Bathtub Reviews are an excuse for me to read modules a little more closely. I’m doing them to critique well-regarded modules from the perspective of my own table and to learn for my own module design. They’re stream of consciousness and unedited harsh critiques. I’m writing them on my phone in the bath.

The highly anticipated Mothership 1e was just released digitally, and while there’s not a lot to talk about in the actual book, I thought I’d take a look at the introductory module Another Bug Hunt, the most recent iteration of the highly successful Mothership offical module series. Another Bug Hunt is a 43 page module for Mothership by DG Chapman, Luke Gearing, Alan Gerding and Tyler Kimball, although it must be noted that the editor, Jarrett Crader gets billing on the cover as well.

Another Big Hunt is a typically high production value Mothership zine, with exceptional art, striking colour choices, and bold design. A notable design decision is picking a three colour palette for the entire zine, and then choosing to switch which elements use the those colours in each of the four sections. This works to communicate the different sections, but I find particularly the second section with its burnt orange background for body text quite wearying on the eyes. Further, it acts contrary to the clear language set up using colour, highlighting and font choice to differentiate different types of information.

This is an introductory module, and the method the team has chosen to facilitate running this module for those new to Mothership is a character named WES who pops up in sections marked with a specific symbol. I think choosing a colour (as previously stated) would have been a better choice, but overall WES is a great tool for assisting new wardens. The advice ranges from managing specific situations to general advice. One thing I don’t like, is that later it addresses ways to progress, which I feel like might encourage wardens to force players into specific action; I suspect this has been playtested to all get out, on the other hand, and accordingly those pieces of advice may particular sticking points in playtesting.

Prior to the scenarios being presented, Another Bug Hunt opens with another innovation: Two parallel timelines, summarising what the players think has happened and what has actually happened. This is a very convenient way of summarising this information. I like a lot. The information that follows is a bit dense and long, though, for a new warden to process, and to be honest too long for me to prefer. Half of the page on the Shriek for example, repeats in wordier fashion what has already been said before. It might help me talk science to the players if a character of that persuasion is met along the way.

We then have four scenarios: The first is an extraction mission, the second assisting a settlement under siege, the third a rescue mission into an alien spaceship, and the final an alien assault on the human base. They are in order of narrative impact, but to be honest the second and last seem to be the most complex, with the first and third being straightforward dungeons. Writing across all four scenarios is, to be be honest inconsistent. “The worst manager you’ve ever written…the more annoying you make him the better” is an excellent description of a archetypical bug hunt character, from scenario 1; “One of the few personalities who can stand up to Sgt Valdez. Was in love with Olsson, and barely masks their grief.” from scenario 2, not so much. And it’s more of a sin in scenario 2, where you’re explicitly told to get into the NPCs shoes in order to make it work. There is writing in scenario 3 that verges on straight up bad: “he turns and speaks in a creepy voice “LEAVE…ME…HERE”. It’s disappointing to me that in a project with so much talent behind it, things like this can get lost.

I really like the first three scenarios in principle, and the fourth feels like it could either be a slog or a walk in the park, depending on luck and what has happened in the previous missions, as it hinges on retaking the Tower which may have been already handled in scenario 2. This one, I could give or take, but it’s only 3 pages anyway.

The first scenario is a classic crawl in the vein of Alien. Here, a single foe that you will encounter en mass later in the zine is the final boss, and is likely to TPK the party. It’s shorter than it appears, because the warden guidance is significant and exceptional. I’m not sure where it’s too much; certainly it expects the warden to study the material beforehand, because there is no chance it could be read and implemented during a session. This is telegraphed in the first WES passage, but subtly and I missed it; I suspect some new wardens might too. This first scenario is worth the price of admission, probably even for wardens with experience running other games.

The second scenario is a complex one, with three missions to complete, and the likelihood of surviving the third being low given the enemy advance and dangerous weather. There are ten NPCs at play across these three missions, but their descriptions aren’t strong enough that I could use them easily; they needed to be stronger archetypes taken straight out of Aliens, which appears to be the inspiration to this particular adventure. I’d struggle with this scenario if it were my second session as a warden, I think, particularly as it involves running a team of NPCs in addition to the mission. The missions themselves, however are each fun and interesting tactical crawls, through a decent map. I could redesign the characters to make this one an absolute ball to play in, but I wouldn’t expect that of the target audience.

Scenario 3 is an attack on the alien mothership. The map here is much less clear, and I actually had trouble understanding where the areas described are in relation to each other, until I realised in the context of all the maps what they were showing me. There are three routes in, and a final area. Two are harder to find, and one of those is clearly the deadliest; in the other two routes are traditional puzzles that can be used to resolve the scenario with player ingenuity. There doesn’t appear to be a benefit to searching deeper, and it’s not especially jaquayed in a way that will effect the final encounter. It feels a little fruitless, and might be better as a single complex rather than a series of routes, as most players won’t immediately realise how to use the traps to their advantage, or might miss one. The final encounter is weird, as if the android was waiting for the PCs to arrive for his surgery, but also has no need for them to be there, and also will turn on them after the surgery. The WES advice is the PCs will die but they put it there anyway because it’s in the world; I’m sorry, no: This is weak writing. A whole mission has no purpose but to reach this room. The players have been risking their characters for hours. You need to give them something to engage with at this point. There’s nothing here. Rewriting this final encounter, and adding rewards for finding the difficult routes in and hints regarding their existence, would make this a good scenario, but right now it’s not.

Because the weaker scenarios come at the end, I’m left feeling quite negative, but I need to check myself: The WES is great, especially in the earlier scenarios. I actually think it would be better to leave the advice in the latter scenarios too, because it’s still just a zine, and a new warden can only benefit from more gradually parceled advice; in fact they are more likely to take on new skills in later scenarios when they grow in confidence.

Because my favoured style of play in my own time is sandbox play, I look at the sheer complexity of these four scenarios and I wonder how anyone could run them from the zine itself. Sandbox play relies on emergent complexity. The players encounter things and the ripples cause things to become interesting. These scenarios, by attempting to limit the ripples (something that’s explicitly talked about in scenario 4, where ripples are impossible to avoid), require a lot more groundwork and reading to actually run. To me, this makes them appear to be too challenging for the beginner, but I wonder if my experience prevents me from seeing the truth of the matter. I know that these would be challenging for me to run, because of the combination of information design and pre-loaded complexity. This tension, between making this mothershippy and making it new warden friendly, really dictates the feel of the whole module. Did the authors, editor and designers succeed in navigating this tension? I find it hard to tell. It’s a challenging one; Mothership house style is anything but friendly to new eyes, even though it’s a certain type of beautifully pragmatic.

Irregardless, the earlier two scenarios are strong, the first moreso. The inconsistency here saddens me, as I said earlier, and I attribute it to loadsharing and a tight deadline. The WES provides excellent guidance on those modules, and less guidance although still helpful in the last two. It’s a beautiful, explosively laid out product even if not always easy to parse due to colour contrasts. But it’s not the best Mothership module out there, and because of the failures in the latter two thirds, probably not the one I’d recommend to be your first as a Warden. That pleasure goes to Dead Planet or a Pound of Flesh if we’re official, or perhaps even to free module In Carmine whose review will be posted in a couple of weeks.

Addition: Changes have been made in the version going to print, to character descriptions and to some maps, as well as clarifying rewards and outcomes in the final section, addressing some of my concerns cited in this review.

11th August, 2023

Idle Cartulary