The Smell of Burnt Toast

 

As you will know if you've been following this blog religiously, I tend to take a jaundiced view of videogames these days. Not all of my friends are so jaded, though, and thanks to their influence, I occasionally get roped into some zeitgeisty new hotness. A little ARC Raiders here, a little Clair Obscur there. I'm glad to have had a chance to try them out, and at least equally glad not to have wasted too much time, or my own money, on them. But every now and then, something really seizes my attention. Like today. Today, I got to play Crimson Desert.

I keep seeing people describe this game's story as “bland,” “boring,” or “forgettable.” I do not know what kind of brainrot these people have been exposing themselves to that Crimson Desert strikes them as being on the bad side of normality. It is terrible, to be clear, but “forgettable” is the last thing I'd call it. Others have called it “convoluted,” “incoherent,” or “nonsensical,” which are all closer to the mark, but I think those adjectives, sapped by overuse of some of their power, also fail to do it justice. Crimson Desert might have the worst story I have ever seen in a game, and it also might have the worst storytelling I've ever seen in a game. It is fucked up in ways that have permanently rewired my brain.

* * * 

The game is actually in pretty good shape, technically, for a new release. No game-breaking bugs, nothing that impedes progress, hardly any minor visual glitches, even. It's a rat's nest of insanely bad design choices in every possible area, from the user interface to the control scheme to the inventory system, but it all seems to be working as designed. Not bad for a big-budget game at launch.

And the life-changing badness of the story sneaks up on you. It all starts the way I've seen people write about it, with some generic but incongruous elements slapped together in a way that's a bit discordant but mostly just tiresome. First there's an attack by (one presumes) the main bad guy on the good guys' camp, and our protagonist gets repeatedly stabbed, his throat is slit, and he's thrown in a river. Seems like he ought to be dead! But instead (or maybe as a consequence?) he goes to techno-heaven and learns the first of many abilities that have been shamelessly cribbed from other, better games. There are no NPCs in techno-heaven. There are no explanations. Is it real? Is it a dream? Does it matter? Eventually, our hero returns from whence he went and washes ashore, uninjured.

His name is Cliff, by the way. They spell it “Kliff,” but…come on. It's Cliff. He has a friend named Duane. This is in a world with orcs (with names like Oongka) and ogres and wizards. There's some guy called Jian (Chinese?). The realm we're all in is called Pywel (Welsh?). Zero effort whatsoever to make things coherent or give any of the proper nouns legible relationships to one another. It's great. The whole thing seems haphazard, slapped together, just an excuse for a beautiful open world to roam around in. Fine.

But there is a main quest, and if you follow that main quest, the sense that things have merely been kludged together lazily begins to give way to something more uncanny. More unsettling. A couple hours in, you realize that you're playing out a waking fever dream, and that your actual flesh-and-blood brain is overheating. The following is an actual sequence of steps in the game's main quest.

* * * 

You jump off some sky islands, which are 1) one of the very most shameless of Crimson Desert's many, many deeply shameless borrowings from the last couple of Zelda games and 2) called “the Abyss” for no reason I can even begin to imagine. You land back near the starting town where much of the quest line has taken place thus far. You are prompted to go to a watchtower nearby. Nobody actually gives you the quest; no NPC has even mentioned the watchtower. You just know: It's time to go there. The holy spirit, or the insistence of the 10-year-old Zelda-loving DM running this most unholy railroad of a D&D campaign, compels you.

As you approach the tower, you hear NPCs yelling about bandits. Seems some bandits have captured the watchtower! You'd better fight them. You do, which is pretty fun, to be honest—trampling them with your horse, hacking at them with a one-handed axe—and the instant the last one falls, the screen fades to black. You've been teleported off your horse to the base of the tower; all the dead bandits have vanished (their gear has helpfully been whisked away to a chest in your quarters, from which you can extract loot, but which you cannot actually manually add anything to; you can only store things in your personal inventory). Up come several of the game's never-ending blizzard of tutorial screens explaining one minigame or arcane sub-mechanic (claiming territory! fishing! investing in the stock market! arbitrage!) after another. You close them out. Your quest now is “Go to the top of the tower.” Do you smell burning? Is something burning?

To get inside, there's a sort of puzzle where the solution is basically, “Hey, you played Zelda, right? You know how this works.” (If you hadn't played Zelda, you'd probably have no fucking clue what's going on. You have played Zelda, for better or worse.) You go inside. There are some extremely half-assed traps, easy to bypass, trivial to evade even if you do trigger them. Did a human being design this? Like, in the game, are we meant to believe that an NPC put these traps here, on purpose? What kind of a watchtower is this anyway, with only one door and no windows? Is any of this real? Is it meant to be? Did a human being design this? Like, was this made by AI, in the real world? Is any of this real?

You hike to the top. There are three traps, and maybe five stories to the tower. Or maybe fifty. It all looks the same, and it's taken you so long. You're feeling a little dizzy. There's nothing at the top except loot. Better get to looting! Halfway through picking up coins and books and random flatware—everything is labeled ??? until you pick it up, and I do mean everything, from grasshoppers to cheese—you accidentally pick up a weird helmet. Your quest now is “Put on the weird helmet.”

You put on the weird helmet. There's a hologram of a wizard who made this helmet to record memories or something. He says something about you being the chosen one, maybe? Or maybe that was somebody else. Who can remember? It's all hallucinatory, and it's hard to hear him over the ringing in your ears. Your quest now is “Talk to the child.” What? Who? Where? Why? (At least you know when. Right now!)

You go back down the stairs and out the tower's front door. There's a kid on the wall. Ah, you do recognize her. For a moment, things snap back into place. The ringing recedes. Back in town, you helped her rescue her cat from a rooftop. Also, she's probably not actually a kid, because that earlier part of the quest line involved an old beggar who turned out to be off-brand Merlin and a noblewoman who turned out to be…a talking bird? Like, a seagull, but magical? Gandalf, but a lady, and a seagull? Don't think too hard about it; you'll only hurt yourself. Follow the cat, the kid says. That's your quest now.

You follow the cat. It takes like an hour. The cat goes halfway up a mountain, and it's not that fast, and it gets stuck in a stream and on a rock along the way. Time unspools. Your eyes lose focus. You shake yourself. How long were you out like that?

Oops, the cat's moving again. Up on the mountain is a magical ruin that's the 185th thing you've seen in the past two hours (four hours? six?) that was shamelessly lifted from Tears of the Kingdom. You watch a hologram do magic to a holographic door, which teaches you a magic spell that lets you do magic to a real door. You go inside the magical ruin. You learn another magic spell by watching a hologram. A different one? The same one? It's all running together, but it doesn't matter. None of this is real, you promise yourself.

You are presented with a puzzle that, perversely, is solved with neither of these new magic spells but one you learned three magic spells ago, back in the Sky Islands, excuse me, the Abyss. Your quest is, once again, “Talk to the child.” What the fuck? How'd the child get here? What happened to the cat? Was there ever a cat? Was the cat the child all along?

You go outside. Oh. It's not that child from before. It's a new magical child. The kid blathers at you about destiny or the balance or something. Your ears are ringing again. Blood trickles from your nose. Wipe it away. A wave of dizziness buffets you. Fight it down. You can't really understand what the kid is going on about. You can't concentrate. But you can stay on your feet. Your head swims. Stay on your feet. Your quest—that's simple enough. That you can understand. “Go back to town.” You can do it.

You go back to town. Some guy wants to fight you. Sure, you say. You say yes to everything. There literally aren't any dialogue options in this game. You simply do whatever the 10-year-old DM railroading you through life and death and unlife thinks would be cool next. Every step of every quest is just “Make the next thing happen,” or “Go to where the next thing is going to happen to you.” You have no choice. You kick the guy's ass. Oops, he has a second health bar. You kick the guy's ass. He compliments you a bunch. You respond with great humility. You are always extremely humble. You have no choice. Your quest now is “Speak with the man who seems to have something to say.”

That's actually from the game. I mean, all of this has really been from the game, but I've been paraphrasing the quest text, mostly. This one is verbatim. That's what this next step of the main quest is: “Speak with the man who seems to have something to say.”

You experience a massive cerebral hemorrhage.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Valeria made a great observation in her recent review of Daggerheart:

TTRPGs have utterly failed to communicate how lighthearted this hobby is to outsiders. When I tell my coworkers that I play D&D, most of them are imagining […] a Lord of the Rings LARP mediated by complicated math. Therefore, most new converts to the hobby - intimidated by the serious game they imagine D&D to be - try to pull the game in a direction more comfortable to them. They play clowns and humanoid bears to protect themselves with a layer of detached irony. 

But the real irony is that this is the most popular way to engage with the game! The most beloved D&D stories are all absurd bits! So the same cycle keeps playing out at table after table. New players enter the hobby expecting D&D to be the butt of their jokes, realize everyone else is also doing bits, then become so emotionally invested in the joy the bits brought them that the game acquires genuine narrative weight.

This got me thinking about my own experiences—not so much my own early ones as a player (deadly earnest, I'm afraid; please pretend to be shocked) but the several times now I've seen other folks sit down at the table for the first time, and in particular my experiences with first-time GMs. I've thought about related questions a fair bit (like, what's a good first system for brand-new players, and what sort of adventures should I, as the GM, send them on?) but I'd never thought directly about what Valeria articulated. It struck a chord, obviously, and it helped me clarify something that's been bugging me lately.

I've been reading through a ton of Mothership stuff. As is tradition, I've gone way deeper than the group (which has for the time being moved on to Tales of Argosa anyway) ever needed. It's just fun! It's a great scene, there's a ton of creativity out there, there's a ton of diversity to what people are writing, and there's loads I'm looking forward to running. But there is a thread running through a lot of third-party Mothership material that I find a bit irksome: a tendency to get jarringly silly. Goofy names, obvious references to popular media, zany gags, all manner of unserious stuff that takes me out of the immersive space I'm building in my imagination.

The part that has bugged me, to be clear, is my own stuffy reaction. Am I a spoilsport? A killjoy? As we established above, TTRPGs are silly, and writing silly stuff is fun. Who am I to scoff at somebody else's silly fun? The sort of dork who approached his early experiences with D&D 3.5e and 4e in deadly earnest, of course. What suits me definitely isn't for everybody! And yet…

* * * 

This week, I also serendipitously happened across a video gently poking fun at director Robert Eggers for how disappointed he is by his much-lauded feature debut, The Witch, and how relentlessly negative he is about it on the film's commentary track. Punctiliousness about historical accuracy matters to Eggers to a degree that seems borderline pathological even to the sympathetic video creator.

For my part, I'm an admirer of Eggers, love The Witch, and am all for pathological devotion to historical accuracy in film. For me, The Witch stands in stark contrast to one of the recent films I've been most out of step with critics and other cinema dorks about, The Brutalist. I hated the latter for any number of reasons, but among the things that most immediately upset me, and then just continually galled me throughout its voluminous running time, was the film's sloppy disregard for historical accuracy. Any movie whose Holocaust-survivor protagonist emerges from Buchenwald with eight-pack abs has burned up all of my goodwill right from the jump, but this one also featured a slew of anachronistic dialogue and had very obviously been filmed in Central Europe (I correctly guessed Hungary during the intermission and have witnesses who can corroborate that!) despite being set in Pennsylvania. I used to live in Germany and spent some time in Poland and Hungary. I recognized the architecture, the trees, even the damn dirt. It quickly destroyed whatever ability to be immersed I had left after the abs.

In an interview clipped in that video above, my man Eggers says, “I didn't obsess over Puritan buttons just because I like buttons. I didn't obsess over the saw marks in the floorboards because I like saw marks. […] It's in the purpose of telling the story. It's about immersing you in the world. If you can't be actually transported to the 17th century, then you can't actually be transported into the mindset of these English Puritan Calvinist settlers, and if you can't do that, then you can't believe in the witch, and the whole movie just doesn't work. […] The more you let things slide, the more the whole thing doesn't work.” Now, it's certainly possible that you can set the bar too high; errors that are only in frame for a fraction of a second, things that only a subject-matter expert or a world-class pedant would recognize, it's probably fine to let them slide. (There are a couple King Hu movies set during the Song dynasty, which ended in 1279, where people have dried maize hanging in their homes despite the fact that maize didn't exist in China until after 1492; this only bothers me a little bit and has not diminished my adoration for Hu or his work.)

The thing is, though, that although nobody will ever notice any of the work that went into raising the bar higher than it needed to be, everybody's going to notice all of the work you didn't put in if you don't set it high enough. The bar depends on the audience, and it depends on the subject matter, but it's always there.

The immersiveness and tone of any roleplaying game depend on a lot of factors, and of course the overall composition of the group is an important one, but nothing is more important than the example the GM sets. Let's carve it in stone right here: My First Law of GMing is that the players will always take the game less seriously than the GM does. This is almost always true on a one-on-one basis (i.e., each individual player in your game will take it no more seriously than you do; nobody wants to out-nerd the boss nerd), but it is always true in the aggregate. I have never been in a game where the average player seriousness (or earnestness, or “buy-in”) was greater than the GM's, and I am 100% confident I never will be—at least not for long. If it ever happens for even a couple sessions in a row, the game probably falls apart.

As a filmmaker, if you're trying to immerse your audience, you want to err on the side of being too punctilious. As a GM, you're definitely trying to immerse your players, so you want to err on the side of being embarrassingly earnest. You can always tone it down! It's a lot easier to relax and let your players inject some silliness into the proceedings (which, again, they're almost always going to do) than it is to tighten things back up. Like a jury tainted by impermissible evidence even after it's been officially stricken from the record, players are probably going to stay in the silliest headspace they've been in even if you enjoin them with “Come on, guys, take this a little more seriously!” Start earnest and let things find their level. Be the straight man to the players' comedians.

By that same token, if you're writing TTRPG material intended for GMs to use, obviously they don't have to run it exactly as you write it and are welcome to revise it to make it more immersive, serious, earnest, or anything else for their table…but you might as well err on the side of earnestness, because it's a lot easier to make things more silly than less. Give your reader all the tools they need to play the most earnest, serious, humorless version of your material possible. They, and especially their players, will have no trouble finding humor at the table.

How Much Detail Is Too Much Detail?

One of the worthy finalists in the Advice category for this year's Bloggies was Sam Sorensen's “Ten Intangible Tips for Development Editing Your RPG Manuscript.” I like the way Sam writes these “ten tips” articles; he adopts an authoritative voice, like he's the author of a style guide (which I suppose is exactly what he's going for, after all, on a small scale). Maybe it's professional bias speaking—although my day job entails mostly writing now, I spent most of my career as an editor—but there's little the TTRPG scene needs more than good, authoritative editing advice. There's a lot of beautiful writing out there, a lot of tremendous creativity; there isn't a lot of rigor or polish.

Accordingly, my favorite tip from Sam's post is #10: “Write to Be Read, Do Not Write to Not Be Read.” You know that (apocryphal) Michelangelo quotation, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free”? Writing is like that. The first draft—all of the writing, in a sense—is just getting the marble from Carrara. Your big, bloated, excessive first draft is your raw material, assembled and ready to be worked. The real artistry is chipping away everything that doesn't need to be there. Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.” (Saint-Ex really did say that one.)

Which is a good segue into one area where I'm kind of in disagreement with Sam, or at least where I'm not sure where I stand. On a continuum between Sam's way (do all the legwork for your reader, so that once they've assimilated the information, they can take it straight to the table without having to do any additional prep) and, say, Luke Gearing's way (where important factions, events, and NPCs are roughly sketched, or even exist in name only, and the reader must develop them at length—maybe with tools the text provides, maybe not—before play begins), I definitely tend more toward Sam's philosophy, but I'm not all the way there, and I also recognize that this is a matter of philosophy. Some people want pick-up-and-playability; others want to make commercial material their own, or leave room for replayability (attractive for one-shots like Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine). “How much detail is too much?” is ultimately not really answerable, at least as long as we avoid the extremes of the continuum. Different strokes for different folks. But what about the extremes?

The extreme Luke end of the continuum is obviously a problem—it sometimes gets to be not so much an RPG manuscript as a mood board the reader can use to homebrew something. But the extreme Sam end of the spectrum has its perils too. He argues, if I can oversimplify things, in favor of great specificity both in the sense of rejecting the generic and in the sense of providing meaty details. Below, I quibble with both.

 

HOW MUCH DETAIL IS TOO MUCH?

The first place Sam loses me a bit is #8: “Clear, Specific, Evocative.” He gives a series of examples of dungeon dressing, which begin vague and generic:

In one corner are caged animals. Sometimes, they make a loud noise.

He makes the description clearer:

In one corner stand a collection of cages, each holding a wolf. Twice a day at a certain hour, they howl.

He makes it more specific:

In the northeast corner stand 8 square iron cages, 5’ on a side, each holding a scrawny, mangy wolf. At 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. each day, they howl.

And finally, he makes it more evocative. Or tries:

In the northeast corner stand 8 chain-link cages, 5’ on a side, each holding a fat, grinning hyena. At 10:10 a.m. and 10:10 p.m each day, they yowl with synchronous laughter, their cackles harmonizing into a B minor Mixolydian scale.

I'm with him to a point. The scrawny, mangy wolves and fat, grinning hyenas I can picture; that's certainly more evocative than simply “a wolf” or “animals.” An individual five-foot cage, whether iron or chain link, I can picture too. But eight cages in the northeast corner? How are they arranged? Are they all jammed together, taking up a 15-by-15 area? If so, how does anybody get to the wolves to feed them? Are they stacked one on top of the other? If they're all on the floor, but spaced out enough for a kennelman to move among them, they're probably spread out across like 600 square feet. Is that really in the northeast corner (just how big is this room)?

To me, an excess of detail has now made things less clear. And what's with them howling at exactly 8:00? Again, it strikes me as being too specific, to the point of being glaringly unnatural—it's accidentally moved back into the realm of demanding extra prep; the GM might need to come up for an explanation of why these guys howl or yowl with clockwork precision. (I'd do away with the precision and opt for something more like “Twice a day, sometime after dawn and again after dusk, one wolf begins to howl, and the others all rush to join in.”)

The final change, introducing “a B minor Mixolydian scale,” has gone way too far for me. I don't know anything about music theory! (I played the drums; you know the jokes.) This surely means something to one of the players in one of my groups, who went to a music conservatory, and probably means something to one of the players in my other group, who has forty different hobbies (music among them) and is confoundingly talented at all of them, but it means nothing to most of my players, and even if a couple of my players get it, it doesn't really mean anything coming from me, a guy who is just parroting words he does not understand.

You have to know your audience when you're writing, but when you're writing TTRPGs, you also have to consider your reader's audience. One of the advantages to not sewing everything up tight, to leaving a little extra cloth for other folks to let out or take in as they see fit, is that you can write for a broad audience, and let them tailor your material to their own little micro-audience.

HOW MUCH ORIGINALITY IS TOO MUCH? 

“Clear, Specific, Evocative” ends with Sam asserting that “an iron cage holding a howling wolf is bog-standard dungeon decor; a chain-link cage holding a chubby, giggly, singing hyena situates the reader someplace far more unique and unusual.” In #9, carrying this thread forward, he enjoins us to “Push Past the Obvious.” And again, I say yes…but let's not push too far. Bog-standard material should never be front and center, but it makes fantastic set dressing. You don't want everything about your setting, your dungeon, your scenario to be unique and unusual—this not only requires a lot more written material, it puts a much bigger cognitive load on your reader and their players. Bog-standard elements are useful shortcuts. In Sam's terms, they're legwork that's already done, legwork your reader and their players have already committed to memory.

We all know what an elf is. We all know what an orc is. We all get the vibe established by some iron cages containing mangy wolves. Not having to do the mental labor of understanding those elements from first principles (if every ancestry, every creature, every magic spell were unusual or original) frees up resources for wrapping our heads around the limited amount of extremely creative, cool, polished-to-a-mirror-sheen stuff that the work is really about. Push harder to make things shine, to make things polished—again, polish, not originality, is what is most consistently, conspicuously lacking from the indie TTRPG universe—but don't make everything weird without purpose. Make things exactly as weird as you need them to be to for maximum effect without disorienting or overwhelming readers and players. (And, again, know your audience; they might have a near-infinite appetite for weirdness, after all.)

Mothership Module Review: Orphans

I haven't reviewed much TTTRPG material on this blog—I don't feel good about reviewing things I haven't actually played, and most of the things I would feel comfortable reviewing, having played them extensively, are both daunting (because they're big-ass rulebooks encompassing entire systems) and unnecessary; the world does not need more opinions about D&D or even Stars Without Number. Adventures are much more manageable to review, but in the time I've been writing here, I've rarely run other people's adventures.

Lately, though, with a new group who are very keen on one-shots and short campaigns and not presently interested in a long mega-campaign, I've been running a bunch of Mothership modules. And I probably ought to review them, because as popular as many of these modules are, they don't always get much critical analysis from the blogosphere.

Now, because I'm a dumbass, I'm starting with one that has gotten some solid coverage already: Orphans. Valeria gave it a mixed-to-negative review months ago that hits a lot of the same points I will. Nevertheless, I think it's worth me digging into, both because there's a lot that's super cool about this module and because I keep seeing it suggested as a good introduction to Mothership (and it represents itself as such), which I think it isn't. Spoilers abound below.

 

* * *

 

THE UNIMPEACHABLY GOOD STUFF

Luke Gearing is a great writer with a vivid imagination. The monster is excellent—tropey enough that players can easily grasp what its deal is, but novel enough to remain weird and spooky—and the whole “sanity-testing swampy fecundity on a should-be-sterile space station” atmosphere is outstanding. The progression track that leads to Auntie's arrival is well constructed and ratchets up the tension and eeriness steadily, without a bunch of ham-fisted messages scrawled in blood (well, mostly without; a note on that below). The figments are cool too; they are handled pretty inconsistently (as Valeria notes, and as I'll get into more below), but the concept is strong, and if the Warden is willing to put in a little elbow grease, they also help make things unsettling without going straight to jumpscare violence and other horror cliches.

As an extension of Auntie's general very-cool-ness, the potential for an epilogue or campaign-level consequences is strong. We know the kids are capable of summoning Auntie, or “inviting her into the physical realm.” It seems like they do so involuntarily when they're in grave danger—they were horrified by what she did at the lab, but they brought her back on Imuen Station when soldiers came to recapture them. They don't seem to be capable of banishing her again, although she apparently can't follow them through hyperspace (a thematically rich inference!). It follows that they're potentially a huge liability. If the PCs bring them along on their ship, or drop them off at some friendly port, they might summon Auntie again next time they're in a dangerous situation and cause another massacre.

There's an ugly but intriguing tension here: Auntie is the antagonist, but Auntie's primary objective (keep the kids safe) is probably aligned with the PCs' objectives, or at least with their moral values. The move that most decisively defeats Auntie, and arguably the best, safest one from a coldly utilitarian perspective, is unthinkable (kill the kids). Still, if your players are kind of evil, just not that evil, there are myriad ways to essentially weaponize Auntie and the kids, using them like a wrecking ball against groups foolish enough to try to exploit them. And Auntie has a ton of potential to be played as a less malevolent, more manipulative, not entirely antagonistic villain.

 

THE BIG BUT EASILY FIXED FLAW

The biggest obstacle to smooth, enjoyable play here is a simple circulatory problem. As written, the module is almost linear, but that isn't clear to players. PCs are clearly expected to enter via one of the docking claws (the only other option, the maintenance bay airlock, is broken, albeit potentially reparable)—the station diagram in the booklet even shows the “player ship” already docked there. They find that the cargo lift is unpowered, and probably go straight up to the ring, where they explore three areas that essentially constitute one big red herring (one minor but intensely felt gripe: having the third area in the book only reachable via the fourth and fifth areas is a perplexingly bad layout choice). When they've exhausted their options above, or if they persist in trying to go down the central spindle from the start, though, there's no obvious path. The Warden must extemporize: “Uhh, yeah, there's a maintenance area behind the lift with a door you can jimmy open or kick down or blast apart, and inside, there's a ladder that goes down the elevator shaft.” Unfortunately, there's still no path. The booklet is explicit about the elevator shaft: It's “blocked halfway by soil and wooden logs” and “digging through takes 1 hour.”

As written, unless the PCs can repair the maintenance bay airlock's manual controls (mine—a marine machine gunner, an android hacker, and a planetologist—had neither the know-how nor the tools) there's no way to get from the station's only entry point down to where the kids are, or at least not without using a laser cutter or something to explosively decompress the maintenance bay. Assuming the players are unwilling to vent the whole station, the Warden has to invent some other options for them. This is no big deal for an experienced GM, of course, and there are lots of possibilities (there's a fourth airlock down below that leads straight to engineering; there's a computer terminal up in management where they can remotely reboot the generators; there's an air duct they can crawl through), but it's reason enough not to recommend this as baby's first module. And it's just a weird oversight; this isn't a trifold pamphlet, and there's plenty of room for this level of detail (and plenty of entirely unnecessary detail, like multiple ways to acquire Staff ID cards that do essentially nothing).

Assuming the Warden invents the most obvious secondary route, the ladder in the elevator shaft (I didn't even have to nudge my players toward this, although I had prepped it; they immediately thought of it themselves), they meet that massive blockage of logs and dirt, an obstacle that (again, unless they have specific gear) seems more definitive than an unpowered cargo lift. In a scenario where there are dead bodies everywhere, swamp plants rapidly growing out of the walls, monstrous entities menacing them, and maybe even an imperative to extract two kids ASAP, this will feel like an absolute dead end to the players. One of mine happened to have a shovel and gave digging a try. “After five minutes, does it feel like I'm getting anywhere? Is the soil more densely packed or less?” Nope. He gave up immediately.

An hour? They would never. And because my crew didn't have a laser cutter or a vibechete or explosives, that was the end of it: They regarded the cargo lift as unusable for the rest of the session. It was so obvious to them that this was intended as a dead end that they went out the airlock again and started searching the exterior of the station for a fourth entrance (I gave them a maintenance hatch that led to engineering).
 

UNDERCOOKED AND EXTRANEOUS ELEMENTS

Auntie herself, as cool as she is, is presented in a muddled way. The booklet tells us that “if physically destroyed, Auntie reappears in 33 minutes.” The very next line seems to contradict that: “If Auntie is destroyed, its slayer experiences external thoughts.” Which is it? This circle isn't impossible to square (maybe with the kids' help, or PhD-level knowledge of xenoesotericism, you can banish the thing for good; maybe everybody who gets a killing blow on one instantiation of Auntie or another masters psychic dirt magic—although can you really say that you slew something that came back half an hour later?), but dropping those two sentences one after the other is confusing. It seems like two different versions of the module were clumsily grafted together here.

There are a bunch of other peculiar loose ends where you can see the imperfectly joined seams between dissimilar drafts. If PCs board the Vampire Squid, for instance, they find one of the crewmembers (the pilot, presumably) torn in half and bloody sigils drawn all over the cockpit. Gnarly, sure (if a lot more generic than all the cool swamp magic stuff), but…who did it? And how? And why? Shouldn't we instead find a punctured suit full of dirt floating nearby—a figment that floated over to the Squid pretending to be a soldier returning for more ammo or something?

Similarly, Limos Slobodan is dead in the mall. Limos is also recorded as the last person to leave the station. Is there supposed to be some significance to this contradiction? Surely it's not that a Limos figment went out into space and did a five-mile EVA to the Squid, which let him inside for no conceivable reason, and that's how the pilot got killed. But then what's this about? Tina Slobodan wants the PCs to look for her brother. Is this only a ploy to separate them, or is it an echo of something that happened before she was killed? Did Limos disappear before the retrieval squad arrived, and if he did, why is his dead body in the mall? If Limos is as irrelevant as he seems to be, why waste so much precious layout space on him? (On top of those damn Staff ID cards!)

The figments are another point of frustrating contradiction. On p. 5, we are told that “Auntie's disembodied form haunts the station, observing all that occurs.” On p. 9, however, “Figments are the eyes and ears of Auntie.” Now, it's clear from the back-cover table that Auntie has awareness of the PCs' movements beyond what figments perceive, and is capable of manifesting without the kids or any figments being present…but that's no fun. Restrictions on monster behavior are much more interesting than omniscience and omnipotence. Anchoring Auntie's ability to materialize to either the kids themselves or the agents she's created from dead victims grounds her a little, gives players a little something to leverage against her, and is more evocative.

“Auntie attacks whenever a single PC or two injured PCs are separated from the rest of the group” just leads to her one-shotting somebody without warning. “Figments try to get a PC alone with them, at which point Auntie will appear and attack,” though? That's cool. Even in a horror game, players usually aren't so jumpy that they won't even leave each other's line of sight. But an NPC begging one, and only one, of them to stay with her? That'll put them on edge.

Finally, another point in which I'm fully in agreement with Valeria: The characters and motivations of both the kids and Auntie are half-baked. The vibes are immaculate as long as things are mysterious and there's no end in sight, but once you've got the kids, well, what now? They have no plan, they're starving, and Luca at least wants to get off the station immediately. Great! Shouldn't take much convincing. “We're here to rescue you. We have a ship. Let's go before that monster comes back.” Makes the crowning social encounter kind of an anticlimax. You can introduce complications, of course (like Charis wanting to retrieve something from her room), and if the PCs haven't been sent to rescue the kids, maybe the encounter is more tense, but then again, if the PCs aren't there looking for the kids, they're probably not going to find the kids. As written, it's pretty deflating. Some guidance on how to play the kids, and in particular any motives for them other than “nothing, really” and “exactly the same as the players” would've been welcome.

 

NITPICKING

My first gripe germinated the moment I opened the booklet: I loved the design of Imuen Station. I'm a big fan of the semi-hard science fiction design quality of a lot of the official Mothership materials—the technologically plausible spaceships, the technologically plausible (looking) space stations—and I was pleased to see, right on p. 2, one of those neat little rocketships from the Shipbreaker's Toolkit, complete with ramshackle thruster assembly, docked to the station. And Imuen Station looks plausible! There are a bunch of residential and commercial functions in a ring, under spin gravity, and then a bunch of mechanical systems and storage and the maintenance bay in zero-G in the central spindle. Right?

Nope. It just has never-discussed artificial gravity that magically functions everywhere (despite the station running on emergency power). The artists tried, bless their hearts (note the great big SPINWARD signage on p. 12), but the writing doesn't follow their lead. This is a pet peeve of mine across most Mothership material, and I'm sure most people generally don't care about it. Here, though, more than in a lot of modules, it's a real missed opportunity.

The way Orphans is structured, there's a literal logjam between the residential/commercial ring and the industrial spindle below, pushing the players to visit the ring first. Having the spindle be entirely in zero-G would enforce the distinction between the two sections in a softer way than that clumsily designed dead end of an obstacle does, make the journey toward the kids after exploring the ring feel a little more ominous, and, specifically in this module, create an opportunity for Auntie's reality-distorting powers to get truly disorienting. Little tiny pockets of Earth-like gravity in odd places, pulling in improbable directions. Floating islands of dirt with trees growing out of them. Big Roadside Picnic vibes. Could've been so cool! Disappointing from Gearing, who in Gradient Descent made some of the most extensive use of zero-G environments I've seen in Mothership.

Another minor gripe at the start of the booklet, but one that I have with a lot of modules: The hooks for getting PCs involved in this situation are not compelling, and the economy is (perpetually) out of whack. How could a 70kcr bounty ever motivate anybody to make the trip to Imuen Station? If you have a ship, every jump costs you a million credits. If you don't, steerage-class passage and cargo space for just three people and their gear is going to cost 66kcr—for a one-way Jump-1 trip. And that's the only paying hook! The kids' parents spent all their money just tracking their location down; do they expect the PCs to do this out of the goodness of their hearts? The hooks that don't involve the kids, as Valeria observes, are likely to result in gameplay that doesn't involve the kids. They're in the last place anybody's going to look for them, if anybody's looking for them. If the PCs' aren't looking for teenagers, they might bounce as soon as they find valuable loot and/or get mauled by Auntie.

Now, several of these hooks are decent starting points for developing a stronger scenario and pointing the PCs either toward the kids or toward other concrete objectives. The PCs' ship is damaged or out of fuel? They'll need to get to the maintenance bay, loot the warp core from the life raft, use the utility pods to make repairs, fire up the generators to make refueling possible, or some combination of those things. One of the PCs has a relative on the station? They'll need to find the relative in hiding somewhere on the ring (and maybe the relative has befriended the kids and wants to go below to rescue them). If the kids' parents hired the crew, well, just change the prompt: They do still have enough money to offer a compelling payday. Likewise if it's a rival corp; just make the money make sense. Better prompts would demand less work from the Warden, though. Sure, space is limited, but 1) the booklet didn't have to be just 20 pages and 2) there's a lot of extraneous stuff in here that could've been edited out. Get rid of Limos and the Staff ID cards!

 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Orphans is a lot less than the sum of its parts, but some of those parts have a ton of potential. Auntie is awesome, her figments are wonderfully creepy (as long as you don't use them like zombies), and the way she warps the environment around her is evocative and distinctive. Apart from some nice set pieces, though (there's a lot of pathos in the descriptions of the murdered station staff), there's not much else to the module. There's essentially nothing going on here other than the kids and Auntie; there are only two other NPCs, neither of whom the PCs have any particular need to interact with. Imuen Station itself is likewise almost entirely unremarkable once you look past Auntie's influence.

As written, assuming a scenario where the PCs are trying to retrieve the kids, the players have a single objective, and there are only two non-Auntie obstacles to that objective, both of which are ill-defined: They don't know exactly where the kids are, and they can't get from their ship to the lower part of the station. This is not a compelling premise to begin with (it has only one element and no levers, to borrow from Ty), and it's compounded by the fact that Orphans offers scant guidance for resolving the latter problem (spend an hour digging through the logjam or repair the maintenance bay airlock) and none for the former. Of course the Warden is free to invent secondary objectives and sub-objectives (restart the generators, fire up the computer system in the management area, use the station AI to locate the kids) and secondary routes, but as written, the expectation seems to be that PCs will just wander from area to area until, by process of elimination, they find their way to the kids in the fuel refining section. If you want the players to do problem-solving more fun than “dig for an hour” or “fix a broken door” and “just explore the whole station,” you have to invent problems almost from whole cloth. And if you're doing that, why not just write your own scenario?

Because Auntie is fucking cool, that's why! And that's what Orphans boils down to: There's basically nothing here other than Auntie, but Auntie is strong enough to make the module enjoyable almost as written, and she's also worth building a more complex scenario around. Below, my ideas to help get more out of Orphans, starting with the changes that will improve the scenario the most with the least work from the Warden and heading toward much more open-ended ideas about redesigning Imuen Station or discarding it entirely.

 

SUGGESTIONS

1. Remove the blockage from the elevator shaft. Not only is this the worst design decision in the whole module, you can just delete it with zero negative consequences. Give the players a ladder, and make it scary! It's 80 or 100 feet straight down, there isn't even emergency lighting in there, and everything is unaccountably wet and slippery. Why is it wet inside a space station? How is there moss growing on some of the ladder rungs? Ask the players leading questions about how they're spacing themselves out—if you slip, you might take down the person below you too!—and maybe you can create an opportunity for Tina, or a figment down in the maintenance bay, to pry the vanguard or rearguard away from the group. If the PCs go straight down the shaft without exploring the ring, and you really want them to see the ring, just have Charis insist on retrieving some personal effects from her room in the residential area before she's willing to leave the station.
   
   
2. Give the players a better hook. I borrowed from Warped Beyond Recognition: The Rimspace Liberation Front will pay a million credits for each kid you can safely extract from the station and deliver to them. Straightforward, lucrative, and leads to good follow-up scenarios and interesting complications if used in a campaign context. A similarly lucrative contract from a rival corporation might be even better, particularly for a one-shot (if your players don't mind being bad guys), because it's more likely to generate tension in the climactic social encounter.
   
   
3. Define the figments' behavior and relationship to Auntie more tightly than the booklet does. As Valeria notes, having them be zombie cannon fodder isn't in the spirit of Mothership, and they really aren't much of a threat to the PCs anyway. Instead of having them be combatants, lean hard into using them as Auntie's eyes and ears. Do have figments like Tina try to separate the PCs, but when they fail (“don't split the party” is second nature to a lot of players, even before a creepy NPC conspicuously tries to get them to do it), just have them follow the PCs from a safe distance, watching, not doing much else. An unarmed person in tattered battle dress just standing and staring at the PCs from a catwalk or tailing them through the foliage in the maintenance bay is way scarier than an easily dispatched zombie hurling itself at them. When they're sifting through the wreckage of the mall and they hear the crunch of broken glass underfoot, and they spin around guns drawn and it's just fucking Tina again, weepily asking whether they'll let Alia keep her company while they look for Limos, they will absolutely hate it (in a good way). At the same time, they'll probably be too uneasy about attacking figments to just eliminate them. My players, even after they found the real Tina's body, were too squeamish to shoot a harmless-looking person who was crying and begging for their help.
   
   
4. Following from that treatment of figments, be strict about using Auntie. She appears 1) if a figment gets a PC alone; 2) if the PCs directly threaten the kids; or 3) if the encounter tracker reaches 46+ and there's a figment present. The latter isn't much of a restriction from the Warden's perspective—just put a figment in ABD around the next corner—but for the players, it helps create a comprehensible set of rules for Auntie's behavior. It also creates some fun ambiguity; when Auntie appears in a swirl of black smoke alongside a figment, players wonder, “Did that guy summon this thing?” My players suspected for the first half of the session that Tina was a puppet wielded by a plant monster (they checked to make sure that there weren't roots or vines connecting her to the wall) and that the horror was a station-wide vegetal hive mind; Auntie materializing alongside one of the figments in ABD dispelled their theories and fucked them up a bit (and then Auntie absolutely pulverized one of them).
   
   
5. Brainstorm some ideas for how Auntie might be banished, destroyed, or otherwise defeated without killing or otherwise harming the kids. If players come up with good ideas themselves, of course, you just run with those, but you might find yourself in a situation where the PCs want the kids to give them some assurances that Auntie won't follow them, or just prompt the kids to “tell us what you need us to do to get rid of this thing.” Of course, if you're feeling ambitious and want to play out the consequences in a campaign, having Auntie be a permanent fixture of the kids' lives could lead to some interesting predicaments. While you're at it, flesh out the kids before your players meet them. Give them opinions, motives, and personalities.
   
   
6. If you're feeling more ambitious, redesign the station spindle to operate in zero-G, with gravity only on the ring. Put weird gravitational anomalies in the elevator shaft and elsewhere in the lower parts of the spindle. Have dirt islands floating around maintenance and engineering. Sanity saves and fear saves galore. You can still have a frog pond near the generators (inside a gravity bubble), but have the hydraulic system that cools them be separate, and just gunk it up with the dead body that's carrying the hardware key to the Squid.
   
   
7. If you're feeling really ambitious, throw out Imuen Station (or consign it to a background event in your campaign, briefly referred to in the news) and move the kids' timeline ahead to a point where Auntie has successfully guided them to a backwater world. The module presents Auntie in a somewhat contradictory way: Capable of at least simulating empathy toward Charis and Luca, and genuinely concerned with their safety (if for entirely self-interested reasons), yet hostile to basically all other human life, despite—can I get one last “as Valeria notes”?—craving worship. Why does she kill the harmless station staff, most of whom were kind to the kids? Play Auntie as more of a cunning manipulator, and you could develop a far more interesting scenario around her. In a hardscrabble colony on some brutally arid planet, her ability to transform the environment around her into a swamp could win her genuine worship. She could be a goddess of rain and fertility, making the desert bloom! And if she demands a few bog-body sacrifices once in a while, is that such a high price to pay? That's what visiting starship crews and passengers are for… 

Ranking the NYT Games

 

10. Anna Garcia is correct: Tiles is for Cocomelon babies

9. Letter Boxed is simultaneously too restrictive and too open-ended. Frustrating without being challenging! You finish it and you're like, Well, I could probably do better than that…but who cares?

8. Sudoku has been upstaged by Pips. It's a good and classic game, but it's slow and dry. It lacks pizzazz. I never even look at it anymore. There's a reason the app has banished these three to a lonely exile at the bottom of the screen.

7. I hate Connections. Emotionally, I want to put it at the absolute bottom of the list, although I know it doesn't deserve that. The format isn't the worst, although it's not great—the fact that the puzzle gets dramatically easier as you go is textbook bad game design—but the real crime here is how poorly constructed 90% of the actual puzzles are. Yeah, every now and then they do something genuinely clever, but do you really want to subject yourself to week after week of “FISH SPECIES MINUS FIRST LETTER” to get to the rare good stuff? No.

6. Strands is way too easy, but also fairly time-consuming. This is a bad combination. Adding achievements just made it worse, because you feel compelled to sit there and stare at it until you've got the theme, but then as soon as you do, the rest of the puzzle basically solves itself. Same poor design as Connections.

5. The Mini is also way too easy, but it's mercifully quick. We are now in the top half of the ranking: the realm of puzzles I actually do a daily basis. I don't think much of the Mini, but it literally takes 15 seconds, so why not? It sneaks into the winner's circle on a technicality.

4. Wordle hits the sweet spot the other baby games (Letter Boxed, Strands, the Mini) miss. It's pretty easy, and you can knock it out in under a minute most of the time, but once or a twice a year, it gets your ass. Knowing that you might fail makes it more interesting than all the too-easy ones, but also, when you fail, you're like, Dang, I fucked that up. You got me, Wordle! This is in contrast to when you fail at Connections and just screech inarticulately.

3. Pips is like Sudoku, but more varied, more colorful, usually much faster, and generally better. The easy ones are far too easy, but the medium ones are nice, sometimes taking a couple minutes to sort out, and although the hard ones are often duds, they are occasionally diabolical, and it's very satisfying to solve a truly tough one. Each really hard Pips puzzle feels like a unique challenge, too, whereas every hard Sudoku feels more or less the same.

2. Spelling Bee is a burden, but it's a burden worth shouldering. And at least it's just one burden per day and not a never-ending barrage of them (see note on Crossplay below). My dad, my sister, and one of my best friends do the Spelling Bee every day and we all must share our Genius status or be shamed. There are strict rules: no looking at hints of any kind until Genius, after which you may look at the in-app Hints page only to help you get to Queen Bee. Resorting to the Community hints is acceptable for satisfying one's curiosity but does not Truly Count. Any game that inspires this kind of fanatical behavior and sprouts house rules must be a good game, and indeed, the Spelling Bee is very satisfying and has the platonically correct difficulty curve (easy, easy, easy, hard, very hard, “I'm never going to finish this one,” “ahh, PITAPAT, thank God”). It takes way, way too long a lot of the time, but in the end, that just makes success sweeter.

1. The Crossword is, of course, the GOAT. If I could get my friends and family to give up all the other games and just do the Crossword, I would be happy, and my days would be a little longer. And also I would be the undisputed champ forever, which is probably why nobody wants to do this. I recently solved a Sunday puzzle in under 10 minutes, and I've almost gotten my average Sunday time under 20, so it's not even taking an undue amount of time out of my day—just over 75 minutes a week, on average. A puzzle that rewards an enormous vocabulary, a pathological command of obscure trivia, a love of puns, and a willingness to spend years absorbing its own idiosyncratic language and patterns? And it has the right difficulty curve not only on a daily, per-puzzle basis, but on a kind of fractal weekly basis too? It's perfect.

* * * 

One must also consider Crossplay, which does not live in the Games app but is in fact a proper game, whereas everything in the Games app, counterintuitively, is really a puzzle. Crossplay is both a temptress and a burden. In game design terms, it's quite good. It makes a bunch of little tweaks to the Scrabble formula (Scrabble being an obsessive family favorite of ancient vintage, going back to my paternal grandmother), a couple of which are questionable (too many S's now) but which are generally very well thought out. Tile values are much improved, tile distribution is somewhat improved, the board is a bit more interesting, and most importantly, the endgame is transformed, and entirely for the better. It's fast and decisive, and there's a nice element of gamesmanship about pushing toward an empty bag or holding back. However, unlike all the proper NYT Games app games, Crossplay has no end. My friends and family start two games at once with me. I'm in there for an hour every day now. This cannot stand.