I’ve been using Prospero’s Dream as the homebase for my Mothership open table set in the Tempest Cluster. This space station is described in A Pound of Flesh and will also be featured in the upcoming Prospero’s Dream boxed set.

Scattered throughout A Pound of Flesh are a bunch of different rumors concerning the station. Among other sources, they can be obtained by:

• Spending 100cr at the Docks
• Buying a drink from Sem, bartender at the Stellar Burn
• Exchanging an O2 tank in the Doptown Slums

I wanted to incorporate these disparate rumors into the wider rumor procedures I’m using for my open table, and to do that easily I wanted to unify them into a single master rumor table for the station. I took the opportunity to add a bunch of new rumors, too.

Since this seems like the sort of thing other GMs using Prospero’s Dream might find useful, I’m sharing the full table here.

PROSPERO’S DREAM – MASTER RUMOR TABLE

Note: Some rumors are divided into parts using one or more /’s. Additional parts develop the rumor in more detail. You may choose to give the full rumor, or the additional parts might be rewarded for investigating the rumor, over time (as events develop), or as the result of rolling the rumor a second time.

PROSPERO’S DREAM – CRISIS RUMORS

*See Open Table Headlines for more details.

In A Pound of Flesh, there are three Crises currently happening on Prospero’s Dream. Each Crisis is divided into three phases, during which various events are happening and locations are being altered. These rumors are designed to point the PCs towards where the weird/interesting stuff is happening.

Arranging these rumors into a random table, however, is difficult, since the situation on the station is constantly evolving. (This is particularly true in my campaign, as I’ve separated the Crises and have them advancing independently of each other.) Therefore, you can roll on the table above to determine which Crisis the rumor belongs to and then select a rumor from the appropriate phase for that crisis.

Note: In your campaign, you’ll know what the current status of each Crisis is and could stock and update a rumor table with only those rumors that are currently relevant.

OUTBREAK RUMORS

• [Outbreak 1] There’s a strange girl who keeps showing up in the Slickworlds in the Ice Box (APOF, p. 200. / She says her name is Ariel.
• [Outbreak 1] Several Slickbay users have gone catatonic. / Some have awoken, describing a cryhing girl who calls herself Ariel.
• [Outbreak 1] The plague is coming through the air filters from The Choke.
• [Outbreak 1] There’s going to be a mass execution of infected prisoners at the Courts.
• [Outbreak 2] Strange images of a laughing man (Dr. Bancali) flash on terminals across the station.
• [Outbreak 2] Gilled Hunglungs are suffering severe mutations. / They’re the source of the plague. / They’re desperate to have the modification removed and the Chop Shop is overwhelmed.
• [Outbreak 2] The Ice Box slickworlds have been shut down. Something has gone seriously wrong with them. / All the slickworlds merged into a single bleak wasteland ruled by a demon named Caliban.
• [Outbreak 2] I saw a huge, fleshy mouth open in the bulkhead.
• [Outbreak 2] The Hunglungs have bred monsters and released them into the station. (FALSE)
• [Outbreak 3] Report of the latest location to be taken over by Caliban. (APOF, p. 7)
• [Outbreak 3] CANYONHEAVY.market has been shut down. The doors are being welded shut.
• [Outbreak 3] Everyone in DOPTOWN has asphyxiated.

STRIKE RUMORS

• [Strike 1] Ships operated by the Teamster Local 32819L have been missing their docking dates.
• [Strike 1] (INSERT FACTION) is responsible for the missing ships! (FALSE)
• [Strike 1] The Stratemeyer Syndicate has claimed responsibility for the missing ships. They’re demanding a 30mcr ransom payment.
• [Strike 1] Negotiations between Yandee and Reidmar have broken down. Rumor is the Teamsters are planning to go on strike.
• [Strike 1] Teamsters are offering a 2mcr bounty for the return of the teamsters being held hostage.
• [Strike 2] Tempest Mercenaries are planning to assassinate Reidmar and disband the union.
• [Strike 2] The Golyanova Bratva is recruiting scab ships willing to cross the teamsters’ picket line and get trade flowing again.
• [Stirke 2] Fuel prices have spiked as a result of the strike.
• [Strike 2] The Life Support modules are being shut down from lack of supplies due to the strike. The whole station is going to turn into Doptown! (FALSE)
• [Strike 2] Teamsters are subject to mass arrests. The holding cells at the Courts are overflowing.
• [Strike/Unrest 3] The Tempest Mercenary HQ is in total lockdown. No one in or out.

UNREST RUMORS

• [Unrest 1] It would take 50.4bcr to pay off the O2 debt of everyone currently living in the Choke.
• [Unrest 1] Report of the most recent bombing. (APOF, p. 7)
• [Unrest 1] A Hunglung wants to recruit you to join the revolution.
• [Unrest 1] Identified Hunglungs are being snuck off station somehow. / Someone must be bankrolling the operation. (It’s the Solarian Church.)
• [Unrest 2] The Solarian Church was working with the Hunglungs! / Tempest Mercenaries have laid siege to the Farm.
• [Unrest 2] Yandee has ordered the Airlock to be sealed. The entire Choke is now under Quarantine.
• [Unrest 2] Yandee has ordered all O2 debts to be doubled.
• [Strike/Unrest 3] The Tempest Mercenary HQ is in total lockdown. No one in or out.
• [Unrest 3] The Airlock has fallen!

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