A post from the every star wars character bot led me to Wookieepedia and the discovery there was a 1989 West End Games Star Wars tabletop RPG adventure that effectively was System Shock on Cloud City. I kind of want to track it down and read it, but I'm also wondering now - what was the first story to deploy the idea of an AI takes over a space and turns all the people inside it into cyborgs or robots under the AI's control? What was the first "System Shock?" It's such a prevalent trope but also one that could only have developed in the past hundred years or so.
I ended-up reading the adventure after finding a pdf with a quick Internet search. It was a disappointing read. The set-up is great and it hits all the notes you'd want in a Star Wars adventure set in the time period of the original trilogy. But it's railroaded to the point there's barely the illusion of choice at times.
The first half is set-up like a mystery, but if the one clue in a given scene is missed, an NPC will provide it to the players. Clues only ever lead to the next clue, so you don't get to explore and investigate. If fights go bad, NPCs will step-in to help keep player characters alive. And as a note at the end of the adventure says, this is by design. The game wants to create a believable illusion that things are dangerous, but never actually place characters in true danger. It's... kind of bleak!
Horror-wise, it does the rogue AI thing well. The adventure is about discovering the existence of the AI, their plan to turn people into robots by exposing them to nanites, and racing to stop the plan before it kicks off. The writers do a great job of taking this and making it feel Star Wars, both by utilizing Cloud City as a setting and by making some choices in how the AI is designed - it's not a computer, it's a droid that operates computers, sometimes manually. It is delightfully in-tone with the pulp serial nature of Star Wars and gives a believable out for how the AI hasn't taken over entirely despite being plugged into the city's central computer.
Sometimes I get the itch to try and run the WEG Star Wars. It was one of the games I cut my teeth on, but only as a player. If I did, I'd consider taking the core of this adventure and re-writing it to be a bit more risky and much less linear.
