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