In discussing the design of the Tempest Cluster a couple days ago, I mentioned that using Prospero’s Dream — a mega-station with a population of 5 million sophonts — ended up forcing me to confront some fundamental issues with Mothership sooner rather than later and used shore leave as example. A patron of the Alexandrian asked me what I meant by that, so let’s dive in a bit.

ORIENTATION

During a Mothership adventure, PCs will accumulate Stress. (Which is bad.) Between adventures they can take shore leave, which allows them to relieve the Stress and also potentially convert some or all of it into improved Saves.

Shore leaves are classified, in terms of cost and effectiveness, by port class:

• X-Class Ports cost 1d100 x 10,000 credits, can convert 2d10[+] Stress.
• C-Class Ports cost 2d10 x 100 credits, can convert 1d5 Stress.
• B-Class Ports cost 2d10 x 1,000 credits, can convert 1d10 Stress.
• A-Class Ports cost 2d10 x 10,000 credits, can convert 2d10 Stress.
• S-Class Ports cost 2d10 x 100,000 credits, can convert all Stress.

To take shore leave, you head to an appropriate port, pay the cost, and make a Sanity Save. If you succeed, you can convert Stress. If not, you don’t. But, either way, your Stress is reduced to you Minimum Stress value.

Heading into a Mothership campaign, therefore, I knew that I would need to have one or more ports of each class, and that this could also be used to motivate the PCs to travel to various locations.

ORIGINAL INTENTION

My original plan was to design custom shore leave experiences and assign them to different ports. There would be three different shore leave experiences:

• Vignette: Play the shore leave as a short scene, evoking the experience in a brief back-and-forth with the players.
• Excursion: The shore leave is played out as a full scenario, similar to the beach episode from an anime series. (If you’re wondering what this might look like, check out Numenera Tavern.)
• Slaughterhouse: Similar to an excursion (in that experience is being played out in full), but in a shore leave slaughterhouse something goes horribly wrong. (Think things like Jurassic Park, the Star Trek episode “Shore Leave”, or “there’s an android serial killer loose on the cruise ship.”)

The occasional excursion would be a fun tension relief from the horror scenarios of Mothership, but also set the players up for a future twist where an excursion suddenly turns into a slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse experience, in turn, would color all future excursions with a patina of paranoia.

PROBLEMS

I pretty quickly realized there were a few key problems with my scheme.

First, while I remain pretty confident that the vignette/excursion/slaughterhouse setup could be awesome in a lot of Mothership campaigns, it turns out that — particularly in an open table — the PCs don’t go on shore leave together. Partly because it’s expensive, and so a player will skip shore leave if their PC hasn’t racked up enough stress to make it worthwhile. Having differing levels of Stress is even more likely at an open table, and the PCs also aren’t a cohesive, long-term group that would do downtime activities together.

Note: What if I added a benefit for going on shore leave as a group vacation? If that could motivate a group to take shore leave together, then I could use it to trigger excursions and slaughterhouses.

Second, the Mothership port-based classification of shore leaves works when you’re imagining a universe of strictly small ports floating in the vasty deeps of space. But what happens in large population centers?

Prospero’s Dream, for example, is an X-class station, so shore leave should cost an average of 500,000 credits there. But the Dream is also home to 5 million people. Does it really make sense that the only leisure activities there are only affordable to multi-millionaires? Not really.

So what was I going to do about shore leave in major population centers (including Prospero’s Dream)? And how was I going to incorporate shore leave into the structure of an open table?

The problem of shore leave was also tangled up with a wider issue of money in Mothership. I also wanted to develop a more robust system for downtime in general, which created its own knot of problems around time-keeping and travel times. (I’ll talk more about downtime in the future.)

STOPGAP SHORE LEAVE

During all of this I was continuing to run sessions. (I’m a strong proponent of prepping enough to start playing and then getting to it. Waiting until everything is perfect is a great way to never start playing at all. Plus, in my experience, there’s nothing better for motivating prep than a really great session; and practical feedback from play and players is really the only way to achieve perfection in any case.)

Shore leave, however, is an essential part of the Mothership gameplay loop, so I couldn’t just skip past it. So I implemented a stopgap system.

First, I decided that all major population centers could be assumed to have a variety of C-class shore leave options. Prospero’s Dream would also have X-class shore leave options.

Second, I didn’t want to prep a specific list of shore leave options until I’d figured out what the actual structure for shore leave was going to be. Without a specific list of options, when a PC wants to take shore leave, I just ask them what their PCs would do for relaxation and then riff off it.  I’ve used this as an opportunity to establish other elements of the setting. (And also create and expand those elements.) For example:

• “I’d just go on a bender for two weeks.” There’s a club on Prospero’s Dream called the Stellar Burn. This is a great opportunity to set it up. (Several sessions later, the PC ended up taking a bodyguard job in the club.)
• “Drugs.” Roll on the random drug table on page 23 of Prospero’s Dream, giving a result of, “Liquid Sword. [+] on Combat Checks for 1d5 turns. Take 2d10 DMG after.” Why would they take that drug? Well, obviously because they’re participating in an underground fight club (that I just made up).
• Slickbay vacations in the VR worlds of the Ice Box.
• A farming retreat, working in the glass domes of the Solarian’s religious gardening compound.

We started by resolving shore leave at the beginning of each session, but we were playtesting a lot of stuff for the beginning of each session and things were getting bogged down. So, based on some post mortem discussions with the players, we decided to experimented with moving shore leave to the end of each session: You’d go on an adventure, rack up Stress, hopefully get out alive, and then resolve shore leave to know how long you were out of commission for.

It made sense, but it didn’t work: Instead of good, solid conclusions, the ends of sessions were dragging out. Plus, when a session ended, people often wanted to head home and hit the sack, so we’d still end up with some PCs who hadn’t resolved shore leave and would need to do so at the beginning of their next session.

So after two or three sessions of that, I bounced it back to the beginning of the session, where it could also get easily folded into the downtime procedures I was slowly bringing online.

CURRENT INTENTIONS

Shore leave is still in a state of evolution and flux in the Tempest Cluster. There are several things I’m currently planning to do.

Shore Leave Menu. I want to create a specific list of available shore leaves, while also leaving open the option for the players to improvise novel experiences their character would want to pursue. This will include multiple options at Prospero’s Dream, but also options scattered around the cluster that would require travel.

Scatter Shore Leave Classes. Prospero’s Dream will have variety of C-Class and X-Class shore leaves, but I want to reserve B-, A-, and S-Class shore leaves for other locations in the cluster. Combined with the downtime travel guidelines, I think this will make them feel like more significant “destination vacations.”

Adventures in Paradise. While it looks like I can’t use “you take a shore leave and it goes wrong” as an effective scenario hook, I could still do stuff like a raid on Pandora Station or “all communication has been lost with the Cretaceous Resort.”

Shore Leave Special Effects. I’m thinking about having additional special effects/benefits that will distinguish shore leave options. Options might include removing conditions, recovery from addiction, speeding up skill training, etc. In combination with variable pricing (“there’s an A-class resort in the next system over, but if you head all the way to Katerineta you can pay half as much for an A-class experience”), this will help motivate the players to seek out specific resort experiences.