Mothership RPG - Running DeadPlanet for a bunch of CoC players - learned new ways to run games.

 Mothership RPG DeadPlanet (spoilers)

I’ve been running mothership. I put a bunch of players through DeadPlanet. 

Running this game has exposed me to new way of thinking about how to structure game, rules and how to run horror. 

// DEAD PLANET SPOILERS AHEAD

DeadPlanet is a three part adventure that basically follows the pattern of get in trouble, get deeper into trouble and try to get out or never return. 

The Alexis was a great dungeon with mounting fear and great pay off. 

My players, because every game is different, are Cthulhu players, they love it. They are used to being victims and not heroes. Another group I play with just don’t like not having a sense of control. 

Running them through the Alexis was a joy for me and them. They liked the mounting terror, the adding stress, the mysterious object, the things clinking in the vents and finally the captain in her new form assaulting them just as they thought nothing bad was going to happen. 

I could have run that combat a little better, old dnd habits. Where the enemy just stands there doing things. Reading through Mothership & DeadPlanet again, the bad guys are supposed to either die fast, or come and go. I think that would have mounted the terror more if the captain had come out smacked them around for a bit and then slurped up a vent to attack later. Instead the combat dragged a little at the end. I should have had her disappear into the vents. They were done anyway  to have her appear later in Red Moon if I needed her  (and I did).

After the Alexis we landed on the Red Moon. Again I didn’t want to destroy their ship and according to the game if they had stayed on the moon for too long they would have gone insane. Was I over thinking it? Was I being too simulationist? Did I want things to make sense too much? Yes to all that and that made that part of the scenario a duller than I wanted.

The players quickly figured out that the denizens of the moon were bad. Having played a lot of CoC they trusted people less than monsters. That left me in a tough spot - because I should have anticipated their cageyness at engaging with humans. I didn’t have a lever to put them in a tough spot. That left Brekt - who was vaguely threatening and unhelpful. He was waiting for them to screw up so that he could pick up the wreckage. The players figured out his plan, didn’t care, they had their own ship. They left the moon and thought they were headed home, but their captain had other plans. The session felt flat, but the players were thoroughly creeped out. So even though we didn’t have many fights, threatening conflicts, the session ended with dread.

The captain puts everyone on ice saying that we’ll follow Brekt’s ship on a slow ride back to civilisation. This is a dumb plan because space is large and pointing in a random direction will mean you’ll be an ice cube for ever. This is probably what Omuamua was a ship full of frozen fools hurtling away from some disaster. 

But that’s not what the captain does, he defrosts the crew except the pesky player characters who where a nuisance. He lands on the dead planet, crashing the ship on the high plain. He takes his crew and goes for the research station because he knows they have good salvage there. The plan is to recruit the Defiance crew to get out. It’s all a bad plan and goes south quickly. In the mean time the ship in it’s dying breath wakes up the players - the captain is 8 hours ahead of them. The players get appraised of the situation and spend hours discussing what to do. Can we fix the ship? No. What is of value on the ship? Not much, the captain and the rest of the crew took everything that wasn’t bolted on. They even took the vehicles you salvaged from the Alexis. Discuss discuss discuss. On one of the monitors in the galley you see something moving. Did they return? No, but mayhem ensues. They leave in a hurry into the eternal half light of dead planet. What happens after was a lot of fun. They explore the necropolis, blow stuff up there, a marine dies, they find one of the humans from the crew, but he’s weird. He’s an android but didn’t know it. It was the pulse that revealed that he was. The crew after almost dying (I should have been a little rougher) escapes on the Defiant without exploring the research station, and finding the code to the Definant’s vault. 

 I’m glad I didn’t give the players their own ship. They were crew on a large salvage ship and the captain was clearly and idiot that got there by other means besides merit. This put the players in danger as much as the monsters

I kept forgetting to use the stress mechanics. I think I like the BitD method where a player does a thing, the consequence is stress. Mothership puts a lot on the DM to “award” stress at every turn. This makes it feel arbitrary or I just forget to do it. For example while they were on the crashed ship discussing what to do something came on board and they left with alacrity - but I didn’t give them stress for it. They should have had some. 

I also don’t have a feel for stress yet, if a player is doing it to themselves, they can arbitrate it’s use, and negotiate with other players as to who is taking stress. If I dole it out, I have to keep in mind if they’re going to make it to the end of the evening without all being mad. 

I don’t like the combat mechanics. Combat feels like a lot of missing and nothing happens. When players do hit the opponent’s armor  negates the hit. This happened with the alpha gaunts ; where players missed a lot then when they did hit it had no effect because of armor.

I switched to a blades in the dark/apocalypse world style combat where if they succeed the get what they want if they fail they get consequences. This worked out  they were none the wiser.  They still rolled armor to mitigate damage.

What I did right on dead planet:

1) The captain was an idiot and did dumb things that put the players in jeopardy. They were on their way home! But no, idiot put them in danger. 

2) Foreshadowing foreshadowing foreshadowing. Reinforce things in the player’s minds. For example the relationship between jump drives and the dead planet. Jump drives amplified whatever was already happening here. A thin spot between dimensions, but jump drives put a hole in that thin spot. So all wrecks had no drives. 

The captain’s actions showed players danger. The crashed ship was getting infested with things. The captain left equipment at the cross roads between the necropolis and the research station. They were clearly attacked there and left equipment instead of fighting. 

That two crew members went to the necropolis instead of the research station. They got trapped and asked for help - but one of them was actually trying to get the players to go to the hum building to explore it for him. 

The definant was a built in foreshadow. It was great - the players also intercepted the radio signals from the ship. I had to make it more palatable because as written it was hard for me to communicate and repeat.

Another wreck, an alien ship, which when they entered gave players with no zero g training stress because there was no up down side ways - showed the players that jump drives are being used to amplify the signal. The ship also had weapons that were removed by people from the research station. The excavators left notes that became increasing insane. 

3) The players had no interest in the research station after the necropolis where they lost a crew member, gained a dubious one, gained much stress and wounds. They decided to GTFO on the Defiant. I made that hard to do. It was protected by auto turrets, deadly forest, roaming gaunts. Once close after wearing them down of resources they had to deal with the crazed crew that seemed normal at first. This was fun, I won’t go into details, it worked out quite nice. They left the planet exhausted, near death and on their last shred of sanity.