An interesting tool kit to make hacking checks more involved.

+ Quick and easy rules for the players that can be learned during play

+ Interesting tools for the players to purchase and gain an advantage on their hacking

+ Good warden notes on how to escalate the act of hacking

As you asked for feedback, I feel this a fun and more "Hackerman" ruleset to implement for hacking, which feels refreshing than going down a realism path. I think the overall ruleset is solid; I can see this be used in very intense moments where the players need to protect their hacker as they try to break all the layers. My main concern is how long anything past Intriguing will take. Given you have a wide range of numbers to guess, several layers to break, and you can only jump up to three nodes, I feel this can take at least 5-7 rounds to successfully breach; realistically more. I feel this ruleset would benefit from reducing the overall difficult so the hacking is kept nice and speedy. I can imagine difficulty to be based more on having more traps laid out rather than making the process longer to complete, making failure even more frantic. This could also be sped up if players can place their node on any position on successes rather than slowly taking a couple steps, with crit successes let you change positions twice.

Overall, I feel this is a novel approach to gamify hacking and create a whole defense encounter for the whole party to be involved. However, I fear the novelty will wear off if players are subjected to this for long periods of time. It's better to keep it short and have them asking for more.

hiya, here are some stray notes i took while reading!

when i read the original hackers pamphlet for mothership-- or i guess more accurately, started to read it-- i bounced off pretty quick, never been too much of a fan of hacking in ttrpgs... figured, leave it to someone more into it. conversely, reading yours, i immediately got the cat and mouse (sorry, another cat) of it all. compelling, high-stakes, easy to wrap your head around. when the rest of the party is just waiting for an alternate reality scene to play out, i want them to be having fun too, and this is visual enough that i could picture the other players cheering and groaning as the results play out!

rotten rico is just so fun to say. rotten rico. 

lemme tell ya i decided to roll one out as i read to understand it better, and the string of crit failures i started with sure made it annoying haha. i just started making up successes. like a REAL GM

love it. you've finally sold me on in-game hacking (haxxing?). fantastic work. praisies NOT subject to changies. 

Props for doing a mechanical add-on entry rather than a module, and making it fit the theme. I like the "layers" approach to simulating hacking. It'd be cool to use this when hacking an AI brain (or even a human one using some neural technology) and do some kind of Inception thing where you're also experiencing layers of consciousness as you go deeper.

I was confused by a lot of the mechanical explanation at first because you took a long time before getting to the central points which is that:

1. The nodes are numbers on a die.
2. The hacker is trying to change their number to match the secret target number, while getting clues about whether they're higher or lower.

If you said that up front and then got into the nitty-gritty, it would make life a lot easier for the reader. A visual representation of the game showing dice on a number line would also go a long way. I feel like a lot of entries in this jam make the mistake of trying to tell everything in full detail from beginning to end instead of starting with the big picture and then doing the detail.

I think the main thing that's missing for me is a way to just fail your hack attempt. You've got Hunter Worms, but they're optional. Aside from those, it seems like the only risk is on the way back out. There needs to be something like a time limit after which you have to start making Panic checks or fail the hack. Otherwise it's just sitting there rolling dice until you get in.

Visually, the biggest issue here is the small variations in type size, width, line spacing, etc. The general rule in graphic design is that if things are the same, they have to be exactly the same, and if they're different, they have to be different enough that it's clearly on purpose. Things that are just a little off are in the uncanny valley.

One example is the text in quotation marks at the top left of the interior spread. You've used a compressed version of the font there, but it's otherwise the same size, weight and color as the surrounding text, which makes it look wrong. If you need to use compressed text there for space saving reasons, make it bolder than the surrounding text and a different colour. Then it will be obviously "different on purpose" and not look like some of the regular text got squished by mistake.

This is a sassy module and I really dig the conversational tone. It's like a stranger in a bar is coaching me through brain surgery! There's absolutely a niche for this kind of minigame within almost every Mothership campaign and not a lot of other modules that cover it.

What I think is successful:

• Inside panels communicate their information really well. Getting example jobs is huge for useability on the fly.
• I like the cyberpunk/neon-soaked art direction. There's a subtle grain on the background gradient and the title that gives them more texture and will look excellent in print.
• The "things hackers ask" segment answers some really clear edge cases. This alone makes the minigame far easier to run!
• Rotten Rico's is really novel and I love how it breaks the 6-panel format. Very Borderlands!
• I was initially worried that the Escape could be long in the tooth after all the previous rolling but it boiling down to a single "don't match the dice" setup is really succinct. I could envision that roll eliciting a lot of held breaths.

What I think could be improved:

• Body text (Bahnschrift?) is pretty heavy and blends together a bit with the headers. Something lighter might help with the hierarchy of information and the general depth of composition.
• Having the "Warden's Eyes Only" panel on the back of the pamphlet may not be wise. Recommend swapping it and the "What You'll Need" panel?
• That second panel in particular feels a touch redundant when the inside panels already walk you through the steps to a hack in a more comprehensive way. I feel it could give a basic overview of the dice mechanics too since it references Layers and Nodes but doesn't really cover what that means.

In the end, I think this is a really fun and unique take on the jam's theme, and a compliment to pretty much any Mothership table. It's got a bit of tone and setting, some fun dice rolling, and a generally novel approach to encounters that many Wardens will get a kick out of! Well done!

I feel like rules supplements can be hard to write and harder to find a niche because people run OSR games in such wildly different ways, especially Mothership. For my style of play at least I feel like I'd have difficulties using this without reworking further. There's definitely a solid foundation here, especially tone-wise, but after a quick playtest I find the mechanics themselves a bit confusing and question if my players would have a terrible amount of fun repeating this after the first attempt. That's not to say there isn't stuff I like, a lot of this scoring is more related to what I get out of supplements like these more than anything.   

But still, please keep working on content like this! Rules-focused supplements are few compared to the adventures out there, and I really like yoinking different ideas from modules like these to flesh out the systems of games I run. There's something good here with the node-based nexus whack-a-mole you got going on for sure.

Polish - 3/5   

I really liked the writing style you went for, feels as if it's written by a hacker trying to give you a low-down on the trade almost. I feel like it could have leaned further towards that direction but it also gets hard because you have to attempt to succinctly and clearly describe the procedures you're trying to introduce. I think you did a good job at separating the two tones for the most part. My only critique is that the explanation of many of the mechanics tends to be a bit confusing to follow, particularly when the layer jumping is involved and skill checks are starting to frequently be made. Trying to simplify the steps and formatting them better could go a long way. A better visual flow indicating the order you go through when hacking would be helpful, something similar to a flowchart design between rules sections maybe?   

Layout-wise it gets the job done. I'm not a huge fan of the colors being used and the way the blue text you used is highlighted  and italicized can be a bit hard to read. The in-world advertisement feel you had for the hacking gear would be a really cool aesthetic to lean further towards honestly. Also gotta say, really like the cover art. It's cute and fits well with the theme and tone of the supplement.

Favorability - 2.5/5   

The low rating is honestly because I just have a hard time visualizing what I'd get from this mini-game versus using hacking checks as-is and describing what happens a bit more narratively. In my experience separate "games within a game" systems like this can be super hit-or-miss because they need to warrant the time you stop playing the main in order to play through it. Hacking is a classic mechanic that typically gets this treatment and many takes have the same issue: unless multiple people present are playing hackers, it turns into everyone else waiting for the hacker/Warden to make a dozen rolls to see if they get what they want or not. Especially if it's something that the entire session hinges on: the access code to the vault they're trying to break into, stopping the AI relentlessly hunting them down, clearing their name of any crimes logged in corpo records. So the mini-game should ideally be A.) quick to run through and get game-able results from or B.) generate results that are interesting enough to justify the mechanics you're engaging with.   

My favorite part still has to be the informal hacker tone that influences a lot of the writing. Makes it an enjoyable read even if I don't mesh entirely with the mechanics present.

Usability - 2.5/5   

As written this involves a lot of rolling at certain points. The mechanics for it themselves are relatively straightforward, it's just the way they're explained and written requires some cross-referencing between sections and minor creative interpretation on the Warden's part to make work. I did a short solo playtest running it and it felt like it involved too much rolling that didn't necessarily result in interesting results. Succeeding largely just lets you avoid stress and move around a bit further. Failure isn't great, but you're still making progress and only ticking up 1 per failure. Just kind of felt like I meandered around a node until I got what I wanted, then it just boiled down to hoping I'd beat the matching d10 rolls I accumulated during the dive. The items are essentially the only way to get further agency over the game, but they're incredibly powerful and priced in such a way that I see most players grabbing just logic bridges and division swarms if they want to get through the hack efficiently.  

Don't get me wrong, I like how you incorporate a narrative element the player directly benefits from which is baked into the procedure itself. Leaving the rewards and consequences up for the Warden to decide and talk about with the players is the best move as opposed to trying to establish a catch-all procedure for what they get out of the task. It just feels like there's a lot of rolling happening while nothing is really happening round-by-round except a "hotter/colder" type mini-game. The active threats you describe could definitely spice things up a bit, but I feel like the process might be a bit more annoying in play than it is rewarding.

Theme - 2.5/5   

Beneath the surface being interpreted as the inner workers of an AI's defense against hacking is interesting, but the theming loses that focus as the rules turn more into generalized hacking procedures. I think narrowing the focus for it being a specifically AI-related mechanic could give it some more focus and let you write in flavor regarding them in your style of writing that'd be fun to read.