DEAD WEIGHT: Death Begets Death
MOTHERSHIP FREEBIE: Transmissions from the Datacache
Hey folks! It’s been a while - since we last spoke I took part in a successful crowdfunding campaign, lived almost full-time as a Canyonheavy Cowboy in OVER/UNDER, worked on several freelance editing gigs, and went through my day job’s busiest time of the year. It’s been a lot, but I’m finally back in the TTRPG saddle with you once again!
In this Missive, I’ve got a review of Norgad’s Mothership module DEAD WEIGHT for you, a hacker-themed Mothership FREEBIE, and - as always - MORE COOL STUFF. Enjoy!
DEAD WEIGHT Review: Death Begets Death
⚠️⚠️ FOR WARDENS’ EYES ONLY - SPOILERS ARE IN FULL EFFECT HERE ⚠️⚠️
It’s been some time since I’ve run Mothership. I asked around for recommendations - new releases from the last year or so - and one module kept getting mentioned to me: DEAD WEIGHT, a 12-page, black and white zine from 2024 written, illustrated, and laid out by Norgad and edited by A Rat.
Something’s about to go terribly wrong aboard the Adamant Lapis. Amongst stacks of unremarkable rock samples, gravel, and ore, there’s a large and featureless sphere that does absolutely nothing;
Unless you’re already dead.
Cadavers are pulled inward with the force of a hundred starship engines, tearing through bulkhead and flesh alike. The hull groans from strain. Oxygen hisses through punctured metal. Every single member of the crew is a potential projectile.
It’s immediately clear, just from the module’s Itch page (the intro to which you read above), DEAD WEIGHT has a special premise at its center (the Pearl), weaponizing something Mothership has in steady supply - corpses - as an additional means of ratcheting up the tension and adding to the chaos of cascading failure.
The aspect of play I wasn’t expecting from this setup was how much it also created a situation where saving NPCs and PCs alike felt very valuable. Especially in one shot play, it’s easy to give up on characters you just met, but it’s another thing to give up on a character AND add another explosive hazard to the situation.
In my session, this led to player’s learning they needed to act a bit differently than usual - both in and out of character. When the first character dies and its clear what happened next, it becomes imperative to do what you can to rescue and stabilize those who remain.
This can also connect to the cascading failure of the ship’s systems: If the reactor is forced to power down, do the cryopods open? If so, how long does it take for any seriously-injured crewmembers kept there to die of their injuries? Suddenly, getting the power back online becomes even more important - and has another ticking clock attached.
But there’s more than a cargo hauler with a meat-missile-making pearl at its center here, there’s first act intrigue put into play by another recently-recovered specimen aboard the ship, one carrying a waterborne pathogen capable of killing an exposed human within 12 hours. In fact, the lead researcher aboard the ship just died of this alien affliction. Don’t worry, her body comes back around in several hours - unfortunately, its after the Pearl has turned it into a cruise missile.
This opening act sets up an infection thriller adventure, and truthfully, that is always at play here too. It’s just no longer the most pressing concern once a crew member accidentally activates the Pearl and the bodies (and meat) start flying.
This mid-adventure switcheroo was fun to see play out because the crew was focused on containing an infection but were failing to considering the many other alien samples onboard the ship. Even when it become clear something else was afoot, the average player’s mind will jump to “an alien creature broke containment” before “there’s a meat-pearl making bodies into bullets,” so there’s a lot of tense confusion and early scrambling to learn everything they can amid the growing chaos.
The classic Mothership elements, Survive - Solve - Save, are all at play here, but they are more uniquely intertwined than in your average adventure. Seeing someone fail to Survive may be how the survivors are able to Solve the mystery, but now it’s even more pressing to Save everyone they can going forward.
The nice graphic design, clear layout, and smart writing is another hallmark of this module. Each spread features a minimap of its corresponding section of the ship. Straight lines (seen above) mark corpses’ paths through the ship. If a line goes through a room, you are given additional info about the now-damaged room right beneath its intact description (for example, General Storage may have new hazards after being breached and finding specific items may be far more difficult and time-consuming than before).
It just plays very smoothly - especially with Player and Warden handouts allowing everyone at the table to track crew members, time onboard the ship, what rooms are and are not damaged, etc. Cascading failure-type adventures in Mothership can sometimes feel quite confusing to track and picture for the players, but here, what is and isn’t failing is never a question as it’s openly and easily tracked - letting the players focus more on what they are going to try to do about it.
After reading DEAD WEIGHT, my only worry was that the zine didn’t nod to any potential resolutions. Typically, this isn’t something I feel like I need in an adventure, but for whatever reason, I was worried here that the players may not be sure how to move towards a resolution. I found myself wishing I was given a few ideas as to how things may be “solved” beyond simply getting the hell off the ship. But after playing, I didn’t miss those “possible endings” at all - players came to a great resolution and many other possibilities were all envisioned easily. So if this worries you too, don’t let it! Embrace the chaos, and those paths will become clear during play.
I ran DEAD WEIGHT as a single three-hour session with six player characters. We started play with a ten-minute montage introduction chronicling the opening weeks of the ship’s journey and began play with the Pearl’s activation. We ended more or less right at the three-hour mark with the surviving crew members (RIP Mickey) reentering the ship to attempt to stabilize the situation for possible future rescue but all the immediate threats were dealt with, mysteries uncovered, and the Pearl successfully tossed deep into the void.
As a one-shot, structuring the session this way worked quite well and retained most of the various elements of the adventure. Due to the lack of lengthier intro, most NPCs fell into the background. If I was running this again, I would roll Panic checks for every NPC whenever an explosive event happened regardless of their location on the ship and used the results to add to the cascading problems aboard the ship. Other than that, this module is a great option for one-shot play.
DEAD WEIGHT is a wonderful new addition to the Mothership third-party supplement “canon.” It features short but sweet writing densely delivered by crisp and clear layout. A wonderful “red herring” threat that need not be a red herring at all, if it is allowed to spread. A true threat so strange and inventive that players will be scratching their head for some time amid the chaos before they are able to figure it out. The warden and player tools (including some options like tabletop audio I didn’t even dive fully into) are top notch. And perhaps most importantly of it - it has a great primary gimmick: drawing straight lines over the ship’s map to show the path bodies take as they turn to missiles and which rooms are breached in the process. It felt satisfying to do, in a mean gremlin-y sort of way, each and every time!
Plus, the adventure’s central artifact is can easily cast a massive shadow over a space station, a planet, or even a whole campaign universe. I couldn’t help but imagine the Pearl being weaponized - or worse, replicated. A nondescript cargo pod left in a docking bay on board Prospero’s Dream… How long until the first death? How much damage is done? How many more missiles are created in that first event alone? How long until anyone is able to make sense of what is happening? Could a station or colony of sufficient size/density even survive something like the Pearl hidden at its center? Like any great module, there are a million possible and enticing ramifications to roll around in your head for days and days after play.
DEAD WEIGHT is available for purchase now:
FREEBIE: Transmissions from the Datacache
This month’s freebie intended for use with Mothership and is inspired by my time spent as a hacker cowboy in last month’s OVER/UNDER. These are my quick and simple house rules for putting a datacache in stations all across your universe, including how to buy intel/counterintel queries, how to hack them, how to spend tokens to offset your costs (or lack of skills), and more.
I wanted to create the minimum required mechanical scaffolding to create some of the exciting moments we had uncovering secrets and creating the “truth” as hackers aboard a space station. If you bring it to your table, I’d love to know how it goes!
Download the high-quality versions (including printer friendly) HERE!
MORE COOL STUFF
Chris Airau recently started Ansible Uplink, a sci-fi TTRPG module review podcast. It’s got a slew of cool TTRPG industry folks reading and reviewing sci-fi modules for Mothership, Traveller, and more. Plus, there’s a very fun retrospective episode on OVER/UNDER featuring several of my Cowboy hacker crew reliving the glory days of that truly unreal gaming experience.
Check out the show HERE or in the podcast app of your choice.
There’s far too much stuff from OVER/UNDER to share it all, but here’s a pirate radio segment I created as my character, Denk “Freaky” Fontaine of the CanyonHeavy Collective cowboys. I’m still trying to come to terms with how to even being to explain or analyze my month-long obsession with O/U, but you can likely expect more on that later!
The new game from worlds by watt, Rust Wings, is coming in the new year! I did some early dev work on this Mausritter hack, and it’s got a ton of really interesting stuff going on. Much like Cloud Empress and its early connections to Mothership, watt is taking the well-tuned core of Mausritter and various Odd-likes but building lots of totally new, really inventive stuff on top. I’m stoked for y’all to see more (and to keep working on some of it myself soon)!
You can save the Kickstarter page HERE to get notified on launch!
Here’s what I backed during MOTHERSHIP MONTH. What did you back?
I recently had the pleasure of getting to play Chris Bisette’s A Dungeon Game with their adventure The Moss Mother’s Maze (and Chris ran the game too)! Both were great. I loved the really open-ended and creative magic system of ADG and found the dungeon at the heart of the Moss Mother’s Maze to be really captivating with an extremely memorable final treasure. My character lived… but at what cost?!
Thanks for reading! In the coming months, I’m hoping to finish up my work on Flatline on the Blocks, put out a small one-or-two page TTRPG, and keep at my current projects. See you later - Christian
Norgad’s stuff is top notch. I’m currently running Brackish for my group and it’s amazing.
Thanks for the Ansible Uplink shout-out! I gotta re-read that module you mentioned to me...