As I’ve begun expanding my Mothership open table from sporadic one-shots to a jump-cluster with persistent continuity, the economy of the game has been giving me endless headaches.

PAY

A simple question, for example, would be: How much money should the PCs get paid for doing a job?

Unfortunately, the answers given in official books are vague, contradictory, and vary by multiple orders of magnitude for little or no apparent reason.

The Warden’s Operations Manual, for example, bases everything around the concept of salary.

• You calculate a monthly salary in credits based on what skills a PC possesses (e.g., 1,000cr/month for every Expert Skill). This generally results in a salary between 3,000 and 5,000 credits.
• Some jobs pay Hazard Pay, which is generally 2-3x your salary.
• You get a 1,000 credit bonus per Jump made through hyperspace.
• Pay might increase by 10% to 50% based on the crew’s rep, etc.

So the pay for jobs would be listed as “6 MOS SALARY” or “3 MOS SAL + JUMP PAY.” This would seem that most jobs would pay a few thousand credits.

This makes sense for regular employment, but gets pretty vague for a job like “assassinate the head of the Wittgenstein cartel.” (You also get some weird interactions with the default travel times in Mothership, which are a whole different issue.)

Which may be why none of the official adventures or supplements seem to use this system. Many don’t include details about pay at all, while those that do are all over the  place:

• Gradient Descent pays mostly in the form of retrieved artifacts, which generally range from 1,000,000 credits to 250,000,000 credits.
• Chromatic Transference: If you retrieve the McGuffin, you can earn 30,000,000 credits.
• Pound of Flesh: The Babushka offers jobs from 2,000 to 40,000 credits. Tempest Company offers jobs from 500 to 5,000 credits, but if you can earn a higher rank your jobs jump up to 50,000 to 500,000 credits. Canyonheavy missions range wildly from 10,000 to 750,000 credits, plus one big outlier at 30,000,000 credits.

And, of course, without any clear guidance from the official supplements, third party supplements are all over the place when it comes to pay.

Let’s rephrase the question as an order of magnitude. In general, should Mothership PCs be earning:

• Thousands of credits per job?
• Tens of thousands?
• Hundreds of thousands?
• Millions?
• Tens of millions?
• Hundreds of millions?

The answer, obviously, will have a profound effect on how the game plays. But, frankly, Mothership seems really uncertain about what the answer should be. Broadly similar jobs can pay radically different amounts of money.

COSTS

And it turns out that this is unsurprising, because the costs in the game are ALSO separated by orders of magnitude.

In the core game, there a few different categories of purchasable stuff.

Weapons range in price from 50 credits to 1,400 credits.

Armor ranges from 2,000 credits to 12,000 credits.

Equipment mostly ranges from 20 credits to 8,000 credits, with a few key exceptions:

• Exoloaders cost 100,000 credits.
• Jetpacks cost 75,000 credits.
• An organic pet costs 200,000 credits.

Starship supplies (fuel, etc.) seem likely to cost 50,000 to 500,000 credits. (I need to explore this a bit more.) The starships themselves can be hundreds of millions or even billions of credits, but these costs are far more likely to be handled through alternative systems rather than spending individual credits.

Contractors cost roughly 1,000 to 10,000 credits per month.

Shore Leave gets interesting, because the average cost basically steps up through orders of magnitude:

• C-CLASS — 1,000 credits
• B-CLASS — 10,000 credits
• A-CLASS —100,000 credits
• X-CLASS — 500,000 credits
• S-CLASS ­— 1,000,000 credits

Looking at these numbers, what becomes apparent is that there’s a roughly tiered experience here: In order for a group to be making choices about shore leave, for example, the need at least 10⁵ credits. If they have that much money, though, then decisions about basic equipment become essentially meaningless: They can trivially buy anything and everything they want.

And then there seems to be another tier at 10⁶ credits, where you can access top-tier shore leave and begin doing ship-ownership stuff.

A POUND OF FLESH

The A Pound of Flesh supplement adds several new categories of things you can buy: cyberware, slickware, and drugs.

The prices for drugs all hang out in the same range as basic equipment, but cyberware and slickware notably have prices that seem to be significantly divided by these tiers:

• 10³ credits: holoprojector, loudmouth, lumatat, prosthetic, slicksocket, tattletale, terminal jack, looky-loo, twitchbooster
• 10⁴ credits: big switch, deadswitch, fangs, handcannon, hotswap, huntershot, little switch, OGRE, panic button, panzerfist, revenant protocol, scapegoat system, god mode, espernetic feedback loop, holopet, vox box
• 10⁵ credits: retractable nanoblade, spidermount, spinal rig, machine code, sentinel system, skillslick (trained)
• 10⁶ credits: remote uplink, sockpuppet, subdermal armor, whiplash injector, skillslick (expert/master)

The biggest thing to note, I think, is that there doesn’t really seem to be a smooth spectrum of costs in these price lists. Rather, perhaps encouraged by the system denoting costs in cr, kcr, and mcr, there are distinct phase shifts.

CONCLUSIONS: SETTING JOB PAY

With all this in mind, my tentative conclusion is that we can break job pay into three echelons, each of which can be multiple by hazard pay.

Basic Jobs pay in the echelon of 10³ credits — roughly 1,000 to 10,000 credits. Hazard pay can multiple this base rate, though, to 10⁴ credits, up to 50,000 credits. At the low end, these jobs give you enough money to cover your costs and seek treatment for your wounds/stress. At the high end, after one or two of these jobs, you can probably buy a really nice piece of equipment.

Restricted Jobs pay in the echelon of 10⁵ credits — roughly 50,000 to 500,000 credits. Here you can start buying some really nice stuff, but you also start unlocking some really powerful character advancement options (training skills, better shore leaves, etc.). The trick is that you can’t just grab these jobs off the street: You need to unlock them in some way. That might mean gaining ranks in a mercenary outfit; earning a high enough reputation score; or just having the right connections.

Windfalls pay 1,000,000 credits or more. These might be rarely offered as jobs (to even higher ranks, etc.), but are more likely to be lucky opportunities PCs can stumble into or pursue (like the artifacts in Gradient Descent). This is the stuff that, literally, makes you a millionaire: There’s a thin layer of massive luxury goods that unlock at this level. This might also be the point where you can make a down payment on a ship. Retirement options (WOM 51) also unlock here.

(For both ships and retirement options, I want to give some deeper thought into how these could be made compelling and interesting options, particularly in an open table.)

OPEN TABLE

For my open table, I think this means I want to create a jobs board that includes a selection of basic jobs.

This jobs board represents the Phoenix Contracting Mesh, which will further divide these jobs into:

• Green List, which are simpler, safer jobs. In most cases, in fact, these jobs can be rapidly resolved, leaving enough time for another job to be selected for the evening. This allows cash-desperate PCs a pathway for earning the credits they need to, for example, treat their wounds.
• Green List – Complicated, which look like simple green list jobs, but when you deliver the mining equipment to Ypsilon-14 – whoops! Aliens!
• Black List, which are jobs offering hazard pay and incentive bonuses. These are more direct links to adventure content,

(I will likely also be adding Bounties to the board once the Wages of Sin supplement is released.)

To these basic jobs, though, I’m going to want to figure out how to add higher paying restricted jobs. I’m currently thinking this might include:

• Red List, which are jobs on the Phoenix Contracting Mesh jobs board that can only be accessed via a Reputation system. (You’d earn rep by successfully completing jobs, which also gives me an additional opportunity for rep-based incentives and/or complications.)
• Direct follow-ups, where being part of the team that completes one job may cause your employer to offer you a “follow-up” contract at higher pay.
• Patrons, which PCs might hook-up with in any number of ways. These might be independent employment offers, or maybe just personal relationships that unlock red list jobs that would otherwise require higher reputation scores.

Finally, windfalls will be scattered semi-randomly. I’m also planning to include Gradient Descent in the campaign, which would also give players the opportunity to proactively decide to seek windfall payments in an extremely hostile environment (and possibly without any guaranteed base pay?).

OPEN TABLE SALARY

The other thing I’ve been workshopping for my open table is salary.

By the book, salaries for starting characters are:

• Marine: 2,000 credits/month
• Android: 2,500 credits/month
• Scientist: 4,000 credits/month
• Teamster: 2,500 credits/month

In a standard Mothership campaign, I think the idea is that you earn this salary by taking jobs.

For my open table, on the other hand, I’ve been letting PCs earn their salary during downtime (with the assumption that they’re working various jobs between sessions). The problem is that, due to a confluence of factors (including how travel time is calculated in Mothership), the PCs are simply earning too much money: The multipliers yeet them straight out of the basic jobs tier, which rapidly causes the entire game table economy to collapse.

I’m pretty sure the solution (or, at least, the next thing I’m going to playtest) is to effectively reduce these salaries to 1/10^th their value:

• Marine: 200 credits/month
• Android: 250 credits/month
• Scientist: 400 credits/month
• Teamster: 250 credits/month

In practice, the character is still earning their fully salary, but most of it is being chewed up by basic living expenses (rent, food, etc.). (This is fairly similar to the guidelines on saving money, WOM 51.)

I might actually combine this with an actual Lifestyle system, but I think I’ll wait and see if these values are broadly working before adding another layer of complexity.

ADDITIONAL READING
Mothership: Thinking About Combat

(click for PDF)

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation.

Its calling card is an old school approach wedded to red hot innovation:

• Blazing fast character creation.
• Brutal systems for Combat and Stress.
• Tons of sandbox support and tools in the Warden’s Operation Manual (the GM book).
• An overwhelming amount of adventure support, including both first party books and a deluge of third-party support.

This last point, in particular, convinced me to make Mothership the basis for my current open campaign. Not only is there a ton of adventure support, a lot of it is designed so that you can spend 15 minutes reading through it and — presto! — you’re ready to go. My expectation is that I’ll be able to rapidly build a stable of adventures that will easily let me run the game with minimal or no prep.

I previously shared an alpha version of this cheat sheet. I’ve made a number of corrections based on your feedback, added additional rules (notable the rules for spaceships), and refined the content and presentation to reflect usage at the table.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

These cheat sheets are not designed to be a quick start packet: They’re designed to be a comprehensive reference for someone who has read the rulebook and will probably prove woefully inadequate if you try to learn the game from them. (On the other hand, they can definitely assist experienced players who are teaching the game to new players.)

The Mothership cheat sheet, in particular, works very well in conjunction with the GM screen(s) for the game, which are excellent. (There’s both a standard screen and a larger deluxe screen, which each come with the respective boxed sets.)

The cheat sheets also don’t include what I refer to as “character option chunks” (for reasons discussed here). In other words, you won’t find the rules for character creation here.

HOW I USE THEM

I usually keep a copy of the cheat sheet behind my GM screen for quick reference and also provide copies for all of the players. I have two copies of the Mothership rulebook at the table, too, but my goal is to summarize all of the rules for the game. This consolidation of information eliminates book look-ups: Finding something in a dozen pages is a much faster process than paging through hundreds of pages in the rulebook.

The organization of information onto each page of the cheat sheet should, hopefully, be fairly intuitive.

PAGE 1: Basic Mechanics and Violent encounters. (Most of the core game play loops are covered here.)

PAGE 2: Violent Encounters and the Threat System. (See below.)

PAGE 3: Survival. (Most of the miscellaneous rules in the game.)

PAGE 4: Ports & Medical Care. (Stuff to do in your downtime.)

PAGE 5: Ship Stats & Space Travel. (All the rules for operating ships except for ship-to-ship combat.)

PAGE 6: Ship Repairs & Contractors. (Not a big fan of these two sharing the same sheet, but they ended up being two half-pages without good companion pieces.)

PAGE 7: Ship-to-Ship Combat.

Having run character creation for Mothership a couple of times, the sheer speed at which it happens turns the limited number of rulebooks at the table into a significant choke point. I’m going to continue experimenting with how that should be handled, and probably trying to figure out which pages from the PDF need to be printed out to help everyone zip through. (I’ll report back when I know more.)

CRUXES

This cheat sheet has not quite reached its final form. There are still several elements I’m experimenting with. A few things to note:

First, these sheets include my personal house rules. With the exception of the Threat system (which I’ll discuss in a moment), these are marked in blue. Some of these are original rules, others overwrite the published rules. When I release the final version of the sheets, I may or may not do a version which is strictly the published rules of the game, but for now this is my working document and what I’m using at the table. If you want to strip these house rules out on your own, here’s a copy of the Microsoft Word file I used to create the cheat sheet so that you can easily edit it:

Mothership Cheat Sheet – Microsoft Word

Note that you’ll need to track down the relevant fonts.

Second, the sheet includes the Threat system, which I first discussed in Mothership – Thinking About Combat. Based on actual play, the system as presented here has received some refinement (and I’m still tinkering with it).

For the moment, this has also resulted in the “Violent Encounters” section of the cheat sheet appearing on both the first page (paired with Basic Mechanics) and the second page (where it appears with the Threat system for a complete combat reference). Partly this is because I’m still experimenting with the Threat system. Partly because I’m still trying to figure out the final layout of the sheets. And partly so that those not interested in the Threat system can simply remove that page of the cheat sheet and still have a fully functional packet.

I previously discussed an additional crux:

Androids & Oxygen: The rules state that androids don’t consume oxygen when life support systems fail, but there are separate rules for vacuums and toxic atmospheres (which require rebreathers or oxygen supplies). Should androids be affected by exposure to vacuum or toxic atmospheres? My ruling is No.

I have not included a resolution to this particular conundrum on the sheet. In my personal campaign, we’ve been developing a wide variety of androids and I’m still figuring out if different types will have different features and, if so, how they interact with things like the Atmospheres rules and hyperspace travel.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

These cheat sheets can also be used in conjunction with a modular, landscape-oriented GM screen (like the ones you can buy here or here).

Personally, I use a four-panel screen and use reverse-duplex printing in order to create sheets that I can tape together and “flip up” to reveal additional information behind them. (This simple sheet, however, will simply fit directly into the four-panel screen.)

I’ve been thinking about jump travel in Mothership. Here’s a quick summary, as described in the core rulebooks:

• Jump points are rated from Jump-1 to Jump-9.
• Utilizing a jump point requires a jump drive of equal to higher rating.
• For the crew of the ship, the jump always takes 2d10 days.
• Jumps usually seem to take the same amount of time for the rest of the universe, but each jump carries the risk of an unusual time dilation: Ships might disappear for months or even years instead of days.
• The longer/higher rated the jump, the more dangerous and severe the time dilation appears to be. It’s possible that some of the Jump-9 deep space exploration vehicles that have gone missing will reappear a thousand years in the future.

The rulebooks, however, leave these time dilation effects up to the GM’s discretion. I thought it might be useful to instead resolve the mechanically.

TIME DILATION

When a ship performs a jump, roll 1d10 per Jump rating (e.g., if a ship is making a Jump-3, roll 3d10).

For each 1 rolled on a d10, the actual trip duration increases by one step:

• days
• weeks
• months
• years
• decades
• centuries

If you’re making a standard Jump-1, you have a minimal risk of the trip taking 2d10 weeks instead of 2d10 days. If you attempt a Jump-3, on the other hand, there is a 1-in-1000 risk that you’ll roll three 1’s and return 2d10 years later.

Note: This does not change the subjective time experienced by the ship. For the crew, a jump trip seems to take 2d10 days, regardless of how much time passes in the wider universe.

Other Chaotic Effects: At the GM’s discretion, each 1 rolled on the time dilation check instead triggers a different chaotic effect. Examples might include:

• a crew member is replaced by a completely different person
• time dilation is inverted (the trip takes minutes or seconds instead of days) or reversed (they arrive before they left)
• subjective time experienced by the crew is dilated instead
• strange hallucinations or manifestations
• crew is unexpected awoken from cryosleep during the voyage
• the ship arrives in the wrong place

ASTRONAVIGATION

Calculating a jump requires an Intellect (Hyperspace) check. This check is made with [+} if the astronavigator remains awake during the jump, monitoring the astronavigation computers.

Success: You made it!

Critical Success: Roll one fewer d10 when making the time dilation check for the jump. For a Jump-1 trade route, roll 2d10 and only have the ship experience time dilation if both dice roll a 1.

Failure: Something goes wrong! The GM chooses one:

• Double the number of dice rolled for the time dilation check.
• The ship arrives in the wrong place. (1 in 10 chance you arrive back where you started after 4d10 days, having traversed a Calabi-Ricci spacetime loop.)
• The ship is damaged by jump turbulence, roll a Repair (SBT, p. 39).

Critical Failure: You could have killed us all! All three consequences of Failure happen simultaneously.

TRADE ROUTES

According to the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, “regular Jump-1 trade routes seem to wear down the chaotic effects” of jump travel. Navigational calculations become more precise with each additional jump that’s recorded along a route, and ships traveling through the jump point can effectively wear a “groove” into spacetime.

At the GM’s discretion, ships jumping along a route which has been “worn” by regular travel reduce the number of d10s rolled for the time dilation check by one. For a Jump-1 trade route, roll 2d10 and only have the ship experience time dilation if both dice roll a 1.

UNCHARTED JUMPS

Most interstellar travel happens along charted jump routes: Jump points that have well-plotted navigational solutions (even if they shift slightly due to stellar drift) and are known to be stable.

These are not the only jump points in space, however. Once you’re away from planets, asteroids, and stations, it turns out there are many unstable points in the fabric of space which are constantly being created, destroyed, and shifting according to complex spacetime geometries.

The GM determines the base Jump rating of the uncharted route. (This can usually default to the total value of all Jump-ratings along the known path from the current system to the destination system. For example, if you could normally get to the other system through a known Jump-1 route, the base Jump rating for an uncharted route would also be Jump-1. If you would normally need to make a Jump-1 followed by a Jump-3, then the base Jump rating for the route would be Jump-4.)

Plotting the uncharted jump requires an Intellect (Hyperspace) check. This includes identifying the location of the jump point you need to use, which you will then need to travel to (as shown on the table below). If you’re in the Inner System or in orbit around a planet, increase the time required by one step. (Weeks become months.)

Success: Add 1d2 to the base Jump rating. This is the Jump rating of the uncharted route, which is then resolved normally.

Critical Success: -1 to the base Jump rating (minimum 1). In addition, roll 1d10. On a roll of 1, the jump path you’ve discovered is a new stable route. (Depending on the value of the route, selling the location of this new jump point might be worth thousands or millions of credits.)

Failure: Add 1d5 to the required jump rating. If you roll 5, roll again and add the result to the jump rating. If the result is 10 or higher, you have been unable to find any jump points leading to your desired destination.

Critical Failure: You thought you could get from here to there via a safe jump, but you were very wrong. Your Astronavigation check automatically fails. In addition, determine the jump rating as per a Failure, but you attempted the jump no matter what the result is. If the result was higher than the rating of your Jump drive, your ship suffers 1d2 MDMG and emerges from hyperspace in a completely random and unexpected location. (This is a good way to end up adrift in interstellar space.)

In Mothership, armor is rated in Armor Points (AP). Any damage you suffer is reduced by your current AP. However, if you suffer damage equal to or greater than the Armor’s AP, then the Armor is immediately destroyed.

I’ve been running Mothership for a while, though, and I’ve decided I don’t like this rule. The primary problem is that damage values in the system are high enough that armor is almost always immediately destroyed in the first hit. The intention is almost certainly to crank up the feeling of horror (not even your advanced battle dress can save you now!), but in practice it just feels cheap and kind of confusing. I’ve had multiple players new to the system who become completely baffled the first time they go into a fight, because it just feels as if something is wrong.

I’ve begun using the house rule below in my Mothership games, and we’ve had some pretty good success with it. It maintains the imagery of xenomorphs and nanoplagues slowly ripping their way through a PC’s armor, but it extends the experience over several rounds (which gives really great vibes at the table) without making armor feel pointless.

(And it works the other way, too, with PCs needing to apply significant force over time to cut their way through enemy AP!)

If you use these rules, let me know how it goes! I’m planning to continue tweaking these.

HOUSE RULE: ABLATIVE AP

If a character wearing armor takes damage equal to or greater than their AP value (including Cover), their armor becomes damaged and the AP of the armor is reduced by 1.

The armor is permanently destroyed if its AP is reduced to 0.

ANTI-ARMOR: An anti-armor weapon ignores AP. It automatically reduces AP by 1 on any hit and by an additional 1 point if it deals damage equal to or greater than the character’s AP value. On a critical hit, anti-armor weapons instantly destroy any armor, regardless of its AP value.

REPAIR: Damaged armor can be repaired with appropriate facilities for half the original cost of the armor.

Note: This rule does not apply to Cover. Cover is still immediately destroyed if an attack deals damage equal to or larger than the Cover’s AP rating.

Go to Part 1

THE THIRD SECTOR

I really love the concept of Ian Yusem’s The Third Sector: Take a dozen different third-party Mothership adventures and weave them together into a sandbox spanning five solar systems. Hypothetically you should be able to do some light remixing, add a little connective tissue, and have a great little campaign-in-a-box showcasing the best of the best.

Unfortunately, The Third Sector really shouldn’t have been packaged as trifold module.

The limited space of the trifold format lends itself to material which is either too brief or broad. But the work required to coherently bind disparate published adventures together is, in fact, entirely in the details.

The two central pillars of The Third Sector are the sector map and the scenario hooks added to each adventure.

The sector map is attractive in a retro, 8-bit-graphics style, but curiously lacking a lot of pertinent details (e.g., the names of planets).

The scenario hooks are designed to link the adventures to each other (so, for example, you’ll find hooks in the Green Tomb that will lead you to Moonbase Blues, Alcor Station, and Echoes in the Graveyard). A minor problem here is that the section is incomplete, with some of the scenarios not receiving scenario hooks for reasons which are entirely unclear to me.

A more significant problem is that most of the scenario hooks are either unengaged (they mention a place exists, but gives no reason for the PCs to go there), non-actionable (they indicate that a place exists, but don’t tell the PCs how to find it), or both. This is likely, once again, due to the limited space, since vague references are easier to squeeze into a single sentence than meaningful, actionable information.

Probably the most interesting thing in The Third Sector is the random encounter which reads, “[Corporation] acquired [other corporation]. (Choose 2 from random adventures each time rumor rolled.”) This is an intriguing procedural method for unifying the disparate hypercorps found scattered throughout the source adventures over time.

In practice, though, that unification — and not just of  hypercorps — is exactly the sort of considered, careful, creative work that would have made The Third Sector a truly useful resource.

GRADE: F

WRATH OF GOD

Wrath of God is another example of a supplement that’s just trying to cram WAY too much into the trifold format. In this case, that includes:

• A complete skirmish system for space fighter combat.
• A hex-based Battlefield map keyed with various Locations of Interest.
• A prequel to a longer adventure called The Drain.

In this case, the result is basically incoherent. I’ve been backwards and forwards through Wrath of God and I honestly don’t have the slightest inkling of what this adventure is supposed to be.

For example, in the skirmish system includes a Skirmish Map keyed with symbols, but what these symbols mean (if they mean anything) doesn’t seem to be indicated. The Battlefield Map similarly has a bunch of symbols, although most of these seem to be related to the content keyed to these hexes… except not all such hexes are keyed. (Although some of the unkeyed hexes are referenced in other keyed hexes, which is an insanely confusing layout that I can only imagine is due to the space limitations unnecessarily imposed by the trifold format here.)

I also only have the vaguest sense of what the Battlefield Map represents. Maybe it’s a war currently being fought? Or many wars currently being fought? Or the wreckage of older wars?

There are Bogeys who will attack the PCs. But… why? And who are they, exactly? Where did they come from? Where are they going? Your guess is as good as mine.

“Okay,” I think. “This is a prequel to The Drain. So maybe I need that full adventure to understand this one.”

Unfortunately, no, that doesn’t help. Because (a) it turns out that Wrath of God doesn’t seem to actually sync up with The Drain and (b) nothing is actually explained. The PCs are seeking the 3^rd Testament, which is apparently a radio broadcast being sent from a colony called Within Wheels. What is the 3^rd Testament? No idea. Why is the colony transmitting it? No idea. How are they transmitting it? Possibly from something called the Grail. How’d the Grail get there? Stop asking questions, please.

GRADE: F

WHAT STIRS BELOW

Something has gone wrong at a geological survey station and the PCs are dispatched to (a) figure out what happened and (b) rescue as many VIPs as possible.

What Stirs Below includes a helpful What The Hell Is Going On? section:

There is an ancient power station deep below the surface. A skeleton crew of ancient aliens uses giant worms to generate energy and sustain the crew’s near-immortality. With enough power generated, this moon will depart on a 10k-year interstellar journey toward Earth… or whatever is a good fit at your table.

It’s a cool concept, which is unfortunately held back from its potential by a number of problems.

First, and probably most intractable, is that the size of the adventure doesn’t match the scope of the adventure. There’s this implication of a huge, hollowed-out moon filled with aliens preparing for some sort of multi-millennia odyssey… but a nine-room location-crawl can’t really deliver on that promise.

This kind of size/scope mismatch is not uncommon in RPG adventures, and I find that they consistently create a mixture of disappointment and confusion in players, while pushing me into a weird, dissociated fugue state between what the adventure actually is and what it’s asking me to convey.

Second, there are a number of execution issues which will leave you confused and disoriented:

• The map of the adventure has a literal ? where a room should be, and I simply can’t figure out why.
• The survey station has been destabilized by the tunnels below the station collapsing, which has created a sinkhole the PCs can use to access the alien chambers. This sinkhole is located… somewhere? The adventure never seems to specify.
• The adventure key is filled with typos. For example, Area A5 has an exit that leads to… Area A5? (I think the rooms were renumbered on the map at some point and the key wasn’t correctly updated, but I’m not 100% sure.)
• There’s an android who, Alien-style, will attempt to impede the PCs’ investigation and even “self-destruct if necessary.” But… why? No explanation is given.

Related to these issues, the PCs are instructed to determine what happened at the station, but I honestly can’t even figure that out for myself: It’s not clear what (if anything) triggered the geological collapse. It’s not clear what any of the NPCs did in the aftermath of the collapse or what the timeline of events was. It’s not even clear why the hypercorp lost contact with the NPCs and needed to send the PCs.

The end result is an adventure that’s… mostly OK. But I would probably end up completely re-keying the entire thing before I would feel comfortable running it.

GRADE: C-

THE HORROR OF TAU SIGMA 7

A routine system survey has detected the signature for the rare mineral NM-109 on Tau Sigma 7. The PCs are sent in as a survey team to confirm the presence of the mineral.

What they discover, while exploring a nearby cavern, is an alien bioplastic cyst-complex which is an untriggered hatchery for a long-extinct alien species. (It sure would be a pity if the PCs accidentally triggered the birthing process, wouldn’t it?)

In The Horror on Tau Sigma 7, D.G. Chapman delivers a creeptacular location-crawl. The excellently xandered, truly three-dimensional environment and accompanying key would be strong enough to recommend this adventure entirely on their own merits, but he also spikes the punch with several scenario-spanning elements:

• The entire complex is a living organism, and responds to the PCs’ presence and actions through an Immune Response Level that escalates and transforms the adventure.
• The complex is suffused with a strange, red liquid referred to as Lifeblood. Essential to the alien biology, it creates numerous strange effects (particularly to exposed PCs).
• Strange cave paintings can be found throughout the complex, which change and evolve as the Immune Response Level increases.

The result is fabulous. I highly recommend inviting your players to Tau Sigma 7.

GRADE: B+

CHILDREN OF EDEN

Graham T. Richardson fills Children of Eden to the gills with an astoundingly rich assortment of alien and exotic worldbuilding: The 200+ meter-tall teralith; an alien skeleton worshiped by the Children of Eden as a god. The Salvage Seal, where a gravitational anomaly yanks vessels out of hyperspace and crash lands them on a fungi-ridden planet. The corrupted Theogeny Engine, an alien terraforming ship buried near the teralith which has recently reactivated, leading to the religious belief that the teralith itself is miraculously transforming a wasteland into paradise. A ruined scientific research center trying to probe the truth of this strange terraforming.

And all of this is supported by a rich cast of characters and a disquieting mystery occluded by a hypercorp’s desire to exploit and religious zealots’ desire to believe.

It’s truly amazing just how much richly detailed and soul-searingly evocative material can be found on these two pages. It’s simply inspiring. Richardson creates a vivid world that compels you to share it with your players.

My only real complaint is that there’s so much stuff in Children of Eden that the connective tissue between all of these elements is often obscured. It can be a little unclear exactly where stuff is in relation to each other, for example, which can make it difficult to figure out how you should be presenting this rich world to the players. There are just places where I’d probably be a little happier if the implied setting was a little more explicit and, therefore, easier to access during play.

To at least some extent, though, this is just grousing over having too much of a good thing. I’ll happily draw up a map, work up a timeline of events, and jot down a revelation list to help keep things clear at the table if it means that I can visit the Children of Eden.

GRADE: B

Note: LionHearth Games provided me with a review copy of Children of Eden.