The adventure support for Mothership is out of this world.

(Pun intended.)

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG, inspired by films like Alien, The Thing, Annihilation, and Event Horizon. It takes a lot of inspiration from the Old School Renaissance, but it also pulls in a lot of new-fangled ideas from games like Apocalypse World.  The result is a fast-paced, high-octane system that can somehow support both high body count slaughterfests and deep, long-term campaign play.

What I want to focus on right now are the plethora of trifold modules available for Mothership. Each of these is just two pages long – printed on two sides of a single sheet of paper and designed to fold up into a trifold pamphlet.

These are similar to One Page Dungeons and Monte Cook Games’ Instant Adventures. The intention is that the GM can grab one of these, read through it in just ten to fifteen minutes, and then immediately run it. They make it so that playing an RPG can be a spur-of-the-moment decision, no different than grabbing a board game.

And Mothership is an ideal game for this type of adventure support because character creation is lightning fast. You can take a group of complete newbies, teach them the rules, and have them roll up their characters in ten minutes or less.

Whether you’re looking for something to on a rainy day; need a pickup session because a player canceled at the last minute; or are just burned out on elaborate campaign prep and looking for something simple to run, these trifold adventures are a godsend.

This review is going to cover all of the first-party trifold adventures released by Tuesday Knight Games. Most or all of these exist in two forms: A 0E version designed for use with the original, “pre-release” version of Mothership, and an updated 1E version compatible with the boxed set. (I’m reviewing the current 1E versions.) Each is available in both PDF and physical formats.

Before we get started, let me share a couple of notes on potential biases here.

First, I got my copies of these adventures as a backer of the Mothership Kickstarter campaign. So I paid for them, but they did kind of feel like cool bonus content. With that being said, I will be trying to judge them with an eye towards what it would cost for you to buy them ($5).

Second, I’m planning to run Mothership as an open table. The primary reason for this is because the trifold adventures are so ideal for an open table – just grab one and run it for whatever group shows up each night – but it does mean that as I’m reading, evaluating, prepping, and running them, I’m definitely thinking about how they can fit into that open table.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

CHROMATIC TRANSFERENCE

Our first adventure, Chromatic Transference, is a riff on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” but venue-shifted to an abandoned secret laboratory built inside an asteroid.

I’m a big fan of “The Colour Out of Space” (see my own The Many Colours Out of Space), so this is right up my alley. Reece Carter makes the most of their material, presenting a delightfully creepy nine-room location crawl coupled to an excellent treatment of the strange colour and its mind-rending / body-altering effects. (It’s notably well-integrated with the mechanics of Mothership and also gives the GM excellent support for responding to PCs attempting a scientific inquiry into the colour.)

The only real weak point of Chromatic Transference is that it’s lacking any kind of scenario hook. Given the strong, iconic nature of the premise, though, you shouldn’t find it terribly difficult to brainstorm some options:

• The PCs are hired by the Corporation. They recently bought out a smaller company and, while sorting through the assets, discovered records of an abandoned research base. They’d like the PCs to go check it out. (Maybe accompanied by a corporate assessor?)
• The ship’s sensors detect the dormant docking bay of the asteroid base while the PCs are on a cargo run… do they want to go check it out?
• While sorting through a mass of data they pulled out of Aerodyne’s computers, they stumble across references to the asteroid research facility.
• They’re trying to track down Dr. Everton, who’s been missing for several years. They finally find records indicating that he was sent to a top secret research facility built into an asteroid.

However you decide to use it, the quiet horror of Chromatic Transference makes it a perfect pace-change from blood-drenched bug hunts, while the high stakes risks of allowing the colour to escape the facility – which the PCs may only figure out after it’s too late – ensure that the adventure will be a memorable one.

GRADE: B+

CRYONAMBULISM

A microbial parasite has infected the ship’s cryopods, trapping the PCs in a nightmare-infused hypersleep.

Things begin with the PCs “waking up” at the “end” of their journey. The nightmare version of their ship that they end up exploring is very smartly presented in a modular system that makes it easy to swap out rooms on whatever ship the PCs might be traveling on.

The core gimmick of the adventure – by which the PCs “wake up” one sense at a time (so that, for example, their eyes might be seeing the real world while their ears are still hearing the nightmare; or vice versa) – is a brilliant twist, elevating the kaleidoscopic action to a whole new level. (While also proving a very unique challenge to actually run.) The melding of real world and nightmare world also keeps all of the PCs involved in the action.

Ian Yusem also does a good job of considering how android PCs fit into the scenario’s biological threat. (For a game where Android is one of the four core character classes, a surprising number of adventures just kind of blindly assume all of the PCs will be human.)

If you’re running a Mothership campaign, Cryonambulism is the perfect filler episode: Don’t have the next adventure prepped yet? Good news! As the PCs blast off to their next destination, you can just hit the pause button by having the nightmare parasite infect their hypersleep!

On the other hand, I’m a little more skeptical about using this adventure as a stand-alone one-shot. The setup for the adventure seems to work best if the players are a little disoriented and uncertain about what’s happening. (Did we actually arrive at the destination and our ship was bizarrely wrecked in transit? Or is something else going on here?) And a lot of the payoffs feel like they’ll land a lot better if the players are more familiar with (and personally attached to) their ship. As a stand-alone, I think it can still work; but I think it’ll also be a tougher sell.

GRADE: B-

HIDEO’S WORLD

Hideo K designed a video game console that lets you play video games in your dreams. Unable to mass produce it, Hideo hooked himself up to his prototype and put himself into a drug-induced coma where he could live in the game world he’d created forever. To wake Hideo up, the PCs will need to enter the game world themselves!

This adventure doesn’t do it for me.

For starters, the lack of a scenario hook really hurts here: No reason is given for why the PCs might be motivated to seek out a washed-up video game developer. And when you start thinking about the premise to gin up your own scenario hook, you quickly realize that there are a lot of unanswered questions. (For example, where is Hideo’s body?)

Unfortunately, once you’ve entered the game world, it doesn’t get better. Hideo is supposed to have been trapped in this world for years or decades, but, of course, in just two pages you can’t really describe a world with a scope that would sell that idea. Most of the module actually describes the game’s main menu, and the rest is a single tower with eight rooms which is apparently the entirety of the game world.

This also contributes to the game world just not being very interesting, which is kind of a death knell for this sort of adventure. There’s possibly a weak stab in the direction of satire and also a friendly wave in the direction of Inception’s dream world logic, but there’s a lack of a strong, coherent vision.

I should also mention that Hideo’s World also comes with an audio file representing the soundtrack of the virtual world.  This is okay, but has the pretty typical problem of many tabletop soundtracks of being too short: Do you really want to listen to three minutes and thirty seconds of video game menu music on a loop for a couple of hours?

GRADE: F

It occurs to me that you might be able to make a bit more sense of all this if you ditch the idea of Hideo being trapped for years and instead make the machine a prototype device whose code has been corrupted by Hideo’s subconscious mind. Then you could have his investors hire the PCs to go in and pull him out. Or, in a long-running campaign, you could even set things up by having Hideo pitch the idea to the PCs after a big pay day and try to get them to invest. That’s a lot of remixing for a two-page adventure, though.

Go to Part 2

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Monte Cook’s Banewarrens is one of the best dungeon-based campaigns of all time.

The campaign, designed for 6^th to 10^th level characters, was originally published for D&D 3rd Edition in 2002. When I read it way back then, I was immediately enamored and knew that I wanted to run it. At the time, I was running an epic fantasy campaign where the PCs had to go searching for various artifacts, and I ended up routing them through Ptolus – the city where the Banewarrens are located – so that I could tease the strange and mysterious Spire that towers over the city, anticipating that when that campaign wrapped up, I would be running The Banewarrens for them next.

Unfortunately, that gaming group broke up. A few years later, however, I had a new group and Monte Cook was releasing Ptolus: City by the Spire, the nearly 700-page sourcebook describing that selfsame city where the Banewarrens were located. The stars were aligned, the campaign was begun, and I have never left the City by the Spire.

I’ve been singing the praises of both Ptolus and The Banewarrens for years, but I’ve never written a proper review. Recently, however, both books have been converted to D&D 5^th Edition, and so it seems like an opportune time to rectify that oversight.

BEHIND THE BANEWARRENS

Thousands of years ago, a good man believed that good and evil existed in balance in the world. Therefore, destroying evil was only a temporary victory, because the evil – released back into the world – would soon find some new way to manifest. The only way to truly triumph over evil, therefore, would be to instead imprison it; to lock it away from the world and keep it where it could do no harm.

This good man, therefore, began a grand project and daring crusade: Recruiting others to his cause, he sent them out into the world to gather banes – things of great evil, whether objects, diseases, or people – while he constructed the Banewarrens, a vast underground vault in which all of these objects could be stored.

Bringing all of this evil together in one place, unfortunately, proved to be a horrible mistake: First, the earth itself rebelled against the evil, thrusting upwards thousands of feet into a terrifying Spire. Then, as the good man’s servants labored to repair the vaults, something went wrong. The good man was corrupted by the banes he had collected. He became the Banelord, betraying his friends and using the evil artifacts they had collected to become a dark and terrible force.

Long ago, great heroes arose who defeated the Banelord. But the Banewarrens, and most of the evil banes which had been sealed within them, remained. In the millennia since, many have attempted to breach them, hoping to claim the banes within and perhaps becomes a second Banelord. But the defenses of the Banewarrens repelled all such attempts, and many believed that, despite his tragic fall, the good man had wrought well and the Banewarrens were, in fact, impregnable.

They were all wrong.

UNLEASHING THE BANEWARRENS

The Banewarrens campaign begins with a random encounter.

The PCs are passing through the streets of Ptolus when they encounter a dark elf named Tavan Zith, a nexus of wild and chaotic magic which is constantly mutating anyone who draws near him.

This is not, in fact, a scenario hook for The Banewarrens (structurally speaking). At first glance, it will likely seem to just be another example of the strange and exotic things that happen on the streets of Ptolus. This will quickly cease to be true, however, as the PCs’ reputation and their involvement in dealing with Tavan Zith brings them to the attention of two different factions.

Because it turns out that Tavan Zith is supposed to be locked up in the Banewarrens. And if he is instead wandering the streets, it can only mean that the Banewarrens have been breached.

The first faction to approach the PCs is the Church of Lothian. They believe the Banelord hid a holy relic known as the Sword of Truth in the Banewarrens and they want the PCs to retrieve it.

Next up is the Inverted Pyramid, an arcane guild which is deeply concerned about the Banewarrens being opened, but also wants to learn as much as possible before everything gets sealed up again.

At first it will seem as if the PCs can serve both their patrons, but as the campaign continues this will become increasingly difficult for them to do. Furthermoer, as they begin investigating the Banewarrens, they will discover that another faction, the Pactlords of the Quaan, is responsible for the breach. A little later, a fourth faction will likely discover what’s happening and also get involved.

This is, ultimately, what makes The Banewarrens such a special campaign. It’s a dungeon-based campaign that’s absolutely drenched in faction intrigue. The PCs will have to juggle the agendas of friendly factions, while simultaneously trying to deal with the machinations of antagonistic ones. (You might even be surprised to discover which ones end up being which in your campaign!) Cook does a fantastic job of presenting these faction intrigues in a format which is both easy for the GM to understand and also packaged into highly practical chunks that can be readily deployed on the table.

The two primary tools for doing this are:

• Events. Listed at the beginning of each chapter, these are floating scenes that can be dropped into the PCs’ dungeon explorations.
• Time Passes. Certain dungeon rooms are flagged with additional key entries describing how the room might be changed by the actions of other factions. (These can be used when the PCs first enter a room if they’ve been dilly-dallying or busy elsewhere, but can also be saved and used when the PCs return to the room later to show that they’re not alone down here.)

In practice, these are quite possible, making it possible to create the simulacrum of real activity with great ease and giving you all the raw materials needed to actively run the factions with only a little extra effort.

What makes this work particularly well is that Cook has designed the Banewarrens to periodically pull the PCs back into the metropolis above. (For example, at one point early in the campaign they’ll figure out that they need a particular magical resource to unlock the doors within the Banewarrens and continue making progress, so they’ll need to leave the dungeon to track it down.) This ingeniously creates absences from the dungeon, allowing the Events and Time Passes elements to be seamlessly implemented. It also allows the PCs to interact with the other factions in new and different ways. Plus, these interludes also provide breaks from dungeon-based play, mixing things up and preventing the campaign from become a monotonous slog.

THE NATURE OF THE BANEWARRENS

The Banewarrens are sometimes described as a “megadungeon,” but I don’t think this is quite right. They’re a rather large and ingeniously mapped dungeon, with more than a hundred rooms, but they’re designed as a single, coherent scenario with the PCs pursuing a singular goal, and not the warren of disparate scenarios you’d see in a true campaign dungeon. (See Types of Dungeons for a deeper discussion of the differences here.)

This is not, of course, to the detriment of The Banewarrens. The singular purpose and vision allows Cook to craft a truly memorable – and terrifying! – environment for the PCs to explore. The expertly xandered maps, distinct flavoring of the different sections of the Banewarrens, and the unique sense of progression (as the PCs travel in-and-up, rather than down-and-out) provide an excellent playground, into which Cook pours a ghastly variety of horrific foes and a creepy panoply of banes.

The banes, in particular, gives the Banewarrens a very unique feel. It fundamentally inverts the typical dungeoncrawling tropes: Instead of kicking down doors and grabbing loot to haul out of the dungeon, the PCs will instead quickly learn that they need to keep the doors locked at all costs and make sure nothing gets out. The Banelord may or may not have been right about the conservation of evil in the universe, but there’s little doubt that releasing these things of great evil into the world will have horrible consequences.

(“Hey! What are the PCs going to do about treasure?!” Fortunately, the other factions and the interludes that take place outside the Banewarrens are designed to solve this problem.)

CONCLUSION

And all of that is why The Banewarrens is one of the best dungeon-based campaigns of all time.

If it hadn’t already been converted to the 5^th Edition rules, I’d still be recommending that you track down a copy of the 3^rd Edition campaign and adapt it to 5^th Edition ASAP. (Or Shadowdark or Basic Fantasy RPG or Old School Essentials or maybe even Mork Borg, whatever floats your dungeoncrawling boat.) It’s not just that it’s a fantastic campaign that you and your players will remember forever; it’s also one of those transformative campaigns capable of teaching you a whole new way to run your game.

GRADE: A+

Author: Monte Cook
Publisher: Monte Cook Games
Cost: $12.99 (5E PDF) / $6.66 (3E PDF)
Page Count: 180

ADDITIONAL READING
Review: Ptolus – City of Adventure
Ptolus: In the Shadow of the Spire
Ptolus Remix: The Mrathrach Agenda
Ptolus Remix: The Vladaam Affair

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Released by Chaosium in 2021 as part of the 40^th Anniversary celebrations for Call of Cthulhu, Keeper Tips: Collected Wisdom on Running Games is a pocket-sized hardcover filled with exactly what the title promises — a motley collection of small tips and random thoughts, each generally no longer than a paragraph, about running Call of Cthulhu games and RPGs in general.

(A “Keeper,” for those out of the loop, is what a game master is referred to as in Call of Cthulhu.)

It’s a handsome volume, with a faux-leather cover and gilt print accompanied by a burgundy bookmark ribbon. Very much the sort of thing you can drop into a pocket and draw out from time to ruminate upon its contents, which are roughly divided into a number of categories:

• Ground Rules
• Inclusivity
• Preparation
• Players
• Sensitivity
• Designing Scenarios
• Gameplay
• Keepering
• Horror
• Sanity
• The Cthulhu Mythos
• Non-Player Characters
• Monsters
• Online Play
• Props & Handouts
• Miscellaneous

The tips themselves are drawn from almost two dozen Keepers associated with Call of Cthulhu from its very beginning to its most recent days. As editor Mike Mason writes, “Some of the tips are contradictory. Some repeat or reinforce advice. Imagine, if you will, that you are sat with a group of experienced Keepers, each sharing and building upon the ideas of the others. Take from this what you will.”

As you read through Keeper Tips, you will undoubtedly encounter much that is familiar, much that you agree with, and also much that you will disagree with. You may even read certain passages that will raise your hackles. But as I’ve slowly worked my way through the book, it has never failed to provoke a thoughtful insight.

I say “slowly,” and indeed this is how I would recommend one experience Keeper Tips. It’s a collection that invites you to read perhaps one or two pages at a time and then set it aside while you think about what you’ve read. Was there some new insight? How will you use it? Was there a unique twist or perspective on something you’ve done yourself? Is there something you vehemently disagree with? Why do you think it wrong and what would you do differently? Is this tip useful for tables with new players, experienced players, or both? And why?

Then, perhaps later in the day or the next day or a week later, you’ll pick the book up again and choose another page to meditate upon. Perhaps the next page. Or perhaps one that you flip to randomly.

To gives you a sampling of what you can expect to find inside, consider these tips:

Counsel your players to create characters that are involved in the story, rather than be passive observers. Example: an expedition to the Antarctic will be an active game for scientists and explorers, not so much for the pilot and radio operator.

Undermine the pillars of the PCs’ confidence. Are they members of an anti-Mythos organization? Drop hints that it has been infiltrated. Do they have academic allies? Strike those mentors with public disgrace. Do they have family? Keep the PCs afraid for them — or of them. Do they have high social statue or loads of income? Chip away at that through media gossip, the Company Board turning on them, threats of unemployment, a hostile company takeover, or a stock market slide.

When making NPCs, assign each of them an adjective (greedy, suspicious, trusting, etc.). This makes them easier to portray in a memorable and fun way for the players.

Pre-made NPCs can be useful as instant replacement investigators.

For an extended game, ask about an investigator’s history, and then say, “What was your first experience with the Mythos?” and let them make it up. The reason is to get past the boring, “No, no, this isn’t real,” part of the scenario. They ‘know’ it’s real.

Never be afraid to rewrite a scenario’s plot hook to better fit your party’s occupations or backstories. All the details in published adventures should be considered more as suggestions rather than as strict guidelines.

If you’d like to see more of the book “in action,” so to speak, I’ve actually featured it a few times on my Twitch streams, using it very much as I describe above as a spur for commentary and deeper thought. (You can see one of these streams here.)

Along similar lines, I think it could be quite rewarding to organize a GM’s book club, gathering fellow masters of the game and using Keeper Tips as a prompt text for any number of wide-ranging discussions.

Ultimately, whether for your own private circumspection or as the nucleus for shared discussion, I can strongly recommend slipping a copy of Keeper Tips into your own pocket.

Grade: B+

Editor: Mike Mason
Contributors: Daniel Aniolowski, Sean Branney, Allan Carey, Keris McDonald, Jason Durall, Paul Fricker, Bob Geis, Lynne Hardy, Bridgett Jeffries, Jo Kreil, David Larkins, Mike Mason, Mark Morrison, Thom Raley, Matthew Sanderson, Becca Scott, Seth Skorkowsky

Publisher: Chaosium
Price: $17.95
Page Count: 128