After a procrastination of nearly epic proportions, I finally subscribed to GameFly last week. The GameFly queue system is not nearly as elegant as Netflix (since it seems to basically amount to a crap-shoot no matter what priority you actually give the games in your queue), but the result was that Infamous materialized in my mailbox a couple of days ago.

Infamous is a sandbox game of superpowers in which you have the choice to either be a superhero or a supervillain. My initial impression could be summed up as something along the lines of Grand Theft Auto + Knights of the Old Republic + Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. (The inclusion of two Star Wars games might seem excessive: But The Force Unleashed didn’t have KOTOR’s elegant light-vs-dark story arcs, while KOTOR didn’t have The Force Unleashed’s Force lightning powers.)

Where Infamous succeeds is the basic gameplay: Parkour-inspired climbing and leaping combined with an effective and interesting mix of electrical superpowers. Where it fails is the writing, which eventually turns the interesting gameplay into a mind-numbingly endless repetition of “been there, done that”. (In a fit of dark irony, the game even has an achievement trophy called “Oh, So You’ve Done This Before”.)

What I find particularly notable about these failures is the ultimately trivial amount of effort it would have taken to vastly improve the quality of the game: Hundreds of thousands of hours and millions of dollars were spent to make this game a reality, but it would have taken only a few hours from a dedicated writer and a fraction of a percentage of that budget to take a disposable trifle and raise it to the level of the sublime.

Which is what prompted this Rewrite essay. It’s obviously not going to do all the work, but it is going to sketch out the handful of simple fixes that Infamous practically cries out for. (Be warned: There will be SPOILERS.)

FAULT 1: THE SANDBOX

The primary shortcoming in Infamous lies in the design of its sandbox. Like most modern sandboxing games, Infamous draws its basic structure from the tradition of Grand Theft Auto 3. And like most modern sandboxing games, Infamous fails to learn some important lessons from Grand Theft Auto 3 (while also failing to capitalize on the opportunity to improve the format in key ways).

To simplify things, there are four types of content in Grand Theft Auto 3:

(1) The main storyline. (A sequential series of missions designed to be completed one after the other while telling the story of the game.)

(2) Designed side-quests. (Specifically designed mini-missions or mini-quest lines that the player could choose to either play or ignore.)

(3) Procedurally generated missions. (Missions created on-demand by the game engine and, thus, creating a bottom-less supply of semi-variable gameplay. Examples include the taxi- and ambulance-driving missions.)

(4) Self-guided play. (Because the game world responded dynamically to player activity, the player could engage in rewarding self-guided play by, basically, seeing “what happens when I do this”. Grand Theft Auto 3 didn’t have much in the way of dynamic world response, but even something as simple as “police chase you if your wanted rating is high enough” resulted in an endless variety of entertaining car chases.)

The first flaw in the Infamous sandbox is the limited nature of the self-guided play: In general, this play is limited to “there are bad guys roaming the streets, fight them” — basically the random encounters of an old school Final Fantasy game. (Surprisingly, despite the parkour-style climbing, there is little or no attention given to providing massive climbing vistas like those to be found in Assassin’s Creed.) Even worse, the primary sub-quests are designed to make city neighborhoods “safe” so that enemies no longer appear — which means that you’re literally removing content from the game as you play the game.

The second flaw is the complete lack of procedurally-generated missions. This significantly impacts the long-term value of the game. I remember playing Grand Theft Auto 3 for years after “finishing” the game because there was always something interesting to do in Liberty City. By the time I finished Infamous, on the other hand, there was literally nothing left to do.

The most significant flaw, however, is that the designed side-quests are written as if they were procedurally-generated: They are repetitive, forgettable fluff.

Grand Theft Auto 3, on the other hand, used its side-quests to develop either plot or landmarks. The former is self-explanatory: The side-quests were interesting little one act plays standing in contrast or support to the full-length drama of the main storyline. The latter is about providing context for the city: You came to recognize Vinnie’s pizza because that’s where you delivered Leo’s drugs (or whatever, it’s been awhile since I actually played Grand Theft Auto 3). The side-quests helped to bring Liberty City to life. They filled the empty, gray building polygons with life and meaning and identity.

The side-quests of Infamous, on the other hand, have no story or life to them: An anonymous guy asks you to kill 10 bad guys. Or blow up a bus. Or kill 10 bad guys. Or kill 10 bad guys. Or kill 10 bad guys. (Did I mention they’re repetitive?)

If these were actually procedurally-generated content (as they so easily could have been), it wouldn’t be a problem. I understand the limitations of procedural content: You take a half-dozen elements, mix ’em up randomly, and that’s what you’ve got. It’s not going to fool you into thinking that an intelligent mind was authoring it.

But this isn’t procedural content: Every one of these missions has been hand-crafted and hand-placed to fill a specific and non-substitutable place in the game. But if you’re designing this content individually, why not take the effort (and the opportunity) to make it individual? And meaningful?

THE REWRITES

In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip Heath encourages people to copy success instead of trying to solve problems.

In the case of Infamous, what they got right were the Dead Drop missions.

To summarize: In these missions, you hunt down satellite dishes hidden around the city. These satellite dishes were used to make dead drops by an intelligence agent, and by accessing the dishes you’re able to recover the audio logs from his investigations into the strange events plaguing Empire City. These logs, of course, reveal a prequel-like storyline over time. (Although the game allows for a non-linear collection of the satellite dishes, the information is recovered linearly. Of course, one could also take advantage of the mechanic to do truly non-linear storytelling.)

If the Dead Drop missions had been constructed like the other side-quests in the game, the complexity of their programming would not have been noticeably affected: The player would still hunt down the satellite dishes and then push a button to access them. But rather than getting a snippet of story information, the player would just receive a tally of the number of dishes they had found.

The storytelling content that makes the Dead Drop missions work, on the other hand, is almost trivial: Less than a half dozen pages of script and probably a half hour of recording time with a voice actor.

So let’s take a moment and consider how the other mission types might have been made to succeed like the Dead Drop missions.

HIDDEN PACKAGES: Using his electrical powers, Cole is able to “hack” the brain of the recently deceased to see their last memories. At various points in the game, he’s able to use this ability on his enemies, revealing the location of hidden packages they’ve secreted around the city.

In the actual game, these packages are nothing — meaningless fluff to be checked off a quest list. But how much more evocative would it have been if there was actually something worth hiding? Perhaps something that had been split up between the various packages?

The possibilites are almost endless: The schematics for the ray sphere. Records from Kessler’s surveillance of Cole. Evidence pointing to a rebel faction within the First Sons.

TRACKING THE DEAD: Similarly, Cole is able to track the ghost-like ethereal “imprints” of a person’s recent movements. (Intriguingly, this ability is always used on murderers — suggesting perhaps that the violence of their action is responsible for leaving a stronger imprint on the world around them.) This is an evocative and interesting mechanic, but it would have been nice to see some of these end with revelations more interesting than, “That’s the guy who killed Senor Red Shirt! Vengeance!”

If nothing else, having the trails lead somewhere other than “a nondescript alley with a bunch of bad guys in it” would have helped. But it wouldn’t take much effort to explain why some of these people were being particularly targeted by the bad guys.

SURVEILLANCE DEVICES: The bad guys have covered various buildings in town with dozens of surveillance devices. It’s your job to climb the building and blow up the surveillance devices.

Oddly, the game never explains why the bad guys are interested in so heavily surveilling these particular buildings. Change “blowing up” to “hacking” and you (a) effortlessly add a new power for Cole and (b) provide an easy mechanism for revealing the reason for the surveillance.

PRISONER ESCORTS: The police periodically ask us to apprehend various bad guys for “questioning”. In other cases, the bad guys have already been caught and it’s our job to escort them to the nearest police station.

Spicing this one up is pretty easy: Have the cops actually report back what they find out from this questioning. This could foreshadow various developments, point us towards new surveillance missions, and so forth.

PROCEDURAL CONTENT: This suggestion moves somewhat beyond the intended scope of this essay (since they require more than a simple rewrite within the existing strictures of the game), but it would be nice if Infamous contained some legitimate procedural content.

For example, the picture-taking missions would be perfect for procedural generation. Triage missions using our healing abilities at medical centers seems like a no-brainer. A stalker fan that pops up to ask our hero for photographs or kisses or the like (or, for the evil-siders, a would-be assassin who periodically sends robotic drones after us). “Walk me home” protection missions (or muggings for the evil-siders). Bad guys blocking roads or railroad tracks. Bomb threats that need to be defused.

THE CORE CONCEPT

The mistake made in games like Infamous and Assassin’s Creed is thinking that storytelling only needs to happen in the main storyline. I would argue that the design principle behind these GTA-like sandboxes needs to be different: Any time you’re hand-designing content (instead of procedurally generating it), that’s an opportunity to tell part of your story. And you should take it.

In general, side-quests offer you the opportunity to create storylines in addition to your primary storyline. (The successful Dead Drop missions in Infamous do this to great effect.) Some of these storylines may be short (a single quest); others may be long (dozens of missions); others will fall somewhere inbetween (three or four linked sub-quests). But the ways in which these storylines will weave together is an exercise left to the player and your game will be the richer for enabling that level of intrinsic collaboration in the creation of its narrative. The result is a unique gameplay arising out of a complex system, but the actual execution of that system is very, very simple.

Continued Tomorrow…

Go to Part 1

THE THIRD SECTOR

I really love the concept of Ian Yusem’s The Third Sector: Take a dozen different third-party Mothership adventures and weave them together into a sandbox spanning five solar systems. Hypothetically you should be able to do some light remixing, add a little connective tissue, and have a great little campaign-in-a-box showcasing the best of the best.

Unfortunately, The Third Sector really shouldn’t have been packaged as trifold module.

The limited space of the trifold format lends itself to material which is either too brief or broad. But the work required to coherently bind disparate published adventures together is, in fact, entirely in the details.

The two central pillars of The Third Sector are the sector map and the scenario hooks added to each adventure.

The sector map is attractive in a retro, 8-bit-graphics style, but curiously lacking a lot of pertinent details (e.g., the names of planets).

The scenario hooks are designed to link the adventures to each other (so, for example, you’ll find hooks in the Green Tomb that will lead you to Moonbase Blues, Alcor Station, and Echoes in the Graveyard). A minor problem here is that the section is incomplete, with some of the scenarios not receiving scenario hooks for reasons which are entirely unclear to me.

A more significant problem is that most of the scenario hooks are either unengaged (they mention a place exists, but gives no reason for the PCs to go there), non-actionable (they indicate that a place exists, but don’t tell the PCs how to find it), or both. This is likely, once again, due to the limited space, since vague references are easier to squeeze into a single sentence than meaningful, actionable information.

Probably the most interesting thing in The Third Sector is the random encounter which reads, “[Corporation] acquired [other corporation]. (Choose 2 from random adventures each time rumor rolled.”) This is an intriguing procedural method for unifying the disparate hypercorps found scattered throughout the source adventures over time.

In practice, though, that unification — and not just of  hypercorps — is exactly the sort of considered, careful, creative work that would have made The Third Sector a truly useful resource.

GRADE: F

WRATH OF GOD

Wrath of God is another example of a supplement that’s just trying to cram WAY too much into the trifold format. In this case, that includes:

• A complete skirmish system for space fighter combat.
• A hex-based Battlefield map keyed with various Locations of Interest.
• A prequel to a longer adventure called The Drain.

In this case, the result is basically incoherent. I’ve been backwards and forwards through Wrath of God and I honestly don’t have the slightest inkling of what this adventure is supposed to be.

For example, in the skirmish system includes a Skirmish Map keyed with symbols, but what these symbols mean (if they mean anything) doesn’t seem to be indicated. The Battlefield Map similarly has a bunch of symbols, although most of these seem to be related to the content keyed to these hexes… except not all such hexes are keyed. (Although some of the unkeyed hexes are referenced in other keyed hexes, which is an insanely confusing layout that I can only imagine is due to the space limitations unnecessarily imposed by the trifold format here.)

I also only have the vaguest sense of what the Battlefield Map represents. Maybe it’s a war currently being fought? Or many wars currently being fought? Or the wreckage of older wars?

There are Bogeys who will attack the PCs. But… why? And who are they, exactly? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Your guess is as good as mine.

“Okay,” I think. “This is a prequel to The Drain. So maybe I need that full adventure to understand this one.”

Unfortunately, no, that doesn’t help. Because (a) it turns out that Wrath of God doesn’t seem to actually sync up with The Drain and (b) nothing is actually explained. The PCs are seeking the 3^rd Testament, which is apparently a radio broadcast being sent from a colony called Within Wheels. What is the 3^rd Testament? No idea. Why is the colony transmitting it? No idea. How are they transmitting it? Possibly from something called the Grail. How’d the Grail get there? Stop asking questions, please.

GRADE: F

WHAT STIRS BELOW

Something has gone wrong at a geological survey station and the PCs are dispatched to (a) figure out what happened and (b) rescue as many VIPs as possible.

What Stirs Below includes a helpful What The Hell Is Going On? section:

There is an ancient power station deep below the surface. A skeleton crew of ancient aliens uses giant worms to generate energy and sustain the crew’s near-immortality. With enough power generated, this moon will depart on a 10k-year interstellar journey toward Earth… or whatever is a good fit at your table.

It’s a cool concept, which is unfortunately held back from its potential by a number of problems.

First, and probably most intractable, is that the size of the adventure doesn’t match the scope of the adventure. There’s this implication of a huge, hollowed-out moon filled with aliens preparing for some sort of multi-millennia odyssey… but a nine-room location-crawl can’t really deliver on that promise.

This kind of size/scope mismatch is not uncommon in RPG adventures, and I find that they consistently create a mixture of disappointment and confusion in players, while pushing me into a weird, dissociated fugue state between what the adventure actually is and what it’s asking me to convey.

Second, there are a number of execution issues which will leave you confused and disoriented:

• The map of the adventure has a literal ? where a room should be, and I simply can’t figure out why.
• The survey station has been destabilized by the tunnels below the station collapsing, which has created a sinkhole the PCs can use to access the alien chambers. This sinkhole is located… somewhere? The adventure never seems to specify.
• The adventure key is filled with typos. For example, Area A5 has an exit that leads to… Area A5? (I think the rooms were renumbered on the map at some point and the key wasn’t correctly updated, but I’m not 100% sure.)
• There’s an android who, Alien-style, will attempt to impede the PCs’ investigation and even “self-destruct if necessary.” But… why? No explanation is given.

Related to these issues, the PCs are instructed to determine what happened at the station, but I honestly can’t even figure that out for myself: It’s not clear what (if anything) triggered the geological collapse. It’s not clear what any of the NPCs did in the aftermath of the collapse or what the timeline of events was. It’s not even clear why the hypercorp lost contact with the NPCs and needed to send the PCs.

The end result is an adventure that’s… mostly OK. But I would probably end up completely re-keying the entire thing before I would feel comfortable running it.

GRADE: C-

THE HORROR OF TAU SIGMA 7

A routine system survey has detected the signature for the rare mineral NM-109 on Tau Sigma 7. The PCs are sent in as a survey team to confirm the presence of the mineral.

What they discover, while exploring a nearby cavern, is an alien bioplastic cyst-complex which is an untriggered hatchery for a long-extinct alien species. (It sure would be a pity if the PCs accidentally triggered the birthing process, wouldn’t it?)

In The Horror on Tau Sigma 7, D.G. Chapman delivers a creeptacular location-crawl. The excellently xandered, truly three-dimensional environment and accompanying key would be strong enough to recommend this adventure entirely on their own merits, but he also spikes the punch with several scenario-spanning elements:

• The entire complex is a living organism, and responds to the PCs’ presence and actions through an Immune Response Level that escalates and transforms the adventure.
• The complex is suffused with a strange, red liquid referred to as Lifeblood. Essential to the alien biology, it creates numerous strange effects (particularly to exposed PCs).
• Strange cave paintings can be found throughout the complex, which change and evolve as the Immune Response Level increases.

The result is fabulous. I highly recommend inviting your players to Tau Sigma 7.

GRADE: B+

CHILDREN OF EDEN

Graham T. Richardson fills Children of Eden to the gills with an astoundingly rich assortment of alien and exotic worldbuilding: The 200+ meter-tall teralith; an alien skeleton worshiped by the Children of Eden as a god. The Salvage Seal, where a gravitational anomaly yanks vessels out of hyperspace and crash lands them on a fungi-ridden planet. The corrupted Theogeny Engine, an alien terraforming ship buried near the teralith which has recently reactivated, leading to the religious belief that the teralith itself is miraculously transforming a wasteland into paradise. A ruined scientific research center trying to probe the truth of this strange terraforming.

And all of this is supported by a rich cast of characters and a disquieting mystery occluded by a hypercorp’s desire to exploit and religious zealots’ desire to believe.

It’s truly amazing just how much richly detailed and soul-searingly evocative material can be found on these two pages. It’s simply inspiring. Richardson creates a vivid world that compels you to share it with your players.

My only real complaint is that there’s so much stuff in Children of Eden that the connective tissue between all of these elements is often obscured. It can be a little unclear exactly where stuff is in relation to each other, for example, which can make it difficult to figure out how you should be presenting this rich world to the players. There are just places where I’d probably be a little happier if the implied setting was a little more explicit and, therefore, easier to access during play.

To at least some extent, though, this is just grousing over having too much of a good thing. I’ll happily draw up a map, work up a timeline of events, and jot down a revelation list to help keep things clear at the table if it means that I can visit the Children of Eden.

GRADE: B

Note: LionHearth Games provided me with a review copy of Children of Eden.

I’m a big believer in open and community licenses that allow third-party creators to publish and sell adventures and supplements for RPGs. Aesthetically, roleplaying games are not just artistic works in their own right; each RPG is a unique medium for creating new works. It’s good for society itself for these mediums not to be encumbered and stifled.

And from a practical standpoint, third-party content is of huge value to the original IP creator. Fears of competition have long since been shown to be irrelevant, as the primacy of the official, first-party content remains supreme among players and GMs. On the other hand, an RPG — much like a computer operating system — gains an immense commercial benefit from having a large and robust library of compatible support material: Each third-party supplement is an opportunity to capture the imagination of a gamer and propel them to the gaming table, which in turn exposes even more players to the game, driving both sales and gaming in a virtuous cycle.

The problem, unfortunately, is that most third-party licenses in the RPG industry have failed. Third-party supplements will generally only sell a small fraction of what first-party supplements will sell; and most first-party supplements only sell to a small fraction of the people who bought the rulebook and/or are playing the game. For third-party publishers to find success, therefore, the RPG they’re supporting needs to already have a very large audience — an audience so large that a fraction of a fraction of that audience is large enough to make a third-party supplement profitable.

And the reality is that the vast majority of RPGs — even those you likely think of as being big success stories — simply don’t have a large enough player base.

As a result, most third-party licenses simply fail. Most of the “success” stories revolve around games with enthusiastic hobbyist designers creating stuff for the love of the game. And good for them! But the games which have managed to create truly professional and thriving third-party markets can almost certainly be counted on the fingers of one hand.

What Mothership, the sci-fi horror roleplaying game from Tuesday Knight Games, has accomplished, therefore, is truly remarkable. First released in 2018, the game quickly invited third-party support not only via a third party license, but by generously and copiously helping to put the spotlight on these supplements. The result is that literally hundreds of third-party supplements have been created, and with the release of the Mothership boxed set this year, the market is, if anything, getting even stronger.

I think another important factor in Mothership’s third-party success is the game’s embrace of the trifold adventure format. I’ve already written a review of the really great first-party trifold adventures, each just two pages long and designed to be folded up into a trifold pamphlet. These are great for a GM because they’re designed to be picked up, read through in just ten to fifteen minutes, and then immediately run. But they’re also great for third-party creators, because they can (a) be quickly produced with a low investment of time and money and (b) given impulse-buy prices that make it easy for GMs to take a risk.

The result is that dozens and dozens of these third-party trifold adventures have been published, and they are an absolute treasure trove for GMs. I’ve launched a Mothership open table, in large part because the library of easy-to-run adventure content makes it easy to always have something ready for the next group of players.

The sheer number of projects made possible by the trifold format has also helped to create an audience looking for those third-party Mothership projects. The existence of this audience, in turn, encourages creators to pursue even more projects and more daring projects. And the audience is willing to take bigger risks on creators shooting for the moon when those creators have already built a rep through their more accessible projects.

This is a virtuous cycle which has already resulted in the creation of several large and impressive Mothership supplements. I’ll likely be taking a closer look at those in the near future. For today, though, I want to start by putting my own spotlight on some of the great third-party Mothership adventures I’ve been exploring. (And also, for better or worse, some of the less-great ones, too.)

SPOILERS AHEAD!

CIRCLE OF FLAME

Joel Hines’ Circle the Flame is one of those adventures that’s almost effortless to drop into your campaign: The Tinea Weather Station, a circular space station, is in orbit around the water world of Mani. Unfortunately, that orbit is now decaying and its corporate overlords have announced a bounty for any troubleshooters willing to board the station and retrieve the valuable scientific data and IP before everything burns up.

Including the semi-uplifted chimpanzee named Boopsie.

(Who the PCs will quickly discover has gone into a bloodythirsty rage, killing anyone she encounters and generally wrecking the joint.)

The adventure consists of a simple map-and-key of the station, along with a simple countdown mechanic, at the end of which the station plunges into the atmosphere of Mani and burns up.

Tick, tick. Time to roll out!

Whether following the corporate bounty or opportunistically responding to Tinea Station’s SOS, it’s easy to hook PCs into this.

The only thing really holding Circle of Flame back are the curious lacunae in the text. For example, the adventure often refers to Boopsie “retreating to the ducts,” but these are neither included on the mapped nor detailed on the text.

The most significant of these gaps, though, are:

• What happened to Boopsie? At one point we’re told that someone was hired “as a backup operate in case the unthinkable happened to Boopsie.” Is that just a euphemism for death? Or something else? And if something else, is that what caused Boopsie to go bloodthirsty?
• What happened to the station? At first I assumed that Boopsie going nuts was the cause of everything else going wrong, but at the very end of the adventure we’re told that, “Operation logs reveal orbital distance was modified below safety constraints by remote command originating from an encrypted transmission planetside.” But… from who? And why?

My view is that the author of a published adventure should consider themselves a co-conspirator with the GM. That means clearly and concisely explaining what the plan is. It’s strangely common for published adventures to instead try to pull a fast one on the GM.

In this case, I’m not sure if Hines is trying to pull a fast one, or if he just ran out of space. I was initially so convinced that the mysterious transmission from Mani was a teaser for Hines’ Tide World of Mani supplement that I went out and grabbed a copy, but there doesn’t seem to be any follow-up there.

Despite these lacunae being rather frustrating, it’s not terribly difficult to fill them in. (The mystery ducts are probably the most troublesome in terms of actual play.) And you’ll certainly want to fill them in, since Circle the Flame is a tight, well-paced one-shot.

GRADE: B-

CLAWS OUT

Some lacunae are a bit harder to puzzle out.

In Charles Macdonald’s Claws Out, the PCs are onboard the Agamamenon transport ship heading to the Banquo Mining Facility, which is about to be reopened. Most of the passengers are mining personnel getting shipped in. (It’s unclear why the PCs are here, but there are any number of possibilities, including heading somewhere else and Banquo just being one stop along the way.)

The adventure does a nice job of providing tight, effective write-ups for everyone onboard, setting you up for a social-driven mystery scenario rife with paranoia and murder.

Unfortunately, there are three major problems that largely cripple this adventure.

First, there’s something funny going on at Banquo. Apparently alien artifacts have been discovered at the site and the “miners” are actually all undercover scientists sent to investigate them. (There’s also a corporate agent “sent to prevent miners from discovering the true nature of the facility,” but there are no actual miners onboard the Agamemnon and the agent is immediately killed, so that dramatic thread doesn’t really go anywhere.)

The big problem is that everyone onboard has a secret Banquo-related agenda and secret information about what’s happening at Banquo… but “alien artifacts have been discovered” is literally the only thing the GM is told about it.

So as nice as the character write-ups are, they’re mostly a secret homework assignment.

Second, the core plot of the scenario is that there’s an alien shapeshift onboard which starts killing people. (It’s completely unrelated to the alien artifacts on Banquo.)

The most egregious oversight here is that they forgot to provide a stat block for the creature. It’s kinda tricky to run a bug hunt scenario without that.

But the monster is also just kind of vague in general: It’s a brain parasite that lives in your brain, but then also a shapeshifter. It’s “inexplicably afraid of cats” and this is a significant plot point; but its primary modus operandi is turning into a cat (thus the title).

Finally, the lack of blueprints really breaks the adventure. The whole core of the scenario revolves around how the monster is moving around and gaining access to various spaces on the ship. The players are, frankly, going to demand a ship layout, and the GM will be faced with reconstructing one that’s consistent with the adventure’s plot.

In short, Claws Out is an adventure laden with booby traps waiting to sabotage the GM.

I’m not quite willing to write the whole thing off, because there are some cool ideas and characters here. (I particularly like K-RA, the android who has so thoroughly entwined herself with the ship’s computers that they’ve become inseparable.) But the salvage job is so extensive that I really wouldn’t recommend grabbing this one.

GRADE: D-

MOONBASE BLUES

Moonbase Blues by Ian Yusem and Dal Shugars isn’t actually a trifold adventure: It’s a bifold one. (Single sheet, print on both sides, fold down the middle.) Hopefully y’all won’t run me out of town on a rail for taking the liberty of reviewing it here.

Everything was fine on the ironically named Azure Base until a strange, blue comet was pulled into the small moon’s orbit. Each time the moonbase is bathed in the comet’s light, the colonists exposed to it are driven into a frenzied madness.

Yusem and Shugars use this setup to craft a pretty solid sandbox adventure: A simple map of the base keyed with the mysterious wreckage left in the wake of the comet, juiced up with the cyclical time pressure of the comet’s orbit and supported by a healthy array of GM tools including well-aimed random tables (meteor-mad characteristics, hazards, stuff found on corpses) and stock NPC survivors who can be slotted into any scene.

The only real stumble here, in my opinion, is that the scenario hook is sort of incoherence. Over a quarter of the adventure is dedicated to a “you all wake up and the Computer tells you to do the following tasks” setup which includes stuff like “unclog the toilets” and “go outside and look up at the comet,” but this seems to have no connection to the rest of the scenario as presented and no explanation is given for how the PCs got there or why their task list includes looking up at the comet. The rest of the text seems to also assume completely different framing devices in various places.

If these were more coherently presented as a list of options, there’d be utility here. But instead it all just creates a weird patina of confusion.

The truly unfortunate thing here is that the space wasted on a largely unusable setup could have been used for even more of the really cool adventure tools that make Moonbase Blues so fun and useful!

GRADE: B

Go to Part 2

(click for PDF)

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation.

Its calling card is an old school approach wedded to red hot innovation:

• Blazing fast character creation.
• Brutal systems for Combat and Stress.
• Tons of sandbox support and tools in the Warden’s Operation Manual (the GM book).
• An overwhelming amount of adventure support, including both first party books and a deluge of third-party support.

This last point, in particular, is driving Mothership to my table as my next open campaign. Not only is there a ton of adventure support, a lot of it is designed so that you can spend 15 minutes reading through it and — presto! — you’re ready to go. My expectation is that I’ll be able to rapidly build a stable of adventures that will easily let me run the game with minimal or no prep.

I’ll likely be writing up a full review of Mothership after I’ve had a chance to run it a few more times, but for now I’d like to share the system cheat sheet I’ve developed for the game.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The Mothership cheat sheet, in particular, works very well in conjunction with the GM screen(s) for the game, which are excellent. (There’s both a standard screen and a larger deluxe screen, which each come with the respective boxed sets.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

I usually keep a copy of the cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. I have two copies of the Mothership rulebook at the table, too, but my goal is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates book look-ups: Finding something in a dozen pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive.

PAGE 1: Basic Mechanics and Violent encounters. (Most of the core game play loops are covered here.)

PAGE 2: Survival. (Most of the miscellaneous rules in the game.)

PAGE 3: Ports & Medical Care. (Stuff to do in your downtime.)

PAGE 4: Contractors. (I debated whether to include this page, but I really want the idea of hiring Contractors to be front-and-center for new Mothership players. It’s such an excellent way of getting them more deeply invested in the campaign.)

Having run character creation for Mothership a couple of times, the sheer speed at which it happens turns the limited number of rulebooks at the table into a significant choke point. I’m going to continue experimenting with how that should be handled, and probably trying to figure out which pages from the PDF need to be printed out to help everyone zip through. (I’ll report back when I know more.)

CRUXES

The Mothership cheat sheet currently only covers the material in the Player’s Survival Guide. I’ll likely be expanding them at some point to include the rules from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, but for the moment I’m going to be focusing on in media res scenarios where I’m dropping the troubleshooters into abandoned military bases, butchered research labs, and drifting derelicts.

There are a few interesting mechanical cruxes I’ve had to confront when putting together the cheat sheet.

Unarmed Damage: Unlisted in the core rulebook, this was immediately an issue in my first couple sessions. I’ve pulled the value of 1d5 from Pound of Flesh, an adventure module included in the Deluxe Edition of the game.

Androids & Oxygen: The rules state that androids don’t consume oxygen when life support systems fail, but there are separate rules for vacuums and toxic atmospheres (which require rebreathers or oxygen supplies). Should androids be affected by exposure to vacuum or toxic atmospheres? My ruling is No.

Combat: The transition from an explicitly turn-based initiative system in Mothership 0e to what seems to be a more freeform(?) resolution in Mothership 1e appears to have been pretty badly muffed. The rules and examples of play contradict each other, and support material (including stat blocks and adventures included in the core game box) don’t seem to be in sync with the mechanics. I’ll likely have more to say about this in the future, but for now I’ve simply included the combat rules as written on the cheat sheet.

I’m currently using a system of:

1. The GM threatens harm. (To use a term of art from Apocalypse World.)

2. Players declare action by going around the table.

3. GM makes rulings for how actions are resolved.

4. Players all roll dice (if necessary) at the same time. (Failures likely result in the threatened harm occurring.)

But although this is strongly suggested by the examples of play, I’m not yet convinced it’s actually working very well. (The system seems to detach from the game world, or vice versa, and every opponent kinda blurs into the same mechanical mush.) As I say, I’m going to continue experimenting with this.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. (This simple sheet, however, will simply fit directly into the four-panel screen.)

Go to Part 1

How quickly can you complete a run of the Dragon Heist remix?

This is a question I get asked fairly frequently.

Personally, I like this campaign a lot, and I don’t recommend rushing it. One of the things that makes it special is how the PCs can become entwined in the fabric of the city — invested in Trollskull and its community; linked to friendly factions; becoming the nemeses of other factions. Weaving a campaign like that, though, takes time. You have to give yourself (and your players) the space to explore all of those threads. If you rush it, those connections will never get formed and will never have a chance to grow and interact with each other.

But, of course, there’s all kinds of reasons why you might need to speed things up: Maybe you want to run it for a D&D summer camp and you only have a limited amount of time. Or you’re midway through the campaign, a player is moving away, and you’d like to wrap things up before they leave.

Whatever the case may be, how can you make sure you reach the finish line before you run out of time?

HOW LONG IS THE REMIX?

Let’s start by establishing some baselines.

When I ran Dragon Heist, the campaign lasted for twenty-two sessions. Several of these sessions, however, were 8-hour marathons. Looking at my recordings, it appears that it took us approximately 120 hours to complete the campaign (as described in Dragon Heist: The Final Session), which would translate to roughly thirty 4-hour sessions.

I’ve talked with a number of DMs running the remix campaign, however, and its length can vary quite a bit: The longest I know of ran a 300-hour version of the campaign (with a lot of extra material). Most seem to cluster between 80 and 150 hours.

One of the biggest variables seems to be Chapter 2: From the time they get Trollskull Manor from Volo to the point where the fireball goes off and the next phase of the campaign begins is a very sandbox-y period. The PCs are repairing their inn, interacting with the NPCs of Trollskull Alley, meeting faction reps, dealing with Emmet Frewn, and going on faction missions. The number and detail of the faction missions, in particular, can vary a lot depending on how much interest the PCs have in the factions and how much effort the DM puts into the missions. The PCs might also be following up on questions they have from Chapter 1 (possibly getting a jump start on the Grand Game), and it’s also not unusual for DMs to add brand new adventures (like The Lady of Trollskull Priory, Blue Alley, The Veiled Society, or something of their own creation) here.

As a result, groups can easily spend dozens of hours in Chapter 2. I know of one group who spent over a year of biweekly sessions on just this one section of the campaign. (Personally, my group spent 20 hours here.)

On the other hand, it’s also quite trivial to speed run Chapter 2: You can skim past or even completely cut a lot of stuff here without fundamentally sabotaging the rest of the campaign. (The players will likely feel less connected to the city and the PCs will have fewer resources to call upon during the Grand Game, but these aren’t crippling problems.) I know of several groups who have rescued Floon & Renaer in one session and then triggered the fireball just one or two sessions later.

The other major variable, of course, is the heists. Each heist itself generally takes less than four hours and can be wrapped up in a single session, but you also need to consider the set-up (i.e., as described in Part 7 of the Remix, tracking faction activity to faction outposts, following the leads from the faction outposts back to the faction lairs, and planning the heist).

In practice, it looks like each heist will take 10-15 hours of playing time (including the heist itself). This generally won’t be sequential, though — i.e., 15 hours on one heist and then 15 hours on the next heist. Instead, the investigations and interactions with the various factions will weave around each other.

Although slightly different in form, this timeline also seems to roughly apply to the Gralhund Raid (with the setup time being spent on the fireball investigation). In practice, this might be a little quicker, but it’s close enough for our purposes.

Wrapping things up, Chapter 1 took my group about 5 hours to complete and the finale of the campaign after the PCs have reassembled the Stone of Golorr — i.e., breaching the vault, getting the gold, and then dealing with whatever the aftermath of getting the gold is — seems to take another 5-10 hours.

To sum that up with a conservative estimate:

• Chapter 1: 5 hours
• Chapter 2: 20 hours
• Gralhund Raid: 15 hours
• Heists: 15 hours x 4 heists
• The Vault: 10 hours

To this, you’ll probably want to add another 10-20 hours of miscellaneous activities. (In my campaign, that included a romance subplot, setting up an orphanage, and running additional faction missions after Chapter 2, among other things.)

So our baseline running time for the Dragon Heist remix is roughly 120 hours, or 30 four-hour sessions.

DRAGON HEIST: THE FAST VERSION

Now, let’s speed things up. For this discussion I’m going to refer to 4-hour sessions, but the advice should hold regardless (e.g., if you have 2-hour sessions, then when I say something should take one session, it should take you two sessions).

Chapter 1: Set a tight pace here to make sure you wrap this chapter up in a single session. To make this happen, you probably want to be exiting the Yawning Portal no later than the 45-minute mark in your first session. (You may need to skip the troll fight to make this happen.)

In this version of the campaign, the PCs will only be aligned with a single friendly faction. Pre-select that faction and use them as the contact who hooks the group up with Volo.

Chapter 2: You’ll also want to wrap this chapter up in a single session. For me, that probably looks like this:

• Hello urchins! (In the scene where the PCs arrive at Trollskull for the first time, introduce the urchins.)
• This Old Tavern (Establish a budget for repairs, then have one or two roleplaying interactions with guilds and/or people they’re trying to borrow money from. This will create a personal investment in Trollskull Manor.)
• Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It. (Have the friendly faction reconnect with the PCs and give them a single simple faction mission. This mission should be resolved in one scene.)
• Opening night! (Establish some of the neighborhood personalities.)
• Fireball! (End the session on a cliffhanger.)

Miscellaneous Activities: Eliminate as much of this stuff as possible. After Chapter 2, I’d recommend bringing in just one additional faction mission. Keep the Trollskull-related roleplaying to a minimum. If the PCs are getting distracted by non-essential activities, try to frame hard, resolve it quickly/decisively, and redirect them away from it.

Heists: Try to keep the faction investigations as tight as possible. Frame aggressively and don’t let the players dither too much in their planning. If they’re in any way confused or suffering analysis paralysis, bring in a faction response team with a bunch of explicit clues in their pockets. You don’t need to pare things down to the bone here; just keep it tight.

Vault Keys: For the finale, eliminate the vault keys. Once the PCs know where the Vault is, they can just go there and enter.

Doing all of this should result in a campaign that looks more like this:

• Chapter 1: 4 hours
• Chapter 2: 4 hours
• Gralhund Raid: 12 hours
• Heists: 12.5 hours x 4 heists
• The Vault: 5 hours
• Miscellaneous: 5 hours (including post-Vault epilogue)

So we can run a fast version of the Dragon Heist remix in roughly 80 hours, or 20 four-hour sessions.

DRAGON HEIST: THE SPEED RUN

But that’s not good enough! Suzie just got a new job in a different country and we need to wrap things up ASAP!

This is the point where we’re going to make some very deep cuts and even fundamentally alter the dynamic of the campaign.

Fast Version: Start, of course, by implementing everything from the fast version of the campaign described above.

Goodbye Gralhunds: We’re going to get rid of the Gralhunds by replacing them with the Cassalanters.

• The nimblewright who triggers the fireball belongs to the Cassalanters. (Which means, of course, that the fireball investigation leads directly to the Cassalanters.)
• The Cassalanters have the Stone + an Eye.
• To keep things simple, I recommend just having the Cassalanters live in the Gralhund Villa and using the Gralhund Raid as described in the Remix.
• I recommend simplifying things even further: The Cassalanters are not Asmodean cultists. (Whether you use the Gralhund Villa or Cassalanter Villa maps, this lets you eliminate the Asmodean temple. Their faction outposts will also not come into play in this version of the campaign.)
• You can still have the Cassalanters try to sell the PCs a sob story about their kids as their reason for doing all this. If you’ve decided that they’re not cultists themselves, then this is even more straightforward: Their kids really WERE cursed by cultists (or maybe it’s a legacy from an ancestor) and this is the only way the Cassalanters can save them.

Fast Heists: To speed up the heists as much as possible, we’re going to run each heist in a single session. This means that we need to eliminate the faction investigations and most or all of the groundwork. We have a couple options for this.

First, we can give the Cassalanters have much more actionable and comprehensive intelligence about the Grand Game: They know that Xanathar has one Eye and Manshoon the other. They also have blueprints and locations for both lairs.

The PCs can now go directly from the Cassalanter Raid to performing the other two heists back-to-back.

If the PCs miss the Cassalanters’ Grand Game report (and, therefore, all this heist-related intelligence they need), you can backstop this by having a friendly faction — e.g., Force Grey — sweep the Cassalanter Villa after the raid, discover the intel, and then bring it to the PCs.

Alternatively, you can use the PCs’ friendly faction to frame up these heists as faction mission assignments. I prefer the Cassalanter intel solution because it keeps the players in the driver’s seat of the campaign, but if all else fails having someone show up and say, “We know you’re looking for the Eyes, and we think we’ve identified the location for one of them…” will certainly cut to the chase.

Option – Simultaneous Heist: You could speed things up even more by having an allied faction do one of the two final Eye heists at the same time the PCs are doing the other. This could be the Cassalanters, if the PCs have decided to help them, or it should be whatever friendly faction the PCs have allied with.

Option — The Final Eye: Eliminate the final Eye Heist entirely by having the faction holding the Eye come to the PCs with the Eye to negotiate. They can make whatever offer seems reasonable and makes sense given the circumstances.

Whatever the offer may be, either:

• The PCs cut a deal, the Stone is reunited, and everybody heads to the Vault.
• The PCs double-cross the enemy faction and take the Eye without a heist.
• The NPCs try to double-cross the PCs, and then the PCs take the Eye after righteously thrashing the double-crossing knaves.

Mix-and-Match: You do not, of course, have to use all of these options at the same time. Depending on just how breakneck you need the pace to be, you can mix-and-match whichever options make the most sense.

If you were to use all of these options, however, your campaign would likely look something like this:

• Chapter 1: 4 hours
• Chapter 2: 4 hours
• Gralhund/Cassalanter Raid: 10 hours
• Optional – Sea Maidens Heist: 4 hours
• Eye Heist: 4 hours (including simultaneous heist or Final Eye negotiation)
• The Vault: 4 hours
• Miscellaneous: 2 hours

This gives you a lightning-fast 32 hour version of the Dragon Heist remix, which can be played in 8 four-hour sessions.

TRANSITIONING MID-CAMPAIGN

If you’re midway through a run of the Dragon Heist remix, there are any number of reasons why you might need to transition to a high-speed wrap-up. The options above should give you the tools to figure out how best to tighten things up and focus on what’s essential for a satisfying conclusion, but a lot of the specifics will depend on exactly what’s going on in your campaign.

For example, if you’re in the middle of Chapter 2, then it’s probably best to trigger the fireball at the beginning of your next session and then chart a course from there.

On the other hand, if you’re in the middle of the Eye heists and now running out of time, you might be best served considering an option like having a friendly faction run one of the remaining heists for the PCs. Or put a twist on that idea by having whichever faction the PCs are targeting next carry out a successful heist on one of the OTHER factions, resulting in them having two Eyes onsite when the PCs arrive.

Whatever form your campaign takes, I hope it has an epic conclusion for you and your players!