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

The Ukrainian podcast Idearoll invited me to join them earlier this year for a discussion of So You Want to Be a Game Master that turned into a wide-ranging discussion of GMing and the importance of fandom and creativity. Their post-production process was disrupted by the war, but thankfully everyone involved is all right and they’ve been able to release the video just in time for the holidays!

The interview is in English. The video has subtitles in both English & Ukrainian!

Review Originally Published January 15th, 2001

The Vemora is a short module for Forge: Out of Chaos supposedly designed not only for beginning adventurers, but beginning players – containing “explanations and guidelines through the text for the first-time Referee to follow.” I have yet to figure out what these “explanations and guidelines” are supposed to be, because the entire module looks exactly like an old-style D&D module.

The “plot” goes something like this: The PCs arrive in a small town. They are told that the town guard has been blinded by an attacking group of monsters. In order to heal the guards, the town needs to find the Vemora – a great healing artifact which was lost many years ago when the underground Thornburg Keep was devastated by a plague. The PCs go into the keep/dungeon, beat up on some monsters, find the Vemora behind a secret door, and go away happy with a bunch of treasure and a rather nice reward.

This is a village, mind you, which is described in four sections: The Blacksmith, The Supply Store, The Temple of Shalmar, and The Drunken Dragon (bar).

In short, the cliches run thick on the ground, the pre-written dialogue would make your players’ ears bleed if you ever dared to utter its stilted clauses, and the artwork will make your eyes bleed (having dipped from the rulebook’s mediocre quality into the truly pathetic).

Writers: Mark Kibbe
Publisher: Basement Games Unlimited, LLC
Price: $7.95
Page Count: 26
ISBN: 1-892294-01-X
Product Code: BGU1002

Tales That Dead Men Tell is, at face value, a far more substantial value than The Vemora: Background information is given on the Kingdom of Hamsburg and the Province of Lyvanna, along with some regional political history – and the adventure does a fairly sophisticated job of hooking the local events which make up the adventure into the larger political affairs of the world.

The plot, in brief: A decade ago the Kamon family was charged with high crimes against the Province of Lyvanna. When the soldiers came to arrest them, however, something went wrong – the household guard became agitated, and the evening ended in disaster: Kamon was executed, his wife arrested, his children missing or dead. Kamon Manor was left abandoned.

But then, years later, the bells of the Manor begin to ring again. Graves are found opened. And the guardsmen sent to investigate never return.

Enter the PCs.

Unfortunately, what is set up as a really top-notch horror adventure degenerates rapidly into a standard dungeon crawl: The PCs move into the manor/dungeon and commit a mop-up operation on a group of necromancers who have moved in to search for some sort of hidden treasure on the property.

Some products have a really good setup, but then don’t quite manage to get the dots connected just right. Tales That Dead Men Tell has a really good set up… but manages to miss the target by the length of a battlefield.

Writers: Mark Kibbe
Publisher: Basement Games Unlimited, LLC
Price: $9.95
Page Count: 44
ISBN: 1-892294-02-8
Product Code: BGU1003

Past me was definitely unimpressed with these adventures, which I received as review copies alongside the core rulebook for Forge: Out of Chaos. If you’d like to see a more positive review of The Vemora, you can find one here (including notes on converting the adventure to other systems and some light remixing).

RCC asks:

I just ran my first game and got into a sticky situation: The NPC quest giver asked the party to clear the dungeon, but the PCs stopped after the first room and came back because the entrance to the second room was blocked. I ended up just having the quest giver pay them because I couldn’t figure out what to do. What should I have done?

It sounds like your players thought they’d accomplished their goal, but hadn’t. You can also run into this sort of situation if the PCs are deliberately trying to con their employer, of course, and the way you can handle it is largely identical.

It basically boils down to a broader GMing principle: Figure out the consequences of the PCs’ actions, then look for how those consequences can be vectored back to and intersect with the PCs’.

In this case, those consequences and that intersection is probably obvious and, in a long-term campaign, pretty easy to bring into play. For example, let’s say that the PCs were hired to clear out a mine infested with rust monsters. They told the person that hired them that the rust monsters were all gone, but they weren’t. What happens when the person who hired them discovers that?

An angry customer demanding that they finish the job might actually be the least of their problems! If the mine owner sent workers back into the mine believing that the dangerous creatures were no longer present, innocent people might have been killed. Has the mine owner been imprisoned due to endangerment? Are bounty hunters trying to round up the PCs to come testify? Does the brother of a slain miner try to track them down for a little vengeance?

Or flip it around and look at the consequences of the mine remaining closed: Does the local economy collapse? Was the silver flowing from the mine an essential income for a local duke, whose political power is damaged as a result of its loss?

Also: Where did those rust monsters come from? What consequences might there be from a herd of (breeding?) rust monsters having longer access to such a prolific feeding ground?

Your most immediate goal might just be to prompt the PCs to go back and finish the adventure, but often the splash back to their reputation and the ancillary fallout from their failures (or con jobs) can be just as interesting or even more interesting.

For a discussion of similar techniques, also check out Running the Campaign: Aftermath of Adventure.

ONE-SHOTS

If this scenario was being run as a one-shot, on the other hand, the real-world time pressure would obviously make it more difficult to explore all of these possibilities. So if I ran into this “whoops, they ditched the scenario” situation while running a one-shot, there are a couple things I’d look at.

First, did we already fill a goodly portion of our time and did everyone seem to have a good time? If so, it can be just fine to shrug and say, “Great adventure!”

On the other hand, if we have a whole bunch of time left in our slot and/or the experience seems unsatisfying, then I’d probably try to figure out how to let them know that they missed the adventure.

If you can figure out how to do that diegetically, great! For example, as the PCs — standing in the first room of the dungeon — conclude that the job was a lot easier than they thought it would be and make preparations to leave, that might be a great moment to have some hungry rust monsters, drawn by the smell of all the succulent metal the PCs are wearing, burst through whatever is blocking the entrance to the second room of the dungeon and attack!

But if you ultimately just need to say to the players out of character, “Hey, folks. The rest of the dungeon is on the other side of the boarded up passage with the signs saying, ‘KEEP OUT!’,” that’s not necessarily the end of the world.

Another way to do this, though, is to look at some of the long-term options you might use in a campaign and to the same thing, but at a faster pace!

For example, the PCs go back to town. They get paid. And then — BAM! — you skip a bunch of empty time and jump straight to, “We fast forward two weeks and the mine owner is in your face! ‘What game are y’all trying to play?! You only cleared out the first room!”

Then take a five minute break and use the time to sketch in a few new details to the dungeon suggesting the passage of time:

• The blockade has been removed by returning miners.
• Signs of fresh violence where the miners were surprised to encounter the rust monsters they were told had been cleared out.
• A creche or two of baby rust monsters that had time to be born because the PCs didn’t get the job done immediately, potentially complicating the situation in any number of ways.

And just like that, you’ve turned frustration into a fun and memorable scenario that’s made even more special because it came not only from you, but from the choices of your players!

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #17

When it comes time to roll the dice, figuring out which skill to use is an essential part of how a GM makes a ruling in most RPGs.

D&D 5^th Edition is no exception, even if its skill system is a little janky. When making these judgment calls, however, there’s one pair of skills that seems to cause more head scratching than any other: Athletics and Acrobatics. When a PC is trying to do X, should it be an Athletics check or an Acrobatics check? Or should you allow the player to roll whichever one they’re better at?

(Fill in whatever action you want for X.)

Sometimes and at some tables, it can feel like the overlap between the two skills is almost complete. As if they were really both the same skill and completely interchangeable with each other. And this only becomes more true if you use the variant rule where any skill can be paired with any ability scores. (Which you absolutely should, since it dramatically increases the flexibility and utility of the skill system.) At least Dexterity (Acrobatics) vs. Strength (Athletics) gives you some guidance based on the ability score, but what’s the difference between Strength (Acrobatics) and Strength (Athletics)?

But if they’re both basically the same thing, why do we even have these two different skills?

ORIGIN STORY

The distinction between Athletics and Acrobatics makes sense if you know that Climb, Jump, and Swim were separate skills in D&D 3^rd Edition and were then combined into the single Athletics skill in later editions. Athletics, and its antecedents, can therefore be coherently understood as, “Are you doing something movement-related that requires a skill check while moving in one of these movement modes?”

Acrobatics, on the other hand, is essentially just a slightly expanded version of D&D 3^rd Edition’s Balance skill and can be understood as, “Are you doing something movement-related that requires a skill check while moving, but NOT in these movement modes?”

And that’s the tip: If you simply and consistently apply this distinction – Athletics is climbing, jumping, and swimming; Acrobatics is everything else – then the overlap between the skills shrinks to almost nothing.

There will still be exceptions, particularly when it comes to complex actions involving multiple modes of movement – e.g., running along a banister and then leaping to grab a chandelier – but that’s all right. It’s okay to have some overlap between skills; it’s only a problem when the overlap becomes a total eclipse. In the now-rare circumstances when it does come up, it shouldn’t be too difficult to check your gut and figure out whether running along the banister or jumping for the chandelier is the most important part of the action. (Or, alternatively, just let the player roll whichever skill is better for them.)

Bonus Tip: Generally avoid forcing them to roll both skills in sequence to succeed. This drastically reduces the odds of success, which will sadly encourage your players to become much more drab and boring in their future action declarations.

The important thing is that you’ve established a clear distinction between the skills so that you can make consistent rulings and the users of both can flourish. (The general rubric here boils down to, “Is there a reason someone would want both skills?” If not, then you’ve probably got a problem. The other solution, of course, would be to house rule one of the skills out of existence.)

… AND THUS CONFUSION

If you find yourself in the position of needing to explain your rulings to a player who has very different preconceptions (and very strong opinions), you may also find it useful to understand why there’s so much confusion between Athletics and Acrobatics, particularly because this confusion is likely to only grow as a result of the 2024 Player’s Handbook reducing skill descriptions to a single sentence and further obfuscating the original reason for both skills existing.

In practice, I think there’s a couple key reasons.

First, people associate the word “acrobatics” with jumping. As a result, common usage – e.g., “You want to jump the chasm? Make a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check.” – immediately dissociates from the rules as written.

Second, DMs have a bias towards calling for skill checks instead of ability checks. (This is, at least in part, because “make a proficient Strength check” isn’t an established concept, so if you want characters to be benefit from their proficiency bonus you NEED to figure out a skill to call.) Therefore, when faced with a PC tackling the fairly common tasks of breaking down a door or lifting a heavy item, they start looking around for a skill and… hey, there’s Athletics!

This very common usage of Athletics isn’t wrong, per se, but further obscures the intended distinction between the skills – i.e., movement-related checks vs. movement-related checks when using a special movement mode. Once you’ve obscured (or never spotted) the intended distinction, you’re generally just left with the common dictionary definitions of the words, which gives you “physical feats featuring strength and coordination” vs. “physical acts which require strength, agility, or stamina.”

And I’m guessing, unless you happen to grab the same dictionary I just did, that you probably can’t tell which of those definitions belongs to which word.

Thus, the endless debate.