Mothership: Preparing for A Pound of Flesh
This post is about my preparations for my first time running A Pound of Flesh (APoF), but I prelude that with some phrase for the module - jump to the first heading if you want to skip the praise!
Heads up, spoilers for A Pound of Flesh and Another Bug Hunt.
I’ve never been so impressed by a TTRPG booklet as I was upon reading A Pound of Flesh. It’s beautifully complex in potential, and yet stunningly straightforward to pick up and run. The fact that Tuesday Night Games created all this in a format the fraction of a size of many of the table top modules is incredible. That’s saying nothing about the consistently glorious art style that is typical of many Mothership module
For those unfamiliar with APoF (spoiler free): the module provides a cyberpunk black market space city full of prominent factions and a host of leads and tables to build stories from. As Tuesday Night Games point out, it is a toolkit, rather than a written story, although the content gives lots of leads for adventures to emerge. I mean, there’s even a few pages on how to roll your own space outpost.
But preparing for my first first session on APoF was also daunting, and more so that I’ve felt with TTRPGs for many year.
Reading APoF brings visions of a rich quest hub that repeatedly entices players back to setting changing slightly with each return. The temptation as the Warden is to rush straight into the fantastic setting of what lurks beneath and the unfolding tension across The Dream - diving deep into the rivalries and decay as an unfolding cascade towards and inevitable and visceral end.
But rushing in didn’t seem right. Yes, the main NPCs and their needs are clearly signposted, but why would a new visitor on The Dream immediately be rubbing shoulders with the city elites? No, my sense is that these developments should come later. That the story of APoF is emergent, smouldering away in the background amongst other stories and denizens of The Dream.
I want the players to smirk at the surface-level dystopian sci-fi troupes, only to realise with time that everything is deeper and more connected than they first thought. The players should slowly work themselves up through the blurred lines of the factions and merchants, that feel alive with the hubbub of the lurid, neon-lit streets. And I want this to happen over multiple returns to The Dream.
Put simply, I want the players to fall a little more for The Dream each time they return and to understand its status quo because it will mean more when this strange home falls apart.
So I felt daunted because this is a longer-term aim that depends on building relationships and trust, in a system where characters could perish at any moment. Incidentally, this is also the form of character progression I feel could be most meaningful in a game like Mothership with otherwise minimal mechanical changes with character experience progression.
Oh also, I have another objective which I really want for this run; ships.
Not just jumping between craft like giant space taxis. I mean building, upgrading and fighting in ships. I want the players to develop their own Millennium Falcon / Serenity / etc.
I really have no idea how we’re going to get there but I’ve picked up that Shipbreakers Toolkit too many times and imagined the players locked in battle with a shift they’ve carefully crafted.
Preparing for The Dream
I'll start with tools and then share the opening content I'll use to draw the players in.
Tools
I have a page here with all the main tools I use for TTRPGs, but many of these are aimed at D&D content or high fantasy settings.
I now plan all my TTRPGs in Obsidian as it works so nicely for both organising my notes and jumping between settings, quests, maps, characters, etc. on the fly during sessions. I tend to separate content up into folders of locations, characters, quests and mechanical bits (monster stats, weapon prices, etc.). Backlinks help me quickly jump between these content sources while playing - for instance, I want to remember more details on an NPC in a mission.
APoF has great random tables. Some of these things I'm happy to leave to rolls during the session (e.g. battles in the court). Others I want to make in advance and flesh out (locations, NPCs etc.). I'll share these locations in a later post in case useful for anyone.
I want to make each section of The Dream filled with settings and people. I want the players to to feel a little daunting when they first arrive, and for them to slowly identify familiar places as quests and characters weave between them - much like anyone exploring a new city.
Oh also, there's this great map interface for The Dream made by Dice.data.lore. This Mothership jump map generator is also fantastic.
Theatre of the mind is fine, but I get a real kick out of flat maps and tiny tabletop minis and standees. There's something wonderful about pulling out a 3cm monster and have all your players genuinely gasp in shock as you place it on the board. I'm also in the camp of card / paper standees over 3D masterwork minis. There's something nice about the old school feel of it.
I'll make maps in mipui for my notes and place these in real life with these dungeon tiles from TT Combat. What I love about these tiles is how easy it is to keep adding the next section, so players have no idea in advance how big the dungeon / building / ship / etc. is. There are also some great maps online for Mothership.
I have two types of music I play during games - ambient background or combat music. Mothership ambient is cyberpunk atmospheric stuff or creepy but not intense stuff. Battle music is more pounding. I make a YouTube mix of both and switch accordingly. It's minor but it works.
Content
As mentioned, I want The Dream to be a quest hub which keeps drawing the players back. The players are going to arrive after Another Bug Hunt (the previous module they played) and I’ve queued up three other Mothership modules that will eventually weave into the missions on The Dream. They are, the Dying Hard on Hardlight Station preview, The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and Warped Beyond Recognition. I'll add many of my own adventures thoughout.
I’ll have Ypsilon and Dying Hard advertised through the Tempest Co Missions which the characters can get to later. I’ll create an ‘experience’ through warp travel to / from The Dream that provides the initial hook for Warped Beyond and have Angus know something about this if asked (information is his job after all…).
Each time the players come back to The Dream, I'll have some escalations of the phases, but I'll drag this out more than I feel is suggested in the booklet.
But first we need to get to the dream.
The last campaign for the players was Another Bug Hunt. They all died horrendously at the end, so we'll have their new characters as fleeing carc related carnage. Partly to add some continuity as well as as a gotcha that even with a new campaign, they aren't totally out of that woods yet!
In the new setting, the players are the last survivors of the carc invasion of their ship due to the rescue of survivors from ABH mining operation. We can hand wave the details but the basic premise is that infected crew were brought onboard, chaos broke out as the crew members changed and barely anyone escaped alive.
In a last ditch attempt, the players took an emergency vessel and fled. With the large expanse of space before them, they activated distress beacons and entered cryosleep. They've been drifting for six months.
As well as the players, there are two others on the ship. Field medic Cortez (carc infected) and Flight Captain Reed (now deceased). I'll read the following entry text.
Red flashing light bathes walls of metal and instrument panels, dancing off the cold surfaces and never quite illuminating the the corners and corridors. The room is still, but the otherwise quiet hum of the engines are interrupted by another sound by a new sound - the low steady drone of an alarm. It goes on unanswered for four days.1
On the the fifth day, the instrument panels light up as one, drowning out the red haze with a galaxy of tiny colours moving constantly across screens and interfaces that surround the small room. In the middle are six crystalline pods. A new chime plays and then a hiss from the pipes near the pods.
With the hissing sound, the the surface of the pod appears to move and then swirl, thinning, emptying, receding to leave dark embryonic shapes hanging from within. The shapes gain forms.
At this point, I'll have the characters come to life and I'll work with the following:
- The characters are awaking in the hypersleep pods, but something isn't right. They're aware that they're being rushed awake rather than the usual process. As they will later find, this is the 'emergency wake up' of the pods, set by the NPC Flight Captain Reed as one of her last desperate actions. The emergency wake up starts when the ship receives a communication message. In this case, from a passing group of Teamsters.
- All are still slow from the deep sleep and lack of movement, rolling with disadvantage. Stimshots would fix this.
- What's actually happening is that Reed stayed awake as the only pilot to guide the escape craft towards somewhere they might find help. She has since died of infections from her wounds sustained during their escape, but her journal details the following:
- The ship appears to be holding up ok after a rough start. The basic meds have helped her clean her wounds and hopefully that should fix things.
- She's keeping the distress beacon going, and moving towards the Tempest Cluster in the hope that a reconnaissance ship might pick up their signal.
- Growing concern that her wounds are infected despite her use of all the anti-septic.
- Cortez's vitals seem strange. She suspects carc infection but she's not a medic and cannot be sure. Whatever it is, he seems stable hypersleep. Hopefully he can hold out until they find help.
- She's starting to get a fever. She's going to go into hypersleep to try and slow the infection. She sets a repeating message that they need help but could be harbouring a xenoinfection. She sets the ship to wake the pods upon receiving a message.
- The message that started the pods waking up is from a suspicious Teamster ship, suspecting the message is a cover up for the Stratemeyer Syndicate - another potential hook to the context across The Dream.
From here, we'll start with:
- The players waking slowly to the sound of an incoming message alarm.
- The NPCs haven't emerged.
- A thudding and glass breaking as the the juvenile carc in Cortex awakes and starts to breaks out the cryosleep pod.
- The players either dealing with the carc, or surviving long enough for the Teamsters to board and take it out. We'll say it's juvenile form makes it more vulnerable than a full size carc.
From here on with this Mothership series, I'll write a report of the action based on the story and follow this with the background of my preparations / choices and some reflections on what worked and what didn't.
For reference, this is a vitals warning on Cortez's pod, as the carc begins to take over.↩