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Projects like this are, in fact, exactly why I’ve decided to start a Youtube Membership program. There are a lot of cool Youtube projects I want to tackle, but which are prohibitively complicated and expensive. To make them a reality, I need to be able to expand how many hours per month my team can dedicate to Alexandrian videos.

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Next spring I will be embarking on the adventure of a lifetime as the featured GM for RPG IN THE JUNGLE.

RPG in the Jungle is a five-day, 20+ hour tabletop adventure at Citadel Fury, the world’s only hand-sculpted gaming fortress in the heart of Peru. Nestled in this untamed paradise, beneath emerald canopies, I’ll be running a full campaign in the greatest game room on Earth.

This is an all-inclusive, seven-day event including action-packed RPG gaming sessions (run by me!), jungle bungalow accommodations, buffet-style gourmet meals, and incredible activities at the Pueblo Colorado sculpture resort!

Although I’ve run convention games and even featured GMing events in the past, I’ve never done anything like RPG in the Jungle! I’m incredibly excited to go on this adventure with you!

BOOK NOW!

In the Belly of the Beast is not only an excellent product in its own right, it deserves to be the template by which other adventures will be written.

Review Originally Published May 21st, 2001

Not only is every Penumbra product from Atlas Games a tour de force of excellence, each betrays an immense talent which is capable of constantly providing a fresh perspective to every aspect of a high quality product. In the Belly of the Beast, sprung forth from the brow of Mike Mearls, offers no contradiction to this rapidly emerging reputation.

PLOT & CONCEPT

Warning: This review will contain spoilers for In the Belly of the Beast. Players who may find themselves playing in this adventure should not read beyond this point.

In the Belly of the Beast begins when the players are approached by Bruno Mezzia, son of Hallan Mezzia and heir of House Mezzia – a powerful and wealthy family in possession of a trading empire. He wants the PCs to help him take care of the Ring of Iron, a local guild of thieves and slavers which has been causing problems. What the PCs don’t know, though, is that Bruno is trying to establish his own position of power within the city’s underworld – and is planning to use the PCs to do it.

When the PCs and Bruno attempt to go after a stronghold of the Ring of Iron located in the city’s sewer system, however, things go wrong: Unknown to Bruno (or the PCs), a member of the Ring of Iron has come into possession of a rare and strange magical item belonging to a necromancer. In fact, the necromancer from whom they had stolen it had – in turn – stolen it from a tribe of orcs.

What none of them knew is that the magic item in question was a chrysalis – an egg from which the demon Vog Mor would be born into the world. While located in the sewer stronghold, the egg has hatched – trapping the Ring of Iron, the necromancer’s apprentice (who killed his master and now pretends to be the master), and a war party of orcs who came after the egg inside the belly of the slowly emerging Vog Mor.

Bruno and the PCs, of course, end up in exactly the same place.

So, to sum up:

The PCs, the head of a would-be crime family, a gang of slavers, a war party of orcs, and a would-be necromancer (who is slowly going insane) are all trapped in the belly of a demon who, in a few short hours, is going to wake up and take over the world.

Cool.

SOMETHING NEW IN MODULES

“This adventure is roleplaying-intensive.”

How many times have you seen a module claim that? 15? 50? 500 times? How many times have you read those modules and then found out the author was telling you a bald-faced lie?

Every single time, right?

The problem with writing a “roleplaying-intensive” module is that, by its very nature, character interactions cannot be as neatly summed up as “when you open the door you see 5 orcs in a 10’ x 10’ room playing poker”. Monsters meant for slaying, traps meant for escaping, dungeons meant to explore. These can be quantified, described, and mapped with precision. Negotiations with King Strophius to release the Mycenaen prince he holds for ransom? That’s a bit more difficult to put down on paper – and ultimately relies upon the particular DM and PCs who are handling the negotiations.

So “roleplaying-intensive” adventures are an interesting conundrum: You can make ‘em. You can run ‘em. You just can’t buy ‘em.

Or so I thought.

There are times when I love being proved wrong.

In the Belly of the Beast is a roleplaying-intensive adventure, and it really, really, really works. No, really: It does. Would I lie to you?

So how does Mearls do it?

First, he gives you five different factions of power in the demon’s belly: The PCs (which he, of course, leaves undefined), Bruno Mezzia and his thugs, the Ring of Iron slavers, the Blood Hatchet orc war party, and the “necromancer” and his servant. Each group is detailed, and each member of the group is detailed – giving the DM a full grasp on his cast of characters.

Next, he gives everyone a common goal: Escape the demon belly.

Then, he gives everyone a common enemy: The servants of the demon who are trying to get past the impromptu barricade and kill everyone.

And then, to round out the foundation of the scenario, he gives everyone a reason for distrusting everyone else – and a reason to ally with one another against the others.

Into this potently developed dynamic, Mearls then adds an exhaustively detailed series of events (and potential events) which allow the mutable plot of the adventure to form. Mearls carefully designs this episodic plot so that it can adapt to whatever actions the PCs may take, giving the DM a strong helping hand without forcing them to tie their players into strait jackets. At the same time, he doesn’t allow the episodic nature of his narrative structure to dominate the actual playing experience – tying his events to each other in a variety of ways, so that the underlying dynamic of the scenario will create a holistic and memorable gaming experience no matter who plays it… or how.

CONCLUSION

So, at the end of the day, In the Belly of the Beast lays claim to being something a little different, something a little new, and something which should definitely find its way into your gaming library. In fact, if your players aren’t able to look back fondly and say, “Hey, remember that time we were stuck in the belly of Vog Mor?” then you’ve definitely made a big mistake in not grabbing this module up and running it.

Now, a real quick note on a weakness I think the product has: It is marketed as containing a “tear-out section”. This section contains the stat sheets for the major NPCs, a combat chart, a hand-out, and the adventure’s map. I, honestly, cannot imagine anyone actually bothering to tear this section out of the module – and the net result is that information which could have been presented in a truly useful manner, now disrupts the lay-out of an otherwise excellently presented adventure. While I applaud Penumbra for experimentation on the one hand, on the other I wish that they would focus on producing the high quality product they’ve proven they’re ably capable of producing and leave the gimmicks for when they are truly deserved and needed.

That’s my assessment as a reviewer, GM, and player. Now, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to pass my judgment on this product as a freelancer who has written or contributed to roughly half a dozen D20 products:

In the Belly of the Beast establishes a paradigm for developing roleplaying-intensive modules. Mearls is, of course, building upon design tools which have been developed before, but, to my eyes, he has done so by creating the ground floor of something that deserves a very close look. I, personally, am already working on a module which will play around with and develop these concepts – and, once I’m done with that, I’m probably going to take a look at combining it with an old idea of my own and seeing how they can be combined to enhance a dungeon environment. I encourage other freelancers (and GMs) to look at Mearls’ work in this light as well – not only to duplicate what he has done, but also to open your minds to doing things using new tools and methods.

Okay, I’m off my soapbox. You can stop reading and go out to buy your own copy now.

…

No, seriously. I’m done.

…

C’mon. Get out of here.

…

Look, I’m going to call the cops if you don’t leave!

…

Okay, that’s it. You’re in trouble now, big guy! You just wait and see!

Style: 4
Substance: 5

Author: Mike Mearls
Publisher: Atlas Games
Line: Penumbra
Price: $8.95
ISBN: 1-887801-96-0
Product Code: AG3202
Pages: 32

This adventure had a HUGE impact on me as a GM. I’ve previously discussed its influence on the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template, and you can trace its impact all the way into So You Want to Be a Game Master. I think it would be fair to say it’s directly or indirectly impacted almost every single roleplaying scene I’ve run in the past quarter century.

I also remember it being incredibly effective in actual play. The faction setup, the flexible diplomatic relations, the event sequence, and the looming threat of Vog Mor all combined beautifully. (Although, if I recall correctly, I souped things up with some material from The Book of Fiends.)

So, yeah, this one is a certifiable classic. Really deserves to be on more Best Adventures of All-Time lists.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

As I’ve begun expanding my Mothership open table from sporadic one-shots to a jump-cluster with persistent continuity, the economy of the game has been giving me endless headaches.

PAY

A simple question, for example, would be: How much money should the PCs get paid for doing a job?

Unfortunately, the answers given in official books are vague, contradictory, and vary by multiple orders of magnitude for little or no apparent reason.

The Warden’s Operations Manual, for example, bases everything around the concept of salary.

• You calculate a monthly salary in credits based on what skills a PC possesses (e.g., 1,000cr/month for every Expert Skill). This generally results in a salary between 3,000 and 5,000 credits.
• Some jobs pay Hazard Pay, which is generally 2-3x your salary.
• You get a 1,000 credit bonus per Jump made through hyperspace.
• Pay might increase by 10% to 50% based on the crew’s rep, etc.

So the pay for jobs would be listed as “6 MOS SALARY” or “3 MOS SAL + JUMP PAY.” This would seem that most jobs would pay a few thousand credits.

This makes sense for regular employment, but gets pretty vague for a job like “assassinate the head of the Wittgenstein cartel.” (You also get some weird interactions with the default travel times in Mothership, which are a whole different issue.)

Which may be why none of the official adventures or supplements seem to use this system. Many don’t include details about pay at all, while those that do are all over the  place:

• Gradient Descent pays mostly in the form of retrieved artifacts, which generally range from 1,000,000 credits to 250,000,000 credits.
• Chromatic Transference: If you retrieve the McGuffin, you can earn 30,000,000 credits.
• Pound of Flesh: The Babushka offers jobs from 2,000 to 40,000 credits. Tempest Company offers jobs from 500 to 5,000 credits, but if you can earn a higher rank your jobs jump up to 50,000 to 500,000 credits. Canyonheavy missions range wildly from 10,000 to 750,000 credits, plus one big outlier at 30,000,000 credits.

And, of course, without any clear guidance from the official supplements, third party supplements are all over the place when it comes to pay.

Let’s rephrase the question as an order of magnitude. In general, should Mothership PCs be earning:

• Thousands of credits per job?
• Tens of thousands?
• Hundreds of thousands?
• Millions?
• Tens of millions?
• Hundreds of millions?

The answer, obviously, will have a profound effect on how the game plays. But, frankly, Mothership seems really uncertain about what the answer should be. Broadly similar jobs can pay radically different amounts of money.

COSTS

And it turns out that this is unsurprising, because the costs in the game are ALSO separated by orders of magnitude.

In the core game, there a few different categories of purchasable stuff.

Weapons range in price from 50 credits to 1,400 credits.

Armor ranges from 2,000 credits to 12,000 credits.

Equipment mostly ranges from 20 credits to 8,000 credits, with a few key exceptions:

• Exoloaders cost 100,000 credits.
• Jetpacks cost 75,000 credits.
• An organic pet costs 200,000 credits.

Starship supplies (fuel, etc.) seem likely to cost 50,000 to 500,000 credits. (I need to explore this a bit more.) The starships themselves can be hundreds of millions or even billions of credits, but these costs are far more likely to be handled through alternative systems rather than spending individual credits.

Contractors cost roughly 1,000 to 10,000 credits per month.

Shore Leave gets interesting, because the average cost basically steps up through orders of magnitude:

• C-CLASS — 1,000 credits
• B-CLASS — 10,000 credits
• A-CLASS —100,000 credits
• X-CLASS — 500,000 credits
• S-CLASS ­— 1,000,000 credits

Looking at these numbers, what becomes apparent is that there’s a roughly tiered experience here: In order for a group to be making choices about shore leave, for example, the need at least 10⁵ credits. If they have that much money, though, then decisions about basic equipment become essentially meaningless: They can trivially buy anything and everything they want.

And then there seems to be another tier at 10⁶ credits, where you can access top-tier shore leave and begin doing ship-ownership stuff.

A POUND OF FLESH

The A Pound of Flesh supplement adds several new categories of things you can buy: cyberware, slickware, and drugs.

The prices for drugs all hang out in the same range as basic equipment, but cyberware and slickware notably have prices that seem to be significantly divided by these tiers:

• 10³ credits: holoprojector, loudmouth, lumatat, prosthetic, slicksocket, tattletale, terminal jack, looky-loo, twitchbooster
• 10⁴ credits: big switch, deadswitch, fangs, handcannon, hotswap, huntershot, little switch, OGRE, panic button, panzerfist, revenant protocol, scapegoat system, god mode, espernetic feedback loop, holopet, vox box
• 10⁵ credits: retractable nanoblade, spidermount, spinal rig, machine code, sentinel system, skillslick (trained)
• 10⁶ credits: remote uplink, sockpuppet, subdermal armor, whiplash injector, skillslick (expert/master)

The biggest thing to note, I think, is that there doesn’t really seem to be a smooth spectrum of costs in these price lists. Rather, perhaps encouraged by the system denoting costs in cr, kcr, and mcr, there are distinct phase shifts.

CONCLUSIONS: SETTING JOB PAY

With all this in mind, my tentative conclusion is that we can break job pay into three echelons, each of which can be multiple by hazard pay.

Basic Jobs pay in the echelon of 10³ credits — roughly 1,000 to 10,000 credits. Hazard pay can multiple this base rate, though, to 10⁴ credits, up to 50,000 credits. At the low end, these jobs give you enough money to cover your costs and seek treatment for your wounds/stress. At the high end, after one or two of these jobs, you can probably buy a really nice piece of equipment.

Restricted Jobs pay in the echelon of 10⁵ credits — roughly 50,000 to 500,000 credits. Here you can start buying some really nice stuff, but you also start unlocking some really powerful character advancement options (training skills, better shore leaves, etc.). The trick is that you can’t just grab these jobs off the street: You need to unlock them in some way. That might mean gaining ranks in a mercenary outfit; earning a high enough reputation score; or just having the right connections.

Windfalls pay 1,000,000 credits or more. These might be rarely offered as jobs (to even higher ranks, etc.), but are more likely to be lucky opportunities PCs can stumble into or pursue (like the artifacts in Gradient Descent). This is the stuff that, literally, makes you a millionaire: There’s a thin layer of massive luxury goods that unlock at this level. This might also be the point where you can make a down payment on a ship. Retirement options (WOM 51) also unlock here.

(For both ships and retirement options, I want to give some deeper thought into how these could be made compelling and interesting options, particularly in an open table.)

OPEN TABLE

For my open table, I think this means I want to create a jobs board that includes a selection of basic jobs.

This jobs board represents the Phoenix Contracting Mesh, which will further divide these jobs into:

• Green List, which are simpler, safer jobs. In most cases, in fact, these jobs can be rapidly resolved, leaving enough time for another job to be selected for the evening. This allows cash-desperate PCs a pathway for earning the credits they need to, for example, treat their wounds.
• Green List – Complicated, which look like simple green list jobs, but when you deliver the mining equipment to Ypsilon-14 – whoops! Aliens!
• Black List, which are jobs offering hazard pay and incentive bonuses. These are more direct links to adventure content,

(I will likely also be adding Bounties to the board once the Wages of Sin supplement is released.)

To these basic jobs, though, I’m going to want to figure out how to add higher paying restricted jobs. I’m currently thinking this might include:

• Red List, which are jobs on the Phoenix Contracting Mesh jobs board that can only be accessed via a Reputation system. (You’d earn rep by successfully completing jobs, which also gives me an additional opportunity for rep-based incentives and/or complications.)
• Direct follow-ups, where being part of the team that completes one job may cause your employer to offer you a “follow-up” contract at higher pay.
• Patrons, which PCs might hook-up with in any number of ways. These might be independent employment offers, or maybe just personal relationships that unlock red list jobs that would otherwise require higher reputation scores.

Finally, windfalls will be scattered semi-randomly. I’m also planning to include Gradient Descent in the campaign, which would also give players the opportunity to proactively decide to seek windfall payments in an extremely hostile environment (and possibly without any guaranteed base pay?).

OPEN TABLE SALARY

The other thing I’ve been workshopping for my open table is salary.

By the book, salaries for starting characters are:

• Marine: 2,000 credits/month
• Android: 2,500 credits/month
• Scientist: 4,000 credits/month
• Teamster: 2,500 credits/month

In a standard Mothership campaign, I think the idea is that you earn this salary by taking jobs.

For my open table, on the other hand, I’ve been letting PCs earn their salary during downtime (with the assumption that they’re working various jobs between sessions). The problem is that, due to a confluence of factors (including how travel time is calculated in Mothership), the PCs are simply earning too much money: The multipliers yeet them straight out of the basic jobs tier, which rapidly causes the entire game table economy to collapse.

I’m pretty sure the solution (or, at least, the next thing I’m going to playtest) is to effectively reduce these salaries to 1/10^th their value:

• Marine: 200 credits/month
• Android: 250 credits/month
• Scientist: 400 credits/month
• Teamster: 250 credits/month

In practice, the character is still earning their fully salary, but most of it is being chewed up by basic living expenses (rent, food, etc.). (This is fairly similar to the guidelines on saving money, WOM 51.)

I might actually combine this with an actual Lifestyle system, but I think I’ll wait and see if these values are broadly working before adding another layer of complexity.

ADDITIONAL READING
Mothership: Thinking About Combat