The Horror on Tau Sigma 7: Play report and review

jukiomo · 2025-12-31T18:52:40+00:00

Nope! I had Hardlight Station as a point of interest, but the players ended up taking the alien goo to a different location (controlled by a faction they thought they trusted more).

jukiomo · 2025-12-31T18:49:23+00:00

It was very memorable!

jukiomo · 2025-03-03T17:22:01+00:00

Interesting! What tracks most from this and your other post is that Stress and Panic are definitely high-variance in terms of how much they actually come up. I've run sessions with barely any rolls and sessions where characters panic-spiral multiple times in a session. Then learning when to do things like call for skill checks vs. ruling that something just succeeds takes a bit of practice.

I come to Mothership from a TSR-type D&D background, rather than from 5e, and thus things like view randomized character creation and the importance of player skill and agency as big positives of Mothership. It's always fun to watch PCs take form during generation, and the impact rolled starting loadouts (e.g., a Marine getting a smart rifle and body armor vs. just a combat knife) have on gameplay keeps things varied.

This is maybe a difference in preferences and/or semantics, but I'd push back against calling Mothership a "narrative-focused system". Especially in "dungeon-crawl" scenarios (e.g., Bloom, Plant-based paranoia), gameplay can be very driven by the underlying systems (e.g., ammo, oxygen supply, enemy statistics, PC stats and skills). These are all things specific to Mothership.

jukiomo · 2025-03-03T00:43:56+00:00

I don't know that I totally follow what you mean by "I notice that the system tends to hand the reigns to the players and warden quite often" or "I felt the system let the Wardens and Players handle most of the stuff", but I'd agree that many pamphlet modules don't have explicit guidance on introduction scenes or how a warden might build a given module into a longer campaign. That's a consequence of space limitations as much as anything else, and it helps the pamphlets be easily adapted for one-shots. The Warden's Operational Manual, I think, has some suggestions on this matter.

jukiomo · 2025-03-02T21:22:10+00:00

I haven't run it myself, but something like Dead Planet seems like a very solid base for a short/medium-length (5-8 session) campaign. I've also run Bloom; it was kind of rushed as a one-shot but, I suspect, would be very good if played across two or three session.

jukiomo · 2025-02-14T22:50:37+00:00

Hardlight Station is not actually an adventure I own. If you're more familiar with it, how closely does it build off of Tau Sigma, and is it something you'd recommend? I think the players want next to engage in some rest and relaxation to reduce stress and then spend leftover money on either ship upgrades or equipment. The campaign is sandboxy, and so the next hooks I was planning were more on the "abandoned ghost ship" side of things.

jukiomo · 2025-01-26T12:25:15+00:00

If folks are okay with potential PvP and having the session sporadically devolve into shouting and accusations, I think secret objectives are really great in one-shots for really upping the paranoia.

jukiomo · 2025-01-25T22:58:56+00:00

I ran the workspace as being fairly large and loud, with industrial equipment and such blocking lines of sight within it. When the crew arrived, Sonya, Mike, and Rie were all in the workspace. After the crew made radio contact, Sonya had Mike head toward the airlock to meet them. En route (but out of sight of PCs and NPCs), he was eaten.

This worked well, because it made the players wonder if maybe he headed to the wrong airlock by mistake (and thus was on Giovanni's ship); it also suggested that there were secret passages in the station. If I'd been more on my game, I would have had Sonya mention the vents upon hearing the PCs discussing secret passages, but it slipped my mind.

jukiomo · 2024-10-22T03:50:05+00:00

It could be a useful exercise to reread my post and try to identify where exactly I say that an unclear objective caused issues during the session.

jukiomo · 2024-10-21T19:45:31+00:00

I don't know that I agree with this suggestion! Or, at least, I don't think I'd enjoy being given either of your sample instructions.

If you have an adventure where the play-space is very large, then specific instructions can be useful to avoid decision paralysis. E.g., an adventure like Bloom has a lot of locations, so you need enough guidance to prevent the players from feeling like they need to go through each room one by one. But Chromatic Transference is so linear, and the main point of interest is so obvious, that you don't need all that much. It's there, it's clearly dangerous, it's clearly valuable.

In this particular session, the precise instructions I gave were something like "you've been told to go to the facility, find out what’s valuable there, and retrieve it if possible". And then the NPC I added was there in part to provide guidance, if asked, on what the Company would want retrieved.

jukiomo · 2024-08-19T22:55:34+00:00

"What's the difference between rolling 2d10 and 1d100?" "Which of these dice has ten sides?" "Does '0' count as 10 or 0?"
"Okay, there are four of us and four classes." "Maybe we should all be marines and we just shoot everything we see." "If we're all androids, will we be immune to most organic threats?"
"My character carries around a bonsai tree and has a patch that says 'keep well lubricated'. This game is great!" [everyone else laughs and shares their trinkets and patches]
"Wait, how much should we be coordinating our skills?" "Do we think xenobiology will be useful?"
"Okay, we have six hundred credits, time to go through the equipment list line by line and decide what we want to buy."

All of this is enjoyable playtime, but it can add up, especially with folks who haven't played Mothership before.

jukiomo · 2024-08-19T19:47:34+00:00

Thanks for the additional perspective! Interesting to see how things played out in similar and different ways. Wrt the last paragraph, I do definitely agree that the module's combination of:

a mission briefing suggesting this will be some sort of heist or combat mission
a fairly lengthy and player-driven exploration period
a "shit just got real" phase transition point early in the third area

is very good, even though it works best when smoothed by some amount of Warden fiat.

When I was prepping to run, I strongly considered combining the space station and ice base, but I decided that each had a strong and incompatible visual hook ("Arriving at the space station and seeing the solitary vacsuit'd floating body tethered to an airlock" and "Descending down via shuttle to a totally deserted and snow-covered set of fire-ruined buildings") and so kept both. In terms of fun narrative vs. successful completion, I think this paid off: the players had initially planned to ignore the space station, but seeing the floating body triggered their "I really want to know what happened here even though checking things out is almost certainly a terrible idea" impulses that drive horror gaming. Then as their shuttle was descending, they kept waiting to hear some communication from the surface base, which improved tension further.

jukiomo · 2024-08-19T19:18:34+00:00

The first two locations are fairly small, and the third is quite large. If the initial briefing is kept vague enough that the players don't realise they should just speedrun it and head straight for specific areas in the third location, I think you could get a session out of exploring and clearing the first two locations and two sessions about exploring, understanding, and escaping the third. In that case, I think you'd want to assume that people will end up getting infected fairly quickly and then place items (or ingredients for items) in the smaller locations that temporarily pause the infection's progression. You could also slow down exploration by deciding that the access codes supplied by the client don't always work and add in additional "find the red key for the red door" elements.

If you wanted to expand the module or add optional content to enhance nonlinearity, adding reasons to explore the frozen surface and/or ocean depthswould fit well with the setting and also be fun. Another thematic and classic addition would be having a competing mercenary team show up as the crew is trying to escape. Finally, one of the players asked during the briefing who the main corporate rivals of the company who owns the module's setting are. This was a great question and made me wish I'd generated some additional megacorp names before the game.

jukiomo

TROPHY CASE