itch.io

lol, you did say brutally honest. No need to mince words.

Mothership has me so used to being conservative and precise with my words that I guess that vibe came out in the comments.

Seriously, though, good job. This is well-written.

Terrible font choice. Excellent color palette, layout, and style. Ditch the weird symbols (pi, hash, gear, etc.) and just use numbers for easy table access. Kudos for including a printer-friendly B&W version.

Otherwise, solid adventure. I'll be running this.

I hate using playing cards. Just make a table and use dice.

Also, I get the reason for the weird trippy vibe, but like...this is Mothership. This does not need to be dripping with edgy prose. Just show me a table, tell me the facts, and let me improv those bits myself.

It's a fine idea, but far far too lengthy. I'd have preferred to see this turned into a series of tables, cut out some of the fluff, and make this a proper Mothership scenario. It has the potential. 

Stunning.

I have no other words.

You asked for brutally honest, so...here goes.

Psychic zombie aliens on a seemingly abandoned paradise planet? Haven't seen that one before. (/s)  And poetry snippets? This is a RPG jam, not art class. They don't add anything meaningful of value. It's not like they are read to the players. I do like the color palette, diagrams, and art, though. Minimalist but classy.

I would have preferred you spend a few more words on a less flat opening. It already clocks in at 11 pages, and a radio transmission, email, or a self-recorded videotape would have been fine. The player hook is sort of left up to the GM to improvise, which is lazy writing in a scenario this long. Also, the NPC names are obtuse, and the NPCs are just...filler. Kinda lame to not even make them unique.

Asking players to secretly answer questions is a recipe for disaster in a lot of RPG groups, but ok, I guess that could work.

This feels like it sort of ends abruptly. I guess the players are like...already mostly psychic alien blanks or something and can decide to blow everything up? It kinda reads like a 10-page railroad. There's some potential there, but it's not really scary. It's like the scenario is trying so hard to be deep, but like...it isn't.

You'd be better off turning this into a short story and not making players interact through this. There's no agency, no meaningful choice, and it's just a vibe piece for edgy art students who play RPGs and like sci-fi. This is what I consider to be the worst kind of RPG scenario, where a short story is translated into a scenario with zero regard for how the players want to tell their own story and turns your RPG group into unpaid amateur actors improv-ing their way through your script.

You asked for brutally honest, so...here goes.

Psychic zombie aliens on a seemingly abandoned paradise planet? Haven't seen that one before. (/s)  And poetry snippets? This is a RPG jam, not art class. They don't add anything meaningful of value. It's not like they are read to the players. I do like the color palette, diagrams, and art, though. Minimalist but classy.

I would have preferred you spend a few more words on a less flat opening. It already clocks in at 11 pages, and a radio transmission, email, or a self-recorded videotape would have been fine. The player hook is sort of left up to the GM to improvise, which is lazy writing in a scenario this long. Also, the NPC names are obtuse, and the NPCs are just...filler. Kinda lame to not even make them unique.

Asking players to secretly answer questions is a recipe for disaster in a lot of RPG groups, but ok, I guess that could work.

This feels like it sort of ends abruptly. I guess the players are like...already mostly psychic alien blanks or something and can decide to blow everything up? It kinda reads like a 10-page railroad. There's some potential there, but it's not really scary. It's like the scenario is trying so hard to be deep, but like...it isn't.

You'd be better off turning this into a short story and not making players interact through this. There's no agency, no meaningful choice, and it's just a vibe piece for edgy art students who play RPGs and like sci-fi. This is what I consider to be the worst kind of RPG scenario, where a short story is translated into a scenario with zero regard for how the players want to tell their own story and turns your RPG group into unpaid amateur actors improv-ing their way through your script.

I'm not very clear at all on what is going on, and as someone with no experience with this system, it reads like a DLC for a british mechwarrior game. Seems like the goal is to steal some mechs and run across a field or a base or something? There's far too much jargon for me to really understand what's going on here, despite the short length.

The layout is clean and effective, I think that this is simply designed for a target audience that is more focused on military and combat and miniature rather than theatre of the mind, so feel free to disregard my opinion.

Heck yeah. This is a great little toolkit. It took a minute for it to click, but once it did, I realize how useful this can be for really any sci-fi system as an adventure generator.

Good stuff. I wish I had something to say so that you could get some critique out of it, but...I don't. This is pretty good!

As much as I'd love to add more detail and explanation, every single word has to fight for its life in a trifold. I think this is ~1300 words in total. I experimented with adding more words than that, but it tends to make the page look too dense overall, especially when printed. It seems to be pretty standard practice for Mothership scenarios in my somewhat limited experience. To address the layout stuff like the whitespace, I went out of my way to avoid a more pedestrian wall of text. 

I totally get the personal preference on wanting more guidance for readers and players, and it may just be that you are not the intended audience here (which is fine!). Mothership is an OSR-style game, where the GM and players are expected to improv and fill in the gaps themselves. Totally understandable that the trifold format is not for everyone, and it can be disorienting if you're used to traditional RPG scenarios that are multiple pages long. It's a different vibe for sure!

The product page description hopefully one day gets turned into a handout brochure in a round of post-jam polish, but I did not have time before the jam deadline to do anything besides write the text.

Either way, I appreciate the feedback!

The Morgue and Processing (and the server room) are in the basement. Must not have translated well from my head to the page. I prefer to avoid color to keep things accessible. 

Password: peepers

This is cool. Layout is solid, but definitely worth spending some more time on and adding a bit more flair. The font is fine, but not my favorite. Art is fantastic. This is overall fantastic, and I look forward to running it.

Yeah, this slaps. Nothing negative to say.

Awesome. As a supplement that tackles the reverse escort quest idea, this is stellar.

Excellent art and layout, solid use of theme. Good stuff!

Solid across the board!

Pretty cool. Others have already stated that this reads like someone wrote a scenario for a game they don't fully understand the mechanics of. I would personally have liked to see more interaction with the survivors, and a better reason for entering. Maybe like a "we traded our important macguffin, and now it's dormant because we have no fresh shiny tech, can you maybe go in there to buy it back with your cool weird modern tech" would give a strong reason to engage with this, and it also telegraphs the gacha trade mechanic a lot more exciting because they keep trading important stuff to get the quest item.

Otherwise, this is cool. I'd personally borrow pieces, and add a few more human interactions and a better driving motivation (like mentioned above) but I'd run this.

This is decent, but could be improved in a number of ways. It's got good bones, but the combat overshadows the human element.

My biggest complaint is that this is basically D&D in space (but actually still in a dungeon) using Mothership rules. There's only really one way this is intended to end, and it's pretty combat-heavy throughout. It's a decent little dungeon-crawl scenario, it just doesn't really fit the Mothership vibe in my opinion.

The layout and art are serviceable, and the plot is fine, but there isn't really anything to solve, and there aren't really many meaningful player choices that resonate. Sure, there are mechanical tradeoffs to be decided on, but there are no real stakes aside from picking your flavor of danger.

As much as I personally dislike the usage of churches and religion that are analogs of Abrahamic religion (mostly because I consider them to be low-hanging fruit), this isn't terrible. Needs some more polish around the layout and some minor editing tweaks (like calling it 3 Cathedral instead of 3: Cathedral) but the politics are actually pretty neat, and this is a clean and uncluttered layout with a cohesive art direction.

Very neat idea to prevent a TPK after a ship battle gone wrong. 

Oozes with style. Good job!

You are certainly not wrong, and I respect your honesty. This is my first published scenario, and I learned a lot in the process, especially when looking at a lot of the other entries. The primary thing being that art and layout aren't make or break, but they certainly count for quite a lot when you've got 2 sides of one page to form an opinion. I'm not an artist, so I went for functional over pretty, and with more time in the oven and maybe a collaborating artist I definitely would have have liked to punch it up a notch and make some deeper thematic connections.

I had some additional ideas for the monofiber's mechanics, as well as navigating the labyrinth, but in the end they were too gimmicky and took up valuable space I needed elsewhere, so I made the decision to cut them.

I appreciate the feedback!

Ok, that was a choice. I respect your power move to make 2 of your 6 panels exclusively dedicated to a random spacer in a bar telling a spooky story. If I wanted to foreshadow (pun intended) the Iralos then toss it into a later scenario, I would definitely reach for this as a downtime activity. I'd really like to see a part 2 with a proper encounter, but hey, you did the thing. GG

Nice map generator, although it does take some time to process. 

Ok, this is cool.

I keep trying to find reasons to hate it because I have strong feelings about tossing around names like cathedral and Solomon and altar, but...you nailed it. I can't find anything to complain about. I'll try anyways.

The layout is a bit dense, and it takes 2 reads to understand what is actually going on and how it all works. Easy to miss key details that way.

You do have a typo in "Thrusters", though. Your version says "Thursters" which I now wonder if this was intentional...

Good stuff!

"Random mysterious thing that drives most of the crew insane except the player characters" is a well-worn trope, but it does what it needs to. The Melded are my favorite part, without a doubt. That's a clever mechanic for determining HP, and the name and visuals are good. The NPC tiers seem like a design artifact from an early draft, and could probably be cut. I'd recommend swapping the stars with various numbers of points for alternate shapes for black and white printing friendliness. There is a lot of purple prose taking up space that could be better utilized, which seems to be a common theme across the submissions to this jam, but they add some nice flavor, so they get a pass here. The art and layout are good, but I can see this turning into a confused maze. The whole thing is basically "navigate a bunch of enemies to get the doors open to kill the captain and use his keycard" and I'm not really seeing the "Survive, Solve, Save" elements and this reads like a prose-heavy DOOM level more than I think it needs to. Overall, it's a fun little dungeon crawl, but I think it's missing that special something that makes it memorable. Final note, the setup does not account for players who already exist, and a quick note that any personal belongings or weapons are stored in the crew quarters or armory fixes this.

Now that's an idea right there...

Thanks for the feedback!

There is a boatload of mythological significance scattered throughout, but they are deep cuts that aren't immediately obvious. I was going for subtle, and didn't want a simple retelling of the Minotaur tale.

The d55 dice cause a probability cascade. The base chance of getting a story encounter is 20%, and it increases by 4% after each random encounter. A d20 would unfortunately break this and make the scenario a lot flatter.

Statistically, this is only about 12 encounters long, including the story beats, so while individual entries are punishing, it's unlikely players will see everything in a single playthrough.

Thanks for the feedback!

The T9K is certainly deadly, but a monster that blows over in a stiff breeze would be anticlimactic. I'm newish to Mothership overall, and haven't quite nailed monster threat levels quite yet. I figured it being able be paralyzed after 2 rounds of riding the bull would be sufficient to end it without a TPK.

As far as the tables go, a d20 is actually not right for the math in order to get the desired outcome here. It's a weighted escalation table, where the longer you play, the more likely you are to get a story result. It keeps the scenario to about 12 encounters total, and you're only likely to see less than half of the results on a given run.

Yeah...I made the classic blunder of trying to squeeze too much text into a box. Sorry about that.

Thank you!

Ah, darn those pesky plotholes. Good spot.

Very cool.

I think this is a great scenario for Wardens well-versed in body horror, and the art and layout are phenomenal!

Ok, so first off this is very hard to read. The fonts, colors, and text density make this hard on the eyes.

That being said, this is a fun (if not entirely unexpected) little side-quest scenario I could see my players enjoying.

Ok, not my jam exactly, and certainly not what I was expecting for a sci-fi horror RPG, but this is absolutely bonkers. I may have to run this just to see what happens. It's technically Mothership, but holy cow, this is weird, in a great way.

Simply wow. This is so good. One day I aspire to be able to do with 6 panels what you have accomplished here. I am in awe.

1000% YES. THIS is how you do Mothership. Weird, dangerous, and extremely likely to get players killed, but they'll jump in feet first.

I agree with the other comments. This is going right on the top of my "ready for game night" pile and this franchise will exist in every backwater spaceport and grungy station.

A bit too much text, but I love the simple color palette and the blueprint aesthetic.

It's definitely missing an "oh, fuck" moment, and "mysterious object makes people go crazy by being nearby" is a bit of an overdone trope.

Interesting haunted house in space concept!

Phenomenal. This is peak Mothership. Admittedly, I can see some players getting annoyed at the prospect of losing their ship, and the random encounter rolling is a bit aggressive at every 10 minutes (takes my group like half an hour just to figure out if they want to open an unlocked door) but that's relatively minor critique.

It'll take a bit of work to get this ready to play, but I will definitely run this.

Love it.

My only two complaints are that this is linear (I personally prefer players to have more agency, but that doesn't make this a bad scenario) and that I'd like to see slightly better layout in terms of separating the days/nights. Maybe some slightly thicker lines or something. Super minor overall.

Fantastic work!