Orphans Stuck in Tasty Mud

23 Sep, 2025

The cover is good in isolation - oppressive, isolating - but communicates nothing about the module’s content or themes. “Big Red”, confusingly colored here in a soft lime green, takes up a considerable chunk of the real estate while being unrelated to the events that follow.

Those events, in short:
Two tortured children fail to develop psychic powers, per corporate hopes. They succeed in using their meager ability to summon a demon orders of magnitude stronger than they are. The beast facilitates their escape to a rimspace gas station, then lays dormant for months until a corpo retrieval squad comes knocking. Chaos ensues as the demon protects the children - its conduit to the mortal plane - with overwhelming violence. Players stumble upon the aftermath.

Imuen station itself is wonderfully three dimensional. While I miss the character of the 3D modeled maps in Another Bug Hunt, Dead Planet, and A Pound of Flesh, the side view + top view compromise here is workable. Official Mosh space infrastructure remains pleasingly chunky.

The layout and paragraph styles are a small step back compared to the majesty of prior works. There are readability issues on page 3, and the paragraph styles are a touch less clear. Luke’s in-key room exit descriptions from The Isle return, but draw the eye too strongly for my taste. The dominant lime color palette works best as a font color on dark backgrounds, but the module only includes 4 such pages. The rest just… look vaguely of piss I’m afraid.¹

Orphans' antagonist is its greatest, unmitigated success. Auntie fucks. Mundane nature aesthetics become terrifying in space. I’m salivating at the thought of explaining to my players how it begins raining as they descend the freight elevator.

The ‘Figments’ she is paired with (soil-and-bone dopplegangers intended to betray trusting parties while inducing paranoia) are conceptually neat but muddied in execution.² What constitutes “a figment”, including their base nature and limitations, changes page by page. Some are perfect duplicates of the dead, capable of full human speech and emotion. Others shamble as slack jawed zombies. A third permutation lack underlying human forms at all - just soil stuffed in combat fatigues.

Mothership is not the sort of system where players expect perfunctory combat encounters, so I don’t understand why the zombie-like versions are present at all. I’d have preferred the scenario lean into the paranoia angle and add a broader mix of real and imposter NPCs.

The zine could have used stronger characters in general, and that includes the titular Orphans. Their trauma takes center stage in the module’s terrific finale set piece - locking the party in an unwinnable fight and pegging their survival on their ability to earn the trust of abused children from across a locked door is a heartfelt twist of RPG tropes.

But once you dig below their trauma, it's unclear who either of these abused kids are or what they want out of life. The text goes out of its way to specify that they have ‘no plans’, which appropriately conveys their panic and nothing else. More thought should have been put into the charisma of the title characters, especially when the text recognizes that they’re highly likely to be drafted into the players’ crew.

Strangely, only two of the five hooks included with the scenario point towards the orphans at all. I’m concerned that, without a reason to find the children in particular, careful boring players will nope out of the scenario before exploring the bottom half of the station. Easily rectified, but still wasted text.

For a Gearing project I’m a bit shocked by the amount of bad lore that made it to print. Though Auntie herself is the highlight, the module is at its worst when trying to flesh out her motivation. All of it is indistinguishable from the tropey schlock I would make up on the spot.

Where did she come from?

“Outside the material plane”

What is the source of her power?

“She uses force and thought to dictate physical law”

So magic

Sure, but she “draws on old human memories” of like dirt and stuff

What does she want?

“Worship and Subjugation. To spread her will.”

How does murdering everyone inspire worship and subjugation?

It doesn’t, she realizes that at the end of the module, big oopsies on her part.

And why does she stop attacking the crew when they reach the kids?
Why attack the crew at all of they aren’t a threat to the orphans?

The concept of what Auntie does and wants seems to have drifted across years of development, with artifacts of each concept slipping into the text. The pamphlet would genuinely have been better if all mention of Auntie’s goals were stricken, replaced instead with a terrifying speculative void. Let the horrors be unknowable.

Warped Beyond Recognition, crowdfunded five months after Orphans’ announcement as a Mothership Kickstarter apology add-on, ate this module’s lunch hard. Until I review this overwhelmingly-praised-but-inexplicably-still-underrated adventure, suffice it to say that if I wanted to introduce abused psionic children into my Mothership campaign Orphans is not where I would start.

Is Orphans good?
…Yes. The premise is good.

I don’t want to run it, but I absolutely want to steal from it. Luke came up with an utterly baller horror movie monster. The random encounter procedure is a useful evolution that escalates tension reliably compared to its procedural peers.³ Orphans just lacks the polish I’ve come to associate with the publishing house that, in my opinion, created the greatest RPG supplement ever written.⁴ I’m used to TKG taking big swings, and this adventure is very “safe”.

I know it feels insane to call the loam bone murder amalgam module “safe”, but I’m confident most of you have read plenty of “unknowable beast murders everyone on a space station” scenarios by now. Even if future releases are better written, I will be sad if TKG’s pamphlets continue to follow this well-trodden ground.

$20 Physical. Buy Warped Beyond Recognition first.

#mothership #reviews