Populating an Alien Ecosystem (with Gameable Stuff)

I've been running a homebrew adventure for my Mothership crew that began life as a response to one player's yearning for a Scavengers Reign TTRPG experience but has turned, both in development and at the table, away from being a wilderness-crawling survival adventure and toward being more of a horror mystery (which, incidentally, has made it more suitable to pitch for the Jump-9 Writers Grant, which I'm probably gonna do). Still, I put a bunch of work into coming up with zany alien life for the players to puzzle out and the PCs to interact with. I started out by coming up with a fairly novel planetary setting, then sketched out a few biomes the PCs might traverse, came up with a few broad-strokes ideas about what flora and fauna looked like (basic body plans, colors), and then got down to coming up with a bunch of details about the first biome they'd be in. Using various tools, particularly this handy generator based on Sebastian Romu's work and the very charming Exquisite Biome by Caro Asercion, I cooked up a half-dozen animals and a dozen plants.

As is so often the case with this kind of detailed game prep, it was a lot of fun, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze in terms of gameplay outcomes. I had a ton of information, but a lot of it was totally extraneous, and what wasn't extraneous was often imperceptible to the PCs, or perceptible only if they took a sustained interest in something. And how were they supposed to know what to study in depth? I came up with some clues about interactions among my xenobiota (this crab-like invertebrate is drawn to this plant-like organism; the bark on this “tree” seems to be consumed by some other lifeform; these things seem only to grow near these other things) but the only way to get that information across was to either hope they asked the right question or make an exhausting info dump. There were other problems, too—turns out my friends, bless their hearts, are squeamish about murdering vertebrate animals.

I need a system that's more player-directed. Give them a broad sense impression of their environment, then let them ask questions and have their interests or needs drive what gets created (or fleshed out) ad hoc. What looks edible? What could we use as a parasol? Can we turn any of this into a prybar? Consequently, I need simpler, faster tables for generating lifeforms. This'll be handy for the game I'm presently running, but it'll be essential for a more open-ended, more squarely Scavengers Reign–inspired campaign, which is something I do want to return to. I want these rules to:

• Be usable at the table without interrupting the flow of the game. A couple die rolls, some immediately gameable results. Should be worth using for more in-depth prep, too, but it's essential to just be able to roll a fistful of dice and instantly be able to tell the players something that's evocative and that they can act on.
• Produce a range of sensory impressions. What does it look like? Does it have an odor? Is it making sounds? (“What does it feel like?” and “What does it taste like?” are important too, but they can and should wait for a more methodical investigation, which helps reduce the number of rolls that have to happen all at once.)
• Give results for lifeforms analogous to plants, fungi, and invertebrate animals that have a high probability of being useful to the PCs. No need to be “realistic” about it, especially when Scavengers Reign (where practically everything is useful or interactive) is the North Star. It is a game, after all. (And perhaps there's a good lore justification for a high degree of usability and combability with human anatomy or technology…)
• Give results for lifeforms analogous to vertebrate animal that are interesting without demanding that the players go hunting, and ideally encourage nonviolent interaction (but also sometimes encourage the players to guard against being hunted).
• Occasionally provoke stress checks. Gotta keep the players on their toes.

 

* * * 

 

The sensory qualities are pretty straightforward. I've already been trying these out at the table, where they work great; they probably aren't enough to bring things to life from first principles, but given that I already have a good sense of what plant-like stuff and animal-like organisms generally look like here, these prompts are enough for an off-the-cuff description of something new.

 

d20 colors (2d10 for photosynthetic organisms; this is under a K-type main sequence star):

1. White
2. Ultraviolet (appears black or dark purple to human vision)
3. Violet
4. Periwinkle
5. Azure
6. Teal
7. Olive green
8. Lime green
9. Gold
10. Saffron
11. Amber
12. Orange
13. Vermilion
14. Scarlet
15. Amaranth
16. Maroon
17. Infrared (appears black or dark red to human vision)
18. Black
19. Pink
20. Powder blue

 

d10 textures:

1. Smooth and rigid
2. Smooth and soft
3. Abrasive
4. Ridged
5. Scaly
6. Stippled
7. Sticky
8. Velvety
9. Spiny
10. Porous

 

d10 animal sounds:

1. Trilling
2. Chirping
3. Barking
4. Roaring
5. Shrieking
6. Singing
7. Trumpeting
8. Wailing
9. Rattling
10. None

 

d5 plant sounds (or maybe d10, with 6–10 being none):

1. Creaking
2. Clacking
3. Rustling
4. Rattling
5. Whispering

 

d10 odors:

1. Fragrant, like floral perfume
2. Resinous, like pine sap
3. Sweet, like ripe berries
4. Sharp, like citrus fruit
5. Minty, like…mint
6. Burnt, like coffee or woodsmoke
7. Yeasty, like rising bread or old socks
8. Acrid, like cleaning fluid
9. Pungent, like garlic or horseradish
10. Putrid, like rotting matter

 

d5 (dominant) flavors:

1. Sweet
2. Salty
3. Sour
4. Bitter
5. Umami

 

d5 intensities (for odor or flavor; might be better as a weighted scale on a d10):

1. None (or imperceptibly weak)
2. Weak
3. Distinct
4. Strong
5. Overwhelming

 

Working out what organisms are useful to the PCs is a little trickier. I might want to weight these differently, and I might want a roll to determine how many parts of an organisms are useful, and which parts (a plant analog might have tasty but nutritionally empty leaves, nutritious but unpleasant-tasting bark, and poisonous roots, for instance). On the other hand, that might be something I can just leave to player initiative/discretion. As a rough first draft, at any rate:

 

d10 useful/harmful qualities

1. Inedible (can't be digested)
2. Inedible (repulsive, possibly emetic)
3. Inedible (toxic)
4. Edible but neither flavorful nor nutritious
5. Edible and flavorful but not nutritious
6. Edible and nutritious but not flavorful 
7. Edible, flavorful, and nutritious
8. Has pharmacological properties
9. Can be processed into tools
10. Can interface directly with the human body

Mothership Module Review: Iron Tomb

 

For my second module review, I'm going back to the first Mothership one-shot I ever ran. It makes an instructive contrast to Orphans (subject of my first review); the latter is absolutely dripping with atmosphere and is wonderfully written, whereas Iron Tomb is less evocative and less imaginative, but benefits from a tight setup (whereas Orphans is loose to a fault). It is unfortunately not super fresh in my mind—it's been almost a year since I ran it—but I was recently making some recommendations for how to introduce people to Mothership (including players new to RPGs in general) and brought up this one (and the author's similar Year of the Rat), so I thought I should go back to my notes and dig into what I liked about it (and what I didn't) and why I think it's a great place to start.

* * *

WHAT I DON'T LIKE

My Orphans review started with the praise and eased into criticisms; I'm going the other way here, because I think the two are mirror images of each other in that sense. The premise here is not particularly creative: The PCs are boarding a derelict archaeological research vessel to recover its black box at the behest of an insurance company, and there's a revenant on board that killed the crew. The writing isn't very evocative, either. It leans hard on Egyptian imagery and language (scarabs, sarcophagi, pharaohs, “the Heket-Neph”); we're inches away from “ancient aliens built the pyramids” territory. It's a trifold pamphlet, space is at a premium, and reaching for a shorthand vocabulary of familiar “mummy's curse” stuff is efficient, I suppose, but it's still not getting high marks.

The layout of the ship, too, might be a victim of size limitations—the whole interior of the pamphlet is a keyed map, and it would've been hard to represent a more complex deck plan in that space. But, again, I just don't like it. This is by no means a shortcoming limited to this module or this author; it's pretty common in Mothership modules for a ship to be represented as a rectangular block of rooms on a single plane, with no verticality and no opportunity to do interesting stuff with zero-G movement. But yeah: A bunch of rectilinear rooms opening from a central corridor, not a lot of depth, few (and short) paths other than going left or right off the main hallway.

 

SO THEN WHY DO I LIKE IT SO MUCH?

Well, the monster's great, for one thing. Most of the pseudo-Egyptian stuff is, like I said, uncreative: alien tombs, hieroglyphs, canopic jars, etc. But in truth, it's easy to modify that kind of set dressing and it hardly matters in the game. Say “logograms” or “runes” or whatever instead of “hieroglyphs,” it all works the same, and your players probably don't even notice either way. Say the expedition was to an ice planet and the tombs were atop phallic spires. Whatever.

The monster, which the PCs are going to interact with repeatedly and consequentially, is a lot cooler than just “space mummy.” Yes, there's a classic mummy's curse situation where if you disturb the grave goods inside the sarcophagus bad things happen, but in this case, instead of the dude in the coffin getting up and lurching after you, a swarm of nanobots invades your body and turns you, from the inside out, into an implacable undead cyborg hunter–killer. Neat! It's got weird magnetic powers, strange weapons, spooky sensors. It gets tougher and tougher the more damage you do to it. It's easy to outrun but implacable. And there's a little puzzle to be solved that can neutralize it.

That might be Iron Tomb's strongest point. What makes it a great way to show new players the ropes, though, is that the PCs' goals are simple and clear, yet still challenging. Their one firm objective is to get the black box from the ship's bridge. They know exactly where it is, they just need to get in there. And they have two obstacles to deal with: First is the monster, which is slow but deadly and relentless. Having somebody lead it away from the bridge while somebody else grabs the box would be simple enough (if risky), but unfortunately there's a second obstacle—access to the bridge is blocked by some scavengers who've barricaded themselves there. They don't want to come out while the monster is stomping around, but if the PCs force entry, they'll fight.

And that's it. There's a Macguffin they need, it's in the possession of some NPCs who won't give it up without getting something in return (or fighting for it), and there's an extremely dangerous monster on patrol that they never have to stand and fight, but that will prevent them (unless they can trick it, trap it, or outright defeat it) from standing still in one place for long enough to, e.g., force open the door to the helm. There's not much else here, and some of the details are incomplete or confusing (see my nitpicks below), but you don't really need more than this. There are a bunch of different ways players can approach the situation, including plenty of interesting applications of starting gear, and the main threat is always dangerous without ever being likely to back them into a no-win situation.

 

NITPICKS

Space is limited on the pamphlet, of course, and the Warden can use their imagination, but there are some appealing but undercooked elements here. Collateral damage from the monster's attacks has busted the ship's generator, for instance, meaning that (until repairs are made) only one of several secondary systems can be powered: cryogenics, remote door controls, life support, and lighting. It seems from context that cryogenics is functioning—the food in the freezer hasn't melted, and Captain Carvington hasn't died. No lights and manual function only for the doors makes sense, but if the life support isn't working…how long hasn't it been working? How close are the scavengers trapped on the bridge to suffocating?

Similarly left ambiguous is the purpose of the captain's keycard. Is it needed to get into the captain's quarters? Can it open the door to the helm? Is it just a bit of fluff that serves no purpose now that the ship's controls are inoperable?

While those items go underexplaioned, a few other things get more of the limited pamphlet space than they need. We have no idea what the PCs will be paid for the job (just salvage rights, I guess, which are contested by the scavengers), but we are told that they must recover the black box within 72 hours or face a 500mcr fee. What's that about? Why would they ever be tempted to spend three whole days on this ship, even if the life support weren't failing?

Likewise, a fair amount of space is devoted to a detailed description of what will happen, over the course of three months, to anybody who opens another sarcophagus (there are five total; the research ship's crew opened only one). This is 1) beyond the scope of the module; 2) really unlikely to happen, given that opening a giant stone sarcophagus can't be done casually, there isn't any incentive to do it, and the disincentive has been telegraphed very strongly; and 3) not all that interesting to play out if it does — it's basically “can you get to and pay for a doctor, or do you want to roll a new character?” (Now, if there were two open sarcophagi—or some infection vector less telegraphed than “whoever opens the sarcophagus gets cursed”—Captain Carvington could also be infected, and we might have an interesting follow-up incident, or news item, after returning to port.)

 

SUGGESTIONS

You may or may not want to tweak the Egyptian stuff and prep a little more background info (the identities of the original crew, what's in the captain's log, what the dig site and tomb look like in the recordings you can find in the lab, etc.). You might also want to prep some contingency plans for certain character-creation outcomes; it's likely your PCs will have no obvious way to get into the bridge without the scavengers' help (in which case you might want the captain's keycard to be capable of overriding the interior lock once the doors are powered), and on the other end of things, a smart rifle will make the monster much, much easier to dispatch (so maybe house-rule some magnetic technobabble interference that screws up the rifle's targeting systems and diminishes or eliminates its anti-armor property against this enemy).

What you'll definitely want to do is come up with a more strictly defined situation for the generator. I decided that cryogenics and gravity (undefined in the pamphlet) were fully powered by the damaged generator and that the lights and life support were running on dwindling battery power: The ship's interior is dim and flickering, the air already stale and thin, when the PCs arrive; it just gets worse from there. Turning off cryogenics condemns the captain to death; turning off gravity puts everybody without zero-G training in a bind (while the magnetic monster just stomps around unbothered). If they don't want to do either of those things, the PCs have a few hours to repair the generator or cut a deal with the scavengers. (Or they can wait until they all pass out and then force their way in if they happen to have a laser cutter or explosives. And are really cold-blooded.)

 

Backgrounds for Early Modern Cairn, Part 2

More backgrounds for a Cairn campaign set, like Beyond the Pale, in something very much like early modern Europe. We are now two-thirds of the way to the full set of 20, and I promise the next and last bunch won't take another half a year! As before, the object here is fun and a bit of verisimilitude, not any kind of balance. Some of these are definitely more powerful than others, but maybe the weaker ones will be more entertaining, who knows. None of these characters is going to last more than a few sessions before they get possessed by a dybbuk or drowned by a bukavac anyway.

* * *

Background 3:

Chiliast

You belong to a millenarian sect like the Khlysty, Skoptsy, Dukhobors, Molokans, Kartanoists, Frankists, or Sabbateans—or maybe some group even more obscure than those. You have, or at least your leader has, inside knowledge of God's plans for this misbegotten universe, and an inside track on getting into Heaven, surviving the apocalypse, or whatever it is you people believe in. Or believed in, at any rate—you seem to have strayed from your flock.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Sackcloth Robes
• Gourd

d6: What are you doing on the road?

1. Hunting for an apostate. You don't seem to be trying very hard.
2. Seeking a holy relic to bring back to the leader of your sect. Maybe you already found it. Maybe you should keep it for yourself?
3. Given a task so vague and obscure by the leader of your sect that you wonder whether they just wanted to get you out of their hair.
4. Looking to slay a demon, or chastise an unbeliever, or accomplish some other heroic deed of that nature.
5. Sneaked away to visit family, friends, or a lover outside the sect. It's probably past time you returned. Or is it?
6. Absent without leave. Having second thoughts about the whole “end of the world” thing.

d6: What eccentric beliefs does your sect hold to?

1. Iconoclasm. Take a Mallet (d6) and be sure to smash any ungodly icons you see.
2. Polygamy. Take a Wedding Ring (petty). Take several!
3. Strict celibacy. Take a Leather Scourge (d6) with which to mortify your sinful flesh.
4. Vegetarianism. Take a Wheel of Unusually Tasty Cheese.
5. Feminism. Take a Pamphlet on the Rights of Woman (petty).
6. Abolition of private property. Take only your unshakeable Confidence in the Perfectibility of the World (intangible).

Background 5:

Dragoman

You are, or were, a translator, interpreter, and mediator. You have a gift for tongues; you speak the languages of the great empires (German, Russian, Turkish, Persian) at least passably, and are perfectly fluent in French and two others, in addition to your unfortunately totally irrelevant native dialect.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Book of Court Etiquette
• Quill & Ink
• Sheaf of Paper

d6: Why aren't you in the employ of a baron or a government minister or some other bigwig?

1. Your employer died of dysentery while on a tour of the provinces.
2. You were outmaneuvered by rivals at court and sacked unceremoniously.
3. You were chronically insubordinate and were sacked unceremoniously.
4. You took a leave of absence to come study an obscure local dialect.
5. You undertook a wildly inappropriate tryst and are waiting for the outrage to die down.
6. You learned of opportunities more lucrative than any minor court could offer.

d6: What exotic gift did you receive in the course of your service?

1. A Pouch of Spices (petty) from the Indies, which enlivens your food.
2. A Silk Scarf (petty) from Cathay, which keeps your neck warm and looks rather dashing.
3. A Hamsa Pendant (petty) from the Holy Land, which wards off the evil eye.
4. An Anatolian Meerschaum Pipe (petty), with which one might smoke tobacco or the like. (You have no tobacco.)
5. Leather Moccasins (petty) from the Americas, in which you can walk quietly and comfortably.
6. An elaborately carved Walrus Ivory Comb (petty) from the Arctic, the better to comb your hair.

 

Background 7:

Estafette

You are a courier, probably in some official capacity (a military messenger or a postal relay courier), although you may be a freelance rider. You've come out here to the hinterlands to deliver or receive letters; maybe your work is done already, or maybe you're dawdling. Perhaps something out of your control has gotten in the way—the post you're meant to pick up hasn't been penned yet, or a bridge is out, or there's bandit activity in the region. Why not look for a little extra work on the side?

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Overcoat Pistol (d8)
• Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds)
• Letter-Case

d6: What was your proudest professional accomplishment?

1. Braved the worst storm of the winter to bring a plea for aid from an avalanche-devastated village.
2. Dashed through enemy lines to deliver orders to the general commanding a besieged city's defense.
3. Bluffed your way past mercenaries sent to intercept you and seize the maps you carried.
4. Galloped all the way from Sambor to Mährisch-Ostrau in just two days. You changed horses a dozen times!
5. Chosen to deliver engagement announcements on the occasion of the imperial heir's betrothal.
6. Rode all night through mud and thunder to warn the crown of the revolutionary army's approach. Or was it to warn the revolutionaries the imperial army was on the march?

d6: What breed of horse do you ride?

1. A dainty Arab, swift as lightning.
2. A doughty Turkoman, famed for its endurance.
3. A lively Holsteiner, strong and agile.
4. A beautiful Mérens from the faraway Pyrenees, bred for mountain service.
5. A hardy Vyatka, fast and sure-footed in wintry conditions.
6. A refined Trakehner, with a hearty constitution and a cool head.

 Note: All firearms require a full round to reload, unless noted otherwise.

 

Background 10:

Hayduk

You are the moon to the armatole's sun, or the sun to their moon—a member, or ex-member, of an armed band who operate just outside the reach of the tsar's, kaiser's, or sultan's law. You may be called batiar, klepht, or opryshok. You may be hailed as a hero or rebel; you may be derided as a bandit, brigand, or outlaw. It's all a matter of perspective.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Flintlock Musket (d12, bulky)
• Cartridge Box with 20 Rounds
• Stylish Cape (petty)

d6: Which of your very heroic and not at all exaggerated deeds is most celebrated in song?

1. Robbed a tax collector in broad daylight. Returned the money to the local peasants. Well, most of the money.
2. Challenged the captain of the guard to a drinking contest. Put him under the table.
3. Evaded an effort at capture by plastering on a fake mustache and offering to join the hunt for yourself.
4. Eluded a month-long campaign to root you out from the hills, using your knowledge of the terrain to humiliate your pursuers.
5. Caught in bed with the local lord's heir. Made a spectacular leap from the balcony to effect your escape.
6. Used to be an armatole; betrayed the empire rather than massacre innocent villagers.

d6: What treasured loot do you still carry with you?

1. A gorgeous Illuminated Manuscript. You can't make heads or tails of the peculiar writing inside, but it sure looks nice.
2. Romantic Letters (petty) from your highborn lover. They keep you warm on lonely nights, and also make valuable blackmail material.
3. A random Spellbook, liberated from the clutches of a wicked sorcerer. Or a book collector, maybe—a wicked book collector!
4. A Bejeweled Pendant (petty) that you're certain protects you from harm. Sure, it didn't protect the previous owner very well, but he was using it wrong.
5. The Fingerbone of a Saint (petty) encased in an elaborate little reliquary. Only apostates (or infidels) venerate this particular saint, so you don't feel guilty about toting it around as a good luck charm.
6. A Flask of Perfume just waiting for the right occasion. Which will hopefully be immediately preceded by an opportunity to take a bath.

 

Background 11:

Lectour

You may have been born into a society in which few can read at all, in which case your literacy alone is a blessing, or one where lettered people are more common, but either way, you were blessed with unusual fluency, and a pleasant voice besides. You might be a meddah, performing morality plays for coffeehouse audiences; a maggid, lecturing on the Torah; a storyteller hired by business owners to entertain their employees while they work; or an itinerant poet reciting your own work and others' for a little coin.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Leather Haversack (stuffed with books)

d6: What great personage once heard you speak?

1. The Man of Destiny! Yes, the Emperor Napoleon himself. Or was it Napoleon III? Or Louis? One of those Bonapartes, certainly.
2. The Kaiser! Well, it was before his coronation. He was a young cavalry officer at the time, quite incognito.
3. The Tsarina! She was in disguise, naturally, but you recognized her—she looked right at you and winked!
4. The Sovereign of the Sublime House of Osman, the Sultan of Sultans! Well, his carriage rolled by while you were speaking, anyway.
5. Lord Byron, the infamous poet! He was rather rude, truth be told.
6. One of those notorious socialist rabble-rousers…Blanqui, was it? Or maybe it was Blanc. Or Buonarroti. Something with a B, surely. Or maybe Lassalle…

d6: What props or accoutrements do you carry with you?

1. Puppets to act out parts of your storytelling.
2. A foldable Painted Backdrop (bulky) to transport your audience into another world.
3. A Small Drum to add a little rhythm to the proceedings.
4. A handsome pleated Hand Fan (petty) with which to cool yourself. Some of these places get quite hot!
5. Spectacles (petty), the better to see what you're reading.
6. A Tin of Ground Coffee—this newfangled brew gives you tremendous energy.

Background 16:

Shaman

You are a conduit between the mundane human world and the realm of spirits. If you live among Christians, Jews, or Muslims, you might incorporate their faith into your practices, or pass yourself off as a humble healer, a znakhar, one of the “clever folk.” In pagan lands, you might be recognized for your power and called noaidi, gonagas, volve, vluxvu, or bakshi. As long as you treat the spirits with respect, the rest is your own business.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses) 
• Ritual Knife (d6)
• Staff (d8, bulky)
• Drum

d6: What magical practice do you most confidently command?

1. The healing arts. As Cure Wounds in the Warden's Guide.
2. Shapeshifting. As Beast Form in the Warden's Guide (but specifically into your totem animal; see next table).
3. Laying curses upon your foes. As Befuddle in the Warden's Guide.
4. Seeing the true nature of things. As Detect Magic in the Warden's Guide.
5. Enchanting the weak-minded. As Vision in the Warden's Guide.
6. Protecting yourself and your people from harm. As Ward in the Warden's Guide.

d6: What animal spirit shares the strongest connection with you?

1. The Bear.
2. The Eagle.
3. The Raven.
4. The Snake.
5. The Swan.
6. The Wolf.

Background 17:

Surveyor

You're an educated person, wise in all manner of natural philosophy, from geometry and trigonometry to physics and engineering. You were surely sent here by an employer or patron—a nobleman, a private company, the crown itself. Perhaps you have encountered intractable obstacles in your work, or perhaps your work went smoothly, but you see other opportunities.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Overcoat Pistol (d8)
• Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds)
• Theodolite

d6: What youthful foolishness did you indulge in during your university days?

1. Dueling. Take a Rapier (d8) and some impressive facial scars.
2. Seduction. Take a Vial of Mercury (petty) and a nasty rash.
3. Freemasonry. Take a whole repertoire of Secret Handshakes (intangible). Who knows what doors they might unlock?
4. Radicalism. Take an Urgent Missive (petty) intended for a local republican thinker.
5. Literature. Take three Dog-Eared Volumes of Poetry. Memorize a few of your favorites.
6. Occultism. Take a random Spellbook and some arcane tattoos, and keep them well hidden.

d6: What business opportunities does your highly trained mind detect in this godforsaken hinterland?

1. Timber. It doesn't take a genius to see it, but your genius might smooth out the logistics.
2. Mining. There's iron here. There's salt. Maybe there's gold!
3. Furs. Ships go all the way to Hudson's Bay in Canada for beaver pelts, and here there are beavers in droves, so much closer to home.
4. Cattle. Once some enterprising lumbermen knock all the trees down, this could be prime grazeland.
5. Textiles. Some of these rivers could support enormous mills.
6. Railroads. Whatever goods other businesses wring from this landscape, they'll need a way to move them back to civilization.

Warped Beyond Intuition

Like myriad unfortunates before me, I find myself compelled to jam the square peg of Mothership's loosely sketched economy into the round hole of a persistent campaign played by bean-counting nerds. And there's one particular thing that, like many before me, I got stubbornly snagged on: Warp cores are really, really expensive. So expensive that the vast majority of work in published materials, often including a job that comprises an entire module, won't even cover a one-way trip from the next system over. (I've touched on this before!)

Now, if you go to Reddit or Discord to search for other people's thoughts about this, you're likely to encounter the observation that, in A Pound of Flesh, there's a Warp Core Vault on Prospero's Dream where it's possible to score cores for a mere 50kcr a pop (APOF p. 43). Most people seem to dismiss this as an unreconciled holdover from 0e; warp cores used to be cheaper, and now they're prohibitively expensive to make interstellar travel an enormous undertaking and emphasize how small and economically powerless the PCs are in the big scheme of things.

But what if neither the 50kcr price on the Dream nor the 1mcr cost in the base 1e rules is “wrong,” and they don't need to be reconciled? I've been warming to the idea that they simply represent extreme possibilities: If you're at a major, densely populated economic hub (e.g., the Dream) that either produces warp cores or is a major transshipment point where a lot of commercial ship traffic (some with warp cores as cargo) passes through; there's a substantial gray or black market at that location; and you have strong connections to whatever group controls access to the cores (perhaps they owe you favors, even), you can score warp cores for as little as 50kcr a pop—maybe even less.

On the other hand, if you're at the only inhabited station in some bumfuck system at the ass end of the Rim, where the few hundreds, or few dozen, permanent residents keep a few warp cores on hand to sell to ships passing through, but have no local access to more, and you're a stranger whom none of the locals know from Adam, you pay full freight. Maybe more, if you seem desperate, or if they're down to the very last of their inventory (or both).

We could cook up a table for prices, something like (and probably derived from) the trade tables in the Stars Without Number supplement Suns of Gold—roll 2d10, “subtract X for each of the following conditions” and “add Y for each of the following conditions,” get a percentile modifier to apply to a base price somewhere in the vicinity of 200kcr or 250kcr—and if I ever published a campaign setting or something that really needed to formalize this, I probably would. For the campaign I'm now running, though, I feel pretty comfortable just spitballing.

* * * 

What does need to be defined more carefully, of course, is what happens when players do the obvious, smart thing and jump at the first chance to hoard warp cores. The low-end price is still far too spendy for starting characters, and even many sessions down the road, modestly successful owner–operators are never more than a few months away from crushing debt and will probably think twice before dumping six-figure sums into speculative stockpiles…but after thinking twice, they'll probably do it. Hell, they'll probably want to look for profit-turning opportunities the next time they meet another crew at some backwater station where cores cost a fortune. So I want some kind of soft cap on how many cores they can just shove into the reactor component.

The description of warp cores in the 1e rules leaves a lot to the imagination, but it does emphasize that cores are dangerously radioactive, and of course we know that hyperspace travel is weird and scary. Warp cores should have a touch of the weird and scary about them too—maybe they come from hyperspace, somehow. Maybe they contain malign hyperspace energies. Maybe they're made of condensed hyperspace ghosts! Who knows. In any event, if you put too many of them in the same place, bad things happen.

When you jump, roll d10 + the number of extra cores the ship is carrying:

1–10: The jump proceeds as normal (or at least as normal as a hyperspace jump ever is).

11: The ship sustains minor damage. Roll once on the Maintenance Issues table (SBT p. 39); reroll Major Repairs.

12: Upon awakening from cryo, the crew are afflicted with persistent disturbing hallucinations (sanity save every day for 1d5 days).

13: The jump consumes one of the stored cores.

14: The ship sustains major damage. Roll twice on the Maintenance Issues table. If your first roll results in Major Repairs, do not make a second roll.

15: The jump consumes two of the stored cores.

16+: Warp core containment failure. As radiation leak from Maintenance Issues table, and the damaged core must be ejected unused. 

This probably needs some tweaking and playtesting—the step up from faintly dangerous nuisance results on 10 and 11 to economically disastrous ones on 12+ is pretty steep, and the ~50% risk of needing Major Repairs on a 13 is a pretty harsh disincentive to ever carry more than four cores at a time—but it'll do for a start. (How do freighters move large quantities of warp cores for wholesale purposes? Special containment fields, of course. Very expensive, very bulky, can only be fitted on enormous supertanker-like ships far beyond the PCs' means.)

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… 

Backgrounds for Early Modern Cairn

Despite being an inveterate collector of TTRPG books, I'm not much of a Kickstarter guy. I've gotten some reprints and second editions and that sort of thing via crowdfunding campaigns, but I've only ever backed one TTRPG book sight unseen: Beyond the Pale. In that case, I had a lot of confidence in Yochai Gal, whose work I greatly admire, but I also just couldn't resist the premise. As a history nerd, and as somebody with a personal connection to the place and people represented, if a somewhat tenuous one—one Ashkenazi grandfather, one Polish Catholic grandmother—it was so right up my alley I had to jump on it immediately. And I'm glad I did! The book is beautiful, it's full of clever and thought-provoking material, and I'm looking forward to running it…one of these days.

Yeah, I still haven't actually played it. And although that's mostly just because of the vicissitudes of game nights (my older group has been big on long-running campaigns; my newer group, turning away from fantasy, has been doing FIST and Mothership one-shots), but it's also because, almost as soon as I had the book, I got attached to the idea of writing my own backgrounds, more suitable to the quasi-historical setting than the fairytale-fantasy lore of Cairn 2e, more detailed than the 1e backgrounds (or the Barebones ones, now). Like the 2e backgrounds, I want 20, each with a couple small tables to make the characters more distinct and provide some story sparks and setting detail, but for the early modern Eastern Europe of the Pale. Or for a slightly broader early modern, quasi-historical Eastern European setting, somewhere in the borderlands where the tsar's and sultan's (and maybe kaiser's) empires abut one another.

It's slow going, obviously. I have like nine other projects I'm working on and my day job etc. etc., excuses excuses. But I'm getting there! I have all 20 backgrounds planned out and at least partly written, and I've got a few complete enough to send out into the world and solicit input about. Specifically, these:

 

Background 1:

Arithmancer

You are a diviner, capable of peering into the mysterious workings of the universe through the magic of letters and numbers. You can read a person's future in their name or in a random verse of scripture. With access to your favored text, some means to write, and a minute to work in a safe place, you can obtain a one-sentence answer to any question about the future (the words, probably very cryptic, come from the Warden; interpretation is up to you). You're also unusually good at math.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Favored Text (see table)
• Quill & Ink
• Notebook (halfway filled already)

d6: What did you foresee that got you into trouble?

1. Pressured into giving the local lord good news despite seeing only dire omens, you skipped town before tragedy struck.
2. You predicted the birth of an illegitimate child that would lead to an inheritance dispute and tear a wealthy family apart. Every party involved—the cuckolded man, the pregnant wife, her paramour—is united on one point: You are a liar and a charlatan.
3. You correctly perceived that one business partner was cheating the other. You just didn't see the murder coming.
4. After you warned the townsfolk that the mercenary company passing through was going to pillage their homes, they tried to bar the mercenaries from the village. Which gave the mercenaries a pretext to stab a few people and pillage everybody's homes.
5. You foresaw a love match between the teenage children of two prominent families who've been locked in a bitter feud. The teenagers fell in love, just as you knew they would, but now everybody thinks it was only because you put the idea in their heads.
6. You didn't get in trouble with anybody else—you just determined that you would have to go abroad if you wanted riches. And you do.

d6: What book of scripture or occult wisdom do you most rely on for divination?

1. The Holy Bible, of course.
2. The Noble Quran, of course.
3. The Babylonian Talmud, of course.
4. The Mandaean Book of the Zodiac.
5. Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia.
6. The Sefer Raziel HaMalakh.

 

Background 2:

Armatole

You belong to what one might generously call a militia, although those who've been at the wrong end of your gun would call you a pandour or bashi-bazouk, not a militiaperson; your area of expertise is more thuggery than warfare. In any event, you're an irregular soldier of sorts, raised from the local population at the ragged margins of the empire to keep the tsar's or sultan's law in the absence of the army. Your loyalty to the distant throne and dedication to the law are both extremely suspect.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Flintlock Musket (d12, bulky)
• Cartridge Box (with 20 rounds)
• Not-Entirely-Uniform Costume
• Dodgy-Looking “Official” Papers

d6: Why are you not with your militia comrades?

1. Sent alone (or perhaps in a very small group) on a secret mission. Word of honor!
2. Last survivor(s) of a disastrous ambush, despite your valiant efforts. Word of honor!
3. Ordered to muster for a transfer to a different post, far from home. Had a better idea.
4. Called upon to make a suicidal last stand. Decided discretion was the better part of valor.
5. They turned bandit, those treacherous rogues, but you remained loyal.
6. You robbed a few measly travelers, and those treacherous rogues tried to turn you in.

d6: What special weapon are you carrying?

1. Flintlock Pistol (d10): You just can't have too many guns.
2. Karabela (d8): A sabre with an open crossguard and a handle in the form of a bird's head.
3. Yatagan (d8): A forward-curved war knife with no handguard.
4. Hirschfanger (d6): A straight-bladed dagger with an elaborate horn handle.
5. Warhammer (d8): A small but heavy beaked club for puncturing armor.
6. Arnautka (d12, bulky): A lavishly decorated, deadly accurate flintlock rifle. Attacks with this weapon against targets you can see are never impaired. (Replaces your Flintlock Musket.)

Note: All firearms require a full round to reload, unless noted otherwise. 

 

Background 4:

Dervish

You are a mendicant mystic, trying to approach God by virtuous living and ecstatic experience rather than by religious scholarship. Your faith, or your meditative practices, have unlocked marvelous powers—karamat—in you. (These do not take up inventory space, but only one can be performed, and only once, before you must rest; they otherwise function like Spellbooks. The Warden may allow you, or other characters, to learn additional karamat via long, dedicated study.)

Starting Gear

• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses)
• Tabarzin (d8)
• Beggar's Bowl
• Tall Felt Hat (petty)

d6: What karamat can you perform?

1. You have learned the power of folding up the earth, crossing distances without moving. As Teleport in the Warden's Guide (but cannot be destroyed).
2. You have uncanny authority over the natural world. As Control Plants and Control Weather in the Warden's Guide.
3. You have faculties of superhuman perception. As Arcane Eye and Hear Whispers in the Warden's Guide.
4. You can perceive and manipulate the thoughts of others. As Charm and Read Mind in the Warden's Guide.
5. You can cure the sick and heal the injured. As Cure Wounds in the Warden's Guide.
6. You are capable of extraordinary physical feats. As Haste and Leap in the Warden's Guide.

d6: How do you achieve ecstatic communion with the divine? (Spend a few minutes doing this while resting in a safe place to restore your ability to use karamat. This does not reduce your Fatigue.)

1. Dancing. Take a Wide-Skirted Robe (petty).
2. Singing. Take a Small Drum.
3. Composing poetry. Take a Quill & Ink and a Sheaf of Paper.
4. Painting. Take a Paint Pot & Brush and a Sheaf of Paper.
5. Chanting. Take a string of Prayer Beads (petty).
6. Meditating in silence. Take a Stone of Contentment (petty).

 

Background 8:

Exile

Not so long ago, all was right in your world; the fall has been precipitous, and sometimes it's hard to believe what a low condition you've been reduced to. Still, you're safe at the moment, if far from home, and you've been resourceful enough to get through worse scrapes than the one you're in now. Maybe you're at the start of a long, hard climb back to the position of privilege you were once accustomed to. Or maybe you'll make a new life in this wild new land.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern 
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Dagger (d6)
• Stylish Cape (petty)

d6: What manner of exile are you?

1. Censored Philosophe: Your radical politics or libertinous ideas scandalized your native society. Take a Cane Sword (d6; passes for a walking stick upon cursory inspection).
2. Dekabrist in Hiding: You took part in a doomed attempt to overthrow the tsar—or you're plotting one even now. Take a Bomb (d12, blast, 1 use).
3. Renegade Janissary: When the sultan disbanded your unit, most of your comrades were massacred. You escaped. You had to leave your musket behind, but you still have your blade. Take a beautifully ornamented Yatagan (d8) and a Cloak (petty) to conceal your distinctive tattoos.
4. Jewish Excommunicant: Your heretical theology or philosophy saw you driven from your community. You are truly alone in the world; take an easily concealed Overcoat Pistol (d8) for protection. Also take a Bullet Pouch (with 6 rounds).
5. Outrageous Poet: Once honored at court, you had to flee after insulting the sultan—or perhaps after seducing the tsarina. Take a Kamancheh (or roll on the Muzikant's table of instruments).
6. Disgraced Noble: Some affair of the heart or of honor back home left ruined lives in its wake, and your reputation in tatters. Take a Brace of Dueling Pistols (d8+d8, bulky) and a Bullet Pouch (with 12 rounds).

d6: What potentially dangerous documents are you carrying?

1. A Notebook full of material that would shock the court, whether back home or here in the empire.
2. Indecent Correspondence (petty) from somebody who would surely faint if they knew you had it.
3. State Secrets (petty) from back home, or which might win you a pardon there if you could smuggle them across the border.
4. Plans (petty) for a novel invention that might revolutionize an industry or shift the military balance of power.
5. A Letter of Introduction (petty) to an individual in your new environs sympathetic to your plight or cause.
6. Bearer Bonds (petty) that you cannot redeem here but that could make somebody fabulously rich back home.

 

Background 13:

Muzikant

You might be known as an ashik, a kobzar, a klezmer, or by any of dozens of other names. Whatever people call you, and whatever you call yourself, you are an itinerant musician, an important carrier of news to remote rural areas as well as a beloved entertainer. People will pay generously to hear you perform, and you've learned a few non-musical tricks and talents during your years on the road.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Lantern
• Oil Can (6 uses)
• Quarterstaff (d8, bulky)
• Musical Instrument (see table)
• Letter-Case

d6: What sort of music-making do you favor?

1. You like to lay down a foundational rhythm. Take a Plucked String Instrument like the saz, kobza, or bandura.
2. You always want to be the center of attention. Take a Bowed String Instrument like the violin, gadulka, or suka.
3. You love the haunting wail of pipes. Take a Set of Bagpipes (bulky) like the dudy, gaida, or parkapzuk.
4. You enjoy delivering a blast of fanfare. Take a Brass Instrument like the trumpet, sackbut, or serpent.
5. You prefer the mellow expressiveness of reeds. Take a Woodwind Instrument like the clarinet, kaval, or balaban. 
6. What instrument is more beautiful than the human voice? Take a Sachet of Herbs (petty) with which to make a throat-soothing brew.

d6: What useful skills or connections have you acquired during your travels?

1. You're pretty good in a fistfight. (Your unarmed attacks do d6 damage.)
2. There's always a local magistrate somewhere around the area who owes you a favor.
3. You're an incorrigible, and generally pretty successful, flirt.
4. You're familiar with local lore everywhere you go, including some hidden dangers and rumored treasures.
5. You've learned enough of the healing arts to bind wounds and make salves and poultices.
6. You always have a standing invitation to perform at one nearby castle or lordly manor or another.

 

Background 14:

Poyer

Like almost everybody else in the world you know, you are a humble peasant. You might be called peon, mujik, serf, dihkan, or seljak; it's all more or less the same, in the big scheme of things. Unlike almost everybody else you've ever known, though, you find yourself on the road, far from your fields, with coins in your pocket and a weapon in your hand. Your lord, if he could see you now, would strike you dead on the spot.

Starting Gear

• 3d6 Groschen
• Rations (3 uses)
• Torch (3 uses) 
• Hatchet (d6)
• Bucket
• Rope (25 ft)

d6: What dramatic event uprooted you?

1. You sheltered a fugitive from the “justice” of religious hatred. Now you are seen as halfway to being an infidel or heretic yourself.
2. Ruined by an unusually bad harvest, you sent your family to stay with relatives and went to seek your fortune abroad.
3. Bilked out of what little wealth you had by a charlatan, you followed him to seek restitution or revenge.
4. It came to you in a vision: You are destined for greater things than tilling the land for some rich man's profit.
5. You had a brief but torrid affair with somebody of a much higher social station. Their family would kill you if they caught you.
6. A nobleman sexually assaulted one of your family members. You struck him dead in a rage, and are now a wanted murderer.

d6: What token of home are you carrying?

1. The Holy Book of your faith.
2. A Pouch of Dirt from your fields.
3. A Sachet of Herbs (petty) from your kitchen garden.
4. A Charm (petty) containing a lock of a loved one's hair.
5. A Lucky Feather (petty) from your most beautiful chicken.
6. Your faithful Dog. No use in a fight, but has a good nose.