Play Campaign Prep Module
Mothership: Unfathomable's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Polish - How is the overall look/vibes/writing & design? | #10 | 3.941 | 3.941 |
| Favorability - how much do you personally like the submission? | #17 | 3.529 | 3.529 |
| Theme - How well does it match the Jam's Theme? | #18 | 3.824 | 3.824 |
| Overall | #19 | 3.456 | 3.456 |
| Usability - How "pick up & play" is this for a Warden? | #35 | 2.529 | 2.529 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Very polished, but there's so much packed in here that I think the readability suffers a bit.
I do like the boss fight mechanic, but I think there need to be clearer or more straightforward links between what the Tell is, what the consequence is, and how the PCs can Cancel it. (Let us recall stories of player groups being stumped by children's puzzles)
For instance if a Warden uses "Fractured Reality" and says "The air around the black hole seems to fracture like brittle glass, you hear morbid whispering in your mind", then I think most players wouldn't understand that they can "self-reflect/confession/being true to themselves" to prevent the outcome, or that the outcome would be a copy of themselves appearing. I think they would conclude "space-time is being damaged, is about to shatter completely, and we should evacuate".
Whereas if the Tell was "Each character sees that their own shadow is starting to take solid form. They sense all the darkest aspects of themselves slowly turning into murderous reality" Then the consequence - they have to face down their corrupted copy - is much more easily anticipated, and the possible Cancellation - trying to repress or acknowledge the dark part of their psyche, or perhaps physically disrupt the copy from forming - is a bit more readily apparent.
thank you kindly! and I agree that the readability is the weakest point of the module. I think (or at least hope) that once you have read it through once and understand it that the structure should make it something you can use to prepare several sessions of play.
As for your suggestion on the Boss fight, I think you are right and I’ll certainly look into refining it for the post Jam version! thanks for the suggestion on Fractured Reality as well I think its a very good point! Do you have any thoughts on Gravity Well or Time Wave? or did they make more sense as is?
The cover art is gorgeous, but I think the adventure itself is trying to do too much for this sort of format, especially with an off-the-cuff writing style. I'm not sure it's possible to convey everything you want to convey here clearly in the space available, but if it is possible, it would require extremely tight writing and the use of graphic design tricks to save space.
I guess the mechanics are clear enough that someone could, with a bit of effort, figure out how to run this as you intend it. But the problem for me is that compressing every location to a single one-sentence feature and a single stat check makes for uninteresting gameplay. It feels less like a storytelling game and more like one of those 80s-era American-style board games that boils down to just rolling dice for hours and seeing what happens.
If I was going to run this, I would ignore the stat checks you suggest and instead ad-lib each encounter, giving the players more choice in the situation and allowing more variation in the possible outcomes instead of just rolling dice and moving on.
However, there's no real reason to have three separate dungeons here. I think the result would have been much better if you had used the space available to flesh out a single dungeon with more detailed locations and complex challenges that can be approached in multiple ways.
I don't know how well it fits the theme. You've added secret motivations and the "Dyson sphere" angle, but they feel tacked on. (Bit of pedantry... it might be hollow on the inside but something moon-sized can't be a Dyson sphere, since that specifically means a huge sphere built around a star.)
Anyway, there are some individually cool details in this and my objections stem in part from a personal dislike for the "dice-chucking" approach to roleplaying. But I do think even as a dice-chucking depthcrawl this would do better if you reined in the breadth of the scenario in order to treat the remaining part in greater detail.
Hiya, here are some notes I took while reading this trifold! (presented in the order I thought em)
First thing is that cover art. My god it's beautiful. Made me immediately go "oh ok I need to know what the story is with this bad boy."
The landing sequence immediately presents a recognizable threat to the PCs, which I appreciate. (not to mention the names of the anomaly & areas!)
Saw astroid (vs asteroid) a few times -- intended? (i'm not dinging anyone for typos in my ratings, anyway. just pointing em out for future versions where I can)
I think I mentioned this on the discord, but the reality check table is so good that I could see myself recycling it in other sanity-testing adventures.
I'm not a Secret Agenda Guy so I would likely either be choosing one as the employer or having the party see them all on the job board and pick themselves. Again not a ding just a stray thought
Gorgon's Head encounter is SO COOL. the tells/cancels/results is such a great mechanic. For the combat stat, would it be rolling this on e.g. when it throws players against the ground? or is that automatic?
Taking my time getting to the inside because it is DENSE. There's so much stuff here!
I think this is a me problem, but I am having trouble wrapping my head around the dive mechanic -- let's say we decide to start by entering medusa. I roll 3 on the d5, for entering at 1, does that mean we start at petrified forest? or are we in at antechamber but the 4 is instead the event (aftermath of encounter which i guess i am rolling now)?
As confused as I sound, that's just easy enough to confirm here and figure out. The important part is that I am imagining some of these moments in these spaces with these encounters and they seem AWESOME.
Ok, realizing I am writing an entire essay here, gotta stop soon. You made something special here, just a cornucopia of brain-twisting moments with a clear goal at the end. I'd run this! Fantastic work!
Thank you so much for the kind words!
to answer your question about the Dive mechanic, the PCs would start in room 1 and then when they leave the the first chamber they “DIVE” so you would roll a d5+ current depth which would be 1, so rolling a 3+1 puts you next in 4 the Petrified forrest. You also roll a Detail and an Event each time you Dive unless told otherwise by the new location (which somehow was missed when we put the Jam version together, will be better explained post Jam haha) additionally you will sometimes roll an Encounter when directed, or it will specifically tell you to encounter what is in the room… for example in Medusa you wander through the rooms in the “Future” with all the traps/enemies ravaged by time, but then once you collect the [Key] in the Looking Glass you then have to make your way back through “Active” rooms as time has been restored, so you might have passed a bunch of Ephra Guard Husks in a room, and now on your way back you find the Ephra Guards are quite alive and capable of hurting you haha.
On the Gorgon’s Head’s attacks it would roll against all targets like it was a sentient enemy and should hit roughly 2/3rds of the time for any attack that isn’t canceled out for the PCs.
This is a bonkers-ambitious trifold with a zine's worth of content and a great deal of flair! Hidden agendas, multiple factions, multiple entire dungeons, a new panic table... I think there's a lot here to love and you can't beat this kind of value for space. It's complex and sprawling and could power a whole mini-campaign.
My biggest point of criticism here is simply that the trifold format means you must compact information into the space so far that it becomes unintuitive. There are so many moving parts, sub-systems, and light-speed explanations that I find it exceedingly difficult to parse, even with a high degree of experience in icon-and-shorthand heavy modules and games. It's not inherently a bad thing - once you do figure it out you've got some genuinely imaginative and exciting content! Veteran Wardens looking for something novel will find a lot of value in this module. I just feel it's sacrificed a ton of accessibility and readability to get there, and I value that kind of thing really highly in a pamphlet.
Huge props for taking such a big swing and not going mad in the process! The eldritch scholars will be proud.
Hello Unfathomable team,
Having read through this adventure I have to say that the scope and breadth that you put into one pamphlet is impressive. It seems like this could be a 3-5 session adventure and all contained in a pamphlet is amazing. And just finishing an impressive pamphlet like this is a feat in itself so congrats on that.
Here are the ratings and explanations that I had for each one:
Polish: 4/5
I really like the overall look of the module and it is clear that a lot of time and effort went into the layout and design because there is so much but you were able to fit everything in, and it is all for the most part very legible. I really like the cover image, it does a great job of foreshadowing the insanity of the adventure. It is a very dense adventure and I found my attention sliding off of it at times, there are also a few inconsistencies in the locations; for medusa there are little sidebars that give a little overview of the location but it doesn't seem like the other two have this style. I would have also liked some more description on some of the enemies, especially the Ephyra, I'm guessing they're some kind of bug people made by the Gorgon's Head, but it is definitely not clear. Overall very nice looking but some inconsistent writing.
Favorability: 2/5
As this is the most subjective category this is just my personal taste. I found many parts of the adventure to be under-explained and overly complicated. I like how crazy it can get but I could not see myself running this personally. I also find depth crawls to not personally be my favorite way to play an adventure. All of the scenes, locations, and events are interesting but not as fleshed out as I would like for my table, and some of them are so conceptual that it seems hard to explain them to my players in a way that would be actionable in game. So overall this is just not my favorite kind of adventure but I find it all very creative and interesting.
Usibility: 1/5
Unfortunately as I have previously stated this adventure seems like a beast to run. The mechanics for the depth crawl are not very well explained and I found myself having to go back and re-read sections 3-4 times to finally understand how to run it, and there were still parts that are confusing for me. For example when does a warden roll for an encounter and when do they roll for an event. It seems like these two tables can be interchangeable at time. Also there are no instructions, other than at a few locations, to roll an event, and on the event table there is an option that says roll an encounter. So it feels a little confused how exactly a warden rolls up a location/encounter/details. There also doesn't seem to be much guidance for the PCs. It was only after reading the entire adventure did I realize that the PCs can assault the Gorgon's Head at any time and that going into the different locations and destroying the pylon in each one just makes the Gorgon weaker. It is unclear how the PCs are supposed to know to do anything that the adventure wants. It also seems to me somewhat unwieldy with all of the different events and encounters but also the different factions and secret agendas, another thing that is somewhat unclear. Overall while I admire the scope and scale of this project it would definitely take some doing by the warden to get this adventure on the table.
Theme: 2/5
I like that the ziggurat and Gorgon's Head is beneath the sands in a desert and that it is uncovered in an asteroid impact, and the way the adventure itself is a depth crawl so you are going down below the surface. Other than those two factors though I didn't really see much more playing off the theme of "Just Below the Surface". Maybe if the adventure had been a little more focused, like with one depth crawl instead of three, the theme could have been explored more.
Overall I think this is an ambitious and great looking pamphlet that maybe fumbles the execution in some places, but I'm excited to see what else this team puts out.
Great Job!
Thanks for the critique!
I will say that the reason Medusa has the side bars vs the others is that, as its dealing with time, each of the rooms is essentially a preview of things to come, until you make it to the Looking Glass (Medusa 10+) and take the [key] which is the missing part of the emitter, at which point time warps around the players and as it says in the side bar in 10+ the Looking glass, “Rooms Now Active” at which point the threats that were neutralized by time in the rooms they went through before now become active and the party must use their wits from what they have seen or fight their way out.
Also on the subject of Encounters and Events, the way a depth crawl works (and i’ll admit in our limited space we might not have had the chance to explain it thoroughly enough) is that when you dive you roll 1d5+Depth, roll a Detail, and roll an Event (unless otherwise told not to which some locations specify) Events are rolled specifically when you Retreat, Stay, if the location calls for it specifically, or if the event calls for it specifically.
sorry that our adventure wasn’t for you, and we will take your notes into consideration for the post jam version! (Its always important to see things through eyes of someone who doesn’t know the systems used. When you are writing it all the systems seem super clear, its a good note that we need to give people a better overview of some of these features!)
thanks again!
No surprises here, this is stunning. Too bad there isn’t a six on all the ratings.
that is exceptionally kind, thank you!