Like last year's Mothership Month, I've kicked off a set of mini-interviews with game designers who are new to the (hellish) fun of crowdfunding adventure modules.
My hopes are to help get more readers familiar with their work. This year, seven designers agreed to spend a little bit of time with me to describe their modules. I hope you take the time to give them a lil read!
- stand/DELIVER, Ahmed Suffety
- A dueling faction toolkit, set in the Dek
- The Company's New Groove, Scott Connor
- Play the prologue in this generation-spanning club-crawl
- Pipesong, BoRyan
- A crime family drama sandbox, set in the Tangle
- All on Red, Abe Chester
- A medical-gambling investigative sandbox, set in the Squeeze
- Cleaning Crew, Chris Foley
- A janitor's handbook for a scummy corpo
- NO GODS, NO MASTERS, Nathan Taylor
- Attack the corpo tower in this Mothership depth-crawl
- Hunters, Zoe Tweedale
- A death game module, set in the Choke.
Chris: Hi Ahmed! You’re a new Mothership writer and new to crowdfunding, but are still a seasoned ttrpg creator, having come in from 5e, Forged in the Dark, and MÖRK BORG. Can you tell our readers what compels you about Mothership RPG, and introduce folks to your MM25 project, stand/DELIVER?
Ahmed: While my start in writing and design was proof of concept for 5e, I’ve always been drawn to other games in the industry, from Forged in the Dark and MÖRK BORG, to designing my own systems, available on sufftety.com. Mothership RPG pulled me in with its lethality, horror, and most of all, pacing.
stand\DELIVER is a dueling factions toolkit for The Dek, an entertainment district on Prospero’s Dream. Players take on the mantle of space pirates vying for approval from the fraternity of pirates (mentioned in Wages of Sin) by delivering a shipment of goods. Or as station security operations (SecOps), hunting down these drugs before things get out of hand. The imminent lockdown puts players in tense encounters as the drugs in the district begin spreading and mutating users.
stand\DELIVER adds class breakdowns and loadouts for both Pirates and SecOps, along with equipment like new Drones and fresh Cyberware. New features, Worth and Debt, drive roleplay, giving players ulterior motives, and provide encounter hooks for the Warden to introduce as complications. A new resource mechanic is introduced for both classes as well. Pirates gain contacts, a way to reach the particularly seedy denizens of the stations, for favors or the purchase of contraband. SecOps gains requisition script, a method for acquiring specialized, powerful gear available only to high-ranking station enforcement. All these new mechanics are modular to fit into any Mothership game, regardless of setting.
Chris: Never such a thing as too much cyberware, that’s for sure! One of the aspects of your module that I admire, and that I think Wardens need more of for running The Dream, is that you’ve built up a new district: The Dek. What can you tell us about this district, your inspirations, and what new mischief it brings to the Dream?
Ahmed: The district is a neon spectacle, littered with advertisements, tourists, and dark corners. Expanding on The Dream’s vibe and setting, The Dek has over 10 locations and at least one NPC per location. Each of these interests is tied to Phase Alterations, which can be inserted into any story arc or campaign and run alongside the greater threat of civilians mutating.
The Dek is an amalgamation of multiple inspirations. Some that stick out are bars and social scenes from Blade Runner, The Expanse, Altered Carbon, and Minority Report. I wanted to capture some of the “cyber-grunge” feel of those worlds while maintaining the Mothership vibe. It isn’t meant to be a cyberpunk supplement, but rather a dirty patchwork stepping stone for the uncertain future of The Rim.
As for mischief, The Dek is wrought with it. Lowly sanitation officers crafting monstrosities from the would-be recycled dead. Sleeve storage facilities provide vulnerable hosts for the mutating drug, creating soulless husks hunting for sentience among the innocent. Multiple phases from The Dek’s Locations and NPCs align with the blood thirsty horrors unleashed upon the station.
Chris: That sounds great. My favorite part of this year’s Mothership Month is seeing all these coherent, zoomed-in settings and the stories they hide. Creates such a colorful smorgasbord for Prospero’s Dream, or any cyberpunk city setting. Thanks for coming on, Ahmed, and congrats on funding stand/DELIVER , :)
Check out stand/DELIVER on BackerKit!
Chris: Goodday, Scott! Lemme tell you, it’s always great to interview a fellow European Mothership writer! Your module The Company’s New Groove has what I’d consider an experimental angle: you’ve crafted a prequel to Prospero’s Dream as readers know it from A Pound of Flesh. Can you tell us more about your Mothership Month project and how this unique structure plays into it?
Scott: Hey Chris, first of all thank you for putting a spotlight on the smaller creators of this year!
With
this book, I wanted to create something different to your typical
Mothership module, something more experimental in terms of how it uses
narrative and music. The Company’s New Groove
is a Club Crawl where the players are rioters, breaking into an
abandoned nightclub to discover that The Company has a hidden facility
experimenting with music to brainwash the population. Experiments and
all kinds of threats stalk in the darkness and the players need to get
out or die trying.
But
here’s the twist, the 5 NPCs that help, hinder or hunt the players in
this polyphonic hellhole are the same characters that the players have
played in the prologue set decades earlier.
For
me, music is one of the biggest tools a Warden has to set a certain
mood in Mothership. I wanted to use music’s power of atmosphere to its
fullest extent in this module. The Prologue is set in ‘The Drunken
Monkey’ nightclub full of bass and mischief. The main adventure has you
re-explore this now abandoned club; this time silent as a tomb. When the
players descend into The Company’s black site, music laced with hidden
tones leak out of busted speakers.
Ultimately,
it’s the combination of how this book uses music and character
interactions that makes this module stand out to give your table a
memorable adventure.
Chris:
I agree that music is an incredible tool, and it’s one that takes a ton
of time (for me, at least!) to research and set up, so it’s great ot
hear this work is done for The Company’s New Groove!
Another compelling aspect of your module is that it comes with
pregenerated player characters for the prologue that become antagonists
to the players in following sessions. Pregens are so rare in Mothership,
and I’d like to know, what were the seeds for this idea, and how did it
develop or mutate for your module?
Scott:
I really wanted to pull the rug on my table in some way, something that
can only be done in TTRPGs. In my experience, players seldom connect
with NPCs on an emotional level. I was trying to come up with a way to
change that, so I thought what if the players were the NPCs? The idea
was to have this almost Shore Leave style prologue where the players get
this mini sandbox and just be this friend group.
Fast
forward three decades, and now the players, with their new self-made
characters, come face to face with their characters from the prologue.
As is often the case in Mothership, time has not been kind to them. How
do the players react to that, how do they survive against these horrors
who they inhabited as carefree teens a session ago?
That’s what this module is trying to do.
Chris:
Hitting that kind of emotional resonance is a great goal for a module,
especially one within a megacity of millions of lives, like on
Prospero’s Dream. Thanks for your answers Scott, and congrats on the
funding! I’m looking forward to seeing how The Company’s New Groove all shakes down.
Check out The Company's New Groove, on BackerKit
Chris: Hello BoRyan! Glad to have you here, even if so briefly. Must admit, I’ve been into your work since your Vaults of Vaarn release, and was super stoked to see you take your craft to Mothership RPG. Can you give our readers who might not know Pipesong a run-down on your Mothership Month project?
BoRyan: Pipesong
is a sandbox module set on a maintenance level deep in the belly of
Prospero’s Dream, run by the Molvo crime family. The boss, Horse Molvo,
is dead. The new boss, Chin Molvo, is hooked on ceo-brained slicksim
influencers, and has a great new plan: what if we sold out to the corps?
The family got the pipefitter’s union contract with bullets and blood,
but if we sold it off to the company, we could replace all the labor
with ox-debtors, and make a shitload of credits.
Following the model laid out in A Pound of Flesh,
and mirroring systems implemented in much of my other work, Chin
Molvo’s plan will unfold as a timeline of escalating events that change
the material circumstances on 04 Deck. Players will see Pipesong transform from bustling little union hab, to security crackdown, to warzone.
No
crime family is complete without a cast of criminals, and Molvo
delivers. To stop Chin’s plan, players will have to take out or flip the
Molvo lieutenants:
- Slick (he/him), a suit-wearing drug-sniffing party-going EVA specialist
- Bunko (she/they), a chromed out bodybuilding enthusiast and fight pit champion
- Zakk (she/her), an educated professional and quickbooks whiz
- Sally (he/him), gangster film enthusiast, owner of a real tommy gun
- Rat (she/her), information dealer, with a small army of informants
Chris:
Yo, that’s way more than you’ve mentioned on your BackerKit page! Gotta
respect an intense core set of NPCs like that. What’s more, Pipesong hones
in on a fundamental reality of a mega-station like The Dream: plumbing
and thermodynamics. I am a sci-fi nut, and love to see folks bringing a
hard reality to games in a fun way. Can you tell us more about the
Tangle, and what inspired you and your partner to focus on the pipes?
BoRyan:
You can learn a lot about a place by asking: “Where does the water come
from, where does the sewage go?” On a space station like Prospero’s
Dream, logistical problems draw inspiration. A big one in space, that’s
often not addressed in sci-fi, is waste heat. That was our starting
point you know, like “what would it be like in this little corner of the
station, where you do critical work that is left off-screen in movies,
and if you make a mistake, a million people might die?”
The
Tangle is a hostile environment. In the book, it takes the form of a
point-crawl, where players have to face hazards, pipe-cultists, and
desperate ox-fugitives. There’s the Hives, a network of out-of-date
class-0 docking bays used by smugglers and EVA freebooters. The Tangle
is a briar patch, a space that locals are able to move around in with
surprising speed and finesse, but will straight up kill you if you don’t
know the way or aren’t wearing the right PPE. It will have
opportunities to get involved in crime, bounties you can go after, and a
place to hide if you draw too much heat.
Chris:
I’m a sucker for site-dependent gear for area traversal (that’s the
Metroidvania sicko in me, I guess). Like I mentioned, I’m already a fan
but you’ve hyped me up even more. Happy to see Pipesong has funded, and I hope to see more of those stretch goals unlock! Thanks for chatting, BoRyan!
Check out Pipesong on BackerKit!
Chris: Howdy-hey Abe! Welcome to the madness of MM25, I hope it’s been treating you well. As a developer on your project, I know the whole story behind the central mystery of All on Red, so what bits of intrigue can you divulge about your neon noir Mothership Month project?
Abe: Thanks Chris, it’s been going great so far, a bit overwhelming for a first-timer but so much fun! We appreciate the dev editing, it’s been invaluable!
Our primary goal with All on Red was to add a small but dense neighborhood to Prospero’s Dream, and make sure it could add something exciting to any Warden’s arsenal of content. We’ve made sure to build in a variety of physical and conceptual links to The Dream, making this module super easy to connect with any table’s version of the station. I think it would make a fantastic place to start a campaign as well as the perfect module to slip in as soon as someone important (PC or NPC) gets badly wounded and medical facilities are needed post haste.
The central mystery of “What happened to Dr. Haddaway” is a great 3-4 session investigation for a crew to tackle, but while doing so they’re also going to run headlong into other hooks and threads. Our test groups have had to make hard choices about finding Dr. Haddaway ASAP vs. dealing with other ticking time bombs such as an infestation of alien worms, handling the vicious gang exploiting the clinic, or foiling/aiding an attack on the station by a dissident faction.
Chris: It’s true this zine is packed with tons of cool, game-changing ideas, and like the neighborhood itself, this helps the station at large come alive. But you’re not alone in packing this zine with intrigue, you have teamed up with veteran Mothership writer A. Jordan DeWitt to form Glue Trap Games. Can you tell us how this came about, and some of the wild ideas you two cooked up together for this collaboration?
Abe: I met Jordan initially playing FIST: Ultra Edition by CLAYMORE RPGs. That online group had been mostly playing Mothership, and after the hilarious FIST one-shot, I joined a long Mothership campaign and Jordan and I and hit it off. We got to chatting about random ideas, and projects we were writing.
I think I started riffing on his re-sleeving facility heist mission pitch of “Anderson Frink is trapped in a box. A hard drive, to be precise,”. Ideas bounced around and I believe he suggested we just write it. We had this bizarrely fast process of just blasting out ideas and hopping around in a google doc looking at what the other person wrote and embellishing on it until we ended up with a pretty decent sized module called BLOCK PATTERN. We tested it a bunch and refined it, and we’ll come back to that after All on Red is complete and shipped.
As for wild ideas relating to All on Red, we’ve got a cybernetic cannibal, an absolutely disgusting parasite worm with a fucked up life cycle that could spiral out into the rest of Prospero’s Dream, and a hardcore rebel faction with an axe to grind against the Novos. The market with its deadly train running through the middle is wildly effective at pumping up stress and making random encounters even more dangerous and pressing. There’s also a corporate vampire. I don’t think many will find him, but he’s there for those players that just can’t help but open the thing they shouldn’t.
Chris: And what is an OSR/NSR module without such wonderful forbidden fruit, eh? Thanks for your answers Abe, and again, congrats on your funding! Looking forward seeing to the next draft of All on Red!
Bet everything you got with All on Red on BackerKit
ChrisAir: Heya Chris, thanks for coming onto the newsletter! I gotta say, the pitch for your module as a “Janitor’s Handbook” cracks me up, and hits on a point I’ve been stuck on before: Normal jobs for folks on the Dream! Can you tell our readers about what kind of gaming materials you’re including in Cleaning Crew?
Chris Foley: We’ve really tried to hit a few different angles with Cleaning Crew to create a sourcebook for all things janitorial! Starting out our focus was very much on equipment—scrubbers, cleaning canisters, disinfecting lasers and the like—but we quickly spread out from there. New chemical rules like wounds and examples, roll tables for various encounters for janitors working around the Dream, a new class for those wanting to get to mopping & scrubbing and eventually a small adventure within: Slip Hazard.
Everything in Cleaning Crew centres around the arrival of a new company to Prospero’s Dream: Hygeia Interplanetary. A cleaning megacorp, Hygeia has every intent in making its presence on the station a formidable and permanent one and will stop at nothing to accrue workers to their fold. However, Hygeia has no intention of footing the bill. Cheap second-hand equipment, gig-economy work and underhanded tactics are sowing discord on Prospero’s.
Slip Hazard is the culmination of that. Hygeia has found a part of the station they are particularly curious about and have had remarkably bad luck cleaning it out. Bad enough that they’ve had to call in the cavalry, Player Contractors, to sort it out. Players venturing down into the Slip find themselves knee deep in grime, grease and something far more sinister lurking down there, all whilst Hygeia’s presence unravels.
Cleaning Crew really brings all of these elements together under one roof, expanding the Dream as a whole.
ChrisAir: And doesn’t everyone love to hate a corporation, especially on the Dream? You’ve also hit a boatload of Stretch Goals for your project! Can you tell us more about the pamphlet Hygeia Automotives and the zine, Unions and You?
Chris Foley: We wanted to build two branches from Hygeia’s arrival on Prospero’s Dream that go a bit beyond what happens in Cleaning Crew!
Hygeia Automotives is styled as an advertising pamphlet to the richest of investors and contractors, offering to exchange their cold hard credits for a variety of formidable engines. Some of these are utility minded like the armoured Domovoy Cleaner-Tanker or the radiation-eating Tiangou Sink, though others like the Caduceus aerial bomber and the ExecuCab are clearly geared towards the more corporate-minded. It’s Hygeia’s corporate victory lap, showing fancy new offerings that came with their investments in the Dream.
Unions and You delves deeper into the darker side of Hygeia. Both A Pound of Flesh fans and current OVER/UNDER players might be familiar with the Local 32819L, the Teamster Union of Prospero’s Dream. Having been pushed to the sideline by this megacorp’s arrival, their discontent has swelled rapidly.
Faced with the threat of mass uprising Hygeia has responded with a polished iron fist. Players are introduced to dangerous Union contraband (from brand-removing steam cleaners to treacherous chem-bombs) and the newly unleashed Garrison, Hygeia’s elite ‘custodial’ unit. It should give some insight into a Dream back under threat of violence from above and below!
ChrisAir: That sounds like a properly thorough exploration of the janitors of the Dream. I can really see PCs starting from the bottom of the job market, and making a rise through the ranks aboard the Dream as they combat Hygeia! Congrats on funding, and thanks for sharing Cleaning Crew with us, Chris!
Check out Cleaning Crew, on BackerKit
Chris: Hello Nathan, glad to have you here! This might be outta nowhere, but for my money, I think you’ve got the most striking cover out for this year’s Mothership Month, and to be clear, that’s saying a lot because so many are 🔥. What’s the run down of what we can find behind that killer cover?
Nathan: Thank you, that’s some high praise considering the quality of everyone else’s work this year! I owe all the credit to Brayz for the cover art. He really knocked it out of the park. I really enjoy the idea of the spark of rebellion, so littered lots of phrasing around tinder, lighting a flame, etc., throughout the pitch I provided to Brayz, and he just ran with it.
The module is about the return of a megacorp, METAStatic, Inc., to Prospero’s Dream. It’s a deal with the devil for the factions in charge as the company has been spreading its tendrils throughout the station. METAStatic is kind of the apotheosis of capitalism, a company that grows for no other reason than an expansion of their own power, like a cancer. Reaching a breaking point, the players’ crew decides to take the fight to the corp and get them off the station for good, by any means necessary.
No Gods, No Masters is my take on a depthcrawl, with all of the generative locations and situations that implies. I did a lot of digging through the design of depthcrawls with classics like The Stygian Library and The Gardens of Ynn, plus Mothership’s own This Ship Is a Tomb. My goal with this module was two-fold: A) Making a tight, compact depthcrawl, and B) making the module as user-friendly as possible. A lot of generative crawls require a lot of page-flipping and my design principle is to minimize that as much as possible. Each level’s page includes all the info a warden needs to run that level, as well as an easy reference set of tables guiding wardens on where to go next based on a given roll.
Chris: I totally understand what you mean with the depthcrawl page-flippery, I’m very interested to see how your information design tackles this. You’ve also teased the existence of the corpo horrors hiding in your tower depthcrawl. What are a couple that you can spill for us today?
Nathan: Christ, because the existence of megacorps isn’t bad enough? I’m mixing up the levels with a melange of the banal and the creepy. I’m just going to list out a handful of my favorites. The Cubicle Farms are managed by overly chipper android middle-managers, all constantly on the cusp of losing their marbles from the pressure of their positions. Another is the Financial Department where financial analysts break into bouts of glossolalia at an uptick in company stock prices and suicidal depression when it dips. There’s also the Biological Research Division, where experiments both mundane and horrifying take place, including a little something called the HK Protocol. That’s a particularly nasty creation that will pursue players from level to level, though there’s a chance that players could turn the tables on the corp if they can make it to Biological Research.
And that’s three of twenty-two total levels, so there should be plenty of variety for folks to enjoy and players to run away from.
Chris: Haha, that’s a LOT of chances of screwing with the corpos, and if there’s one thing OVER/UNDER has taught me is that players will jump at the chance to burn these kinds of characters! Glad to see you’ve funded, and can’t wait to set my players on molotoving these METAStatic sickos.
Find NO GODS, NO MASTERS on BackerKit
Chris: Heya Zoe! Wonderful to see a new writer hitting so much success during Mothership Month, and from what we can glean from the BackerKit page, it’s no surprise! Can you tell us about Hunters, to clue readers in on why folks are so keen to snag your Mothership Month project?
Zoe: I am blown away by the response to Hunters so far. As someone new to crowdfunding, I’m very humbled by the faith the community has put in me as a first-time module creator.
The pitch for Hunters is simple: a death-game set in The Sink on Prospero’s Dream. The player characters find themselves trapped in the plague and monster-riddled ruins of the old corporate heart of Prospero’s Dream, and if that wasn’t bad enough, wealthy thrill-seeking hunters are competing to kill them and their crewmates. Their only way to officially “win” this lopsided game is to kill all of the hunters, which is a steep task. Or, they can use their wits to attempt to break the rules and find their own way out.
Supporting this scenario is the adventure’s location: The Hunting Grounds, a mini sandbox detailing the downtown core of the sink with over a dozen locations, fellow hunted target NPCs, unique monsters, and environmental storytelling. My hope is that Hunters can also be used as a toolkit to help support any campaign that ventures down into The Sink.
Aside from writing Hunters, I am also illustrating it myself. For me, the atmospheric and detailed art bringing life to The Sink is just as important as the text. Even if the players never see it (and I hope they do!), evocative art helps to bring the world alive in the Warden’s imagination, which I think is an essential job for any good adventure module.
Chris: After the artwork I’ve seen you put into Hunters, I have to agree. The NPC cards look wonderful, too, I must say. Which one of these sickos do you love (or love to hate) the most?
Zoe: Thanks! I always appreciate the repeated stat-blocks in the TKG modules like Another Bug Hunt as a Warden, but for the hunters, it’s a bit harder to do that effectively since their characterisation is just as important as their mechanics. So cards are a good alternative, with the added bonus that you can show them to your players without spoiling any surprises.
It’s hard to pick! Especially because once I start play-testing with my main group, they will come alive in ways I haven’t expected yet. That being said, I’m very excited to see The Green Man (the one with 4 arms on the cover) in play. He’s a terrifying and extremely challenging antagonist; he’s playing to win, and enjoys the thrill of the game. But probably my “favourite” is the secret-android corporate spy Anna Yoon. She’s an accomplished liar and at the heart of an assassination plot against some of the other Hunters, and has some fun abilities with her “invisibility poncho” and her android nature allowing her to continue fighting until the players find a way to completely destroy her. But most importantly, she’s a hook for the players to get involved in the melodrama and backstabbing of the ultra-rich if they so choose; because while the hunters are monstrous, it is important to me that these are unique characters who are fun for the Warden to play!
Chris: That’s the rub isn’t it? Because Wardens want to have fun too, and making the complex characters is a great way to do that. 750+ backers seem to agree with me too, haha. Major congratulations on your campaign, and I’m eager to see the Hunting Grounds come to life!
Check out HUNTERS on BackerKit
