…And Blanche Will be Burning (a tiny hole in my itch budget)
Pamphlet module, following the within-map room key template popularized by Ypsilon-13. Makes heavy use of symbology. Escape is the primary goal, with at least four supported paths to success.
The selling point here is a terrific room-by-room ship systems failure procedure. Each room includes tracking boxes for electrical damage, fire, hull breach, and radiation level. Roll Xd10s every IRL ten minutes, or as an in-character cost to slow actions, where X is the number of rooms currently damaged. Tick up the damage track on rooms corresponding to the numbers rolled. 00 is reserved for surprise environmental damage against players.1
Ex, rolling a 1 on the d10 causes Cryo to catch fire.
I particularly like how this procedure can scale to varying ship sizes. If your party’s ship has seven rooms, roll d8s instead and reserve the 8 for Star Trek exploding control panels. Larger ships are innately advantaged against catastrophic failure as well - elegant! Lots of crunchy drama here to mine. With a little refinement this system might even enable called shots in ship combat.2
NPCs are passable. Fougasse is a standout - a droid bluffing self-destruct to escape is just wonderful. Tsutomusdottir is a nothing burger. The main antagonist is suitably intimidating, but has nothing to distinguish him from a bounty hunter caricature. The quest hook dropped by a co-prisoner is underdeveloped.
The randomized traits for secondary antagonist Zohar raise my blorby hackles. Pre-session you’re expected to roll up whether they’re an android, psychic, serial killer, alien, or infected cat. Only the name is shared - each result is functionally a different character fulfilling the same narrative role.
Call me a killjoy, but I don’t think indie pamphlet modules should be spending word count accommodating for repeat playthroughs. You’ll be lucky if ten people run your module once, let alone twice. If you, the author, are ambivalent between half a dozen possible antagonists, that’s a sign you need to tighten up your draft. I’d rather use that space to add an extra couple lines to every NPC - flesh out their relationships to one another, perhaps - and canonize a specific cause to the MSS’s Blanche’s destruction.
This is the rare Mothership module I like more for its rules than its setting - but that’s okay! That’s the wonderful thing about the pamphlet boom - when the reader’s investment is this low, a module only has to convey one good idea to be worth your time. And Blanche does. Even if my players never happen to be kidnapped by bounty hunters (we know how players are about being taken alive3), this module’s ship collapse procedure is singlehandedly worth the cost of admission.
$4 digital on itch. Buy this, steal its cool thoughts.
————————————————————————————————
In the module this auto-applies one wound. I’d keep this as is in a one-shot setting where rapid-fire consequences are your priority but in a campaign setting I’d replace this with a damage roll.↩
Perhaps Battle check crits permit damage to specific systems instead of bonus damage? Randomized room damage should remain the default combat outcome. I’ll have to percolate on this… suggestions welcome!↩
At time of writing, my last Mothership session ended with my Teamster threatening a suicide bombing in a last ditch attempt to avoid arrest. Thanks for making me google hostage deescalation tactics Drak very cool.↩