Another Bug Hunt (MRPG-M4) is the introductory adventure for Mothership 1e. It contains four scenarios which can be strung together consecutively to form a larger adventure or run as one-shots.
The crew (how Mothership refers to the PCs/the party) is hired by the Company to investigate the Greta Base Terraforming Colony on Samsa VI. The colony has not made contact in six months. The crew needs to rendezvous with 2ndLt Kaplan, figure out what's going on, re-establish satellite communications, and get the terraformer back online. Failing that, they need to evacuate the head scientist Dr. Edem and retrieve the android Hinton's logic core. The crew is aware that the colonists have been at war with an alien species of arthropods called carcinids for about a year, and that the colonists captured a carcinid larva nine months ago.
The module has great art and layout. It has an orange, white, and green color scheme which allows for some really great blocking. The org chart, character portraits, and map of the terraforming station are my favorite illustrations. There are also a few scene illustrations which really standout.
The orange text on white font was very difficult for me to read unless I was in bright daylight. I can read it very easily while sitting at my desk in the middle of the day, but not so much when I'm in bed or at the gaming table on a Saturday night, which is when I'm more likely to be reading it. It feels like an aesthetic choice which was made because it looks "cool" or because it looked good on the computer. It is not, in my opinion, accessible.
The module features Warden Education Support (WES), a sort of designer commentary with advice for Wardens about running the game (both Mothership in general and Another Bug Hunt specifically). It also includes advice for running each scenario as a one-shot.
I think WES is pretty great. When I read modules, I'm constantly scratching my head wondering what the designer's intent was. Is this encounter supposed to be a TPK? Is this trap supposed to be impossible to detect? WES comes right out and says it, which is something I wish more designers would do.
I've run just one session of Mothership so far, and started with this module. In that one session, we were able to finish the first scenario, so WES's advice about running at least that one scenario as a one-shot is pretty sound.
So, what's really going on here?
SPOILERS for Another Bug Hunt incoming!
There is an alien mothership in the planet's jungle. The "nobles" of this alien race are sleeping aboard the ship. When the colonists landed on the planet, the ship started birthing carcinids to defend itself. Dr. Edem and Hinton learned that the carcinids transmit a memetic virus through their Shriek, which turns other creatures into carcinids. Hinton went rogue and converted the Shriek into a signal which could be broadcast over the radio, then used it to transform several colonists into carcinids during a birthday celebration, causing chaos. The survivors fled from Greta Base to Heron Terraforming Station and barricaded themselves inside. Hinton traveled to the mothership to awaken the carcinid nobles, hoping to become one himself.
Unfortunately, the timeline doesn't make much sense. The colony hasn't been in contact for six months, which coincides with when Hinton discovered how to transmit the Shriek over the radio. We eventually learn that Hinton actually strapped a carcinid into the controls of the radio tower in order to accomplish this. However, three months then passed before the birthday massacre. The tower is just on the other side of the dam from the terraforming base. Did no one go there for three months to investigate what was wrong with the comms?
It is important now to discuss the Shriek. Anyone who hears the carcinids' shriek must make a Sanity Save or become infected. The infection has five stages. Every 2d10 hours, the infected person must make another Sanity Save, or else the infection advances. A fully-grown carcinid emerges from the infected individual's neck, chest, or abdomen at stage five.
The average character in Mothership has a Sanity Save of 21 (2d10+10). To make a Sanity Save, the character must roll under that number on d100, meaning that the average character makes a successful Save roughly 20% of the time.
First, I find it hard to believe that an infected colonist didn't transform in the middle of Greta Base or the Terraforming Station a lot sooner, considering the colonists have been fighting the carcinids for a year. Second, the adventure is very clear that anyone who attempts to use comms is exposed to the Shriek due to Hinton's sabotage. That means that roughly 80% of the colonists should already have been infected six months ago when Hinton first executed his plan (it also means that roughly 80% of the player characters will be infected immediately upon beginning the scenario through no fault of their own, if by chance they happen to have the very reasonable idea to try talking to each other over comms).
That doesn't sound unreasonable until you do the math. A Sanity Save is made, on average, every eleven hours. On average, 80% of Sanity Saves are failed. It takes four failures to transform after initial infection. That means that an average person, after infection, can expect to pass just one save before transforming. The average infected person transforms after something like 55 hours - about two and a half days.
So, how did three months pass between Hinton's sabotage and the birthday party massacre without any other colonists transforming into carcinids? How did several colonists transform at the birthday party simultaneously if the course of infection varies slightly for everyone? How has the Shriek been broadcast over the radio for six months without the majority of colonists being transformed? Why has a month and a half passed between the birthday massacre and the siege on Heron Terraforming Station? Were Hinton and the carcinids just waiting around?
To add to it, Greta Base ceased all communications six months ago. The Company hired the crew three months ago. This needless padding of the timeline causes all sorts of problems with the credibility of the scenario.
The reason I'm pedantic about all of this is because when I run a module I want all of this stuff figured out for me. I run modules because I've been running my own stuff and am tired of figuring stuff out all the time. I want someone else to map and key the locations, give the NPCs motivations and secrets, and figure out the logistics of timelines so that I can focus on simply adjudicating the game and accurately presenting the information to the players. In a fantasy game it's easy to handwave inconsistencies as magic, but in sci-fi the soundness of the scenario's logic is incredibly important.
I need to understand what happened and be able to make sense of it so that I can communicate information to the players, allowing them to - maybe - also understand what happened. If I have unanswered questions, so will they, and with good play they should have a chance to answer those questions, which means I need answers to them myself. If the module doesn't provide the answers, I need to provide them. Now I'm figuring stuff out, which is what I was trying to avoid!
How I'd Run It
Lose the Shriek. The scenario is perfectly fine without it and it feels like too harsh of a middle finger to the players, who are probably playing Mothership for the first time. You could probably lose the whole infection mechanic entirely (it's just a play on a bad Reddit joke about how everything is always evolving into crabs) and the scenario as written will make a lot more sense.
I would make it so that being injured by the carcinids is what causes someone to become infected (with a Body Save to resist instead of a Sanity Save, which doesn't make any sense to me). I would also rule that Androids can't be infected (I have no idea why they can be infected in the module as written).
I would also make the carcinids more docile by nature, so the colonists were not essentially at war with them for a year. My carcinids would be initially found only in the jungle and would act only to defend their mothership, which the colonists would not have discovered yet. I prefer it to be more mysterious that way, and it would make more sense that the colony hasn't already been overrun.
Hinton, meanwhile, would discover the mothership all on his own and keep it to himself. He would discover that the carcinids could be controlled using certain frequencies emitted by their nobles. Three months ago, he would have sabotaged the comms tower to emit a frequency that made the carcinids more aggressive, which disrupted comms. The aggressive carcinids prevented anyone from going there to investigate. The Company hired the crew immediately and they began heading to Samsa VI.
Meanwhile, the colonial marines did an admirable job fending off the carcinids at both Greta Base and Heron Terraforming Station. Unfortunately, Hinton was intentionally infecting the marines at Greta Base with carcinid larvae under the guise of administering routine medical procedures. He timed it carefully so the infected would turn all at once during the birthday massacre. The base was overrun and the survivors fled to Heron Terrforming Station.
And that's it. I think that fixes the vast majority of issues with this module.
The Scenarios
Overall, they're nice and varied.
In Scenario 1: Distress Signals, the crew gets to do some methodical investigation in the mostly-abandoned Greta Base. It's a good introduction to the game with just a single deadly combat encounter (with an easily-telegraphed solution that is guaranteed to make new players feel like geniuses).
I think there is a missed opportunity here to build tension - the crew either goes in the front door and immediately enters the commissary where the birthday massacre happened, or they go in the side door and immediately encounter the monster, both of which kind of let all of the air out of the room at once.
Scenario 2: Hive Mind is my favorite. Here there are three factions, Team Leave (led by HM3 Brookman), Study Group (led by Dr. Edem), and Hog Squad (led by Sgt Valdez). They all want different things, and the players have to choose what to prioritize (or risk splitting up). If the crew focuses on one thing, the other two tracks advance for the worse. Each faction has a good reason for wanting what they want. It's not an obvious choice.
Conveniently, the three options fit nicely into Mothership's "Survive, Solve, or Save" framework, which is outlined in the Warden's Operation Manual. Team Leave want to secure the comms tower to call for evac (Survive), Study Group wants to recover their research from the lab to find the carcinids' weakness - cue "What is the WEAKNESS" written on a whiteboard in the lab (Solve), and Hog Squad wants to rescue a missing squad of marines and stop the reactor from shutting down (Save).
This is a brilliant and simple piece of design that reinforces the game's thesis - the players can't accomplish all three goals. It's a perfect scenario for an introductory adventure meant to teach both the Warden and players what kind of game Mothership is.
Scenario 3: Mothership is a Lovecraftian dungeoncrawl through the carcinid mothership. Lots of OSR-ish tricks, traps, and puzzles with an unknowable alien flavor. It does at times feel a bit too "alien" as in "random", i.e. just weird for weirdness's sake, and not necessarily weird in a way that makes sense for these particular aliens. The rooms don't really give the impression that the carcinids actually like, live here and use these weird devices. There is also, hilariously, a gun designed specifically to kill carcinids inside the carcinids' lair.
Scenario 4: Metamorphosis challenges the crew to escape the planet during a monsoon and carcinid offensive. It comes with a timeline which describes hour-by-hour flooding, carcinid numbers, and evacuation possibility. It seems very unforgiving, but I guess that's Mothership.
At the end, the carcinid mothership launches a messenger ship which flies off to alert the rest of the carcinids throughout the universe. It fights for one round before fleeing, and WES explicitly says "it is too difficult for the players to fight". This presents the players with one last choice: try to stop it and Save the day (they probably can't), or turn tail and flee (Survive).
Verdict
Overall, I like this module and think you could get around six sessions out of it. The timeline presented at the beginning is pretty much nonsensical and needs to be completely overhauled. The easiest way to do it is to change the way infection works and condense events onto a shorter timeline.
Once you get that sorted out, you have a nice nonlinear adventure with clearly defined goals and a variety of possibilities for play. It's a good introduction to the game for both Wardens and players, and it more or less practices what the Warden's Operation Manual preaches.
My rating (F is worst and S is best): B. I like it, but it has problems that need fixing, and those are big conceptual problems that the Warden has to rationalize if the scenario's conceit is going to have any hope of holding up against scrutiny from inquisitive players. With a more casual group, this probably runs very well.
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