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 8 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