Coconut Tree Wellness Centre

Work has been slow on SPILT MILK between other jobs but it's coming along. I'm pretty confident about the first case, and I think about half of the phonebook is in a playable state. But as I keep bemoaning, it doesn't work until the whole thing is ready and all d100 phone numbers work.

Let's call one of them now, shall we?

015 COCONUT TREE WELLNESS CENTRE. Combination spa and therapist. Well maintained, expensive furniture, lots of houseplants. Soft slide guitar music plays in the background, under the gentle sound of the raindrops from outside. 

Healer Kim Ng wears floral silk shirts under a lab coat, and large round glasses that magnify her freckles. She is very nice but not very good at her job. Unlicensed by PacyGen Soft Drinks and Pharmaceuticals, she is unable to prescribe medication. 

100cr per session, paid up front. At the end of your last session Sanity save vs therapy, one reroll allowed per session taken, compounding any Stress gained. Relieve 1d5 Stress or a relevant condition on a success. 

○ Open for over-the-phone or in-person sessions. 

● Closed. 

One of the shorter entries. I don't think any one of the numbers gives a thorough vertical slice of the whole adventure, the point is the sum total, the volume and variety of material. But a lot of them are a bit like this one - things to spend money on, possible mechanical benefits, characters who might provoke interaction.

Players will come across these naturally as they go about solving cases. Once they've built up their own little black book somewhat, the hope is that they'll form their own interests and connections, driving gameplay.

Consider this a preview I guess. Now then, back to work 🫡

PS it's Odai 47 again, not 57 after all, I've decided. I reserve the right to undecide later

Mothership en noir

 Been doing research for SPILT MILK, the phonebook mystery adventure, which means watching film noir movies on internet archive and playing Hotel Dusk on my old DS

Noir isn’t the only aesthetic at play in Odai 57, but the more I lean into it the more I find it fits Mothership specifically. The black and white is apropos but the connections run deeper

1. The Solve. Most apparently, MoSh is a mystery game already. I’ve already done a “solve” focused module for TKG, Piece By Piece, which has an X-Files vibe. The survive and save are still there, but are reliant on players working through the immediate questions first, and are easier when equipped with answers from the central mystery. There are still people to die for and things to kill you in the phonebook too, but they’re fewer and further between. No aliens, for one thing. But none of this is outside a Mothership module’s jurisdiction 

2. The Panic. I rarely put too much focus on making things horrific when I’m writing for Mothership, I find it comes naturally. But it is a horror game with that Stress/Panic core and flimsy characters made of nasty wounds and repressed trauma. I don’t think any of this is far removed from noir - people die, sometimes the lead, always in quick, dramatic bursts after long stretches of simmering tension. There are guns everywhere but few shots are fired and fewer make contact, like a survival game you can count the bullets. Our heroes are troubled, desperate and weak. It’s only their quick thinking and a little luck keeping them out of the frying pan, which sounds pretty OSR to me.

3. The Rest. All that’s left is vibes tbh. Closing in on aesthetic specificity is part of the joy of each new MoSh module. Every corner of the outer rim has its own corporate overlords and tech levels, each author has their own sci fi vision. If I want my landline phone network in focus, I can say that the station’s extensive radiation shielding renders wireless comms useless. If I want rain-soaked streets, I can make the station’s pipes drip with leaks and submarine-style condensation. Mothership is malleable enough to get us the rest of the way there without fuss

I think a lot of very good modules have already been made within Mothership’s existing vibes wheelhouse. I’m excited to make something a little different, even if it turns out the heart is still very much the same

Night Shift Noir

 Progress continues on SPILT MILK, the phone book setting for MoSh. I’ve got half the numbers locked in and about a third fully detailed so far. That’s the setting, which is essentially standalone and player facing - cases slot in modularly. I’m working on a couple from scratch to try and take full advantage of all the new frameworking. Got one close to playtest levels which should be fun.

Anyway, thinking about failstates and procedures. I wanted a more obvious way of tracking how things were going on an investigation. Each will have consequences for not being solved which are generally pretty easy to think up - don’t catch the killer, now there’s a killer on the loose. But what do the specifics look like in practice, and how long before they kill again?

Clocks are an option, the WOM suggests them for enemy schemes, but I wanted something universal, more player facing and tied to the style and tone of this specific setting. STRICT TIME RECORDS are an option too but, frankly, dull. And MoSh doesn’t delineate time all that specifically, I wasn’t about to graft on a whole system just to give players even more to worry about. Dungeoncrawls do turns, hexcrawls do watches and travel times, so whence the phonecrawl?

The solution I’ve settled on is a function of the world more than a rule or procedure. Every* entry in the phone book, meaning every number/location combo, has a day and night shift. No more specific than that, just two options for what’s going on depending on the general time. Many are only open by night or during the day depending on the kind of business. Some are more unique, with different people working there or entirely different services offered.

*some are 24 hour, automated, etc

Time will pass because the players will find they want to do X during the day but wait til night for Y. They might not be able to follow up on a lead until tomorrow, which could lead them to discovering a new favourite hangout or even a whole other lead as they find somewhere to while the night away. It gives them a new way to engage with the world that’s less about bookkeeping and more about player driven actions and consequences. Now I can say the killer will strike again in three days, say, and have that mean something.

Also, since these slow burn mystery investigations don't have as much in the way of spooks and scares as a "traditional" mothership module (mosh modj), I have a new easy fix to keep the tension simmering that fits the new dynamic. +1d5 Stress per full day that passes while working a case. Players can rush to solve the mystery quick (risking botching it) or wash their hands of it entirely to avoid the repercussions of taking too long, but now that's on them.

I’m also happy with this because noir and other mysteries are all about those neon lit nights and grey days, and now those aesthetic choices actually mean something to play. Next stop is more work on the bloody massive phonebook. Excited to see how this all falls apart in play

GRAVEROBBERS 2025

 (once again!) RETURN OF THE MACK (top of the world!)

Took a break for much of 2024. Creative burnout, but mostly the realities of trying to make this hobby work as a career were proving untenable. I'm not saying it can't be done, I know plenty of folks who make it happen and kick ass, but my approach wasn't working and I needed to rethink and regroup.

So here it is - all major personal projects still on indefinite hold. I can fiddle with stuff in my free time or work for hire, but the middle ground of self publishing just doesn't do it for me. Sales from my personal online store have hit pretty much absolute zero

I'm proud of what I did with GoGoGolf! on my own for instance, but since PWG has taken up publishing that game I've had a much better time of it. I love partnering with folks on stuff, the great reception to the Mothership box last year was further proof that this is the way forwards, even if I only had a small role in that one.

Anyway, time to get back to work.

2025:

- New stuff releasing. Bits I worked on last year, some even longer ago. If you like it when I write weird Mothership adventures you will be well fed.

- New new stuff. As in not RPG, early days on this one but your boy's got big plans, stay tuned

- The blog. Gonna try and get back into the swing of posting notes and other bits, no kind of regular schedule but all the sort of stuff I used to post fairly often. If there's anything specific you want to see on here just ask and I'll probably do it at some point

and a couple of other important bits

1. The big project. I've been calling it Odai 57 (and before that it was Odai 47, idk why I changed it, what do you like better?) But it's at the stage now where giving it a name is going to help, so allow me to announce

SPILT MILK
[and other mysteries]

A hardboiled mystery campaign setting for the Mothership RPG.

This is technically just for me so it doesn't count as self publishing, shut up. But I will be posting it in one form or another eventually. if you haven't seen me talk about it before it's basically:

a) a self-contained MoSh setting presented as the phonebook of a remote space station truck stop and the attached retail park. d100 working phone numbers, each attached to places, people, hundreds of new items and things to spend credits on. A hub world or rest stop for your campaign, or a just big load of scraps for you to scavenge from.

plus

b) a neo-noir mystery campaign taking place entirely within that setting. Players are adjusters, corpo detectives for an agency that insures androids. Say one goes missing, or shows up dead. Is it malfunction, or malfeasance? Get to the bottom of each case so that your company can pay out as little as possible.

That's enough on that for now but I'll be posting more about it as I continue tinkering. Call it the Odaiaries. I want to get this out in one form or another this year

and

2. Work. I fucking love doing this job folks, and I'm good at it. If you want to hire me, now's the time.

I've worked on huge projects with established companies and little zines from first time solo publishers. I write games and adventures, I edit and proofread and everything in between.

Get in touch, graverobbersguide[at]gmail[dot]com

Happy new year x

Mysteries within mysteries

 Working on the phonecrawl adventure - a murder mystery setting for Mothership, mapped as d100 working phone numbers. Twin Peaks in an airport mall.

Once again it’s being rebuilt from the ground up, but progress is still being made from before as I’m using a lot of the same Lego pieces. Folks who supported the project by buying the ashcan version way back when will still get the final thing when it comes out. Also idk if it’s still called Odai 57. We’ll see.

Anyway. Update number one is that I’m shifting the campaign frame slightly. A maintenance worker being drawn into these cases as auxiliary mysteries to their main job is a fun conceit and would be great for a short story or two, but in game it’s an unnecessary layer between the players and the juice of the thing.

So now they’re insurance adjusters, getting to the bottom of android accidents and malfunctions and finding someone to blame so that their bosses don’t have to pay out. This has a more cynical MoSh feel and gives us some great actionable verbs for each case: Find fault, recover assets, prevent further losses. I’m this close to calling them the Android Claims Adjustment Bureau or something lmao

Right now I’m building out some of these cases. The structure here is vital as this adventure doesn’t have one otherwise - all areas being theoretically available at all times negates classic dungeon exploration, and I’m avoiding combat scenarios almost entirely  - though they still make a great failstate.

One of the main inspirations for the setting is the Phoenix Wright games. In those you examine a scene until you find all the clues, then the game unlocks the next scene and you can travel between locations freely. Obviously there are key differences between mediums, here players decide when they’ve found enough clues and where they want to go next, but the flow is similar enough.

Looking into how this flow is built in these games is proving helpful for organising my own cases. The above image comes from a presentation by the series director and covers the progression of a case in-game. You don’t need to understand the text, the key bit is that little loop in the middle. There’s a similar diagram in the Warden’s Operations Manual. Basically, the body of a case is a series of smaller mysteries, little question-answer loops that build until the denouement and climax.

These loops are crucial to play in a mystery-focused game. The overall solve can, and should, feel huge and out of reach, so players need these little victories that propel things along. Structurally I’m thinking of them like rooms in an exploration game or fights in a combat based one. They’re not the treasure or boss at the end of the dungeon, which the players might not even get to, but without them there’s really no adventure at all.

The difference is in the verbs. Players fight a monster and explore a room, but what they need to be able to do with clues is make connections. Everything has to point to something else, building up the staircase of little answers to hopefully get to the big one at the end. As the WOM says, the game also has to work if they fail, but ultimately this is a game of connecting dots. I’ve just got to write a whole load of dots.

Will try to keep posting as the project develops. Don’t want to give too many answers away though x

Murder On Line One

“Hey, maintenance? Yeah, I got a real mess over here. Someone trashed a milk right out the front of my store. You gotta send someone to clean this shit up… Nobody likes looking at a dead android. Bad for business.”

New update to the Odai 57 ashcan version! (see last post)

I’ve added a text version of Murder On Line One, a neo-noir Mothership mystery. Just the text but it’s all there and it’s all good. The adventure works as a standalone like All the Fun of the Fair, but it makes much more use of the setting’s phonebook.

I’m still working on the third adventure, which is a slightly more low-keep introduction suited for longer games in this setting. Lot of work getting a setting intro right, so that’ll be out when it’s out.

(I also feel like I didn’t end up getting that in depth with what makes the phonebook setting so suited to mysteries in my last post, so maybe I’ll revisit that in future. Not today though, it’s very hot and I’ve got like 200 zines to ship. Weapons Test 023 backers, thank you for your patience, they’re a-coming!)

Big thanks to the folks who have downloaded the Odai 57 ashcan already! Like I said this was a big experiment from me, I had no idea how it would be received or if it would even get any attention. So I appreciate your faith that the material will be good despite a lack of presentational polish as of yet. Hope you’re getting some good games out of the two adventures so far. £10 for 2 adventures seems good to me, idk.

I’m still thinking on what the best way of making and releasing this stuff is going forward. Maybe like a subscription thing? £5 a month for more polished content or something. But until I have a better idea, buying this ashcan version is the best way to support not just this project but me in general. (Or hire me! graverobbersguide(at)gmail(dot)com)

Or getting anything from my store really, maybe there’s something else on there you’d be into? Did you know I did a game about golf? I don’t talk about stuff I’ve done in the past nearly enough, there’s some cool shit on there. Take a look.

Anyway, back to shipping zines and slowly perishing in this heat. All the best x

Odai 57

 Following on from last week’s post. What kind of game do we get when the world is presented as a phone book?

I love mysteries. I rarely watch TV as it airs, but right now I’m up to date with The After Party and Only Murders In The Building (both fun). I’m also rewatching Twin Peaks, including The Return for the first time. Also have had Ace Attorney lets plays on in the background while I write. Also replaying Ace Attorney Investigations. I know what I like.

Mysteries are well suited to dungeon crawling RPGs in the classic midwestern folk tradition. Someone has set out bits of useful information for you to explore and find and put to use, with possible rewards at the end. It’s the same premise. Mothership specifically lends itself to mystery, with Solving being one of its core tenets and Blade Runner being among its big inspirations.

There are mystery adventures for MoSh already - my own Piece By Piece is an X-Files style one-shot murder case, and there’s the tense social investigation of Picket Line Tango. Every module has some element of investigation, really. But what does it mean to expand from an adventure to a setting?

Long-running mystery series, from classic detective fiction to TV, run on their investigators. What energy does the lead sleuth bring to each case? And so for a Mothership setting we look to our PCs. Fragile but skilled, outgunned but clever, crucially working class.

The default for mystery fiction is cop, but thankfully there are plenty of alternatives. Private eyes, writers in over their heads, precocious teens and their dogs. What we’re asking here is the key question for most ttrpg settings - who are these people and what are they doing? This gives us the basis of our setting but also sets up the players, informs their characters’ actions and invites them in.

This but Agatha Christie

In Odai 57, my mystery-driven phonebook setting for the Mothership RPG, players are maintenance workers. They get called in to fix things on the titular space station, a stopping point in the Qilin Gate Company’s astral gate network.

Each job is its own case, an investigative adventure in which getting to the root of a technical issue on Odai 57 (the Solve) leads the players and the residents of the station’s Commercial district into danger (the Survive and the Save). While each job works as a disconnected one-shot, stringing them all together reveals a complete setting, and possibly a larger conspiracy…

It’s Twin Peaks in an airport mall.

(Also - I know MoSh is a horror game and this doesn’t sound like the scariest place to be. But neither did Elm Street until there was a Nightmare on it. This is a different flavour of horror than typical for Mothership, not the uncaring void of space but the insidious darkness in the shadows of suburbia.)

I’ve been at work on this project for a while already, and honestly I feel like I’m just getting started. This thing is going to be enormous. Like I’ve said before, this is all deliberately crafted adventure content, little to no random generation or work for the Warden.

Each case is a complete standalone pamphlet adventure, though every one impacts the wider setting in some way, from introducing a killer who may strike again to offering player upgrades. And while some span multiple phone numbers, some are at the end of just one call. At the rate I’m going I’m looking at upwards of 30 interlinked adventures before I’m done.

But! I don’t have the time or frankly the funds to work away at a project this big. I’d turn to Kickstarter but… ugh. So here’s what I’m thinking.

This but he’s the guy who’s come to do your wifi

Right now, three of the adventures are closest to completion, with a couple of them 100% written. These are:

Odd Jobs. An introductory adventure that gets players set up on Odai 57, eases them into the setting’s quirks and sets them on a few errands around town, with clues to a potentially deadly secret linking them all together. Vibe: small town sheriff’s department by way of The Wrong Trousers

All The Fun of the Fair. An investigation into old tech going haywire in Odai 57’s derelict amusement park quickly turns into a destructive chase with a despicable villain. Vibe: Scooby-Doo gone very, very wrong

Murder On Line One. An android shows up dead next to a public phone. Your job is to clean up the mess, not investigate a murder. But it looks like this case is going to keep causing problems… Vibe: Classic hardboiled noir with a Mothership twist

I’m putting up an ashcan version of All The Fun of the Fair, by far the easiest of the three to run standalone, for download. This ain’t going to be pretty, I’m doing the layout and scribbling some art myself, but it’s a complete adventure, as good as the best stuff I’ve done, finished and playable.

In lieu of a crowdfunding campaign, I’m selling this for £10. I get that that’s a lot for one pamphlet, but think of this like a donation to the overall project. I’m going to work on getting ashcan versions of the other two done as well, so bare minimum you’ll end up with for your tenner is a three-pamphlet miniseries, which seems like a better deal to me.

Realistically, any money I make off these is going to rent and bills first, but if I get enough support I’m going to fold it back into making these adventures better. I’ve got great plans and some amazing potential collaborators lined up, and I’d love to turn this into like a digital starter pack for the setting, maybe with some cool extra add-on materials too.

So, the plan:

- Ashcan versions of three cases.

- Any profit from those gets put into making the final files.

- If there’s enough support and interest I can continue adding cases, until the whole setting is done!

- Maybe, eventually, collect it all in one big physical phonebook?

If the final thing ends up being worth more than £10 I’ll up the price accordingly, but obviously anyone who’s already bought it will continue to get new files and updates for free. So what you get for your contribution is up to you.

Honestly I have no idea if this will work out. I’m basically just gauging interest. I’d love it if this were a project I was able to focus on, but what I want to make and what people want to play don’t always align. So if this is something you want to see more of, please support in whatever way you can - you can buy the ashcan and get in on the ground floor, or post about it and share it with your group.

If anyone buys it I’ll know I’m onto something! And if I can sell like 50 of these in the next month or so I’ll be off to the races. If not, no harm done. I’ll do the three ashcan pamphlets at the very least, and then move on to the next thing probably.

Anyway, that’s all that. You can buy the ashcan version of All The Fun of the Fair here, and doing so will get you any and all upcoming updates for free. Thank you!

*

General maintenance crew wanted for immediate start. Unskilled labour, minimum wage. For further enquiries call 00-57-01 or report to:
Maintenance Office
QGC Utilities Building
01 Commercial District
Odai 57
Odai System
GC101.108.977

Cities of Phones

 So in a recent post I had some vague thoughts about laying a city out like a dungeon. This makes the city feel a certain way: lets you spotlight traversal, define areas and position them in relation to one another, use encounter systems to emulate a vibe. This city will probably feel busy, maze-like, claustrophobic and sprawling, with a stable concrete layout made ever-changing by its inhabitants and happenings.

But that’s not all a city can be. I don’t feel like I’m traversing a dungeon when I head out into my city. I’m not delving or dealing with encounters, I’m moving freely and easily. I don’t have to learn complex systems, I have them internalised or handled for me - I can roll onto a bus or train or DLR, zone out and my destination comes up to meet me. I barely think about where places are in relation to one another, except to decide if I should just walk or not. I don’t drive, so I don’t have personal dungeoneering costs or equipment to maintain. Apps and contactless payments handle my journey. It’s not a quest… it’s not a dungeon.

So if we don’t want to focus on traversal, or encounters, or even where locations are in relation to one another, how else can we define a space? And why might we want to, what new game modes or vibes could open up to us?

In that post I briefly mentioned a Big Thing I’ve been working on, so I figured I might as well share!

Short answer, it’s a phone book. d100 phone numbers, each with a location on the other end. (Yes these are landline phones, this is Mothership.) Players can use the phone network in-game, but also travelling around between these placers is just as easy as calling. It’s a table of contents, a list of locations they can pick from as and when they want. In the same way that I can just decide to stroll up the high street and walk into any of the shops in any order or combination, the focus here isn’t on movement and space but on an open and accessible list, the points without the crawl.

So here’s what I’ve been working on and a few things I’ve found out so far. Hopefully this is useful to anyone who might want to do something similar!

The biggest drawback as I’ve seen it is that you need all your bits written up front. In a big dungeon-city I can make one “floor” or less at a time, and expand as and when the players get to the edge of my map. Here, every phone number needs to work straight away or it all falls apart. I can mitigate this with generators somewhat - different reasons a number might be disconnected, “filler” entry tables. But it works best with a whole lot of bespoke, specific gameable bits, so that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve found it easiest to do what I normally do, small individual adventures, and mosaic those into a complete whole. So one phone number might have its own complete mini-adventure at the end of it, or one adventure could be spaced across a few locations that lead to one another. Each adds a little bit to the city overall, and while I prefer to keep things modular I can sprinkle in some interconnected-ness to keep the space feeling cohesive. And numbers can be reused ofc. I can also fill out more numbers with non-adventure-specific game bits, like some of the item-list vendors I’ve posted here already.

The space, btw, is not a whole city. d100 carefully planned locations is a whole lot of game for me to write but is maybe one road’s worth of landlines in the real world. So this is a high street, a typical commercial/residential space, on a space station to give the space clear edges. I’m folding in some of the “at the gates of dawn” setting stuff I’ve posted here too, but the overall size and shape is something like an airport mall in a Stanford torus.

That means I’ve got more than enough distinct locations to be getting on with, without overwhelming the Warden with millions of phone numbers and characters to keep track of. Keeping things modular in individual adventures with their own relevant subset of numbers helps here too. Also means I don’t have to write as much, so I can focus on those deliberately constructed details over generators to fill things out. Detail makes space in ttrpgs anyway. I don’t even have close to d100 yet and this place already feels huge.

So what kind of a city does all this give us, and what kind of a game? I’ll go into that next time!