Crab Meat — my thoughts after running Another Bug Hunt

The meat of Mothership is in its modules. The adventure, setting, and scenario writing has been where the specificity and quality of the game resides for as long as I’ve been aware of it — and I’m amenable to that, pretty positive on it even. My tastes in the rules end of ttrpgs are for assemblage: a default resolution mechanic is fine and good to have, but as a campaign comes together it is valuable to be able to attach and detach whatever tools make it go or hinder it without significant disruption, and specific adventures bent around certain ideas can be a great place to collect and deliver these tools to other players who may also find them useful. This places me in and adjacent to a number of osr-esque principles, which certainly is where my tastes tend, but it’s something that has held true for me in a vast swathe of other games as well.

I recently ran a short campaign of Another Bug Hunt, the module included with the Mothership boxed set and presented in its content as an introductory adventure for both. I came away with a number of doubts as to its ability to successfully introduce the style of play that the other core Mothership material positions as ideal (which aligns reasonably to my preferences) to anyone who isn’t already enculturated into it, or to be a satisfactory scenario for anyone who already is.

The module itself is a series of mini-scenarios arranged in a roughly linear pattern, with advice for the gm on how to run them as an interconnected series or as individual one-shots — I opted for the former. It reminds me of the WotC dnd modules I have personally experienced in both 5e and 4e: each discrete scenario is a differently arranged combination of space and objects in that space with objects to poke at to get to a few different outcomes, all of which push you along towards one or more of the later scenarios, until the very last one that is distinctly a dramatic ending. You move from dungeon crawling basics to a socially-inflected situation where choices advance a timeline to a much more grandiose deathtrap-setpiece, and finally have a frantic escape sequence for those who survive all of the above or decide to leave early. I found the second scenario, featuring squabbling survivors in a failing power plant, to be the meatiest and it’s the one I will most likely run on its lonesome in the future: theres a lot of chance for clashing goals and personalities in a way I find fun and fertile ground.

It feels like it is built to be friendly and familiar to someone who has primarily experienced those, which makes a lot of sense given the way I have seen Mothership explode in popularity in spaces that tend towards this style, and the moment to moment advice in the sub-scenarios tends to strike me as good. This produces a lot of the worries I mention above: despite some brief gesture at travel across expanses of jungle, there is very little to assist in what the game might become if the players do not progress pretty linearly with time spent outside of the scenario-setpieces being treated as perfunctory. No random encounter table, no ecology to the world, very little specifics to build out the lush jungle we are told exists all around. If someone were to run this as their first venture into Mothership, I think it would prepare them quite well to run it again, but in the larger world of supplements that exist I think it would leave them strikingly unprepared to parse a lot of what’s in the best work in the space and to interface with tables that preexist the 1e explosion.

Thinking about the module from the GM side necessitates thinking about the Wardens Operation Manual, a document that I tried to use as much as possible when running these sessions to see what outcomes came of the tools it offers. An uncomplicated positive, in my opinion, is the advice on organization of a notebook. It is practical and actionable in a way that the vast majority of GM advice I encounter simply isn’t and that deserves some real applause. I’m already a notebook-user but it definitely inspired me to buy a new stack of cheap composition books to have on hand, and I’ll probably be trying and adjusting its specific advice for a number of future games I run. Some of the more rhetorical moves it makes are where tension arises. This passage on page 22 stood out to me in light of a conversation I had regarding the value of skills:
“A lot of times, players want to know which Skills are useful. Tell them to treat their Skills like a wishlist of items they’d like to see come up in play. If they’re really nervous about survival, they should take a Skill like Firearms. If they’re more interested in learning about the world, some of the sciences might be better for them.”
I pregenerated a number of characters with a pretty wide swathe of skillsets, and my players noted that it felt like the presentation of the game bent towards the 5e-esque “I want to use my Signature Thing and will try to bend the scenario to do so” much more than the “I want to do clever problem solving with tools on hand that removes the need to go to the dice for resolution” that is more to my taste and played up in the WOM as something to aim for. It felt to me that Another Bug Hunt ends up being pretty uneven in terms of having ground to do the aforementioned wishlisting in.

An aside: I think the TOMBS Cycle is goof-ass in its prescriptiveness.

We also ended up having a conversation about the way that stress accumulation and Panic feels pretty inconsequential in this sort of shortform campaign — notable when shortform play has been what I anecdotally see Mothership positioned as being for in a lot of spaces I’m in. I perhaps could have followed the one-shot advice to hand out d5 rather than 1 per failure, but given that I ran the whole dang scenario without it mattering much despite being a thing we had to take the time to track, it seems like maybe that advice should extend to any game that aims to have a concrete end date. The Shriek infection and crabification process was fun to use and felt much more consequential. I was left with the thought that my favorite Mothership modules are Luke Gearing’s Gradient Descent, which has its own alternative stress track in a similar style, and Joel Hines’s Desert Moon of Karth, which is just made to be played for a longer time in a sandboxy way and as such will involve a greater accumulation of stress. I wonder if there wouldn’t be some value to a version of Mothership wherein the panic table is unique per adventure and thus more interestingly tied to the writing, paring down the systemic workload that much more while opening the space up for more creative uses of a descent into horror.

I do think that what I think of as the default Mothership house style strength shone through: when the game needed to convey dry numbers and mechanical content, it did so with efficiency that is easy to parse and work with and did not distract from the writing.

Danni and Cameron, who were two of my players for this game, touch on some of their player-side experiences with it in one of their monthly patreon podcasts (It’s behind a $5 paywall but if there’s anything I feel good about shilling for its Ranged Touch’s patreon content). Cameron’s perspective on a desire for setting and adventure material to be where distinct mechanics lie rather than systems is something I both agree with and think I’m already deeper in the world of than he is, as a number of game objects and play spaces I enjoy already hew to this, and expect further rules assemblage to happen over the course of distinct campaigns. I recommend to anyone interested in seeing some of this in action my favorite “teaching the game” adventure I’ve read is Chris Bisette’s In The Bluelight, which has a great example of how one might do this assembly on the fly based on various practical needs in its alternative modes of navigating the basilisk lair, or Ezra Claverie’s Crypts of Indormancy for some interesting appendages to any given dnd-descended system wrt gaining experience.

I know that the other player of the campaign, Michael H, is writing a post on the sessions and his thoughts on the game to put on his blog. I look forward to reading and sharing the post when it is done. UPDATE: it is posted!

I plan to write some thoughts on the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit and Unconfirmed Contact Report books, as well as some other aspects of the boxed set, at some point but that is for a later time as they weren’t directly consequential to this game.