Mothership Adventure - 95 Million Lightyears to the End of the Universe

cool pic of saturn's hexagon

 

 

A Near-Future Mothership Scenario

I wrote an adventure for Mothership. It's about a mysterious structure found on the surface of Enceladus, which is an ice moon orbiting Saturn. An interesting thing about it is that it's not set in the usual Mothership assumed setting, rather it's closer to our own reality and you take part in a near-future NASA mission. 

 

I created it originally in a rough form for Gromb's halloween games event. Spooktober 2024 I believe he called it. We'd all run little one-shot games for halloween over the month of October. It was super fun, and it inspired me to write this adventure.

 

Here it is! 

 

Writing is Hard
This is not the first adventure I've ever written. But it's the first one I've shared online. When I ran it, it was only half-written up. I went back to it after and tried to polish it up. That was a very difficult process. I learned that creating an adventure you can run is only a fraction of the task of writing up an adventure you can share for other people to run.

 

I also learned that the closer you get to the end of a project, the more inertia it seems to acquire. I think 80% of the work for this thing was done in the first 3 weeks. After that, it was all these tiny tweaks that just seemed to take forever to complete. Part of that was motivational. It's less exciting to go through the end product and make sure there's no spelling mistakes or whatever. So you're less inclined to sit down and do it.

 

Anyway, it's June 2025 now, about 6 months later, and I'm ready to be done with it. I know it's a bit of a mess, but it should more or less be functional. It'll probably kill your players, and the setting makes it difficult to tie into a campaign. Sorry about that.

 

Thanks

Mum and Dad, 

Tommy,

Cormac and Dowens, 

Gromb and Wilber H Force, 

Jim and Graham, 

Johnny and Tristan, 

Kevin, Mark and Ryan, 

Luke / Elia for the final playtest and some friendly feedback, 

Mr. Mann, miles1545, and many other people on the purple osr server,

The thinking adventure server for being encouraging about writing,

The Mothership Warden's manual for being very helpful in figuring out how to even start. 

Adventure Report Mini: Sag River Extreme Cold Research Facility, Alaska – First FIST, then Violence

Session #1

System: FIST
Adventure: Sag River Cold Research Facility, Alaska
Players: Brendan, Dowens
GM: Me!!!
Session Length: 3h ish

First Thing’s FIST
The first time I ran this scenario, and I decided to use FIST. Inspired as I was by Onslaught Six’s podcast epidode of it on YouTube, and having recently purchased FIST but having no opportunity to play it yet, I wanted to give it a whirl.

The rules are straightforward, it’s a 2d6-with-mixed-success type of deal. I’ve spoken before somewhere (I can’t remember if I said it on this blog or not, it’s been a while) that I’m not generally a fan of the forced drawback thing that you get with mixed success systems. I much prefer to make a ruling in the moment based on what makes sense, rather than be beholden to the “oh, you rolled a 7, so you manage to do the thing but you trip over your shoelaces while doing it” bullshit-loop that you can sometimes fall into with those systems.

But at the same time, I’m not gonna be a pigheaded dogmatist about it. So I ran FIST and had a good time regardless!

Character Creation
This was super fun and flavourful. We had one demon-summoner / chef (I believe one of the pregens) and a character who could double her body mass at will. Together, they were a messed-up pair of misfits with a pair of conspiracy-inducing codenames. Like something pulled straight from a Metal Gear Solid antagonist lineup.

Vibe
The adventure has this eerie, quiet paranoia vibe to begin with. It then escalates quite rapidly with the possibility of meeting zombie chimpanzees. After that it goes completely haywire and – I’ll not spoil it. It’s honestly worth reading the original text. It goes places. And it’s beautifully written. Highly recommended.

The issue I had, though, running this scenario with FIST characters, was that the characters were – as mentioned above – wacky and out-there. One of them could casually summon demons by using kitchen ingredients. The other could change into a giganto titan at will. When the whole point of the adventure scenario as presented is to take some form of grounded mundanity (an abandoned prefab office building) and abruptly turn it upside down – it kind of loses something when you start off with all the WEIRD already turned up to eleven.

Finishing
That said, the game was super fun. The NPC powder keg that is the second half of the adventure provides so much potential for chaos and tension. I believe they managed to find the knife and figure out a way to get home. They didn’t do exactly what was written in the module, but their reasoning and deduction skills, as well as their negotiations with high-strung NPCs, were sound, and their attempt was pretty damn close.

They both made it back to reality, with only a handful of casualties and limited reality distortion.

Session #2
System: Violence
Adventure: Sag River Cold Research Facility, Alaska
Players: Cormac
GM: Me
Session Length: 1h ish x 3

Lunch Time Violence
Given what I said above, I wanted to retry the adventure using the rules they were initially written for. Luke Gearing’s Violence is something like a single resolution mechanic stretched as far as it can go. And it turns out it can go really far.

So, I asked a friend if he’d be willing to try some short, 1 hour lunchtime sessions. A way to squeeze in some extra gametime through the week without having to commit to full 3hr+ seshes.

He was on board. He lived and worked in Scotland at the time, so we did it via discord and he was usually driving cross country while we played. Amazingly, it was really easy to play like this. I handled all the dicing, so it wasn’t a big deal. He said it was mostly all straight roads, so I assume he didn’t murder anyone under his wheels along the way. But you never know.

Vibe Check
This time, the vibe of character creation worked so much better with the overall tone of the adventure. Included in the Violence pdf are some rules for how to make a “modern paranormal horror” investigator character. It’s clearly Delta Green with the serial numbers filed off, but that isn’t a bad thing. It's actually a really good thing.

The characters generated come with a federal agency background, a handful of skills, a family (or not, depending on rolls), and, optionally, a traumatic or paranormal event from their past – the thing they can’t forget, that keeps them up at night. The reason they’re even in this line of work in the first place.

So, straight away, you’re a lot more of a regular person in this setup. You can’t summon demons out of thin air. You’re not slinging fireballs. You might have a gun, though. Or wirecutters. Practical shit.

Violence
As the player and his sidekick got stuck into the game, it was apparent how much more dangerous this system was. As soon as the chimps were discovered, both protag & sidekick went down very quickly.

 

 

Ha! Ha! I'm using Violence

 

Given this was a one-shot, with only one player, I decided not to end with a TPK and instead have him and his sidekick regain consciousness a while later. The chimps had dragged them down into the basement and left them with a gored eye and a broken arm.

The way things went so quickly from creeping anxiety to outright gore and terror was extremely cool. Exactly what you expect and want from a system named Violence. So from there, they went on to discover all the madness that lay within. Again, I won’t spoil it, so go and have a read. All I’ll say is that this pair weren’t so lucky as their FIST counterparts.

Resolutions
The mechanics for Violence are very minimal. If you’re not dealing with something directly related to violence or injury, you first try to reason it out with negotiation and common sense. When there’s still uncertainty, you roll a d20 and try to hit a target number set by the ref.

Advantages and disadvantages can be added to any d20 roll, via contextual or mitigating circumstances. Obvious examples are if the character is trained in the particular task they’re trying to complete, or if an injury impairs them.

I found these very simple to come up with on the fly, but as The Weekly Scroll guys said on their podcast episode this week, this probably is a system that works best for people who have plenty of experience in making rulings and refereeing systems. 

 

Anyway,

Harry

 

Adventure Reflections: The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen

Snapshot of my notes that I printed out based on the Retired Adventurer’s Better Notes series of blog posts. These were very helpful all the way through the adventure.

 

Adventure Reflections
This will be the name I give to posts where I look back at larger groups of sessions, whole campaigns, groups of one-shots, etc. and reflect on them in a more general sense. It won't be focused on the particulars of each session or the details - I'm trying to provide a "big picture" view of things.

General Thoughts
Overall, The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen was not what I was expecting, but still a very good adventure. A lot of my frustration with it came from that mismatch in expectations - I had no idea I was getting into a 15+ session long campaign. That said, I took it as a challenge and I'm glad I did.

My skills as an RPG referee have undoubtedly improved over the course of this adventure, and the longer narrative arc allowed for a lot of immersion and memorable character moments. The dark humour and Lovecraft flavour both come through strongly in this one. The way we played it, it wasn’t very horror focused, it felt more like a Lovecraft themed adventure than a spook fest or an eerie mood piece. I think the dark aspects could be played up though, and there were certainly some stand-out eerie moments and set-pieces that have stayed with me. The temple, for example, has a really dark, oppressive atmosphere.

The module will require a lot of quick thinking from the GM and a little extra seasoning to fill in the blanks throughout. There’s 41 locations and a lot of them are just a single paragraph. There are events and NPCs hinted at, but not fully fleshed out. This will be a challenge for newer GM but I do think it’s a challenge worth taking on as it will be good practice.

Layout
The layout is pretty to look at, but hard to reference at the table. Looking at the city map and then flicking forward to the locations to match them felt like spinning plates, especially with no distinct city landmarks or districts to orient around.

The text is also very densely packed in there. It’s the Merry Mushmen editing flavour, which I appreciated in a dense zine of articles to be read like Knock, but for adventure layout I found myself frustrated with it. It also has a fair few typos to watch out for.

Length
I did not expect this adventure to last 15 sessions. That’s something I wish I’d known going in. I’ll know better from now on what kind of things make an adventure long and “sticky” – lots of things for PCs to trip over and get involved in. This one could really double up as a city setting, as Brad and Yochai mentioned on their podcast review recently.

Expectations
In addition to understanding the proper length of a given game, I learned too that tone is an important thing to consider before diving into a game. I didn’t quite anticipate the tone that this adventure would take, and I think I was expecting a bit more Elric due to the tone of the core rulebook. That was really my own mistake, since the adventure text is very clearly Lovecraftian in tone, and I should have just adjusted based on that.

Rules preference
I’ve also refined my personal palette for what I enjoy in RPGs over this game, as well. I’ve decided that Black Sword Hack is a little on the light side for me when it comes to longer games. Some of the aspects, like player-facing rolls and roll-under ability checks as a core mechanic, are not things I gelled with, and I often found myself wanting to rule things differently.

I don’t like roll under ability checks as a core component because they tie roll outcomes too strongly to ability scores. In contrast, other games such as Delving Deeper only give players a small bonus to certain actions if their Strength score is 15+. This de-emphasises ability scores, and emphasises player strategy, character traits and usage of things like items, environment, etc.

Balancing
I also think that if you were to run this game system yourself, you may need to house rule a few of those background special powers. At-will invisibility and assassination were the most potent combination, and the two players were able to trivialise quite a few encounters throughout this adventure. It’s okay to have these things tempered a little either in-fiction or simply as an agreed upon house rule.

Variety
Something I really enjoyed was introducing variety throughout the adventure. In session #8, the players took the role of two different characters for a session (I used A Man on the Road and it was awesome). In session #14, I used By This Poleaxe to run a large-scale city skirmish, “zooming out” the action from the two main characters. These diversions were fun dashes of heterogeneity to the adventure that I think worked very well and served to flesh out elements of the world that wouldn’t be accessible through the eyes of the two usual player characters.

 

Thanks,

Feirsteax

 

Adventure Report: The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen #15

Finale (played 03/09/2024)

System: The Black Sword Hack
Adventure: The Darkness Over Nijmauwrgen (from The Chaos Crier issue #0)
Players: Faaya (Capingreen), Kvam (Janitor911)
GM: Me (Feirsteax)
Session length: 4h ish 

 

Incomplete snippet of campaign notes taken using OneNote for this adventure.

Explosions in the Deep

The players ingeniously brought a big barrel of gunpowder with them to blast open the portcullis below the temple and were therefore able to enter the evil Black Sun Temple from below!

This did not spare them, however, from a cruel ambushing at the hands of four Deep Infiltrators of the Black Sun, who had been tailing them in secret for some time now. These four assassins were quite brutal, and through the battle, managed to kill all of the player characters’ allies (including poor old Bonifacio, the dog-shaver and secret hit-man for hire).

The rules for inter-NPC combat in Black Sword Hack mean that PC allies will take d6 damage four times in six. It felt a bit too punishing and NPC allies tended to die quite quickly.

I prefer when NPC actions are simply ruled the same as PCs. When players ask their hirelings to do weird non-combat actions, you just rule it as you would a PC.

So much I didn't use in here

Sarakasas the Mad

They pushed through the depths of the temple, clearing rooms of any tentacled Deep Ones that they encountered thanks to the insta-killing power of the newly acquired Roodr.

Upstairs, in the central chamber, they saw a gruesome scene. Sarakasas was acting like a one-man army, standing atop a pile of corpses as rebels came forward to slash at him in total vain. Sarakasas was completely impervious to damage from non-Roodr sources, and it led to this terrifying outcome.

Faaya spotted someone lurking in the alcoves – it was the leader of the Thieves Guild, Zvoorinius! After a brief chat with them, she determined that they didn’t pose an immediate threat, but if things went south they would probably try to jump in and try to benefit from the fallout.

Alcantor and Lady Estabana were still standing, but their morale was almost entirely shaken by the sudden disaster that befell their rebel army. Thankfully, Kvam was here with the giant trident, Roodr, to sort things out.

In the first few rounds of battle Kvam turned invisible and entered barbarian rage, and Faaya cast Darkness and Withering on Sarakasas, which meant he couldn’t directly target them. Things went pretty quickly downhill after that for Sarakasas.

Within a couple of rounds, Sarakasas was slain by the mighty power of the Roodr, and everyone celebrated. There was a moment of slowed down time where Sarakasas’s immortal soul hung in the central chamber, and the cursed ring that Faaya was wearing started glowing and pulsing.

The otherworldly entity she had made a pact with, Emptalar of the Void, wanted her to plunge the ring into the soul so he could absorb it into his power vortex. She did so and was rewarded with EVERY STAT being boosted to 20!

At this point, the adventure had concluded, and I was just riffing for the finale to make it feel climactic. Every stat at 20, why the hell not!?

Great Deep Old Freak!

They emerge onto the streets as the earth shook and the gigantic Deep Old One quaked towards the temple. Kvam and Faaya performed an amazing feat of athletics and ingenuity by using one of the big monster’s huge tentacles to fling themselves into the air and perform a massive plunging attack on the beast.

This meant they flew for three turns and dealt TRIPLE damage when they landed. By an amazing coincidence, the total damage output after this calculation was 45 HP – the exact amount needed to slay the Deep Old One!

Epilogue

The session ended with a brief reunion with key NPC friends, like Sfen who washed up on the reef, and Rhosa who was saved from the depths of the temple, and even Julovern and his amazing airship.

The party decided to leave the city via airship and visit Taineri for a final goodbye as well – and the adventure ended with both of our heroes setting off into the clouds…

 

 

Goodnight,

Feir