DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 39C: Liberation of the Slaves

Tor became a whirling dervish – a one-man electrical storm – at the top of the stairs, holding off the churning wall of fur. Several of the ratlings leapt down onto the stairs behind him, surrounding him utterly, but they were no match for the speed or ferocity of Tor’s electrical blade.

When the furious job was done, Tor and Elestra quickly got the prisoners up the stairs and out the front door of the temple. They sent them, with money in their pockets and food in their bellies, to the watch station in Delvers’ Square.

Particularly in campaigns where the PCs are Big Damn Heroes™, I think it can be really powerful to show how their actions have earned them a reputation.

You save the world a few times and people start taking notice, ya know?

One technique I particularly like is the Big Social Event, as we saw back in Session 12: A Party at Castle Shard. As I discussed in Game Structure: Party Planning:

I’ve … found them to be effective as a way of signaling when the PCs have changed their sphere of influence. You rescued the mayor’s daughter from a dragon? Chances are you’re going to be the belle of the ball. And you’re going to discover that powerful and important people have become very interested in making your acquaintance.

When these events work, they’re exciting and engaging experiences, often providing a memorable epoch for the players and spinning out contacts and consequences that will drive the next phase of the campaign.

But, more broadly, the attitude of the world towards the PCs should shift. Partly because the players get a huge thrill out of their actions being recognized. Partly because it just makes sense.

One thing I find frequently useful for this is some form of Reputation system. For In the Shadow of the Spire, I’ve been using a streamlined variant of the Reputation mechanics from the 3^rd Edition Unearthed Arcana sourcebook.

The short version is:

1. Stuff that the PCs do earn them Fame or Infamy points, which collectively create a reputation bonus.
2. When the PCs meet a new NPC for the first time, the NPC makes a DC 25 skill or Intelligence check + the PCs’ reputation bonus.
3. On a success, they recognize the PCs. Their reaction depends on their opinion of the actions the PCs’ took to earn their Fame/Infamy (and this may also inflict bonuses or penalties to subsequent social skill checks equal to the reputation bonus).

I can also flip that around and give NPCs a Reputation score so that PCs can recognize them with a successful Knowledge (Local) + reputation check.

In this case, I decided that recusing the slaves from the Temple of the Rat God would create a big enough splash that it would add a half point to their PCs’ reputation. To track this, I have a short section in my campaign status document that looks like this:

REPUTATION

FAME: 5.5

INFAMY: 0

FAME: Rescued Phon. Recovered Jasin’s body. Castle Shard party. Shilukar’s bounty. Association with Dominic. Tavan Zith riot. Freeing slaves and children from Temple of the Rat God.

The quick rep reference basically gives me a menu of stuff that I can have NPCs who recognize the PCs mention. (“Didn’t I see you at the Harvesttime party at Castle Shard?” or “Oh my god! You saved my brother during the riot in Oldtown!” or “I heard you helped us out on that Shilukar case.”)

In practice, I grade these on a pseudo-logarithmic scale: Rescuing the pregnant Phon was enough to get earn their first point of Fame (people might recognize them as “the delvers who rescued that pregnant woman!”), but after that they aren’t going to earn Fame for every single person they rescue.

In any case, I’ve found this minimalist reputation system to be pretty effective. It tends to only be meaningful once every few sessions (although as their Reputation grows, that becomes more frequent), but the maintenance cost is extremely low and the moments when it’s triggered provide nice little spontaneous pops of payoff and, in some cases, unexpected twists.

Campaign Journal: Session 40A – Running the Campaign: Show the Help
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation. The core boxed set of the game comes with two amazing resources.

First, Unconfirmed Contact Reports, which is Mothership’s equivalent of a Monster Manual. It includes a fair share of ghouls and greys and husks, but also even more terrifying threats like The Good and Granny and Sally in the Screen.

Second, the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, which notably includes a dozen ships with full specs, illustration, and maps, like the Sato GS Grail VI executive transport:

I love this kind of raw adventure fodder. Stuff that’s prepped and packaged so that you can just drop it straight into session and take off running. You need to put in zero work, because everything you need is already on the page. You can just use it. And often not just once, but over and over and over again.

You’d think this sort of stuff would be the rule rather than exception in RPGs, but this is surprisingly not the case. You’re far more likely to get a bunch of “adventure ideas” that you need to flesh out. Or you’ll get something like a ship described in broad terms, but without the concrete tools you need to bring it to the table with rock solid confidence.

Because Mothership gives you these great resources, though, we have an opportunity to leverage them to even greater heights.

DERELICT ADVENTURE RECIPE

Scenario Hook: The PCs find a derelict spacecraft floating in space. Or they answer a distress beacon. Or they’re sent as a salvage crew.

Step 1 – Ship: Pick a random ship from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit or roll on this table.

Step 2 – Monster: Pick a random monster from Unconfirmed Contact Reports. This monster is onboard the derelict (and is almost certainly why it’s a derelict).

Note: Not every creature in Unconfirmed Contact Reports is equally likely to work well with this adventure recipe, so I’m not including a random table here. (If you want to roll randomly, you can flip to a random page or roll a random number on the book’s Index.) Don’t forget the Five Quick Horrors on the back cover of the book!

Step 3 – Monster Sign:

• Pick three ship compartments. Place a hint suggesting the horror that was unleashed here in each compartment.
• Pick three more compartments. Place a clue revealing the monster’s identity and/or abilities in each compartment.
• If the monster has a special weakness, add three clues that reveal this weakness anywhere in the ship. (One of these clues may be found while encountering the creature itself.)

Step 4 – Confrontation: Either…

• Pick a compartment where he monster is currently located.
• Roll 1d6 each time the PCs enter a compartment. On a roll of 1, the monster finds them and attacks.

Or both.

And that’s the whole recipe. As you can see, you can probably spin up the whole adventure in less than fifteen minutes. (I’d say you could it while the players are rolling up their characters, but that’s probably not true only because character creation in Mothership is so insanely fast.)

LARGER SHIPS

Some of the ships described in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, like the Northstar Paragon exploration vessel, are very large. Using the basic recipe on these ships will result in adventure content being spread out too thinly across the numerous rooms.

Option 1: Increase the number of hints and clues. For example, you might use the guidelines above for every deck of the ship instead

Option 2: Run the ships as a sector crawl, reading “sector” in the recipe everywhere that it says “compartment.” (Conveniently, the ships in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit are already mapped in sectors.)

RANDOM DERELICT SHIPS

The adventure Dead Planet, which can be found in the deluxe edition of Mothership or purchased separately, includes a Random Derelict Ship Generator, including stuff like random cargo and, even more importantly, a random deckplan generator.

How incredibly useful!

Instead of selecting a ship from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, you can obviously use the Random Derelict Ship Generator to provide an endless variety of ships for this adventure recipe!

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