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!

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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