally realized how to use spellcheck in Affinity. Outside of that, I probably made another 30–50 minor to major changes based on suggestions, to punch up the writing, clarify instructions, and improve the style and design. 
Going back to my original intention, I worked to add in implications for your choices during the adventure, so that engaging, moral choices pushed the player closer to being Lappoy or the Intruder.  
After submitting the Appx N, I realized that I really liked the adventures with art work of the characters and monsters. I realized that the spider droids were really clear in my mind, but probably were visually ambiguous to the people reading. So I decided to take a swing at drawing one. I realized after drawing that I was doing the 

🥺👉🏻👈🏻 without realizing it and I gave it some eyebrows, which I have received strong mixed feedback on, but really makes me laugh.

I hope you enjoy playing, and are encouraged to try your hand at making your own!

The zine has been written, play tested, the art and design is complete and I have selected the printer and page weights which are, to my understanding, the same as what is used by Tuesday Knight Games for their Mothership products. It is my intention to order the prints as soon as the campaign is complete and mail them as soon as I received them. I have added some padding to the timeline in case there are unforeseen issues, but I hope to be able to "under promise and overdeliver."