I was surprised to see that I had actually posted in this thread back in 2017. Because I never got to actually play this campaign until a few days ago, which was a mistake.
Because this is a fine piece of FREDing.
The Scroll of Atankharzim clearly breathes the spirit of the old days, e.g. the player is a mute rather than an actualy character and you cannot oversee that the classic masterpiece of
Derelict was a main source of influence on the authors. Yet, it contains plenty of modern-day SCP features to improve mission design which was overally flawless. I liked that very much. I don't think that you have to re-invent the wheel in every mission and TSoA proves it.
The campaign does a good job at not just telling the player but actually have him
feel to fight in the wilderness, beyond the Frontier. The choice of music is just right here. Especially during the early missions you have a nice impression that something mysterious and wunderful is happening here. Yet I have to agree with Antares that this impression created by the score is somewhat counteracted by the tedious reactions of the player's copilots who are neither particularly excited about the discovery of the Knossos nor the appearance of the Shivans in general nor the Lucifer in particular.
By far the biggest point of critique I have is that story-wise the campaign does not exploit its potential. I understand that this is merely the exposition. Yet this beauty is 24 missions long and I think you could do a little more than show bringing up the questions of what is going on with those Shivans and introducing some minor background information which does not have any significant influence on what is happening in the campaign itself (e.g. there is something called the NTB or that the Sol Knossos is actually being built). While I don't believe at all that the lack of actualy characters is much of a problem, it certainly gives you, as campaign authors, additional opportunities to make your missions more exciting by adding interesting dialogue. I very much enjoyed the interaction between the Terran and Vasudan pilots in the first mission after the GVTA loop. Especially the first couple of missions, while feeling nicely feel a little anaemic and could benefit from denser dialogues. Let your copilots talk about what is currently going on, not only in-mission events like the discovery of the Knossos, but also political/economical/social background events, what they do in their free time, what they did before they joined their current assignment. This contributes a lot to world building and gives an impression that this is a world populated by actual people. I very much liked that ISF admiral and hope to learn more about him in the future.
Overall, however, despite the somewhat lean story, this is definitely a campaign I'd recommend to anybody to play.
