Go to Part 1

I scooped up a handful of Mothership trifolds today with an eye towards restocking the jobs board for my Mothership open table. I’m beginning to dive deeper into the vast sea of Mothership content, which may mean a few more misses, but also the opportunity to uncover hidden gems and a few diamonds in the rough.

RECLAIMER

The PCs has been hired to “scavenge usable resources from the Galloway Outpost, a long-abandoned mining and research facility on the desert moon Kara-9.” Coincidentally, despite this outpost being “long-abandoned,” another corporation has hired another team to scavenge the outpost at the exact same time. The PCs will need to compete with this other team to “secure and extract as many undamaged resources as possible.” Even more coincidentally, the whole place collapses two to three hours after the PCs arrive.

Despite the inexplicable string of coincidences, this is a pretty solid concept for a scenario that’s anchored to a pretty good map that’s well xandered and ready for potential conflicts to break out between the rival salvage crews.  (Although for some reason the map depicts a space station with a docking bay instead of the land-based outpost from the scenario’s introduction, just one of a surprising multitude of continuity errors.)

Unfortunately, Reclaimer is senselessly hostile to any GM wanting to run it.

First, it’s designed for a custom micro-pamphlet format that requires you to print, cut, and then origami the PDF. The result is cute, but completely impractical: Among other things, it splits the map of Galloway Outpost across multiple spreads, making it painful to use.

The map also uses a number of custom symbols, all of which are unkeyed. You’ll probably be able to figure out most of them, but some remain complete mysteries to me.

Once you work your way past the unfriendly formatting, what you’ll discover is that the adventure is functionally unfinished:

• There are no stat blocks for the rival crew.
• Colored keycards are used to unlock various areas of the base, but the keycards not included in the key. Instead, the GM is instructed to “spread keycards around the outpost and allow crews to find them through exploration.”
• There’s a potentially interesting little mini-game where power has to be rerouted to different areas of the base… except it’s unclear why the PCs would need power restored to any of these rooms.

Perhaps most importantly, the central dynamic of the adventure is scavenging on a time limit: How much can you salvage before the competing team arrives (unless they got here first in yet another continuity error) and before the base collapses?

The collapse of the base is put on a specific time limit described in six stages from Minor Structural Damage to Total Collapse. Which would be great, except no guideline for the time required to salvage material is given. And although a list of salvage types is given (industrial fuel, raw minerals, rare electronics, etc.) these are keyed to the map in only vague, incomplete, and, yet again, contradictory ways. Also missing is any sort of value for this salvage.

Most of the adventure, therefore, simply isn’t here. If you want to run Reclaimer, you’ll need to be prepared to do most of the design work yourself.

GRADE: D

MEAT FARM

A lone hacker has suborned the computer systems of Cibus Station, a corporate research station. They’ve freed the experimental subjects, killed (almost) everyone onboard, and are demanding a ransom. The PCs’ corporate overlords want them to board the station and regain control.

Pyry Qvick’s Meat Farm is another adventure that does a great job of layering threats: The hacker will turn the station’s automated stations against the PCs; a suborned android has gone homicidal; and the station is overrun with dangerous/weird/disturbing experimental animals.

What will make or break a creature feature adventure like this are, of course, the monsters, and Qvick delivers a nifty combo pack, including turret gooses, parasite pigs, and albino mammoths, among others. These are stocked in minimal-but-vividly keyed rooms, which are both varied and interesting.

The only real problem I have with Meat Farm is the pointmap itself, which is maddeningly vague to the point of incoherence. I’ve had this problem with vague pointmaps in other Mothership adventures. The problem is that, yes, the pointmap is meant to be an abstract representation of the game world. But it still needs to represent the game world. If I look at your map and (a) I have no idea how to describe the game world to the players and/or (b) the connections between rooms appear nonsensical, that’s a problem.

So when I run Meat Farm, I’ll be taking the adventure’s room keys, but rearranging them into a coherent map.

GRADE: C

CARRION PROTOCOL

Here’s another adventure of experimental meat. (I’m tempted to connect them in some way.)

The PCs answer the distress call of the FUV Irene only to discover that the ship’s meat labs — designed to provide fresh food for the crew — have catastrophically malfunctioned. Multiple compartments have become overgrown by semi-sentient flesh and violent fleshhounds are wandering through the ship.

Carrion Protocol is short, creepy, and fun.

The only real problem with the adventure is the lack of a clear vision of what, exactly, happened on the ship before the PCs showed up. There are a bunch of “clues” thrown around (blood trails, corpses, etc.), but none of it seems to add up to a coherent narrative, which makes the scenario unnecessarily difficult to run. (If I, as the GM, don’t understand what happened, it becomes much harder to answer the questions the players are asking consistently.) Somewhat related to this is a continuity issue where “every 10 minutes a room adjacent to meat growth is overgrown.” But at that pace, the entire ship should have been overgrown long before the PCs could have answered the distress call.

Also, the adventure is presented a pamphlet, but every PDF is screwed up in a different way so that you can’t actually print any of them and get a functional pamphlet, which is rather frustrating.

These problems are not terribly difficult to fudge your away around, however, and as a pay-what-you-want title, this one is worth checking out.

GRADE: C

BURYING GROUNDS ON PAVEL THETA

Rebecca Bennett’s Burying Grounds on Pavel Theta is a Pet Sematary riff: On a newly terraformed world, the corporation has lost contact with the team who was supposed to be establishing a base camp and the PCs are sent in as the backup team.

Unfortunately, it turns out that any corpses buried in the ground become reanimated undead. This includes Mikey, a member of the original team who died and was buried by his teammates, and a bunch of undead opossums.

Conceptually, I really like this adventure. The undead opossums are incredibly creepy and Bennett includes a great pacing mechanic for them.

Where it unfortunately falls apart is, once again, the details. Like Carrion Protocol, Burying Grounds desperately needs an authoritative background: The previous team is missing, but (other than Mikey) what happened to them? Where are they? Where did the opossums come from? How did they get buried?

It’s a lot of cool stuff, but it kind of all falls apart when you look at it… which, of course, the players will definitely do.

The adventure also includes three recorded audio logs you can share with your players, but they appear to be performed by voice generators with a flat intonation, so they’re probably not worth using.

GRADE: C-

QUANTUM CARGO

Researchers on the FMV Dirac have been attempting to perfect quantum duplication technology, allowing the Quantum Dynamics Corporation (QDC) to collapse multiple quantum states of an object simultaneously, functionally creating a perfect copy. Dr. Flora Ciama attempted to steal the prototype device, accidentally triggering a quantum collapse.

From the outside, the ship appeared to vanish only to reappear several weeks later broadcasting multiple distress signals. The PCs have been dispatched to retrieve the top secret research (although, of course, QDC doesn’t trust them enough to tell them what that research is). They arrive at the Dirac and find it trapped in a quantum flux: At ground zero, three different versions of Dr. Ciama carry out the heist against and again and again — one succeeding, one failing and triggering the quantum explosion, and one stuck in the quantum core chamber.

Quantum Cargo has a few issues — like Burying Grounds on Pavel Theta, for example, it could really benefit from a definitive crew list and a slightly more coherent explanation of what’s been happening on the ship — but the incredibly clever structure of its core premise, in which four different zones of random quantum effects dynamically combine with a location key filled with reality-bending set pieces, make this adventure something special. And despite a few lacunae, there’s also a lot of loving attention to detail here, which includes providing detailed player maps.

GRADE: B-

Go to Part 1

The Rimbound series by Stella Condrey is a set of twelve Mothership trifold supplements and adventures. These are pay-what-you-want and also available for free download. (However, while they’re available on a variety of platforms, it seems that the series has only been partially uploaded to many of these platforms, so you may need to poke around a bit to track them all down.)

I’m reviewing these in the order I read them in. I admit this is quite idiosyncratic, but I wrote these reviews as I went along, and when I reorganized them into numeric order I discovered it was like giving a presentation after dropping your notecards on the floor and shuffling them into a random order. So you’ll just have to join me on this journey.

RIMBOUND #6: REDSCREEN

One of the challenges with executing a micro-supplement, whether trifold or otherwise, is making sure that it offers something of value beyond the basic pitch. This is something that Redscreen: A Disease for Androids unfortunately struggles with.

The basic concept is that Redscreen is a virus that infects AIs (including androids) and makes them murder humans.

And now that I’ve told you that, you don’t need to buy Redscreen, because you already know everything in the trifold. Ostensibly there are three sample infected AIs, but these largely have no actual value: One full panel (out of six) explains in laborious detail that a space station AI could turn off the life support systems. Another full panel goes into great detail about how a ship AI could slam automatic doors to hurt the PCs. If you can make the intuitive leap from “infected AI wants to do harm” to “will use computer-controlled systems to do harm,” you’re good to go here.

The other challenge is making sure your micro-supplement includes all the necessary information to use it. Here, too, Redscreen struggles. For example, guidelines are given for what to do “if a PC becomes infected with Redscreen,” but it forgets to explain how the PCs could get infected in the first place.

GRADE: D-

RIMBOUND #11: UNDER THE DUNES

Under the Dunes is a pretty solid foundation for a cool adventure: While scanning a desert planet for ore deposits, they stumble across the buried wreck of a spaceship. As they breach the wreck, a sandstorm rolls in: It’s going to be hours before they can leave. What mysteries, dangers, and wealth will they find inside?

Opening up the trifold, there’s a good map and a functional key.

Unfortunately, with this foundation in place, it seems as if Condrey wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. I’m left with the impression that she just started throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something would stick: The ship is from three years in the future! …and maybe one of the PCs could find their own dead body? It’s a cool moment, but there’s no explanation for how this happened and no real development of the idea.

Okay, so there’s a squad of military fleshbots onboard! They’ll activate and attack the PCs! … but why? And also, what are they doing on an ore transport vessel?

In short, there’s a bunch of ideas here, but nothing fully developed or coherent.

With that being said, I’m slipping Under the Dunes into the stack of adventures for my open table. But it’ll need a little TLC to build something compelling on top of its foundation.

(While Under the Dunes provides the sample desert world of Euthana, it would be pretty easy to locate this adventure on The Desert Moon of Karth, among others.)

GRADE: C-

RIMBOUND #9: UNDER THAT BLACK SKY

The clever thing that Under That Black Sky does is taking TWO cool concepts and combining them into a single adventure. If an adventure only has one big idea, it can be easy for it to run out of gas, but when you combine ideas you usually end up with something greater than the sum of its parts as you combine and contrast them in countless ways.

The first idea here is a colony planet with a cloud cover so thick that no visible light can penetrate, so you can only see what your artificial lights illuminate.

The second idea is that this planet was once the bioengineered hunting grounds for an alien species, and now something has awakened the ancient xenofauna generators, unleashing horrific beasts into the wilderness.

These aren’t just cool sci-fi concepts, they’re both unique vectors for horror.

Here’s the problem:

Why are there are no monster stat blocks or descriptions?

To let the beauty of your imagination create your own Hyades V, dear warden.

So you completely failed to actually write the scenario, but you’re pretending it’s a virtue?

Well… That’s too bad.

GRADE: F

RIMBOUND #7: GEAR FOR A SPACEFARER

The central feature of Gear for a Spacefarer is a couple dozen pieces of new equipment for Mothership. I quite liked this. Items like airlock foam, jerry cans, an algal starter kit, and trail cameras provide a nice blend of unique functionality and gap-filling. There are several times, while reading through the equipment list that I realized something should obviously be available for sale and even more where I said, “Ooh! That’ll be fun!” Like all good equipment lists, therefore, this one both adds tangible depth to the game world and great gameplay options.

I would, however, recommend reviewing the listed prices. Many of them seemed a little wonky to me, with the worst example being a drone listed at 2% the price of a drone from the core rulebook.

Gear for a Spacefarer also includes the Cadwal Trade Depot, a caravan of vessels providing the services of a C-class starport. This is only sketched in with the broadest strokes, but does include a fun 1d10 table of plot hooks that immediately started inspiring my creative muse.

GRADE: B

RIMBOUND #10: COLD OPENING

Twelve years ago the PCs were placed in cryosleep onboard the Thelma 2. Three months ago, the ship went off course. Two minutes ago the ship’s AI woke the PCs up.

You’ll be shocked (shocked!) to discover there’s an alien predator called the Cretin onboard.

Nothing wrong with a good trope. (Although I will note that this particular trope can be troublesome to pull off in Mothership since android PCs don’t enter cryosleep.) The problem here is that nothing makes sense: Why is this journey taking twelve years? How did the Cretin get onboard? Why are the PCs being woken up now?

As with Under the Dunes, I’m overwhelmingly left with the impression that a bunch of random, undeveloped ideas were just randomly dumped into the adventure key in the hope that something would stick: The Cretin turns out to be a robotic creature, but someone smeared feces all over the airlock. There are “yellow-tinged eggs” in the antigrav generator. There’s religious ramblings in an unknown xenolanguage scrawled across the rooms of the reactor room. A seemingly unrelated religious organization engraved a metallic cube with a message and stuck it inside the Cretin. And so forth.

Perhaps the kindest thing I can say for Cold Opening is simply Unfinished. This one doesn’t make the cut for me and I won’t be running it.

GRADE: D

Go to Part 8: More Trifolds!

Here’s a piece of bespoke terminology that I often teach my  players: low stakes test.

It’s not at all unusual for a roleplaying game or storytelling game to gives PCs a resource that they can use to improve their action checks. This might be a meta-currency, charges from a magical item, or some kind of exertion mechanic. Some games will even make this a central element of the resolution mechanic. (In GUMSHOE, for example, spending points from your skill pools is the only way that your character’s skill will have an impact on the check. This is less true in the Cypher System, but most checks will still see the PCs spending points through Extra Effort.)

The trick is that, when I’m GMing, sometimes I like to interrogate the system for stuff that would be kind of a rip-off if the players decided to spend limited resources on the check. If it’s a situation where I can clearly describe the stakes of the roll before the roll is made, no problem. (The players can decide for themselves whether it’s worth spending resources on.) But sometimes this would be awkward, inappropriate, or anticlimactic.

For example, the PCs might all be searching a room together and I want to figure out which of them finds the hidden tiara. I could make an arbitrary decision, roll a flat random check, or even elide past the question of who actually finds the tiara, but in this case I want the focus, reward, and/or factoring of skill that comes with an action check.

If I call for Find Hidden checks, however, one or more of the players might decide this is worth spending Perception Points on, which I know would be silly because they’re guaranteed to find the tiara – the check is just providing focus, a little bit of color, and a potential roleplaying prompt for one of the players (“Look what I found!”).

This is where the low stakes test enters the picture. Instead of saying, “Give me Search checks,” I say, “Give me low stakes Search checks.” This just literally means, “This check isn’t a big deal and I don’t think it’s worth spending points one.”

Players can, of course, still spend points on a low stakes test, but now I’ve done my due diligence and nobody will ripped off when the true stakes of the check are revealed.

It’s a small difference, but I’ve found – once I’ve taught the players what it means – that it greatly streamlines these interactions. (Some of my players probably think this is actually a published term of art in the games we play: It’s not at all unusual for me to include it when I’m explaining the rules of the game.)

MEANWHILE IN MOTHERSHIP…

In Mothership, every failed check causes a PC to suffer one point of Stress. This is a fantastic mechanic which constantly ratchets up the tensions and helps provided perfect pacing for every session, but it also largely removes small, incidental checks from GM’s toolkit.

I know some will cry out that this is, in fact, the point. I get it. But after a dozen or so sessions, I was still feeling handicapped by the loss of these checks.

So, once again, I’ve introduced the concept of a low stakes test, this time indicating to the player that they shouldn’t mark Stress if they fail the check. And, once again, I’ve found it incredibly useful for streamlining these table interactions, even when I’m running an open table and have to frequently introduce new players to the terminology.

This is very much a finesse technique (like the ones I use when collecting initiative), but it’s another example of how small improvements in your GMing can really add up.

If you’re an Alexandrite member of the Alexandrian Youtube channel, you can check out the latest After Action report from my Mothership open table. This one has bloodwights!

WATCH NOW!

I’m also releasing another video tonight: An unboxing video for The Crooked Moon, which you can find over on my Patreon!

You don’t need to be a member to watch this one, but I’ve decided not to release this unboxing video on Youtube because our previous unboxing videos have performed very poorly and they seem to torpedo the algorithm.

But I did want to spread the word about The Crooked Moon, which I think looks really, really cool. Unboxing this one got me very excited to dive deeper! So we’re going to see how hosting videos on Patreon works out.

WATCH NOW!

Go to Part 1

Most of the Mothership adventure reviews I’ve written have focused on the wealth of trifold and other pamphlet modules, but there have also been many zine-style adventures published for the game. Here’s three of them.

THE EARTH ABOVE

James Hanna’s The Earth Above is set on the fast-rotating planet or moon (it’s unclear) of Cor-9. The Helios corporation has lost contact with their mine for unrefined starship fuel and the PCs are sent in to figure out what’s happening and/or get the mine back online. It can be as simple as delivering a new communications array!

… but you’ll probably be unsurprised to discover that hostile alien monsters are the real problem.

In this case, the hostile aliens are the Pest. These are clearly heavily inspired by the Alien xenomorphs, but there’s a dash of the psychic bugs from Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers movie in there, too, and some unique twists to their multi-stage life cycle. One of these twists is that the Pest can adapt to a wide variety of food sources, but then become hyper-focused on their chosen source. In this case, they’ve hyper-focused on starship fuel, including the unrefined ore, and infested the mines.

Round that out with a great isometric map of the mines and you’ve got a solid ‘crawl.

But Hanna doesn’t stop there.

Some of the miners survived the initial attack, but are now being held prisoner in the Hab City mining camp by the android miner workers, who have suffered a malfunction due to their core directive to “protect all intelligent life forms.” The directive was meant to apply to humans, but once the androids realized that the Pest were intelligent life forms, they needed to not only protect the humans from the Pest, but the Pest from the humans. And they decided locking everyone up was the best way to do that.

This adds a completely different threat vector to The Earth Above, while also introducing a rich social component to the adventure with a diverse cast of strongly motivated NPCs (human and android alike). And Hanna’s still not done! There’s also a rogue mercenary team loose on the planet who have been dispatched by Xenos Unlimited to secure biological samples of the Pest!

These additional layers add an exponential complexity and depth to the scenario. It’s a good example of how you can take two fairly simple, straightforward adventure ideas, add them together, and get something much greater than the sum of its parts.

The only thing holding The Earth Above back is a patina of strange holes and continuity errors. It’s a difficult to nail this down, but it’s stuff like:

• The mercenary team is both close to the action and 9,000 miles away “on the other side of the planet.”
• The PCs need to deal with threat of the malfunctioning androids… so how many are there, exactly? What security measures have the androids put in place?
• How many survivors are there?
• The adventure assumes the PCs are stranded here without fuel (which ultimately motivates them to journey down into the mine), but it’s unclear why. (The Pest are shown to have drained other ships of their fuel, so perhaps one could imagine adding an attack on the PCs’ ship at some point?)

This stuff is pervasive. Even why the adventure is called The Earth Above is unclear. And the net effect, in actual play, is to throw a bunch of grit in the gears. Unless you take the time to address them in your prep, these countless little snares are going to keep catching you out at the table.

But with a little extra polish, I think The Earth Above can be a really great addition to your Mothership campaign.

GRADE: B-

THE VIEW AT THE END OF TIME

At the end of the universe, an intelligent species evolves, expands, and discovers the cruel trick played it on by fate: They have been born in an era of unimaginable scarcity, as the last stars burn out and the fabric of space-time itself is stretched thin. They look back with envy at the civilizations which were free to plunder galaxies of abundance they hatch a plan: They create a machine capable of ripping a portal through time, but they lack the energy to activate it. What they can do is send a message back in time and hope that some younger race will discover it, decipher it, and open the portal. Then they will be free to journey back and claim what should have been theirs.

Is humanity foolish enough to open a temporal Pandora’s Box?

Of course we are.

And now the PCs have been hired to step through the portal and gaze upon the end of time.

To be honest, you can just inject this one straight into my veins. Everything about The View at the End of Time is aimed straight at my heart, and Elliot Norwood does a very good job of delivering on an incredibly challenging concepts.

As the PCs step through the portal, they find themselves in the preserved ruins of an alien civilization, gazing out on the death of all things in the lurid red glow of a dying sun. Exploring those ruins, they’ll have a chance to begin unraveling the secrets of the Morrow — the name given to these future species by human xenoarchaeologists. As the aliens begin waking up from the long sleep in which they awaited their “saviors,” the PCs will find themselves caught up in the strife

If they’re lucky, they’ll realize in time that their only chance at survival — and perhaps humanity’s only chance — is to flee back through the portal and shut it down from the far side before aliens can use it as a temporal beachhead.

The View at the End of Time is beautiful and horrifying and wondrous all at the same time. I’m very much looking forward to sharing its haunting vision with my players.

GRADE: B

BRACKISH

On the strength of Norgad’s Dead Weight, which I very much enjoyed and have previously reviewed, I immediately grabbed a copy of Brackish, written by Norgad and C. Bell. I recommend you immediately do the same, because I love everything about this adventure.

The basic scenario hook is pretty typical for a Mothership adventure: A corporation has lost contact with a research outpost. They’ve hired the PCs to figure out what happened.

Where Brackish shines, however, is in concept, execution, and detail.

First, they provide a player map of the facility. This seems like a small thing, but it’s literally the first thing at least ninety percent of my Mothership tables ask for when they’re sent on a mission like this: Obviously the corporation would have a map of their facility. Obviously that would be useful. Can we have it please? Brackish anticipating this need and providing what I need is just one example of how Norgad and Bell are intensely focused on the experience of actually running and playing this adventure at the table.

For the GM, the map is supported by an excellent key. The rooms are detailed and evocative, and their descriptions well-organized and easy to use. The layout cleverly uses box outs to provide rich detail while keeping the core presentation free of clutter, and the whole thing is supported by a cleverly compressed version of the map on every spread so that you always know exactly where you are. (So clever that it was only on the second reading that I realized what it was. So bear a wary eye, but once you spot it, it’s invaluable.)

Second, they elevate the generic trope: The corporation doesn’t just want a generic “investigation.” They want the PCs to account for the whereabouts of all station personnel, and the adventure immediately gives the PCs a staff manifest including names, jobs, and descriptions:

But the corporation doesn’t just want a verbal report: They want evidence. So they provide the PCs with a cryptographic camera that they can use to record secure visual and audio evidence, and to track this the players are given a worksheet:

The concept is that the PCs will track the recordings they make, keep brief notes on what the recordings contain, and draw a sketch of what they’ve filmed.

I’ve never seen this concept before, but it brilliantly pushes the players to creatively engage with the game world in a novel way while simultaneously using notetaking to force an attention to detail, sucking them into the scenario and immersing them into the environment.

They wrap up this whole aspect of the adventure with a detailed breakdown for the GM of every NPC — their current whereabouts (dead or alive), what happened to them, and the specific evidence the PCs can use to discover (and document) their fate. In other words, a comprehensive revelation list. I’ve seen so many published adventures screw this up, effectively forcing the GM to solve the mystery for themselves before they can run it for the players, but Brackish again gives you exactly what you need.

But there’s still more!

Third, Brackish makes the environment dramatically dynamic: A malfunctioning pump is causing roughly half the facility to flood, then drain, and then flood again in a forty-minute cycle. The idea is to track this in real time, using the environment to put pressure on the players and create a sense of urgency.

This element would be a little smoother if the key provided some clear insight into flooded vs. non-flooded rom conditions, but even without that, it gets the job done.

Finally, we have the monster of the week. “A bloated corpse, skin taut and silver-smooth like a pregnant mirror.” A strange, alien artifact transforms those around it into guardians with two key features: It can pass into, through, and out of reflective surfaces. And its touch gives flesh the texture of wet clay, allowing the creature to wipe away the features of its victims. The result — gliding unnaturally and relentlessly through the murky waters — is a truly terrifying nemesis that will haunt your players’ nightmares.

After one round in the tentacles’ grip, the features of the face are left crooked. After two, spun like a whirlpool. After three rounds, the face is polished away completely. The eyeballs are still in there somewhere, sunken beneath the surface.

Then, on top of all this, Brackish rounds things out by providing a custom soundtrack (that you can also use as a countdown clock for the flooding) and a bevy of print-and-play handouts for our players.

Very few published adventures reflect what my complex adventure prep actually looks like. Brackish does. Not because I’ve done something exactly like it — I haven’t! — but because Bell and Norgad have layered multiple scenario and scene structures together to create the desired situation and effect. It’s a technique that not only lets you prep and run complex scenarios with confidence, but delivers truly unique experiences — experiences like Brackish! — for the players.

GRADE: A

Go to Part 7: Rimbound Transmissions