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DINOPLEX CATACLYSM

It’s Jurassic Park, but on a space station!

This is a cool idea for an adventure, but this scenario is, unfortunately, sabotaged by lackluster execution.

For example, there’s a player handout designed as a kid’s activity game where they’re supposed to find all twelve dinosaurs in the Dinoplex! If they can find them all, they get a free sticker set! But there aren’t twelve types of dinosaurs in the adventure. Even if you include the wooly mammoths and sabretooths which, despite the adventure’s claims, are clearly not dinosaurs, there’s still only eleven creatures listed. I really want this to be something clever – are they supposed to count Tony the T-Rex, the park’s mascot, as a separate dino? is the task deliberately impossible so the park never needs to give the kiddies their sticker sets? – but I’m pretty sure it’s just a mistake.

The adventure primarily consists of six park zones, each given a brief description, a list of attractions, a list of “dinosaurs”, and a one sentence description of how everything is changed “post-disaster.” I can hazard a few guesses on how this material could be used to actually run the adventure – a sector crawl seems like a good fit? but the park map is a hexmap, so maybe per-hex random encounter checks? – but at a certain point I’m no longer really describing the published adventure.

Dinoplex Catalcysm also briefly flirts with the idea that the resort could be used as a shore leave location, possibly more than once, before the disaster strikes. Since taking shore leave is a central mechanic in Mothership, required for characters to recover and advance, this is a very clever idea that could really give the scenario some extra punch. Unfortunately, it’s not actually developed into something useable: First, it’s not integrated into the actual shore leave mechanics. Second, the pre-disaster amusement park activities are largely not interesting enough to support any meaningful spotlight during actual play.

The same problem is found in the meat of the scenario: The post-disaster details of the park are simply too shallow, in my opinion, to support meaningful play. The fundamental details of the park are also too sketchy, with, for example, tundra environments requiring specialized cold weather gear being located a couple hundred meters from humid swamps with no explanation beyond possibly a vague wave in the direction of a “weather system.” Even the “disaster” which triggers the adventure is a headscratcher. I actually missed it entirely during my first read-through of the adventure because it’s hidden away as a single sentence in a sub-bullet point.

Ultimately, this seems to be more the concept of an adventure than an actual adventure.

GRADE: D

YEAR OF THE RAT

The PCs are sent to retrieve the black box from a curiously nameless casino ship that went missing a month ago. Unbeknownst to the former owners or the insurance company looking to avoid a costly payout, the ship has become infested by a rat-like alien species.

The adventure primarily consists of a one-page map-and-key spread detailing the ship. This has some really nice details, although the ship consisting of only a single two-dimensional deck feels a little wonky.

An important note: Although at first glance this appears to be formatted as a trifold module with six panels of information, for some inexplicable it’s not actually designed to be folded into a pamphlet. So if you do, in fact, print the adventure, fold it up, and attempt to read it, you will be very confused.

This disorientation is not helped by a layout which is clearly more interested in looking “cool” – with lots of graphical artifacts, “dirt,” and the like — than being usable or even legible.

Also worth being aware that, since the PCs will be looting a casino ship, their payout from this job is quite likely to be incredibly large. (And that’s before factoring in the insurance company’s payment to the PCs being salvage rights for the entire ship… which doesn’t quite make sense to me. You might also want to interrogate the logic of “ship went missing, here are the coordinates where it’s located” before running this.)

Despite a few rough edges, though, Year of the Rat is a solid adventure that can be a lot of fun in play. The rat-like aliens are, of course, the stars, and they can be a wonderful change of pace in a long-running Mothership campaign: Creepy, varied, and interesting, but also an infestation that the PCs can actually triumph over and clear out.

GRADE: B

MITOSIS: ESCAPE FROM STAR STATION

At a cutting-edge research station, a bacterial and/or viral outbreak causes some humans to mutate into either Lethian Braniacs or Cyberviral Goons. These mutants seem to have formed gangs and divided the station between them. Oat milk inhibits the Braniacs, but causes the Goons to go berserk. Walnut oil has the opposite effect.

There’s a map that’s very difficult to read, with lots of symbols that are unexplained. There’s a random encounter table consisting of either goons, brainiacs, or goons AND brainiacs.

The key for Area 0 seems to suggest that the PCs are pirates who were captured and then locked up in the prison and then their pirate captain promised escape, but the escape never happened, and also the captain (who they might meet later) doesn’t seem to know who they are.

To be honest, there’s like five different things going on in Mitosis: Escape From Star Station, and none of them are properly explained. This includes the nature, reason, and timeline of the outbreak itself, with just a vague reference to the “Mitosis-bacteria breach” and the “Mitosis-bolstered cybervirus.” (But also “Mitosis” is a board game that was being played in the cafeteria?) The color version of the module is also essentially unintelligible, although thankfully a black-and-white version is included.

What little coherency I can piece out from the text seems more like a parody of Mothership than anything else. There is a zany, schlock horror that seems promising if the idea of playing through a movie that Mystery Science 3000 would mock is appealing to you.

But, particularly at $6, I really can’t recommend this one.

GRADE: F

SO YOU’VE BEEN CHUMP-DUMPED

This is an odd adventure because the title and pitch — while being quite evocative! — really have nothing to do with the actual adventure.

The pitch is:

A cheap Jump-1 ticket? You thought you got lucky.

Now, stuck in the airlock with the other marks, you couldn’t feel lower. Then the warning lights flash. You hear a loud clunk, and your stomach sinks. In a blink, you’re all gulped into the nothing beyond with a brief whoosh.

Stars spin as you tumble through space, screaming promises of violence upon the friend who said they knew the perfect guy, who turned you into a doomed chump. The sounds just rattle around inside your helmet. Your only hope is this vaccsuit you were lucky enough to save for, or inherit, or steal and paranoid enough to don before leaving solid ground.

I was really intrigued by this! A unique survival scenario with vibes similar to Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity? In addition to the proposed jump-travel scam, you could imagine whipping out this adventure in any number of situations: Things go wrong for the PCs when pirates board their ship! A catastrophic hull breach! The only way to kill the alien horror is by blowing the airlock!

How will the PCs survive?!

Unfortunately, it turns out that this isn’t the adventure So You’ve Been Chump-Dumped delivers. Instead, the answer to, “How will the PCs survive?” is, “They immediately bump into a covert science vessel where an alien experiment has recently escaped confinement.”

How convenient.

It turns out, though, that this other adventure is really quite good. The adventure key describing the ship is colorful and engaging. The alien organism is creative and dynamic, driven by procedural generators that will create a unique playing experience for every group.

Other than the bait-and-switch, my only real quibble is the adventure map, which supposedly depicts the deckplans of the science vessel:

I’m obviously not opposed to a good pointmap, but this one is abstract to the point where it becomes impossible to actually describe the ship to my players. There are also some rather key questions raised by this map — like what, exactly, is the nature of these hallways? and what’s going on with this random vent system? — that I think you’ll want to straighten out before running this one.

I’ll definitely be drawing up a version of that map for myself soon, though, because So You’ve Been Chump-Dumped is definitely going into my open table rotation.

GRADE: B-

Go to Part 3

I’m a big believer in open and community licenses that allow third-party creators to publish and sell adventures and supplements for RPGs. Aesthetically, roleplaying games are not just artistic works in their own right; each RPG is a unique medium for creating new works. It’s good for society itself for these mediums not to be encumbered and stifled.

And from a practical standpoint, third-party content is of huge value to the original IP creator. Fears of competition have long since been shown to be irrelevant, as the primacy of the official, first-party content remains supreme among players and GMs. On the other hand, an RPG — much like a computer operating system — gains an immense commercial benefit from having a large and robust library of compatible support material: Each third-party supplement is an opportunity to capture the imagination of a gamer and propel them to the gaming table, which in turn exposes even more players to the game, driving both sales and gaming in a virtuous cycle.

The problem, unfortunately, is that most third-party licenses in the RPG industry have failed. Third-party supplements will generally only sell a small fraction of what first-party supplements will sell; and most first-party supplements only sell to a small fraction of the people who bought the rulebook and/or are playing the game. For third-party publishers to find success, therefore, the RPG they’re supporting needs to already have a very large audience — an audience so large that a fraction of a fraction of that audience is large enough to make a third-party supplement profitable.

And the reality is that the vast majority of RPGs — even those you likely think of as being big success stories — simply don’t have a large enough player base.

As a result, most third-party licenses simply fail. Most of the “success” stories revolve around games with enthusiastic hobbyist designers creating stuff for the love of the game. And good for them! But the games which have managed to create truly professional and thriving third-party markets can almost certainly be counted on the fingers of one hand.

What Mothership, the sci-fi horror roleplaying game from Tuesday Knight Games, has accomplished, therefore, is truly remarkable. First released in 2018, the game quickly invited third-party support not only via a third party license, but by generously and copiously helping to put the spotlight on these supplements. The result is that literally hundreds of third-party supplements have been created, and with the release of the Mothership boxed set this year, the market is, if anything, getting even stronger.

I think another important factor in Mothership’s third-party success is the game’s embrace of the trifold adventure format. I’ve already written a review of the really great first-party trifold adventures, each just two pages long and designed to be folded up into a trifold pamphlet. These are great for a GM because they’re designed to be picked up, read through in just ten to fifteen minutes, and then immediately run. But they’re also great for third-party creators, because they can (a) be quickly produced with a low investment of time and money and (b) given impulse-buy prices that make it easy for GMs to take a risk.

The result is that dozens and dozens of these third-party trifold adventures have been published, and they are an absolute treasure trove for GMs. I’ve launched a Mothership open table, in large part because the library of easy-to-run adventure content makes it easy to always have something ready for the next group of players.

The sheer number of projects made possible by the trifold format has also helped to create an audience looking for those third-party Mothership projects. The existence of this audience, in turn, encourages creators to pursue even more projects and more daring projects. And the audience is willing to take bigger risks on creators shooting for the moon when those creators have already built a rep through their more accessible projects.

This is a virtuous cycle which has already resulted in the creation of several large and impressive Mothership supplements. I’ll likely be taking a closer look at those in the near future. For today, though, I want to start by putting my own spotlight on some of the great third-party Mothership adventures I’ve been exploring. (And also, for better or worse, some of the less-great ones, too.)

SPOILERS AHEAD!

CIRCLE THE FLAME

Joel Hines’ Circle the Flame is one of those adventures that’s almost effortless to drop into your campaign: The Tinea Weather Station, a circular space station, is in orbit around the water world of Mani. Unfortunately, that orbit is now decaying and its corporate overlords have announced a bounty for any troubleshooters willing to board the station and retrieve the valuable scientific data and IP before everything burns up.

Including the semi-uplifted chimpanzee named Boopsie.

(Who the PCs will quickly discover has gone into a bloodythirsty rage, killing anyone she encounters and generally wrecking the joint.)

The adventure consists of a simple map-and-key of the station, along with a simple countdown mechanic, at the end of which the station plunges into the atmosphere of Mani and burns up.

Tick, tick. Time to roll out!

Whether following the corporate bounty or opportunistically responding to Tinea Station’s SOS, it’s easy to hook PCs into this.

The only thing really holding Circle the Flame back are the curious lacunae in the text. For example, the adventure often refers to Boopsie “retreating to the ducts,” but these are neither included on the map nor detailed on the text.

The most significant of these gaps, though, are:

• What happened to Boopsie? At one point we’re told that someone was hired “as a backup operator in case the unthinkable happened to Boopsie.” Is that just a euphemism for death? Or something else? And if something else, is that what caused Boopsie to go bloodthirsty?
• What happened to the station? At first I assumed that Boopsie going nuts was the cause of everything else going wrong, but at the very end of the adventure we’re told that, “Operation logs reveal orbital distance was modified below safety constraints by remote command originating from an encrypted transmission planetside.” But… from who? And why?

My view is that the author of a published adventure should consider themselves a co-conspirator with the GM. That means clearly and concisely explaining what the plan is. It’s strangely common for published adventures to instead try to pull a fast one on the GM.

In this case, I’m not sure if Hines is trying to pull a fast one, or if he just ran out of space. I was initially so convinced that the mysterious transmission from Mani was a teaser for Hines’ Tide World of Mani supplement that I went out and grabbed a copy, but there doesn’t seem to be any follow-up there.

Despite these lacunae being rather frustrating, it’s not terribly difficult to fill them in. (The mystery ducts are probably the most troublesome in terms of actual play.) And you’ll certainly want to fill them in, since Circle the Flame is a tight, well-paced one-shot.

GRADE: B-

CLAWS OUT

Some lacunae are a bit harder to puzzle out.

In Charles Macdonald’s Claws Out, the PCs are onboard the Agamamenon transport ship heading to the Banquo Mining Facility, which is about to be reopened. Most of the passengers are mining personnel getting shipped in. (It’s unclear why the PCs are here, but there are any number of possibilities, including heading somewhere else and Banquo just being one stop along the way.)

The adventure does a nice job of providing tight, effective write-ups for everyone onboard, setting you up for a social-driven mystery scenario rife with paranoia and murder.

Unfortunately, there are three major problems that largely cripple this adventure.

First, there’s something funny going on at Banquo. Apparently alien artifacts have been discovered at the site and the “miners” are actually all undercover scientists sent to investigate them. (There’s also a corporate agent “sent to prevent miners from discovering the true nature of the facility,” but there are no actual miners onboard the Agamemnon and the agent is immediately killed, so that dramatic thread doesn’t really go anywhere.)

The big problem is that everyone onboard has a secret Banquo-related agenda and secret information about what’s happening at Banquo… but “alien artifacts have been discovered” is literally the only thing the GM is told about it.

So as nice as the character write-ups are, they’re mostly a secret homework assignment.

Second, the core plot of the scenario is that there’s an alien shapeshift onboard which starts killing people. (It’s completely unrelated to the alien artifacts on Banquo.)

The most egregious oversight here is that they forgot to provide a stat block for the creature. It’s kinda tricky to run a bug hunt scenario without that.

But the monster is also just kind of vague in general: It’s a brain parasite that lives in your brain, but then also a shapeshifter. It’s “inexplicably afraid of cats” and this is a significant plot point; but its primary modus operandi is turning into a cat (thus the title).

Finally, the lack of blueprints really breaks the adventure. The whole core of the scenario revolves around how the monster is moving around and gaining access to various spaces on the ship. The players are, frankly, going to demand a ship layout, and the GM will be faced with reconstructing one that’s consistent with the adventure’s plot.

In short, Claws Out is an adventure laden with booby traps waiting to sabotage the GM.

I’m not quite willing to write the whole thing off, because there are some cool ideas and characters here. (I particularly like K-RA, the android who has so thoroughly entwined herself with the ship’s computers that they’ve become inseparable.) But the salvage job is so extensive that I really wouldn’t recommend grabbing this one.

GRADE: D-

MOONBASE BLUES

Moonbase Blues by Ian Yusem and Dal Shugars isn’t actually a trifold adventure: It’s a bifold one. (Single sheet, print on both sides, fold down the middle.) Hopefully y’all won’t run me out of town on a rail for taking the liberty of reviewing it here.

Everything was fine on the ironically named Azure Base until a strange, blue comet was pulled into the small moon’s orbit. Each time the moonbase is bathed in the comet’s light, the colonists exposed to it are driven into a frenzied madness.

Yusem and Shugars use this setup to craft a pretty solid sandbox adventure: A simple map of the base keyed with the mysterious wreckage left in the wake of the comet, juiced up with the cyclical time pressure of the comet’s orbit and supported by a healthy array of GM tools including well-aimed random tables (meteor-mad characteristics, hazards, stuff found on corpses) and stock NPC survivors who can be slotted into any scene.

The only real stumble here, in my opinion, is that the scenario hook is sort of incoherent. Over a quarter of the adventure is dedicated to a “you all wake up and the Computer tells you to do the following tasks” setup which includes stuff like “unclog the toilets” and “go outside and look up at the comet,” but this seems to have no connection to the rest of the scenario as presented and no explanation is given for how the PCs got there or why their task list includes looking up at the comet. The rest of the text seems to also assume completely different framing devices in various places.

If these were more coherently presented as a list of options, there’d be utility here. But instead it all just creates a weird patina of confusion.

The truly unfortunate thing here is that the space wasted on a largely unusable setup could have been used for even more of the really cool adventure tools that make Moonbase Blues so fun and useful!

GRADE: B

Go to Part 2

If you asked me to describe the combat system of Mothership in one word, it would be a toss-up between “strange” and “missing.”

What seems to have happened is that Mothership 0e had a turn-based initiative system. A decision was made at some point to transition Mothership 1e to a more freeform(?) resolution system, but the execution was pretty badly muffed. (It may have also been further complicated by a last minute attempt to revert back to the 0e version of the rules.)

The result is that the rules and examples of play contradict each other, and support material — including stat blocks and adventures — don’t seem to be in sync with the mechanics. To attempt to give a taste of what the confusion in the rulebooks looks like:

• The Violent Encounters chapter in the Player’s Survival Guide suggests a player-facing system, in which PCs make all the checks.
• The example of play is also player-facing, but doesn’t follow the same procedure.
• In the Warden’s Operations Manual, however, player-facing is described as an alternative to the normal combat system. (But, if so, what’s the normal combat system?)
• Meanwhile, all the horrors in Unconfirmed Contact Reports have Combat stats that are designed to be rolled to determine damage… except what function is that supposed to serve if the players are supposed to be making all the checks?

Sean McCoy, the designer, has said that rules-as-written is supposed to be that the monster takes a turn and rolls Combat checks, although he prefers the player-facing option “90% of the time.” And on the Mothership Discord he’s mused about how the Combat stat should be interpreted (“my guideline would be: monsters with 60+ Combat impose [-] on player facing rolls, and monsters with Combat below 20 impose [+] on player facing rolls”).

From what I can tell, the result is that there are three major options for combat in Mothership:

1. Everybody takes a turn, including the monster(s), with the monsters rolling Combat.
2. At the beginning of a round, the GM threatens Harm (to use the parlance of Apocalypse World) and that Harm (e.g., damage) is inflicted if the PCs fail to prevent it with their checks during the round.
3. Monster damage can be inflicted as a consequence for any failed roll by the players. (Possibly resulting in the monster “attacking” multiple times per round.)

This uncertainty has also led to nigh-infinite variation in actual practice, most of which can be characterized as GMs filling the howling vacuum with whatever combat procedures they can nick from other RPGs they’ve played.

(Honestly, you can even see this in my own interpretation of Mothership’s examples of play through the lens of Apocalypse World terminology.)

The most charitable interpretation of all this is that the intention is for the GM to just kind of fluidly move back and forth between these options at their whim. (Or, if you like, in accordance to their sense of “dramatic timing.”) But the difference in outcome is clearly so radically different that it becomes meaningless for the players to even pretend that they have true agency.

Of course, this also affects adventure design. When the combat system is lost in time and space, it’s impossible to actually dial in difficulty. You can arguably see this in Another Bug Hunt, the adventure bundled with the core rules, where the carcinid monsters fluctuate between “one is a nearly unstoppable killing machine” to “actually, y’all can take out a dozen of them with no problem” and than back to “oh no! there’s three of them! y’all gotta run!” (Although, again, it’s possible the intention is for the GM to just enforce whatever “vibe” the current scene has been scripted to have.)

EVERYBODY TAKES A TURN

If you go with Option #1, you’ll likely want to add an initiative system. Mothership 0e used Speed checks:

• Success, you go before the bad guys.
• Failure, you go after the bad guys.
• Critical Success, you get an extra action.
• Critical Failure, you can move OR take an action, but not both.

That works well enough, although you’ll need to decide whether to check each round or just once at the beginning of combat. (And, if so, how long the effects of Critical Success and Critical Failure results last.)

The advantage of this approach is that it likely cuts through all this folderol. It’s clear-cut and it will be very obvious to you which sections of the rulebook you should simply ignore.

Other simple options could include:

• Bad guys always go first.
• PCs always go first (in any order), unless Bad Guys ambush them or seize advantage with an Instinct check.
• Go around the table, with bad guys acting when it’s the Warden’s turn.
• Go around the table to resolve PC actions. The Warden can choose to have a bad guy take their turn before or after any PC’s turn.

MY EXPERIENCE AT THE TABLE

I’m a cuss-headed fellow, though, so I’ve been trying to grapple with the player-facing vision imperfectly presented in the Player’s Survival Guide, which I think can be broadly summed up as:

1. GM threatens Harm. (Again, using an Apocalypse World term of art.)
2. Players declare actions by going around the table.
3. GM makes rulings for how actions are resolved.
4. Players all roll dice (if necessary) simultaneously.

Unfortunately, after running Mothership for a few sessions, the results have not been particularly satisfying. Partly there’s been limited combat and, therefore, limited opportunities for me to experiment, but also:

First, without specificity locking things down, the system is mixing poorly with my default GM stance of letting the PCs set an agenda and then playing to see what happens when they try to make it work. I need to work on setting stronger, clearer Threats and really focus on, “Did the PCs stop the Threat? If not, devastate.”

Second, I’ve still been trying to figure out how to incorporate the Combat/Instinct stats for the critters. Having the creatures make rolls to resolve actions seems to only water down the Threats even more, so it’s not working. It’s just fundamentally problematic that the entire mechanical chassis for horrors in Mothership is incompatible with the combat procedures described in the Player’s Survival Guide.

Third, I’ve been running an open table and my players have rolled random loadouts that include Advanced Battle Dress (AP 10, DR 3) and the 1d100 DMG laser cutter. This isn’t a problem, per se, but in combination with the adventures I’ve been running — which have been slow burning explorations of creepy environments, and then GAH! CREATURE FIGHT! — I’m cognizant that this is likely warping my limited experience with Mothership combat.

Fourth, overall the fights have been thrilling and the players have been immensely enjoying them, but I’m mostly faking it with vibes and panache. This isn’t great for me as a GM because I really, really don’t like killing PCs through acts of capricious fiat. Since the whole combat system feels like a towering edifice of fiat right now, my gut instinct is making me pull my punches when it comes to lethal consequences, and in the long-term that’s really going to hamper a horror game like Mothership.

So my next step at this point is to get a little more specific in how I’m structuring this. That’ll likely give me a bit more clarity when I’m actually running the game, and if I’m at least in the ballpark I should be able to iterate through playtesting. (And, if  not, then at least I’ll know that and be able to toss all this in the burn pit and start over.)

Let’s take a peek at what I’m currently thinking.

THE THREAT SYSTEM

The core combat loop for Mothership is:

• GM makes a Threat.
• PCs declare and resolve actions.
• GM resolves Threat and sets a new Threat.

When making a Threat, the GM should default to devastating consequences.

COUNTERING THREAT: If the PCs’ actions during the round don’t counter or block the Threat, then the Threat is resolved. (You may also have situations where threat is mitigated and only some of the original Threat goes into effect.)

RESOLVING CHECKS: When the PCs fail a check, there should be consequences. Depending on circumstances, those consequences might include the creature automatically dealing damage; making a Combat check to inflict damage; or gaining the Edge (see below).

HORROR THREATS

The Threat from a horror should almost always include one automatic hit for damage. To this, add one (or more) of the following chasers:

• Special Ability: The creature gets to use its special ability (e.g., sucks blood, implants larvae, infects with lycanthropy).
• Ravage: After dealing their automatic damage to a target, the creature can make a Combat check to inflict an additional attack of damage.
• Multiple Targets: Instead of automatically damaging one target, the horror automatically hits multiple targets (e.g., it charges down a hallway smashing through or slicing up anyone within reach; tentacles burst out of the amorphous blob, hitting everyone in Close range; there are multiple creatures and they’re all hitting different targets).
• Trap: One or more PCs become trapped (e.g., the monster is pinning them to the ground; backed them into a corner; etc.).
• Environmental Complication: In addition to the horror, the PCs also need to deal with some other crisis in the environment (e.g., the hull has been punctured and air is rushing out; the blast doors are lowering, threatening to trap them with the creature; the timer on the bomb is ticking down).
• Slaughter the Innocent: The horror takes out one or more screaming bystanders or similar extras in the scene. (This shouldn’t include significant members of the supporting cast, who should be targeted like PCs.)
• Escalate: See below.

Specific creatures or situations may, of course, suggest other chasers. The list above is just a useful set of defaults.

ADVANCED OPTION: EDGE

As an advanced option, consider the tactical position/momentum of the fight. We’ll refer to the side which currently has tactical advantage as having the Edge. By default, you can assume the horror starts with the Edge in the fight unless circumstances suggest otherwise (e.g., the PCs have managed to ambush it). Of course, in addition to blocking the horror’s Threat, the PCs may also be able to take actions that give them the Edge.

If the horror has the Edge, it can make a full Threat as described above (i.e., damage + a chaser of additional nastiness).

If the PCs have the Edge, then the horror’s Threat options, depending on circumstances, will be limited to one of the following:

• Make a Combat check in order to deal damage/use a special ability.
• Regain its Edge in the fight.
• Withdraw. (It will be back later, once again likely defaulting to having the Edge.)

For example, one of the PCs manages to pin a zombie to the floor. They now have the Edge on the zombie. Withdrawal isn’t an option (since it’s pinned to the floor), but the zombie could either try to escape the pin (regaining the Edge so that it can make a full Threat on the next turn) or try to deal damage to the character pinning them.

It may often be useful to think of the tactical Edge as a thing that has to be actively maintained by the PCs (e.g., the PC pinning the zombie to the ground has to keep making Strength checks each round to hold it down). No resting on your laurels!

Note: You don’t have to think of Edge as a super formal thing. It probably isn’t a player-known structure. (Although, for some players, knowing about it may encourage tactical creativity.) But it can be a nice mental model for the GM to have so that combats have a satisfying back-and-forth pacing and the PCs’ actions feel like they have meaningful consequences.

ADVANCED OPTION: ESCALATION

You can expand on the binary concept of Edge by simply extending the concept in both directions.

If the horror has the Edge, it can escalate (e.g. by getting into a better position; charging up its super-weapon; summoning reinforcements; etc.). For each escalation, you can add another chaser to the Threat each round.

If the PCs have the Edge, they’re in a position to potentially

• withdraw;
• isolate the threat;
• force the horror to make its checks with disadvantage;

or otherwise prevent the horror from directly assaulting them.

You may find it useful to think of escalation in terms of vectors. For example:

• The alien can’t attack you right now because the door is blocking it. Can you stop the alien from getting through (or around) the door?
• Okay, it got through the door, so now it’s in the room with you and is threatening harm. Can you escape/kill it first/whatever?

Or:

• It’s trying to take out your tires.
• It’s taken out your tires, can you keep control of the vehicle?
• You’ve crashed and now the alien has jumped on top of the vehicle. It can easily strike anyone who gets out, and its serrated tail starts spiking down through the sheet metal and into the compartment.

A generic progression along these lines is:

• It’s trying to get to a position where it can hurt you.
• It can hurt one of you.
• It can hurt all of you.

You can also think of this in terms of setup and payoff: On the level of a single round you set things up by Threatening an outcome at the beginning of the round; then you pay off that Threat (by either fulfilling it or thwarting it) at the end of the round. Escalation just extends this same concept, with the resolution of this round’s Threat setting up an even bigger payoff (for either the PCs or their opponents) in the next round!

Go to Part 1

[C: 70 Claws 2D10 DMG, I:50, W: 3(20), Pseudomilk Suck: After hit or vs. disabled android, Body save [-] or 4D10 DMG per round, Strength check to detach ]

On the jungle world of Kikkomari V, the milk-white sap of the cream-leaved kikkan palm trees had a significant bio-similarity to the pseudomilk “blood” of androids. (In both cases, the liquid served as a nutrient conveyor and an electrical conduit. In androids, this conductivity enhances the response of cybernetic bio-tissue, while in the kikkan palm it was a pest deterrent.)

While Dr. Skithar’s report on kikkan sap offers several tantalizing avenues of patentable exploitation – most notably the antigen TK cells and the albino fibrin cells which could potentially improve android self-repair functions – no clear case has been made for why these studies could not continue from lab-grown samples.

Therefore her request to expand the ecological preservation zone is DENIED.

See attached recommendations for expanded funding of the Prista Research Center.

Salem-Watts Corporate Directive
Kikkomari V

The kikkan palm existed in a semi-symbiotic relationship with the sapdrillers. The sapdrillers had long proboscises tipped with a curious “auger” structure consisting of a hard-tipped bony mass that could be rapidly pounded through a muscular spasm into the soft wood of the palm tree. In addition to drinking the sap of the trees, the sapdrillers would also eat various parasites that might otherwise kill the trees.

When the kikkan jungles were clearcut to make way for vast, corporate-owned android plantations, the sapdriller habitats were destroyed. They were, however, just one of many species caught in the middle of a mass extinction event well-catalogued by the planetary ecologists.

The sapdrillers, however, discovered that they had access to another abundant food source: The android plantation workers. Rapid evolutionary pressure transformed the sapdrinkers on Kikkomari V into the seivant diabo.

Seivant devils are ambush predators capable of short bursts of terrifying speed. Long, razor-sharp claws can disable androids, while their whip-like proboscis can lock onto a victim and then punch through flesh (and even light armor). Once attached, they’ll begin sucking up precious pseudomilk.

Excerpt: TSCS Law Enforcement Briefing Transcript

Ofc. Banks: The big brains tell me that “invasive species” isn’t the correct term because LX-510 doesn’t have a “natural biosphere” to disrupt, but I don’t know what else to call it.

We’ve traced the original source of the diabos to the Wittgenstein cartel. When they took down Herr Wittgenstein, no one thought to secure his private menagerie. Most everything else has been tracked down, but the milk-suckers are damn elusive. Worse yet, we’ve found at least one cache of their gelatinous eggs stuck under a toilet in Sector 4F. So there’s really no way to know how many of them are crawling around in the walls now.

In addition to enjoying a brief fad among rare animal collectors, there have been efforts by several mercenary companies and corporate security forces to train and  domesticate seivant devils as an anti-android deterrent. The earliest examples were among the plantation security forces on Kikkomari V, where the seivant devils proved particularly adept at tracking errant androids via scent.

For better of worse, this has led to seivant devils spreading to multiple worlds, their expansion seemingly only limited by the availability of their preferred prey.

Go to Part 1

PIECE BY PIECE

In the Daedalus Robotics Lab, a haunted screwdriver curses anyone touching it to begin disassembling the world… starting with people.

Writing out the premise of Piece by Piece in such plain terms might make it sound a little goofy, but in practice this adventure works really well. The Daedalus Lab is a well-structured location crawl stocked with clues that can unravel a decade-old mystery. A well-rounded cast of NPCs fleshes the whole thing out with some nice character moments and emotional stakes (and gives you some raw meat to target when the shit hits the fan).

The only real weakpoint here is the scenario hook, which looks like this:

The Daedalus Robotics Lab is in lockdown after personnel were fatally compromised in a random incident. Reports are linking the events to a work tool found at the scene, now classified as Artifact 21. Further details are undisclosed.

Daedalus Robotics Lab’s parent company, Jensen-Hung, is excited to offer an attractive opportunity to any self-motivated freelancers in the sector! Taking on the important role of Temporary Maintenance Crew, contractees are tasked with retrieving Artifact 21 for analysis. Caution is advised; discretion is enforced.

Your crew must investigate the lab, identify ARTIFACT 21 and retrieve it.

At first glance, this all seems fine. Unfortunately, that’s part of the problem because it will lure you into a false sense of security. In reality, there are multiple layers of problems here:

• Given the facts presented in the rest of the module, Jensen-Hung should know that “Artifact 21” is the screwdriver. So why are they asking the PCs to identify it?
• If Jensen-Hung owns Daedalus, why are the PCs being sent in undercover as a maintenance crew?
• The hook suggests that Jensen-Hung was notified of what happened (by an android named Curtis), resolved to retrieve “Artifact 21,” put up a job posting, waited for the PCs to respond to it, hired the PCs, and then sent the PCs to the lab. But both the current situation at Daedalus Robotics Lab and the timeline of events provided by the adventure makes it clear that Curtis’ call to Jensen-Hung actually happened maybe fifteen minutes ago.

These issues — particularly with the timeline — caused a lot of headaches for me the first time I ran the adventure. The players really struggled to figure out the timeline (and, therefore, the mysteries connected to that timeline) because they immediately realized that it didn’t make any sense.

As written, I give Piece by Piece a C+ (okay, with some nice bits). But it’s a B (recommended) or B+ experience if you make a couple simple tweaks:

• I would avoid telling the PCs that an item is responsible for the incident. It really weakens the sense of enigma about what’s happening onsite. (It will also likely cheapen the ending.)
• The timeline is weird because there’s no meaningful gap between Curtis calling Jensen-Hung and the events that are happening when the PCs show up; but obviously there must be a gap of time in which Jensen-Hung contacts the PCs and hires them. Shorten the latter by having Jensen-Hung reach out to the PCs (instead of posting an open ad). Lean into the former by creating a gap: Curtis called Jensen-Hung and was instructed to download all the research data and then wait for extraction. So he did that and then, as described in the adventure, went to the Lobby and met with Dr. Ojo, who is now repairing the minor injury he received. (I would also skip the bit where Curtis supposedly told Ojo that Martina was brutally murdered, but then Ojo just doesn’t do anything about that… because that’s also weird.)

And that should get you sorted.

It might also be useful to note that, if the PCs realize that the screwdriver is responsible, then the finale of the adventure will likely resolve very easily as they all make a point of not touching it. This works well if it’s earned; less so if that knowledge is just handed to them. You really want the finale to be various people getting possessed by the screwdriver and creating chaos, and it’s even better if that includes the PCs.

(Along these same lines, I encourage you to have a PC who gets stabbed by the screwdriver have it get stuck in their shoulder. This will create a natural vector for someone to grab it and pull it out.)

But I digress!

As noted, I recommend this adventure, particularly with the tweaked hook. DG Chapman provides a very satisfying experience at the table.

GRADE: B-

TERMINAL DELAYS AT ANARENE’S FOLLY

The centerpiece of Terminal Delays at Anarene’s Folly is the Creation Device — a cheap knockoff loving homage to the Genesis Device from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, capable of rapidly terraforming an entire planet. (Which is, if you think about it, quite horrific from a certain point of view.)

Unbeknownst to the PCs, the Creation Device is currently in their ship’s hold, concealed in the false bottom of a crate of hydroponics equipment that they’ve been hired to deliver. When they arrive at the space station Anarene’s Folly to refuel, however, the station personnel either know or discover that they have the Creation Device and mount an operation to steal it. It’s time for a reverse heist!

I’ve actually found this to be a tough adventure to review. I like the concept, and Ian Yusem’s execution includes a lot of realty nice material. But for some reason, I just can’t seem to get the whole thing to gel.

Here’s an example of what I mean: The core structure of Anarene’s Folly is the Station Escalation Timeline. This consists of seven numbered steps, and the idea is that you trigger one step for every twenty minutes of real time at the table. But the first two steps are:

1. The PCs are hailed by dock control and told there’s a wait time before they can dock.
2. The PCs are asked to transfer control of their ship to the station AI. (And then the AI begins hacking the ship’s computer, initiating the complementary Systems Hack Timeline.)

On the one hand, this makes sense. On the other hand, what actually happens in the twenty minutes between Step 1 and Step 2?

Anarene’s Folly does give you a roleplaying profile for Simon Wainwright, the Space Traffic Controller, and a Small Talk Table to provide raw fodder for that conversation. I’m looking at that and it just seems interminable.

And it feels like the Station Escalation Timeline, the Systems Hack Timeline, the Gaslighting Table, and the Marine Kill Team Tactical Plan are all modeled as independent, modular components so that they can interface dynamically in actual play…

… but it doesn’t seem like they actually do? The central Station Escalation Timeline is a long slow burn, triggering the Systems Hack Timeline, which has a slow burn of its own until the station AI gets to the point where it can start triggering the Gaslighting Table, which consists of various fake malfunctions and false alarms. These aren’t really independent variables; they’re all linked in chain (although each can be hypothetically disrupted separately).

So you’ve got the PCs running around doing random chores, and maybe at some point they get suspicious and maybe that’s meant to mix things up? But then you start looking at the “flexible” tools that you can use to respond to the PCs, and it seems like they aren’t actually that flexible. If they’re disrupted, the timelines mostly just break. Plus, the PCs don’t seem to have any real options because there’s no clear vector by which they can figure out that the Creation Device is in their hold, plus you’re supposed to kinda railroad them into Anarene’s Folly without enough fuel to reach another station. And then there’s some weird and unexplained stuff. (At one point, for example, Anarene’s Folly abruptly evacuates all nonessential personnel from the station for no discernible reason.)

So, as I say, it feels like Anarene’s Folly is well-stocked with cool tools for running a flexible adventure that responds dynamically to the PCs’ actions. Maybe it is and I’m just missing something. But I just can’t quite seem to grok this one.

GRADE: C

THE HAUNTING OF YPSILON 14

The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is set on an asteroid where miners have accidentally woken up an alien who was resting in suspended animation. The alien is hostile (of course!) and mayhem ensues!

The first thing you’ll note about the adventure is that it presents the mining base as a flowchart, unifying key and map together rather than a more literal depiction. This largely works, although some unkeyed map symbols may leave you scratching your head.

DG Chapman does several things that elevate this above a simple evening of “there’s an invisible alien eating people” affair.

First, the design of the station is very satisfying. There’s a variety of environments and the areas have been spiked with lots of little fun easter eggs and clues that reward exploration.

Second, Chapman has again included a robust supporting cast. Their details can be a little sketchy, but in practice they develop well in actual play.

Third, in addition to the alien monster, there’s also the Yellow Goo: A medical nanotechnology that heals aliens, but interprets human bodies as being very, very sick and in need of “curing.” This adds a second vector to the scenario’s horror, helping to mix things up and keep it fresh.

Once again, the weak point here is the scenario hook, which is a little shallow and can cause PCs to kind of skim off the surface of the adventure instead of really diving in. (I’ve written a separate article on How to Prep: The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 that you may find useful here.) This is balanced, however, by the supreme ease with which this module can be slid into any Mothership campaign or framed up as the perfect introductory module.

A lot of Mothership GMs will tell you they got started by running The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, and there’s a good reason for that: This is just a rock solid adventure. Easy to run. Easy to enjoy.

GRADE: B

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

These trifold adventures are Mothership’s secret weapon, and in large part their strength is collective: None of them are the greatest adventure you’ve ever seen, but they are consistently good. They also do a good job of showcasing the breadth of what Mothership is capable of.

Individually, therefore, each is pretty good and I recommend all but one of them. As a collection, on the other hand, I find that they demand my attention and insist that I run them as part of a Mothership campaign as soon as possible.

Which I will be more than happy to do.

FURTHER READING
Reviews: Mothership Adventure Sphere

A guide to grades at the Alexandrian.