JOURNEYLANDS #1

 

Journeylands #1 is out now!

Click here to get it for yourself. If you were a KS backer last year during ZineQuest, check your inbox on there for your discount code.

Happy travels x

At the Gates of Dawn

 “Due to the explosion of the Lunar Gate, all data from before 2022 has been lost” - Jet Black, Cowboy Bebop

I know this is not one of the gates from the show but it’s a Strong Visual

Meridian is a satellite in stationary orbit around the astral anomaly X-108, a transport-regulated wormhole. Owned and operated by the Qilin Gate Corporation, the station’s central hub is a port offering access to the astral gate.

 

Airlocked elevators over a kilometre long connect from the zero-G port to the outer ring, a city bathed in X-108’s constant, golden dawn. The centrifugal force of Meridian’s spin creates approximately 1G of gravity on the city section’s inner surface, allowing citizens to traverse its 5km circumference as if planetside.

 

Once a bustling port, the advent of ship-based warp drive technologies have seen a decline in travel and tourism. These days, only those unable to afford modern conveyance still make use of it, and only those too poor or stubborn to leave still live here.

 

Qilin take payment via a subscription plan, with members allotted 12 jumps per year through any of the company’s outer rim locations for a monthly fee of 11kcr. There is no cancellation policy.

 

Thanks to a privacy waiver at sign-up, QGC are able to locate customers exactly using hyperspace latency tracking. As stipulated in the contract, failure to keep up with payments will result in forfeiture of equivalent value in biomass from the offending party. Collector Drone [W: 3(15), C:70 Scalpel, I:80]

Welcome to Meridian babyyyy

So this is a mini setting I’m working on for a Mothership game and I thought I’d share notes so anyone can use it or take bits as needed. I’ll update as I go.

If this were a book I’d include something useful along with that blurb up there, like a d5 table of spaceships you can encounter at the port. But since the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit isn’t out yet I’ll do that another time i guess

That means for now all you’re getting is an intro, sorry! But I suppose this post is good to link back to for other stuff I do in this setting, like an overview.

Expect mystery, investigation, janitorial work, corpo-governmental conspiracy, fancy briefcases, robot butterflies, lamb dumplings and the side effects of psychic psychedelia.

(also right now blogger isn’t letting me make or reply to comments? Idk. But you can still comment if you’d like)

GRAVEROBBERS 2022

 Hey! You made it :)

This year:

- JOURNEYLANDS #1 will be released soon, backers should keep an eye on KS later this month for info on how to get your copy. I will try and post extra bits for players to use now and then (psssst anyone can do this)

- MOTHERSHIP 1E is approaching. How are you all liking the beta version? I have, uh… like, six? projects in the works for MoSh. Mostly 1st party but I’ll also be releasing my first 3rd party project in 2022, more on that in time I’m sure.

Basically, as if you weren’t already, expect big things from the Mothership. Like… just from the stuff I’m personally working on? Oh boy. You have no idea.

In the meantime have you seen Hull Breach yet?

- THIS BLOG remains a place for me to air notes, work things out and make games in public, ramble when I feel the need. Thanks for your continued attention. I try to only post things I think are potentially useful.

I feel like most people know me for MoSh now, and I haven’t really put much ~content~ on here for that, so this will be rectified. And probably less fantasy bits than in the past? Idk, I write stuff for me first and I’m not currently running a fantasy game so. But hey a year is a long time

- GRAVEROBBERS is still a thing, next stop is a starter adventure but there is no timeline on that. As and when. Free here, always will be.

- Other projects like the d6 duel-clock “souls” game and DEADLINE are still being worked on too, but practically speaking they’re lower on the priority list than things that make money.

- On that - as well as my continued work on Mothership stuff for TKG I would love to work on whatever else you’ve got cooking, get in touch. If you like what I’ve done you can literally just hire me. Graverobbersguide at gmail dot com.

If you can’t pay i will probably still take a look at any serious projects and help, for fun. Especially if you are from any group/identity not typically given platforms. Just hit me up and I’ll give notes on your Mothership zine or whatever it is you’re doing.

- Rebalancing a bit. Less-to-no twitter, everything anyone has ever said about games on there is boring. I’ve always aimed to put real life first and that’s going to continue. Games is just a fun thing to do with people I love, love comes first.

You also might see other artistic projects from me at some point I suppose, like other media, you can ignore those if they’re not interesting to you

I can’t think of what else to say but anyone can just ask me stuff if you have questions! I’m just some guy

I hope you’re spending time/money/energy on worthy causes, chiefly yourself. Let’s show 2022 what true power looks like. Peace and love to all xo

Structuring Horror In Adventures

 So I don’t know if you heard but uuuuuuhhhhh

Mothership raised over 1.4 million USD. That’s like 1 mil in real money!

(you can still back it for a bit with the late pledge manager, go for it, early Christmas innit)

I wasn’t involved in the campaign but in case you missed the announcement I will be contributing to the starter module that comes free in the box set, Another Bug Hunt. Very very excited and pleased for the whole team. This box is gonna knock your sox

gimme gimme gimme

So i thought I would do a post about Mothership in some way, since a lot of people are going to be getting this game soon or are currently trying out 0e. I haven’t really posted any serious MoSh Content on here before. But I had this idea that might be useful to some so here we are

This is going to be some macro design stuff about making horror adventures in general.

Btw, I don’t actually like horror very much! I’m more into stuff with horror ~elements~ than the genre itself, I’m not into straight up scary movies. I’m a chicken, a wuss, a weenie, a putz I tells ya, a palooka, a real jimmy jamoolie

But I’ve also written more published mothership adventures than… um, anyone lmao, so

Also worth pointing out that this structure isn’t a Thing I Do, it’s just me reverse engineering some stuff I’ve done before. There’s some amount of value in trying to codify vague ~artistic processes~ into something more tangible, at least for practical purposes. I’m very wary of academia, death by analysis, but as long as we’re still talking in (hopefully) useful, practical terms and not ThEoRy then we’re all good.

All good? Good.

The upcoming Warden’s Guide is going to walk you through the TOMBS structure, something Sean I think came up with to describe horrors - as in, monsters. It’s pretty useful, maybe I’ll do a post about it. What I’m going to try and do here is make a similar framework for looking at the overall adventure structure.

(This is just an idea I had last night so I’m going to see if it works as I’m writing it, if you’re reading this post then I guess it does haha)

A way of looking at the horror adventure scenario is in layers, which I’ll call:

- Fear

- Terror

- Dread

- Despair

These names are arbitrary and I’m sure if you’re an actual horror fan they already mean specific things! Sorry!

Picture it like a cross section of a planet or a jawbreaker, with fear at the core and despair as the outer encasing layer.

Let’s look at what I mean by each of these and why it matters. Then you can maybe look at your next adventure in a similar way. Check that you have each layer present, and you should have a functional horror adventure, or at least enough of the aesthetic of one

Oh! And I’ll be using examples from The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 because I think it’s the one of mine most people are familiar with, but SPOILERS if you’re not. If someone is going to run Mothership for you soon there’s a chance they’ll be using this adventure, so proceed with caution.

Ok. the actual post

Fear

Immediate, emotional reaction.

Boo! In movie terms these are things like jump scares or gross-out effects, but that’s not really an inherent function of this medium. We do have Fear saves though, for these moments of sudden emotional upset - just they’re for the characters, not the players directly. (The players might be scared too but i don’t really see that as relevant, that’s probably another post entirely though haha)

In Ypsilon the monster may suddenly show up at any time, or the discovery of Dr Giovanni or the goo effects could be played as Fear Moments. I’ve seen people use Prince as a fakeout 

You need these in MoSh games for practical reasons, to make use of the Fear (and Sanity which is the same but for mindfuck logic-based stuff) saves, but as part of the Horror Jawbreaker these are core to the experience.

A scary movie without these moments probably won’t be classed as horror at all, or it’ll be like Arrival or The Lighthouse where people have boring, beard-stroking chats about how and why it “straddles” genres. (I have seen and liked both those films btw, which tells you something about the part of all this I’m less into haha).

We all know what counts as gross and scary, and you have a wealth of genre staples to pull from, so getting Fear into your adventure shouldn’t be super difficult.

The main “issue” is that you don’t know if these moments will actually show up in play because it’s the players driving the action! The best plan I think is to put a few possible Fear moments around the place, make the adventure site small enough that they’ll probably find at least one, and just give up at that point. Players gonna play.

If they don’t find any of your spooky bits - hey, good for them. The other layers should have you covered just about, all you’ll miss is that sense of immediacy of Pure Horror but that’s not a problem - Arrival is totally a MoSh pamphlet. You can have a laugh after about how they missed everything.

Terror

A few seconds after the shock, when the mind makes sense of what’s happening - and doesn’t like it.

This is deeper than fear, which is a bad way of phrasing things because we’re going one layer up in the jawbreaker but whatever. Fear is “AAHH! A dead body just fell out of that vent!”. Terror is “Oh god… that body is Barry, and he’s got no face”.

Basically these are moments of realisation. Ypsilon examples would be things like “there’s an alien”, “it’s invisible”, “the goo is fucking people up”, “the Dr is fucked up”, etc. Mothership mechanises this, if you want to, with Intellect and Sanity. And Panic, these layers are all about Panic in a way.

To put these in your adventure, just have things going on the players don’t know about that they can work out through play. You probably have this covered already without realising it tbh. The genre suggests A Sense Of Mystery.

You don’t have to make this an actual mystery with Clues, these can be obvious! There are sooo many ways of finding out what’s going on on Ypsilon. But at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter if you do or not. Survive, Solve, Save, pick one - you might not Solve anything.

So don’t worry so much about the moments of revelation - Kinda like Fear that’s all player driven, and not 100% necessary anyway. Just have enough questions in the air. The suggestion that those revelations are out there somewhere is enough - be bold though. You achieve that sense of suggestion by posing questions, not by just kind of vaguely hinting. Players don’t get hints.

And even if nobody else does, you should absolutely know the answers yourself! Failing the investigation exercise is totally fine, but if there’s actually nothing real there to Solve, the exercise is hollow. And the answer can ultimately be a bit of an “I don’t know”, something like “an unknowable cosmic entity messed with shit”, just give it enough consistency and verisimilitude to feel somewhat satisfactory.

Give your players good questions, hide the answers, but the answers ultimately don’t matter as long as they do actually exist. Does that make sense?

Dread

Slower. Takes root and grows over time.

After the initial emotional reaction, after the terrifying revelation (or simply more questions suggesting  more terrifying possibilities) - where does that leave the players? The answer is here, and it’s nowhere good.

Dread isn’t a moment, though it can involve moments of Terror or Fear. It’s the creeping sensation of knowledge. Things are bad, sure, but it’ll become clear overtime just how bad things are, and for the players specifically. In Ypsilon it’s that you’re alone in deep space with a monster and some goo. It’s the full scope of the character’s immediate reality - and specifically, their odds of survival.

I don’t know if you’ve played Mothership but those odds? not good!!

This one’s mechanised throughout the system. Hit Points, Wounds, Stress, Panic. You achieve Dread (again, in your characters, not necessarily your players) basically through just playing the game. Dread happens from Being In This Situation. All you need to do is give the players a decent grasp of how fucked they are, and so much of that is done by the maths already.

I guess the question is how can you make them understand how bad the situation is if they might not fully understand what that situation even is? Mostly through those inner layers i think. Enough Fear and Terror will instil Dread automatically.

Yeah, this one just kind of happens. It’s about situational awareness, and Mothership is kind of about that on its own anyway. Again, player driven, they need to be paying attention - so just give them shit worth paying attention to and the Dread will follow.

And, obviously, make things difficult! No stakes, no dread. Isolate them in one way or another, present seemingly unbeatable foes and obstacles, take away obvious solutions (careful with this one) and add Stress with the steady drip of a CIA waterboarder.

Despair

And after all that… what’s left? Nothing.

“Despair” was once considered a sin that superseded the 7 Deadlies (I’m half-remembering this from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus so like Elizabethan Catholicism, don’t quote me). It meant, basically, atheism. A loss of belief in God’s ultimate power, plan and protection.

Can you even imagine the emptiness of someone in that culture losing faith? The shape of the void that leaves in a heart? What’s left? What’s the point?

Even if the characters Survive, what kind of a world are they living in? One where shit like this happens to people like them and there’s nothing they can do about it. If they Solve - so what? Now they know just how little the universe cares. And if they Save… do they really?

Rent is still due. The ship is a loaner. You made a quick buck risking your life and mind but that’s only worth so many weeks of Rocket Noodles until you have to do it again. You escaped the Squid Game - congratulations! Welcome to Seoul. Is it any better?

Ypsilon 14 is underfunded, understaffed. The bare minimum for survival and hygiene. it wasn’t even designed with a medbay, someone thought of that later and set it up in the workspace - probably to avoid being sued. The only things that offer any kind of enjoyment - a pet cat, video games, music, drugs - were smuggled in by workers who’d probably get their pay cut if anyone cared enough about them to find out. Someone went missing last night and the company hasn’t done a thing. All they have is work.

And for what? Someone with a much nicer ship than yours is doing research. Metals are being mined and sold for someone else’s profit margins. To the management, as we hear in Dr Giovanni’s cassette recording, these workers are numbers in a database.

There is power out there. But it will not protect you. And its plans are to prosper only itself.

How to put this into your game? Just make sure everyone’s aware whose fault this all is - and how very, very far away they are from here.

*

I hope all this is of use to anyone preparing horror adventures for their friends! Just make sure you have all the layers of your jawbreaker in there at least somewhere and you’re good to go.

1. Fuck!

2. This is fucked.

3. We’re fucked.

4. Everything’s fucked.

Latin Cockroach Spaceship

 Hard at work on many things, so once again it’s time for me to recommend 3 current rpg Kickstarters! These are all things I’m not just hyped for but NEED, I would be backing em all if i had the money. Hold on to your wallets!

Reach of the Roach God

Zedeck Siew is the best writer working in games right now. He and Mun Kao’s A Thousand Thousand Islands project is the best fantasy game zine running, thanks to the letter’s incredible artwork.

Now that series is getting its first book. System neutral adventures on a fantastical island inspired by SE Asia. If you play fantasy adventure games of any stripe, you’re going to want this.

LATAM Breakout

Like the Our Shores project back during Zine Quest, this is a collection of games from a part of the world that often doesn’t get exposure outside of its own communities - and as with that project these games absolutely deserve an audience!

They all look amazing of course, but my one to watch is BRAVE ZENITH, the creator Giuliano Roverato has written something fantastic for my own ZineQuest project Journeylands (coming soon! Update on KS next week probs) and this promises to be just as good. Dude knows his stuff. Check it out!

Mothership

You already know about this one. MoSh is a big deal! I’m privileged and proud to be an auxiliary part of their crew (I don’t get money from this campaign but you can add my stuff onto your pledge!).

If you’re on the fence about the game, now is the time. It really is That Game. At least follow the link to see the bonkers $$ it’s pulling in lol

PIECE BY PIECE

 The new official Mothership pamphlet just dropped!

Piece By Piece is a murder-y mystery type one shot set in a robotics laboratory. Good for Wardens who like setting up investigations and playing up their NPCs, and players who enjoy the “solve” aspect of MoSh’s “survive, solve, save” mantra.

Made this one a while ago, then COVID happened, so it’s nice to see it out in the world! Feels like the last of the “old” MoSh, especially with the box set Kickstarter right around the corner. Everything from here on out is going to be… well, you’ll have to wait and see x

You can download or purchase the physical version from Tuesday Knight games right here.

1d6 More Gadgets

 I’d like the final DEADLINE dossier to have 6d6 gadgets (d66 if you’re nasty) rather than the current 1d6. Or as many as i can do without them getting worse. You’ll probably roll twice for them too.

My current vague “rules” for making gadgets are

- looks like a pocket-sized, era-appropriate item nobody would question you owning

- must do 2 cool things, on a standard spy mission at least one will probably be useful

- must offer a choice

Plus all the normal things that make a good magic item, just a bit more mundane

You can check the google doc for the current d6. I think they’re pretty good! Also I’ve adjusted the text for them a bit lately, just paring down the word count.

Anyway here’s some more. There will end up being some overlap in effect/ability by the time there are 36 of these - this is by design, certain abilities should be common/consistent. Some items might repeat as well I guess.

Ok so,

1. A lighter that can be used normally, or spend all its fuel at once in a single, intensely bright flare. The case is also a powerful electromagnet which can be switched on or off.

2. A flat red lollipop that reveals fingerprints and bloodstains when used like a magnifying glass. Once eaten, it coats the mouth with chemicals that neutralise any poison consumed or inhaled.

3. A wallet that can stop bullets, best kept in a pocket over the heart. It also contains a hidden camera which can take and immediately print a single picture.

4. A single key on a leather fob, easily detachable. Two hidden switches on the fob control the key wirelessly, one causing it to emit a loud whining noise and the other detonating the small explosive inside.

5. A cigar that holds a supply of clean, breathable air. If lit, it quickly burns away in a large plume of thick, acrid smoke.

6. A rolled newspaper, fireproof, waterproof and strong as a steel rod. It unrolls into a single sheet the size of a small parachute but cannot be rolled back up by hand.