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

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

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

ORIENTATION

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

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

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

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

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

ORIGINAL INTENTION

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

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

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

PROBLEMS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STOPGAP SHORE LEAVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CURRENT INTENTIONS

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

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

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

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

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

The Tempest Cluster was created to be the setting for my Mothership open table. This is a peek behind the curtain for my setting prep.

When I first sat down to design the cluster, I knew a few things:

• As an open table, the PCs would have a home base — a point from which essentially every session would begin.
• I’d read several Mothership adventures, and had a short list of scenarios that I already knew I wanted to use. (This gave me some guidance what the cluster would need so that I could place those adventures.)
• Mothership requires a setting to have some specific infrastructure to work (e.g., ports for shore leave).

I got started with a short brainstorming session, just listing some cool ideas and broad concepts for star systems and planets that I thought would be interesting (or were dictated by the things I already knew the cluster would need). Then I laid that sheet of paper to one side and grabbed two more blank sheets. On one of these I began sketching jump node maps and on the other I started naming and listing features for specific systems.

I knew I wanted to keep the scale of the cluster relatively small. First, if travel time became too large, it would cause problems with keeping the PCs in sync. More importantly, I know that layering material is more effective than dispersing it: It’s more interesting to put three adventures on the same moon and see what happens when their concepts start bumping into each other than it is to, for example, create a whole new system for every adventure.

On the other hand, I wanted the cluster to be large enough that some stuff would be near to the PCs’ home base and other stuff would feel far away. It helped when I realized that, since the nature of the cluster would naturally constrain the open table, I could place the PCs’ home base at one end of the cluster (in what would end up being the Ariel system) and immediately create a “far end” (in the Verstern system). This is also the origin for the Long Road, the series of dark systems between Verstern and Hajar:

There were originally several more dark systems in the Long Road, but they ended up making travel from Ariel to Verstern to lengthy and I needed to adjust it. (In much the same way that I often let players make adjustments to their characters after the first couple sessions of a campaign, I also won’t hesitate to do some quick setting retcons if we discover something isn’t working in actual play.)

HERE THERE BE DRAGONS

I also deliberately DIDN’T fully flesh out every detail of the setting. For example, I could’ve gone through and said things like, “Hajar has exactly nine planets. Hajar-I is a super-Jupiter. Hajar-2 is a small terrestrial planet. Hajar-3 is an all-water planet, and between Hajar-2 and Hajar-3 there’s a binary pair of dwarf planets.”

Filling in concrete details like this can lead you to discover interesting stuff about your setting, but at this early stage I generally prefer to sketch in enough detail to give everything a unique character — Hajar has multiple asteroid belts; the Ternary is filled with lots of Earth-like planets; Mrachni is a black hole — but leave a lot of blank spaces where I can plug stuff in later.

For example, I’ve recently been reading Joel Hines’ Tide World of Mani and Desert Moon of Karth, a pair of linked planet supplements. If I’d already detailed every planet in every star system of the cluster, I’d either be unable to use these supplements or I’d need to open up a new jump point and expand the cluster. Instead, looking around, I can see that there’s plenty of room in the Laxmi system. (I’d previously placed a different adventure in that system, which established that the two major terraforming megacorps are engaged in a large campaign of espionage and sabotage there. So it’ll be really interesting to weave the politics of Mani and Karth into that conflict.)

Similarly, I also left the precise history of the Tempest Cluster rather nebulous. This is somewhat unusual for me, as I often enjoy exploring and developing a setting through its history, but in this case I wanted to let things cook a little longer before nailing down dates to things. (Part of this was also that I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to handle the calendar yet.) After about a dozen sessions of play, however, I ended up with some tangles of continuity — between character backgrounds, scenario setup, and player questions — that needed specificity to work out. My current timeline, therefore, looks like this:

• 90 Years Ago: The Long Road discovered between Verstern and Hajar.
• 80 Years Ago: KAS operations in the cluster abruptly come to an end.
• 25 Years Ago: Golyanova Bratva takes over Prospero’s Dream.
• 15 Years Ago: Ternary discovered.
• 10 Years Ago: Jadis discovered.
• 2 Years Ago: Cloudbank pulls out of the Tempest Cluster.

As you can see, this is still pretty barebones, but it’s enough to make sure that historical cause-and-effect stays consistent. (KAS can’t shut down before they discover the Long Road; the Bratva needs to take over Prospero’s Dream before the Ternary is discovered. And so forth.)

A key question for me in setting these dates was how long the “land rush” in the Ternary had been going on. I wanted it to be recent enough that I could justify having whole new worlds which had been barely been touched, but also long enough that if I had a “colonists have been here awhile and then things went to shit” scenario, then I could slot that in.

Note that leaving room for the adventures you haven’t dreamt of yet means (a) leaving undefined space, but also (b) making sure you’ve got the broad conceptual scaffolding. For example:

• An adventure set on an asteroid? I’ve given myself both the debris fields of Mrachni and the multiple asteroid belts of Hajar.
• Urban adventures? Katerineta is an older colony world with established cities, etc.
• Colony worlds? Gave myself a lot of conceptual space for this.

In many cases, I’ll try to give myself a couple different options. As continuity begins accumulating around one option, it may box other stuff out, so it’s nice to have a fallback.

My inclusion of dark systems also plays a part here: If I ever need more space… well, I guess one of those undefined dark systems actually has some interesting stuff in it!

Of course, not everything needs to be (or should be!) left a cipher. Where you need or want detail, don’t hesitate to lock it down. For example, I knew that I wanted the Ariel system, where the PCs’ homebase would be located, to be fairly barren (as a contrast to all the exciting places they’d travel to). So in this case I did describe and define all the extant planets in the system.

MEGACORPS

Having multiple megacorps in the cluster similarly gives me options: If a particular mission, project, colony, or facility doesn’t feel right for one megacorp, I can assign it to another. Plus, with multiple megacorps in play, I can have them in conflict with each other, and all kinds of adventure scenarios can spill out of that conflict.

From the beginning, I knew that I wanted two megacorps fighting over colonization and terraforming in the cluster. I’d created the name Salem-Watts when I wrote up the description of pseudomilk predators last year: They ran the Kikkomari V colony. I briefly played with the idea of including the Kikkomari system in the Tempest Cluster, but ultimately decided it would instead exist “offstage” in the Oberon Cluster.

Meanwhile, I’d used Behind the Name to generate some names, and that pushed me into Arabic influences for the Hajar and Jadis systems. (I can’t actually reproduce the steps that led me to Tasm and Jadis, but that’s the fun part of going down the research rabbit hole.) The Alshaahin megacorp, with its operations based out of Imliq Station (named after a king of Jadis), flowed pretty smoothly from this.

I added Namir-Radi as a sort of catch-all megacorp for any projects that didn’t fit Salem-Watts or Alshaahin. This has inadvertently, and largely through coincidence, caused it to become the most prominent megacorp in the campaign so far.

The last megacorp, Cloudback, is taken from the Gradient Descent adventure, which I’m planning to incorporate into the open table. My original plan had been to swap out the name “Cloudbank” for one of the other megacorps, but I wasn’t sure which one, so I decided to put a pin in it. Before I had a chance to circle back to that, however, one of my players rolled up an android character and, in exploring their background, I ended up invoking the name Cloudbank.

This turned out to be fortuitous, however, because it led me to develop the “Cloudbank mysteriously pulled out of the cluster two years ago” concept, which has created some low-level intrigue for the players who are paying attention and is also beginning to spin off a lot of ancillary developments that are really interesting, too. (For example, what happens when the megacorp who was providing hospital services to new colony worlds suddenly shuts down all the hospitals?)

CHARACTER BACKGROUNDS

This touches on something else I think about when developing a new setting: I want enough context that we can hang PC backstories off it. Furthermore, I’ve learned the power of being able to give players a couple different choices.

Player; I’m playing a Marine.

GM (Me): Okay, there are a couple military outfits in the cluster. First, there’s the Tempest Mercenary Company. There’s also the Novikov Naval Eskadre based  out of the Verstern system.

For an open table like this, what I’m usually doing is asking for an initial concept pitch (“Tell us about your character”) and then following up by either (a) taking a general idea (“I think I came here to do scientific research”) and making it specific (“you could’ve been working for Namir-Radi”) or (b) prompting them with a question (“if you came out here to research terraformed biomes, how did you end up bumming jobs on Prospero’s Dream?”).

Even with this limited background development, it’s remarkable how much it can end up driving the development of the settings (like the example of Cloudbank spinning off in a completely unexpected direction because someone happened to roll up an android).

PROSPERO’S DREAM

Using Prospero’s Dream as the home base for the open table was a gut instinct. Reading A Pound of Flesh, the supplement where the station was first detailed, I was really intrigued by the three phased fronts and how they’d been cleverly integrated throughout the book to create a palpable sense of passing time and escalating stakes. I saw the contours of how I could bootstrap that structure into an open table to potentially create something really cool, but I knew it would only work if the PCs were based out of the station.

We haven’t played enough to be sure how all that will turn out, but the initial results have been really promising.

On the other hand, having a space station with a population of 5 million as a home base for the campaign also forced me to confront a lot of issues with Mothership (like shore leave being classified by port type, which bizarrely means Prospero’s Dream has no dive joints) sooner rather than later.

The layout issues with A Pound of Flesh (pink text on a pink background?!) also make it incredibly unfriendly to use at the table. I have “completely reorganize all this information so that it’s not a headache to use it” on my To Do list.

TO DO

Speaking of my To Do list, this write-up of the Tempest Cluster is very much a beginning, not an end. My own version of the document has already expanded quite a bit as I add emergent details from character backgrounds (“kinfolk mines? interesting…”) and cross-reference scenario notes (Nirvana is one of the moons of Apsaras; Ypsilon-14 is located in the Hajar system; etc.).

But, as I talk about in So You Want to Be a Game Master, one of the great things about this initial setting write-up is that it also doubles — with little or no change — as a setting briefing for the players that I could post to our Discord.

(In practice, at an open table, many players nevertheless won’t have the opportunity/time to read it. So I have a five-minute spiel for new players sketching in the broad outlines of the cluster, which I can then flesh out with additional details as they roll up their characters.)

Some of the stuff on my lengthy To Do list dates back to when I originally wrote the setting up (stuff that I knew I would need to add at some point), while other needs and opportunities have been discovered through play. Examples of stuff I need/want include:

• A menu of shore leave options that the PCs can choose during downtime.
• Exotic shopping options, where the PCs can seek out non-standard equipment.
• Alphanumeric codes for the dark systems (KU-2B, KU-17, etc.) for easier referencing and keying.
• Name lists for the major cultural groups in the cluster.
• Name the spurs of Prospero’s Dream for easier referencing/keying. (Possibly add urbancrawl layers.)
• Figure out exactly how the NNE Volk 79 security patrols along the Long Road work.
• Where is the Stratemeyer Syndicate?

At the moment, pure worldbuilding stuff — no matter how interesting — is largely backlogged behind finetuning my open table procedures (downtime, life events, job board, journeys, etc.) and scenario prep. So my setting notes are largely only getting expanded as those needs dictate.

Honestly, this is how I do most of my worldbuilding. Every so often inspiration will strike and I’ll start exploring the setting out of pure curiosity, but for the most part I’m designing stuff for play and letting the setting slowly accrete over time.

Which also means that I have only the slightest inkling of what the Tempest Cluster will look like a year from now. Particularly since, if all goes well, the players will begin having larger and larger effects on the state of the world.

And given that this is Mothership, the whole place might have been eaten by an Elder God or invaded by time-traveling aliens unwittingly released by the PCs.

MORE MOTHERSHIP
Mothership Review: Adventure Sphere
Mothership Review: Trifold Adventures
Mothership: Thinking About Money
Mothership: Thinking About Combat
Untested Mothership: Astronavigation
Untested Mothership: Ablative AP
Mothership Monsters: Pseudomilk Parasites & Predators
Unboxing Mothership!