Post by Caravan Cult in THE OLD DUST - A Mothership RPG Trifold jam comments

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I was inspired by the Doom of Verden Prime and nearly went for all black and white with only the green accent for the cover, in terms of art.

My intention was to be fairly terse with all of the elements presented and so I agree that mileage will vary when it comes to the connections made between the myth of Chang'e and more broadly, Elixir of Immortality/Fountain of Youth/etc themes. Essentially all of the nouns are related to the myth and their roles in it. The Osmanthus is Fu Sang a permanently regenerating tree that Wu Gang (Ken Wu in this case) is punished to cut forever. The Rabbit(s) accompany Chang'e and help her to grind THE OLD DUST forever with their feet - in a mortar but that's ancient history. Obviously all down to context in those regards for sure.

Guanghan and Yuegong are "Moon Palace" and the name of the Moon in the myth, and are repeated in characters underneath the map. Moon for the labs, and Palace for the R&D section.

All of the notes on minor typographical things are appreciated!

I'd love it if you could elaborate on what you found cliché about the narrative.

Thanks again!

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benefactum-games1 day ago (1 edit) (+1)

I'll bump you up to full marks for Theme because if it's there and I'm just not familiar with the specific myth, that's not on you.

Regarding clichés, there are basically two Mothership plotlines you'll see over and over for dungeon-crawl type formats. "Science Experiment Went Wrong," and "Mysterious Alien Device Turned Out to Be Bad." And in the science experiment version, there is usually crew (or in this case animals) that got turned into monsters, and it's almost always the scientist who's the BBEG, often in disguise when you first meet them.

Take a look at Project Indigo in this jam and you'll see what I mean... although the map is much smaller, the storyline for this one and that one are structurally almost identical.

For sandbox formats, there is a third cliché, which I guess you could call "Soylent Green is People!" where you're wandering around offices or a factory until you realize that what they're doing is even more horrible than you first thought.

To be fair, I think part of the issue here is with Mothership itself... it's a game that lends itself heavily to these structures.

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