Dead Weight Raises Questions about Lactation
A perfect cover.
At first an oppressive absence, crushing humiliated bones.
In retrospect, a titanic depiction of the module’s chief antagonist. “A large and featureless sphere that does absolutely nothing; unless you’re already dead.” - in which case you accelerate toward it at 450 miles per hour.
“You” is broadly defined — the module squeezes many surprises out of this. Consider its implications on hair, food, and skin.
11 pages. Dense yet practical layout. Shoutout to the editor, who is a rat.
Passes the conceptual density test with flying colors. Even ignoring the module’s titular sphere, it offers:
- A research vessel with a modular layout and a pair of detachable single-pilot tugboat engines.
- A lethal respiratory virus which increases oxygen consumption thirty-fold. Its symptoms are identical to normal panic responses until the moment it’s contagious. It lives inside waterlogged geode grenades.
- Hyper magnetic, radioactive, and distressingly greasy ore samples. They act both as creativity toys and red herring explanations for the ship’s disaster.
The module is dripping with delicious opportunities for creative problem solving. The violent impulses so frequently lauded by elf games will only make these problems worse.
The Manifest + Random Item table on the back cover is a concept I can’t wait to steal. Unlike a conventional random table filled with items that might optionally be present, this is a list of all items present to find. Multiple telegraphed catastrophes ensure time spent methodically searching is never free.
On the topic of timetables: don’t be confused by the virus’s 12hr gestation period relative to the module’s 8hr forced climax. The dramatic question Carminosis exists to create is not “will the infected person survive?” (they won’t), it’s “will panic over a quarantine break keep the surviving crew from working together.”
This module repeatedly outsmarted me - first by using kitchen heating elements in a vacuum to create a novel trap, and second by tricking me into researching the composition of milk.
The fridges contain meat and dairy, you see. The meat rips through bulkheads to reach the sphere, while the ice cream is unmoved.
Does that imply the milk is alive? Surely not when frozen. But folks in cryo count as alive, so perhaps frozen microbes in milk equally qualify? But then the ice cream would have to be unpasteurized. Can you make ice cream with unpasteurized milk? Does pasteurization alter milk’s physical properties at all? What is milk composed of, and how do mammaries synthesize it?
It is at this point I noticed I’d misread the dessert’s true title - “Ice Cream™”.
Quality joke.
Look at these lines. Each maps the trajectory of a corpse projectile. Each a gunshot through the relatable world of deadlines, cigarettes, and funerals the players inhabit.
Evil is a comfortable fiction. It obscures the complex roots of our suffering and promises catharsis through its defeat. Physics offers no such comfort.
Dead Weight has replaced Ypsilon-14 as my go-to Mothership one shot. $5 on itch, $9 physical. It comes with player handouts, a GM worksheet, and a 9 track OST. Literally all of you should buy it.