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!

The Tempest Cluster was designed as the setting for my Mothership open table.

The Tempest Cluster is located in the Shakespeare Sector, its systems rimspin of the shattered, balkanized remnants of Terran Hegemony. It was previously two unconnected micro-clusters:

• Verstern, connected by a Jump-2 gate to the Oberson cluster
• Ariel and Hajar, connected by a Jump-4 gate to the Banquo cluster

Verstern lay on the edge of the Russo-Germanic Novikov Confederation. The isolated, low-value Ariel and Hajar systems were squabbled over by a variety of megacorp subsidiaries.

The lengthy Jump-1 route between Verstern and Hajar was accidentally discovered by a xenoarchaeology expedition, creating the unified Tempest Cluster. This created a minor trade route between the Oberon and Banquo clusters (albeit inhibited by the Jump-4 link to Banquo), but more importantly, the resources of the Hajar and Ariel systems were suddenly in demand on Katerineta, the old Verstern colony world.

The Tempest Cluster, however, remained an ill-visited backwater.

Everything changed, however, with the discovery of the Ternary – three systems directly linked via Jump-1 points, each with multiple worlds in the habitable zone. It was a massive colonization target – people and megacorp money began flowing into the cluster at an unprecedented rate.

This is the Tempest Cluster today: The fate of a dozen newborn worlds being written among the stars.

Because Jump-1 drives are more common, cheaper, and less prone to time dilation, space naturally becomes divided into clusters of systems connected by Jump-1 points. Galactic directions are divided into rim vs. core and trail vs. spin. Thus, “rimspin” is towards the edge of the galaxy and in the direction the galaxy is spinning.

TEMPEST STAR SYSTEMS

The Tempest Cluster has eight major systems and, of course, numerous dark systems, six of which lie along major trade routes.

Dark Systems: These intermediary systems along the cluster’s jump routes contain little of interest (or, at least, little that has yet been discovered). Ships mostly just pass through these systems on their way from one jump point to another, although there is a risk of pirates and the other horrors of rimspace.

ARIEL

The gateway to the Banquo Cluster, the Ariel system is a barren system. It has numerous dwarf planets in the outer system, but only two planets of note:

• Ariel I is a hot Jupiter which has gotten too close to the star. Its atmosphere is currently being ripped away. A deuterium plasma mining station operated by Salem-Watts called Hephaestus can be found within the “Roche river.”
• Ariel II is a gas dwarf. It also orbits relatively close to the star and has been stripped of its moons.

Prospero’s Dream, a station whose population has recently swelled to 5 million sophonts, orbits Ariel II. The station was dying before the Ternary was discovered, allowing the station to be taken over by the Golyanovo Bratva, a mafia with origins in the Oberon Cluster. The bratva has held onto control with the muscle of the Tempest Mercenary Company, although the rapid expansion of Prospero’s Dream is now taxing the station’s existence in different ways.

THE TERNARY

These recently discovered star systems are filled with colonization and terraforming targets. The resulting colony rush has only been accelerating as more terraforming projects come online.

• Parvati
• Vani
• Laxmi

The systems are named for the Tridevi — the three principle Hindi goddesses.

Pandora Station: Located in the Parvati system, Pandora Station is an infamous X-class “pleasure city” – the perfect place for the best shore leave of your life… if you can afford it.

Moons of Apsaras: Apsaras, a dark gas giant in the Vani system with an abnormally small magnetosphere, is orbited by multiple planet-class moons with terraforming potential.

HAJAR

The Hajar system recently (in astronomical time scales) had multiple terrestrial planets destroyed. (The current theory is that a rogue planet passed through the system. In addition to destabilizing some planets in its own right, it also caused the orbit of Hajar II, a super-Jupiter, to move inward, wreaking havoc in its wake.) This has resulted in multiple asteroid belts, several of which currently orbit at strange inclines to the planetary disk.

Generations of asteroid miners who have made Hajar their home are now having to contend with increased hypercorp interest in the system’s riches. There’s also been a significant uptick in piracy.

JADIS

On the far side of the Hajar system, Jadis is another newly discovered system with multiple terraforming targets. With so much focus already placed on the Ternary, development has been slow here.

The system is currently governed by the Jadis Terraforming Conglomerate (JTC), which is effectively controlled by the Alshaahin megacorp.

Imliq Station: The JTC is based out of Imliq Station, in orbit around a planet named Tasm.

Jadis is named after the “lost” Arabian tribes of Tasm and Jadis.

MRACHNI

Mrachni is a black hole orbited by numerous dead worlds, many of them ten or twenty times the size of Earth. A scattering of isolationists and scientific stations can be found throughout the system.

There are spacer tales of a fabled Eden — a habitable, Earth-like world hidden somewhere within the glare of Mrachni’s accretion disc, warmed by the blueshifted light of the cosmic background radiation. But no reliable evidence of such a place has ever been found.

VERSTERN

Verstern is a border system of the Novikov Confederation.

Katerineta is an old colony world with a population just over 1 billion. The equatorial region is too hot for human habitation, but both polar regions have been settled. The south lacks a continental mass and is referred to as the Archipelago.

LX-510 is a Class-B military port that has expanded to also support trade between the Oberon and Tempest clusters. It’s home to the Novikov Naval Eskadre (NNE) Volk 79, which is spread thin ostensibly providing anti-piracy patrols in the Verstern-Hajar corridor.

MEGACORPS

ALSHAASHIN (Royal Falcon): A terraforming megacorp based out of the Banquo Cluster. The clan-guilds of Alshaahin control the Jadis Terraforming Conglomerate (JTC), which governs the Jadis system.

SALEM-WATTS: A competing terraforming megacorp based out of the Oberon Cluster.

NAMIR-RADI: A hydra-headed hypercorp with multiple subsidiaries active in the Tempest Cluster.

CLOUDBANK: Cloudbank specializes in medicine, biotech, cyberware, androids, and artificial intelligence. They had a growing presence in the Tempest Cluster, but recently pulled out of the cluster entirely for reasons which remain largely unexplained.

Next: Designing the Tempest Cluster

Go to Part 1

Airlock is a series of systemless SF horror adventures created by James Floyd Kelly. I grabbed the first four in the series with an eye towards using them in my Mothership campaign.

All of the adventures in the series are two-page trifolds. The presentation is fairly standardized and they’re all designed with white text on a black, star-speckled background. The result is evocative, but not very friendly on the printer ink. (I actually jumped through some hoops to invert the files before printing them.)

(You may notice that the Mothership logo appears on the cover images for these adventures on DriveThruRPG, but they are definitely systemless and do not use Mothership’s mechanics.)

AIRLOCK #1: THE SIGNAL

The PCs are sent to pick up two data technicians from an isolated, long-term data vault being run by the Kars-Sundar corporation. When they arrive, however, they find one of the techs dead and the android survivor acting erratically. If the PCs investigate, they’ll likely discover that Abbi, the android, was corrupted by a distress call received by the station.

The concept is straightforward enough that you should be able to hack a playable experience out of this one, but The Signal is near-fatally flawed by its continuity being all over the place:

• Kars-Sundar is shutting down the long-term data vault… except then it isn’t any more.
• When the PCs find Abbi alive and Steven missing, Abbi tells them her fake story of what happened… unless it’s a significantly different fake story that’s only implied elsewhere in the adventure?
• As the crew arrives, a radiation storm will knock out the comms and prevent Abbi from exposing them to the Signal… but also she plays it for them when she first meets them.
• Is Abbi’s goal to reach the origin point of the Signal or is it just being randomly destructive and murder-y?

This adventure is supposed to have a direct connection to Airlock #2: Distress Call (which ostensibly takes place at the location where the Signal originated), but it turns out this just creates even more weird continuity glitches.

I’d like to say that all of this makes The Signal a kind of grab bag that a GM could pick elements from build their own version of the adventure. But it’s really just a vague, barely usable mess that becomes more confusing the more time you spend trying to unravel it.

What I want from an adventure – whether one I buy or one I prep myself – is rock solid continuity. I want to know exactly what the situation is, so that we can then inject the PCs into that situation and play to find out the result. So this one misses the mark pretty wide for me.

GRADE: D

AIRLOCK #2: DISTRESS CALL

Following some dubious experiments, the AI core of the Fractal Dream has taken over the ship and killed the crew. Unfortunately, this leaves the AI stuck in space, so it sends out a distress signal to lure in some suckers (i.e., the PCs). Now Katie, the AI, needs to take over the PCs’ ship so that it can escape.

…which would make sense if the crew of the Fractal Dream had managed to disable the ship’s engines before Katie took over. But they didn’t. Instead, shutting down the engine is something the PCs are expected to do.

Maybe the intention here is that Katie is just pretending to be stranded to lure in the unwary? But this would seem to contradict other sections of the text and it’s all very vague. In fact, the biggest problem here is that a lot of Distress Call is just waving generally in the direction of an adventure.

This also means that there’s a lot of blather on the page. For example, there’s four different paragraphs scattered around this two-page trifold, each explaining how Katie has broken free of her programming, is no longer bound by her safety restrictions, and so forth.

But because so much space is wasted on blather, it also means what should be the actual meat of the adventure is short-shrifted. For example, there’s a bit where Kelly writes, “Katie has plenty of offensive weapons – shocks via metal surfaces, electrical overloads, temperature control, and many more.” Many more? Thanks. That’s super useful. The adventure would be considerably better if a lot of its blather was placed with actually giving Katie a concrete, fully realized toolset of fun, dynamic actions the GM could deploy in response to the players.

What’s here isn’t really a firm foundation that you could use to build a playable version of the adventure. It’s more like a quick sketch of what a blueprint of that foundation might look like.

Expect to put a lot of work into this one.

GRADE: D-

AIRLOCK #3: CRYO – SWEET SCREAMS

Cryo: Sweet Screams is a really frustrating adventure to use. (Or, at least, try to use.)

First, the scenario is incorrectly sequenced. There’s a section called “Running the Scenario” which is positioned, on the page, to seemingly be read last, but which has essential information necessary to understand large swaths of the rest of the adventure. But, upon closer inspection, it turns out that reading this section first won’t work, either: There’s no correct reading order here. It’s just a big jumble.

The scenario also promises the GM certain tools, only to fail to deliver on them. Take the “Cast of Characters,” for example. It would be super useful to have this authoritative reference for each character in the adventure,  but it turns out that every single character write-up lacks the essential information for the character (e.g., “she’s the bad guy”).

Once I untangled the adventure, though, what I discovered was something that seemed hopelessly overwrought:

The PCs are sent to intercept and redirect a medical intervention ship whose comms array has been damaged.

But that’s not all! The corporation is also reprogramming the ship’s android to get up to mischief, and that obviously goes awry and causes the android to start acting erratic (as androids are wont to do).

But that’s not all! The android isn’t the real bad guy. The real bad guy is the human member of the crew, who has ALSO been infected with a (biological) virus that makes her a psychopath.

Even if you want to roll with this “it’s viruses rewriting personalities all the way down” premise, though, Cryo: Sweet Screams has deeper issues.

The crux of the adventure is, “Durden will slowly exhibit strange behavior once he wakes.” But what is this strange behavior? No idea.

Later, if the PCs watch the news and learn that the vaccination program at the ship’s last stop was botched, “this news will trigger actions in Durden and Talisha.” What are these actions? No idea.

Furthermore, the medical ship’s shuttle “will have some issues that need to be addressed by the crew.” This is, in fact, stated no less than three times across the six panels of the adventure, and the idea is that this will give the PCs something to do while the unspecified “strange behaviors” are happening.

But what are these tasks the PCs are supposed to do?

No idea.

GRADE: F

AIRLOCK #4: DEAD WEIGHT

I’ve concluded, after reviewing dozens of these adventures, that the trifold format is a tricky one. Creators really don’t seem to understand how to organize their information. The front page is often used as if it’s back cover text (which is kind of waste of space in a format where space is quite limited), and then, once you flip open the trifold, it’s a complete crapshoot which order you’re supposed to read the other five panels in.

Some creators seem to have decided to just wave the white flag and simply not include any sort of orientation for the GM. For example, no matter where you begin reading Dead Weight, the text will always just blithely assume that you know what a GH3 is.

If you, too, are wondering what they are, after trawling the text and reassembling the scattered bits of information thrown around with wild abandon, I’m fairly certain the answer boils down to, “A large tribble with legs and teeth.” The GH3s breed incredibly rapidly, and will quickly overwhelm any station or ship they find themselves on, rending every bit of flesh they can find along the way.

As another example of the white flag being waved, take the NPC named Mitchell. In one section he’s been placed in cryosleep. In another, there’s an offhand comment to him “having his own programming.” From this, I assume you’re supposed to conclude that he’s an android, but the adventure never actually says that. There’s a lot of this kind of stuff scattered around the text, creating countless booby traps and lacunae.

Taking a step back, the scenario hook for Dead Weight is that the PCs detect an intermittent signal coming from an abandoned space station which has drifted into deep space. When they board the station to claim the salvage rights, they awaken the GH3s, which have survived in a state of advanced hibernation.

The core premise seems to be that the PCs will conclude that it’s impossible to kill the GH3s faster than the GH3s reproduce! They’ll have no choice but to flee and/or blow up the station!

… except the reality is that the GH3s double their numbers every 8 hours. That’s quite aggressive for a biosphere, but rather less terrifying to a PC with a flamethrower. (In contrast, an ochre jelly in D&D is terrifying because it can split multiple times per round. If it, like the GH3s, split once every 8 hours, it would be considerably less intimidating.)

In fact, this is another example where it’s difficult to understand how the time scale of this adventure is supposed to work at the table: What are the PC supposedly doing during the hours and hours of time the GH3s need to become a meaningful threat? This is something you might be able to solve by prepping some time-consuming guidelines for how long it takes to effectively salvage the station – e.g., repairing thrusters takes 4 hours, etc. – but you’re really swimming uphill at this point to force this adventure into a satisfying experience at the table.

GRADE: D

Note: This adventure should not be confused with Dead Weight, an unrelated Mothership adventure written by Norgad, which I previously reviewed.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

There are a lot of problems with these Airlock adventures, and they’re pretty consistent throughout the series. The impression I’m mostly left with is that all of them are more like the concept of an adventure, each remaining, sadly, undeveloped in any meaningful way while the poorly organized trifold format is instead filled with vague, often directionless and repetitive blather.

I was really hoping that these were going to be great. I was very excited when I found the series, which has almost a dozen installments. I thought I’d found something that would keep my Mothership open table supplied with adventures for potentially months.

Unfortunately, I found these first four installments to be essentially unusable and I’ve given up on the series.

Go to Part 6: Three Zines

Go to Part 1

TURN BACK THE CLOCK

Turn Back the Clock by Kyle Tam is a thinly disguised roman a clef of Arthur C. Clarke’s and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The PCs receive a distress call sent from a ship thought lost for centuries: Mankind’s first expedition to Jupiter. It’s been knocked loose in time by the presence of the Star Child Flux Child. The original crew is experiencing Annihilation-like transformations, and if the PCs aren’t careful, they’ll similarly become lost in space and time.

Conceptually this seems really interesting. Unfortunately, it’s the execution that kills this one.

First, imagine adapting 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you aren’t really sure how to do that, so the structure of your adventure is just punching the Flux Child in the head until it’s “felled,” freeing you from the ship. But, also, that’s basically impossible because the Flux Child does 5d100 damage, has 20 maximum Wounds, and you forgot to include a Health score.

Second, I frequently found the text confusing. For example, “the crew is not technically in danger,” but they were currently fusing with the furniture and/or have pieces of their bodies falling off, plus they will shortly cease to be sentient. Hmm. I feel like I have a radically definition of “danger” than the author here.

Finally, there are more fundamental design problems here. For example, a core structure of the adventure is, “The longer you spend onboard the Charon, the more of yourself you lose. Each day, make a Sanity save or else roll on the [Distortion Table].” But the adventure is keyed as a pointcrawl with three briefly described areas.

This is a problem I frequently see in published adventures. I’ve discussed a similar problem in Running Background Adventures: There’s simply not enough narrative material to fill the time necessary to trigger this structure.

“Clarke’s Star Child does body horror” is a cool concept. But, sadly, there’s nothing on the page in Turn Back the Clock that I would actually use in bringing that concept to the table. This is a disappointing miss for me.

GRADE: F

The PCs are hired to pick up a secretive shipment from an automated shuttle. The only problem? An experimental combat drone – the Synthetic Predator 1^st Design, 3^rd Revision (or SP-1D3R) – has stowed away on the shuttle to escape the facility where it was being tested. Desperate for energy, it begins draining the power systems on the PCs’ ship.

This is another good concept with shaky execution.

Designer Nikolaj Gedionsen describes the adventure as “a claustrophobic game of cat-and-mouse aboard a failing ship where an intelligent machine predator turns the crew’s familiar home against them.” Which sounds great, but immediately runs face-first into a ship map that’s entirely linear. It’s hard to play cat-and-mouse on a balance beam.

The Plea also frequently relies on overriding or ignoring the core rules of Mothership. In my experience, this sort of thing doesn’t work because the players get frustrated at the bullshit “threat” that’s being arbitrarily thrust upon them.

The adventure includes its own mechanical superstructure in the form of a Power Drain system (modeling and tracking the SP-1D3R taking over and depleting the ship’s systems), but I have a difficult time believing it was ever playtested. The core of the system boils down to:

1. Start with 12 Power.
2. -1 Power when the drone connects to a system.
3. If the PCs power down a section, it can’t be Power Drained and also save 1 Power per turn.

The math just fundamentally doesn’t math here. Nonetheless, I’ve done several dry runs of the system using various interpretations of what it might have meant (did you mean -1 Power per turn? can the drone be attached to multiple systems simultaneously?) and it just doesn’t work.

All of these issues, I think, explains why a significant chunk of this adventure is a section called “The Vibe.” Ultimately, that’s a pretty good summary of The Plea: It’s a concept running almost entirely on vibes.

GRADE: D

TESSERACT

Pyry Qvick’s Tesseract initially threw me for a loop because (a) it’s called Tesseract (a cube extended into fourth-dimensional space in the same that a square is extended to become a cube in three-dimensional space) and (b) it features a bunch of non-Euclidean cube-shaped rooms. So my brain kept trying to make the adventure work as an actual tesseract… but it isn’t.

Which is OK. I mention this only in the hope it might help you avoid the same pitfall and get straight to appreciating just how cool this adventure is.

Things kick off in Tesseract like this:

Your ship passes a massive metallic cube. After a moment, your ship passes by a massive metallic cube. Again and again. Your navigation shows no progress made.

On the cube’s surface, a hatch opens.

Crawling inside the cube, you discover a dozen of the aforementioned cube-shaped rooms, all arranged on a map that makes it easy for you to run as the GM, but devilishly complex for the players to unravel. (If they ever do.)

The rooms themselves are consistently themed, but each one is varied and intriguing. In addition to the navigational puzzle of the non-Euclidean map, exploring the cube is also deeply satisfying because the rooms present an interconnected mystery that allows the players to slowly piece together what’s happening here (and, hopefully, undo it). This is very much the adventure that Turn Black the Clock wanted to be, but dropped the ball on.

Season to taste with the creepy cube-droids which infest the place.

The net result is a creepy, well-designed adventure I am sure will leave your players disoriented, paranoid, and thrilled.

GRADE: B-

Rather than the trifold modules we’ve been reviewing, Dead Weight by Norgad is a twelve-page micro-adventure.

The PCs are crewing a cargo ship when an alien artifact in one of the ship’s holds activates, causing all dead bodies in the area to rapidly accelerate towards. It starts with all the meat in the ship’s galley, which rips through the crew currently eating dinner. The dead bodies of the crew, of course, are added to the mass of meat and bone, which rip through the hull of the ship, causing lockdown and atmospheric pressure doors to trigger throughout the ship.

As the investigation and emergency repairs begin, a crew member mortally injured in the initial incident dies, inflicting more damage… and that’s when corpses start arriving from outside the ship. Can the PCs figure out what’s going on and jettison the artifact before the asteroid the artifact was taken from arrives and annihilates the ship?

The concept of Dead Weight is elegant in its horrific simplicity. The execution is simply beautiful.

Just look at this map:

(click for larger image)

Each of the vectors here show the trajectory of damage from the scripted meat projectiles, and you can see how simple it would be to draw your own vectors and immediately understand the resulting damage as events play out at the table. This map is simply fantastic as both a reference and a structure of play, and Norgad has also included player handouts (without the GM-only info) that you can print out for the players.

The ship key itself is equally polished: Nested descriptions make it easy to master the adventure, while creating satisfying layers of investigation for the PCs. Clearly delineated post-incident shifts in the room descriptions make it a breeze to keep the potentially complicated continuity and dynamic environments of the adventure crystal clear in play.

I have only one quibble with the whole package: It’s not immediately apparent why the adventure track ends with the asteroid 98-Gobstopper crashing into the ships. Careful reading suggests that the asteroid – composed of “banded layers of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and phosphorus, with some other trace elements” – is actually the compacted remains of the countless dead attracted by the artifact at the asteroid’s core. But it would have been friendlier to the GM to just spell that out.

This quibble, of course, scarcely detracts from the whole package. Dead Weight went straight into my open table rotation. I adore it.

Note: When you run your own session of Dead Weight, I recommend taking the time to frame up and play through more of the back story that sets up the First Projectile incident. These events are well detailed in the text of the module, but I think it will work better if the players actually experience those events for themselves and then see the payoff.

GRADE: B+

Go to Part 5: Airlock Series