The Haunting of Ypsilon-14 is a pamphlet adventure for the Mothership roleplaying game. It’s just two pages long and designed to fold up as a trifold pamphlet. The goal is to make this an adventure that a GM can pick up, read in about fifteen minutes, and then immediately run. In addition to the super-fast character creation and streamlined rules of Mothership, the result is an RPG that you can pick up and play as easily as you might a board game or card game.

I think the short length of the adventure can also make it a great example of how I read and use published adventures, as described at length in How to Prep a Module. I’m going to try to give you a peek into my thought process as I read through Ypsilon-14: What I’m looking for, what I’m prepping, and how I’m solving problems before they happen at the table. Even if it’s all happening in just fifteen minutes.

Although I don’t think it’s necessary, you might want to grab a copy of the adventure to follow along.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

THE HOOK

The basic concept of Ypsilon-14 is that Dr. Ethan Giovanni, while studying a mysterious “yellow goo” discovered by asteroid miners, has woken up an alien at the mining colony and now it’s killing people.

The published scenario hook for the adventure is that the PCs have come to a mining asteroid (the titular Ypsilon-14) to pick up some cargo.

This is not a bad hook. It gets the PCs where the scenario is so that they can start interacting with it. What I notice, though, is that it could very easily require some heavy-lifting in actual play to get the players invested in the action and have a clear vector for taking action. (For example, it would be pretty easy for the PCs to just stay at the docking bay and wait, forcing the GM to figure out how to bring the action to them.) The scenario hook is relying on open-ended player curiosity, which can be fine, but isn’t particularly strong.

If I was planning to run this as part of an ongoing campaign, I would look to make the hook specific to the PCs and their goals: Not generic cargo, for example, but a specific thing that the PCs need. Or maybe the PCs learn that Dr. Giovanni has information that they need, and now they’ve tracked him to Ypsilon-14.

In my case, I’m planning to run Ypsilon-14 as an open table one-shot, so the hook will need to be more generic. (Although I might look for opportunities to feed specific hooks or connections to the adventure to various PCs: For example, if someone creates a former asteroid miner, I might suggest Ypsilon-14 as a place they previously worked.)

What I will do, though, is make the generic cargo pick-up more specific: The PCs have been hired to pick up a scientific sample from Dr. Giovanni.

I do this knowing that:

• The sample they’re picking up is the extremely dangerous yellow goo, which will encourage them to interact with it.
• Giovanni, having been infected by the yellow goo, is locked up inside his ship.
• His workstation, where he accidentally woke up the alien and also where I think I’ll place the sample container the PCs are supposed to pick up, is located down in the mining tunnels.

What I’m looking at here are the vectors of the hook: Where is the hook pointing the PCs?

The vector of the original hook terminated at the Docking Bay. As you can see, though, just a slight change to the hook creates vectors that point much deeper into the adventure.

With the PCs, therefore, motivated to follow those vectors, it will be much easier for the players to get invested in the scenario. Their actions in pursuing the vector will also give me more opportunities to bring the other elements of the adventures (e.g., people going missing and alien attacks) into play as part of the natural flow of the action.

CATCHING BOOBY TRAPS

Published adventures often have booby traps: Information that’s either missing or hidden that can unexpectedly sabotage you at the table.

Sometimes these are deliberately included by designers who want the GM to read the adventure as if it were a novel: They want you to be flat-footed by their surprise ending! And, for some reason, you’ll often read mystery scenarios where you have to first solve the mystery yourself before you can run it.

More often, they’re just mistakes and oversights.

For example, in Dr. Giovanni’s workstation in the mines:

A small WORKSTATION of scientific equipment has been set up nearby. A SCANNER relays readings from the pod to the Heracles [his ship] and a SCRAP OF PAPER sits on the desk that reads “0389.”

There are two booby traps here. The milder of the two is that I don’t know what “0389” means unless I cross-reference it to a different section of the adventure.

The more significant one is the scanner relaying readings to the Heracles: First, what do the readings say? I could improvise that, but it feels pretty core to the adventure so I’d probably throw some prep on that. More significantly, these readings aren’t mentioned in the write-up for the Heracles, so if the PCs go to the Heracles first, I could very easily not realize that PCs checking the Heracles’ computers should notice the scanner reading being relayed.

Another booby trap can be found with the crew listings. The adventure includes a great reference for the CHARACTERS in the adventure, listing everyone on the station. This write-up includes:

DANA. Head Driller. Stoich, professional, sullen.

KANTARO. Leader. Muscular, quiet, hasn’t bathed in a few days.

That’s all well and good. But in the adventure key for the crew quarters, we can also read:

KANTARO’S BUNK. Dana’s clothes mixed in with Kantaro’s laundry.

And you can probably immediately see the problem: Kantaro is in a relationship with Dana (or he’s a huge creep. But because that essential information isn’t included in the character write-ups, you could very easily end up roleplaying Dana and/or Kantaro earlier in the adventure without realizing they’re in a relationship and end up creating a continuity issue that booby traps you later.

This kind of “essential information missing from a section of the adventure that presents itself as a comprehensive reference” is a surprisingly common booby trap. Obviously, though, it can be cleared up if you just keep an eye open for booby traps while reading the adventure and make a quick note in, for example, their character write-ups.

INFORMATION FLOW

I also like to identify the essential information in a scenario, make sure I understand how the players will get that information, and improve this process where I can.

In the case of Ypsilon-14, there seems to be three key pieces of information that should be established at the beginning of the scenario:

• A miner named Mike is missing.
• Ethan Giovanni is a scientist who’s doing research onsite.
• The cast of characters — nine miners + a cat named Prince.

There doesn’t need to be a single, definitive vector for any of this information, and just having the mental list of what’s essential will go a long way towards setting you up for success at the table. But I’m not above giving myself a little clearer structure to work with.

First, you’ll note that I’ve already sorted Dr. Ethan Giovanni by connecting him to the scenario hook. So that’s done.

Second, in the adventure as written, Mike has been missing since last night and everybody knows it. So presumably, at some point, I can just have one of the NPCs give that information to the PCs. But what if we show instead of tell?

As written, when the PCs’ ship docks, Sonya, the team leader on Ypsilon-14, unlocks the docking bay door for them. What if, instead, Mike was supposed to be on monitoring duty? So the PCs dock, signal the mining station, and… nothing. They get no reply. You can give the players a little rope to figure out how they want to respond to that, but eventually Sonya will show up, open the door, and apologize on behalf of Mike’s dumb ass. Or, if the PCs have already hacked their way through the docking bay door by the time Sonya arrives, maybe that conversation goes a different way. Either way, “Mike was supposed to be here, where the fuck is he?” gets established through action that directly affects the PCs.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Third, we have the cast of characters. This is essential information because (a) “Oh no! Jerome is missing now, too!” is probably more effective if the players know who Jerome is; (b) until the PCs figure out an alien is involved, this is your list of suspects; and (c) once things shift fully into survival horror mode, these are the people who need to be kept alive.

When an adventure has a large cast of characters like this, it’s vital that you don’t just introduce them all at once. It’s literally impossible for the players to process an info dump like that: They’ll never be able to remember their names, differentiate them as individuals, or form any meaningful relationship with them. The NPCs will just be an anonymous mob to them.

So when I see a big list of characters like this in an adventure, I’m immediately thinking about how I can split them up and sequence their introduction. In this case, my rough thoughts are:

• They meet Sonya first, as described above.
• One or two more people can come into this opening scene, probably prompting an additional discussion about the missing Mike. (Sonya: “Have you seen Mike?” “Not since last night after he broke the fucking shower.”) Maybe the cat could be in this scene and Morgan comes in looking for her?
• Throw together a quick adversary roster for everybody else.

The function of the “adversary” roster here is to just split everybody up into smaller groups and scatter them around the base. Specific groupings and locations probably won’t stick as the situation evolves, but it’ll still give me a good starting point for spreading out the introductions.

Looking at the cast list:

• It looks pretty easy to split them into On Duty and Off Duty.
• I can split the On Duty crew between those near the entrance to the mine in the Mine Tunnel and those working in the Depths.
• Off Duty crew can be split between Crew Quarters, Mess, and the Showers.

As I’m quickly spreading these characters around, I’m likely already getting ideas for how some of these scenes could be framed up. (For example, if I put Ashraf and Kantaro in the Mess, what might they be arguing about? Or is it Dana and Kantaro in there and they’re flirting with each other? Or is Dana supposed to be in her quarters, but she’s missing if you go looking for her because she’s actually shacked up with Kantaro in his quarters? If Rie is sleeping, how do they react if they get woken up? And so forth.)

If a particularly brilliant idea occurs to me here, I’ll jot it down for posterity. But I’ll usually just let these wash over me. It’s a sign that the scenario is beginning to take life in my imagination, but I’ll trust myself to find the rights answers while improvising at the table.

WRAPPING UP

On that note, the intention of a minimalist adventure like The Haunting of Ypsilon-14 is to give the GM raw material and trust them to improvise.

This is, of course, good praxis: Don’t prep stuff that you can improvise at the table.

With that being said, if you see a place where the adventure is expecting you to improvise and either (a) you’re not comfortable improvising that or (b) you see a big value add from prep, then you should finish up by prepping that stuff.

For example, Sonya has a collection of cassette tapes in her quarters and she’ll blast music from her boombox. Improvising a bunch of titles for her cassettes is the type of thing that I, personally, can get hung up on in a session, so maybe that’s something I’d want to do ahead of time. (In this specific case, that’s being balanced against my desire to keep my prep for these open table one-shots somewhere between “extremely minimal” and “none at all,” so I’ll probably end up skipping it.)

As another example, with the large cast of characters it might be useful to grab pictures for each of them that you can show to the players to help keep them all straight. Along these same lines, if you’re not feeling confident in improvising these characters from the minimalist descriptions, then maybe it’s worthwhile to spin up a universal roleplaying template for each of them.

It’s important to remember that there’s no “right” answer here: It’s about what you feel confident improvising at the table and what added material, if any, seems valuable to you.

In this case, jotting down the prep described above took about fifteen minutes. That feels about right for how I’m choosing to use this module, and I think I’ve set myself up for success at the gaming table. What and how you choose to prep will different from the choices I made, but ultimately we have the same goal!

Mothership is the sci-fi horror RPG you’ve been waiting for! I’ve been waiting years to get my hands on this bad boy, and I’m excited to have you join me in diving into all the hidden treasures and secrets these boxes have hidden away!

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

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

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

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

I’ll likely be writing up a full review of Mothership after I’ve had a chance to run it a few more times, but for now I’d like to share the system cheat sheet I’ve developed for the game.

WHAT’S NOT INCLUDED

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

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

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

HOW I USE THEM

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

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

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

PAGE 2: Survival. (Most of the miscellaneous rules in the game.)

PAGE 3: Ports & Medical Care. (Stuff to do in your downtime.)

PAGE 4: Contractors. (I debated whether to include this page, but I really want the idea of hiring Contractors to be front-and-center for new Mothership players. It’s such an excellent way of getting them more deeply invested in the campaign.)

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

CRUXES

The Mothership cheat sheet currently only covers the material in the Player’s Survival Guide. I’ll likely be expanding them at some point to include the rules from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, but for the moment I’m going to be focusing on in media res scenarios where I’m dropping the troubleshooters into abandoned military bases, butchered research labs, and drifting derelicts.

There are a few interesting mechanical cruxes I’ve had to confront when putting together the cheat sheet.

Unarmed Damage: Unlisted in the core rulebook, this was immediately an issue in my first couple sessions. I’ve pulled the value of 1d5 from Pound of Flesh, an adventure module included in the Deluxe Edition of the game.

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

Combat: The transition from an explicitly turn-based initiative system in Mothership 0e to what seems to be a more freeform(?) resolution in Mothership 1e appears to have been pretty badly muffed. The rules and examples of play contradict each other, and support material (including stat blocks and adventures included in the core game box) don’t seem to be in sync with the mechanics. I’ll likely have more to say about this in the future, but for now I’ve simply included the combat rules as written on the cheat sheet.

I’m currently using a system of:

1. The GM threatens harm. (To use a term of art from Apocalypse World.)

2. Players declare action by going around the table.

3. GM makes rulings for how actions are resolved.

4. Players all roll dice (if necessary) at the same time. (Failures likely result in the threatened harm occurring.)

But although this is strongly suggested by the examples of play, I’m not yet convinced it’s actually working very well. (The system seems to detach from the game world, or vice versa, and every opponent kinda blurs into the same mechanical mush.) As I say, I’m going to continue experimenting with this.

MAKING A GM SCREEN

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

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

Mothership is a sci-fi horror RPG. Think Alien, The Thing, Pitch Black, or Annihilation. The core boxed set of the game comes with two amazing resources.

First, Unconfirmed Contact Reports, which is Mothership’s equivalent of a Monster Manual. It includes a fair share of ghouls and greys and husks, but also even more terrifying threats like The Good and Granny and Sally in the Screen.

Second, the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, which notably includes a dozen ships with full specs, illustration, and maps, like the Sato GS Grail VI executive transport:

I love this kind of raw adventure fodder. Stuff that’s prepped and packaged so that you can just drop it straight into session and take off running. You need to put in zero work, because everything you need is already on the page. You can just use it. And often not just once, but over and over and over again.

You’d think this sort of stuff would be the rule rather than exception in RPGs, but this is surprisingly not the case. You’re far more likely to get a bunch of “adventure ideas” that you need to flesh out. Or you’ll get something like a ship described in broad terms, but without the concrete tools you need to bring it to the table with rock solid confidence.

Because Mothership gives you these great resources, though, we have an opportunity to leverage them to even greater heights.

DERELICT ADVENTURE RECIPE

Scenario Hook: The PCs find a derelict spacecraft floating in space. Or they answer a distress beacon. Or they’re sent as a salvage crew.

Step 1 – Ship: Pick a random ship from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit or roll on this table.

Step 2 – Monster: Pick a random monster from Unconfirmed Contact Reports. This monster is onboard the derelict (and is almost certainly why it’s a derelict).

Note: Not every creature in Unconfirmed Contact Reports is equally likely to work well with this adventure recipe, so I’m not including a random table here. (If you want to roll randomly, you can flip to a random page or roll a random number on the book’s Index.) Don’t forget the Five Quick Horrors on the back cover of the book!

Step 3 – Monster Sign:

• Pick three ship compartments. Place a hint suggesting the horror that was unleashed here in each compartment.
• Pick three more compartments. Place a clue revealing the monster’s identity and/or abilities in each compartment.
• If the monster has a special weakness, add three clues that reveal this weakness anywhere in the ship. (One of these clues may be found while encountering the creature itself.)

Step 4 – Confrontation: Either…

• Pick a compartment where he monster is currently located.
• Roll 1d6 each time the PCs enter a compartment. On a roll of 1, the monster finds them and attacks.

Or both.

And that’s the whole recipe. As you can see, you can probably spin up the whole adventure in less than fifteen minutes. (I’d say you could it while the players are rolling up their characters, but that’s probably not true only because character creation in Mothership is so insanely fast.)

LARGER SHIPS

Some of the ships described in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, like the Northstar Paragon exploration vessel, are very large. Using the basic recipe on these ships will result in adventure content being spread out too thinly across the numerous rooms.

Option 1: Increase the number of hints and clues. For example, you might use the guidelines above for every deck of the ship instead

Option 2: Run the ships as a sector crawl, reading “sector” in the recipe everywhere that it says “compartment.” (Conveniently, the ships in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit are already mapped in sectors.)

RANDOM DERELICT SHIPS

The adventure Dead Planet, which can be found in the deluxe edition of Mothership or purchased separately, includes a Random Derelict Ship Generator, including stuff like random cargo and, even more importantly, a random deckplan generator.

How incredibly useful!

Instead of selecting a ship from the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, you can obviously use the Random Derelict Ship Generator to provide an endless variety of ships for this adventure recipe!

In the Mothership RPG, when your ship takes megadamage it advances along track where each point of megadamage also inflicts an additional effect, as described in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, p. 35, and also on the ship manifest sheet:

00           All Systems Normal
01           Emergency Fuel Leak
02           Weapons Offline
03           Navigation Offline
04           Fire on Deck
05           Hull Beach
06           Life Support Systems Offline
07           Radiation Leak
08           Dead in the Water
09+         Abandon Ship!

Because you can suffer more than one point of megadamage per hit and you only apply the effect of the megadamage total you land on after, there is some variation within this system. But if you want to mix things up a bit more (so that, for example, you might suffer an emergency fuel leak after weapons go offline), you could deploy a basic megadamage pyramid:

You start on the top row and mark off boxes in a random order, once again only applying the last megadamage effect crossed off on each row.

Note: This pyramid is slightly less forgiving at the top end than the original rules, as it’s possible to hit Abandon Ship at 8 megadamage.

BRUTAL VARIANT: CAPRICIOUS FATE

Combat in the void is harsh and unforgiving, for this was a place that man was never meant to live or die.

In this brutal variant of the megadamage pyramid, each time a ship suffers megadamage roll the effect randomly:

If you roll an effect you’ve already rolled, it spills over to another effect on the same row. If all effects on the row are filled, then the effect rolls down to the next level of the pyramid.

While it’s possible for your ship to suffer catastrophic damage the very first time you’re hit in combat (Abandon Ship!), there is one glimmer of hope: On a roll of 00, you still suffer the megadamage, but it has no further effect.

Variant – Fast Escalation: If you roll an effect your ship is already suffering from, you instead sink down the pyramid to one of the two adjacent damage effects (determine which one randomly).