The Rimbound series by Stella Condrey is a set of twelve Mothership trifold supplements and adventures. These are pay-what-you-want and also available for free download. (However, while they’re available on a variety of platforms, it seems that the series has only been partially uploaded to many of these platforms, so you may need to poke around a bit to track them all down.)
I’m reviewing these in the order I read them in. I admit this is quite idiosyncratic, but I wrote these reviews as I went along, and when I reorganized them into numeric order I discovered it was like giving a presentation after dropping your notecards on the floor and shuffling them into a random order. So you’ll just have to join me on this journey.
RIMBOUND #6: REDSCREEN
One of the challenges with executing a micro-supplement, whether trifold or otherwise, is making sure that it offers something of value beyond the basic pitch. This is something that Redscreen: A Disease for Androids unfortunately struggles with.
The basic concept is that Redscreen is a virus that infects AIs (including androids) and makes them murder humans.
And now that I’ve told you that, you don’t need to buy Redscreen, because you already know everything in the trifold. Ostensibly there are three sample infected AIs, but these largely have no actual value: One full panel (out of six) explains in laborious detail that a space station AI could turn off the life support systems. Another full panel goes into great detail about how a ship AI could slam automatic doors to hurt the PCs. If you can make the intuitive leap from “infected AI wants to do harm” to “will use computer-controlled systems to do harm,” you’re good to go here.
The other challenge is making sure your micro-supplement includes all the necessary information to use it. Here, too, Redscreen struggles. For example, guidelines are given for what to do “if a PC becomes infected with Redscreen,” but it forgets to explain how the PCs could get infected in the first place.
GRADE: D-
RIMBOUND #11: UNDER THE DUNES
Under the Dunes is a pretty solid foundation for a cool adventure: While scanning a desert planet for ore deposits, they stumble across the buried wreck of a spaceship. As they breach the wreck, a sandstorm rolls in: It’s going to be hours before they can leave. What mysteries, dangers, and wealth will they find inside?
Opening up the trifold, there’s a good map and a functional key.
Unfortunately, with this foundation in place, it seems as if Condrey wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. I’m left with the impression that she just started throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something would stick: The ship is from three years in the future! …and maybe one of the PCs could find their own dead body? It’s a cool moment, but there’s no explanation for how this happened and no real development of the idea.
Okay, so there’s a squad of military fleshbots onboard! They’ll activate and attack the PCs! … but why? And also, what are they doing on an ore transport vessel?
In short, there’s a bunch of ideas here, but nothing fully developed or coherent.
With that being said, I’m slipping Under the Dunes into the stack of adventures for my open table. But it’ll need a little TLC to build something compelling on top of its foundation.
(While Under the Dunes provides the sample desert world of Euthana, it would be pretty easy to locate this adventure on The Desert Moon of Karth, among others.)
GRADE: C-
RIMBOUND #9: UNDER THAT BLACK SKY
The clever thing that Under That Black Sky does is taking TWO cool concepts and combining them into a single adventure. If an adventure only has one big idea, it can be easy for it to run out of gas, but when you combine ideas you usually end up with something greater than the sum of its parts as you combine and contrast them in countless ways.
The first idea here is a colony planet with a cloud cover so thick that no visible light can penetrate, so you can only see what your artificial lights illuminate.
The second idea is that this planet was once the bioengineered hunting grounds for an alien species, and now something has awakened the ancient xenofauna generators, unleashing horrific beasts into the wilderness.
These aren’t just cool sci-fi concepts, they’re both unique vectors for horror.
Here’s the problem:
Why are there are no monster stat blocks or descriptions?
To let the beauty of your imagination create your own Hyades V, dear warden.
So you completely failed to actually write the scenario, but you’re pretending it’s a virtue?
Well… That’s too bad.
GRADE: F
RIMBOUND #7: GEAR FOR A SPACEFARER
The central feature of Gear for a Spacefarer is a couple dozen pieces of new equipment for Mothership. I quite liked this. Items like airlock foam, jerry cans, an algal starter kit, and trail cameras provide a nice blend of unique functionality and gap-filling. There are several times, while reading through the equipment list that I realized something should obviously be available for sale and even more where I said, “Ooh! That’ll be fun!” Like all good equipment lists, therefore, this one both adds tangible depth to the game world and great gameplay options.
I would, however, recommend reviewing the listed prices. Many of them seemed a little wonky to me, with the worst example being a drone listed at 2% the price of a drone from the core rulebook.
Gear for a Spacefarer also includes the Cadwal Trade Depot, a caravan of vessels providing the services of a C-class starport. This is only sketched in with the broadest strokes, but does include a fun 1d10 table of plot hooks that immediately started inspiring my creative muse.
GRADE: B
RIMBOUND #10: COLD OPENING
Twelve years ago the PCs were placed in cryosleep onboard the Thelma 2. Three months ago, the ship went off course. Two minutes ago the ship’s AI woke the PCs up.
You’ll be shocked (shocked!) to discover there’s an alien predator called the Cretin onboard.
Nothing wrong with a good trope. (Although I will note that this particular trope can be troublesome to pull off in Mothership since android PCs don’t enter cryosleep.) The problem here is that nothing makes sense: Why is this journey taking twelve years? How did the Cretin get onboard? Why are the PCs being woken up now?
As with Under the Dunes, I’m overwhelmingly left with the impression that a bunch of random, undeveloped ideas were just randomly dumped into the adventure key in the hope that something would stick: The Cretin turns out to be a robotic creature, but someone smeared feces all over the airlock. There are “yellow-tinged eggs” in the antigrav generator. There’s religious ramblings in an unknown xenolanguage scrawled across the rooms of the reactor room. A seemingly unrelated religious organization engraved a metallic cube with a message and stuck it inside the Cretin. And so forth.
Perhaps the kindest thing I can say for Cold Opening is simply Unfinished. This one doesn’t make the cut for me and I won’t be running it.
GRADE: D
