Play Report: Mothership Session 11
I’ll be doing some session reports, diligent neophyte blogger that I am. Shoutout to Gorgon Bones, who inspired the structure of this post. I like their combination of a recap followed by referee reflections.
We’re hopping into the middle of a campaign with this play report, so I’ll share some context. We’ve switched over to a homebrew planet-crawl after our disappointing run with Gradient Descent (read about it in my previous post). Here’s the gist:
- The desert planet Ammida-V has re-entered the habitable zone of its star as the star shrinks from red giant to white dwarf. Toxic atmosphere. A plateau of badlands and mountains surrounded by a sea of dunes.
- The Company has exclusive rights to the resources of the planet. Population: approx. 500. Arrivals/departures: every 6 months.
- Heavy oil drilling for local use and for greenhouse gas terraforming. He3 crawlers and desperate gold prospectors extract the actually worthwhile stuff.
- Kelp farmers who provide the only local food have announced independence from the Company. They and the Company have an uneasy truce because one cannot survive without the other.
- A rival corp is contracted out to extract drinking water from the depths of the planet. They use their foothold to perform espionage, illegal surveying, etc.
- The PCs are hired by this rival corp to track down a missing research crew. Visiting their last known coordinates, PCs found an alien forest and an excavated alien ruin inhabited by aggressive lifeforms.
Here's what happened this session:
Mothership Session 11, March 11 '26
PCs: Arnis (Scientist); Salamandra (Marine); Shkek (Teamster).
January 14
Out in the plateau badlands, the crew stopped their car to examine the campsite of a prospector. The person is missing, but their belongings are untouched. A mess of footprints shows signs of a scuffle. Arnis connects this to reports of trespassers in the nearby oil fields, skulking at night and watching the oil drillers. What if they’re kidnapping people out here in the desert?
They go to the coordinates that Queensie the Android (absent this session) pulled out of the alien writing they found in a ruin. At the spot, they find nothing but desert, but Salamandra’s Geiger counter detects elevated radiation levels. The group decides that the alien structure they were hoping to find must be buried. Since they don’t have excavation tools, they proceed to the oil fields as previously planned.
They arrive at a ridgeline and monitor the oil field below for a few hours. At dusk they drive down to the dusty field office, where Jakub, the foreman, gives them a warm welcome. Over drinks, Jakub confirms that the watchers come once every few nights and retreat northeast. Jakub thinks they must be with the separatist farmers (the PCs suspect, however, that there is a third party stirring shit between the Company and the farmers).
That night, the PCs go out on patrol with the oil drillers but find nothing.
January 15
On the second night of patrol, five trespassers do show up, but retreat as soon as they’re noticed. Shkek fires a warning shot. One returns fire while the others mount their isopods to flee. In the ensuing firefight and chase, two trespassers are shot. Shkek is fired at with a silent and flashless weapon. Salamandra runs one of them over with the car. Arnis saves one with first aid; they have a captive. The remaining two trespassers flee into the desert night.
Inspecting the bodies, all of the watchers are young, and all have a gunshot scar on their left arm. One scar shows signs of bulbous growth, just like Salamandra saw on a Company soldier in the medpod back in town. The group’s suspicions of a ‘mutation gun’ are all but confirmed.
Among the captive’s possessions they find an unfamiliar dried fruit. Salamandra eats it, and undergoes violent mutation, taking damage and almost losing consciousness. She gains a new condition: she can now freely breathe the Ammidan atmosphere and eat its food. Shkek also eats the fruit: he takes a wound from the damage, his jaw deforms, and rows of rapidly growing teeth fill his mouth. But he also survives and gains the immunities.
Reflections
I hadn’t prepared anything for the session due to work and procrastination. Just before heading to the game, I took 20 minutes to flesh out the oil field and the foreman a little. That ended up carrying the session.
The game felt vindicating on two levels. For one, the investigation was totally player-driven, based on rumours, intel, and a random encounter (the abandoned campsite) from the previous sessions. Seeing players piece together information and act on it is like half of why I love running games, and it’s what I wanted from this little homebrew setting.
The other big win is that the fiction is working! And the legwork from the initial prep (ideation, faction network, location outlines, random encounters) is paying off. They’re picking up on the threads and are able to reason about things – because the tangle I’ve created makes sense. My favourite little player eureka this session was when Arnis’ player realized that if there’s oil all over the place, that means there must have been an extensive biosphere. This sort of connecting of dots is so satisfying.
I’d be in trouble if they had pursued the alien coordinates further, since I have NOTHING for that location. At this point, the overland stuff is developed enough that I can make it work in a pinch, but I really do need to finish the little alien locale dungeons. Since I’m such a procrastinator, I was thinking that a good time for prep could be the twenty-minute bus ride home, but with bicycle weather around the corner, I doubt it’ll happen.
This session is the furthest we’ve drifted from Door D&D, and I actually spooked myself for a moment that – gasp! – this had the structure and feel of the 5e sessions we played like 8 years ago. The crucial difference for me, however, is that these events emerged from player initiative combined with sandbox procedure. In the 5e days, we might have had a session with a similar arc, but it would have been a result of DM direction and prep. If I were the DM, I’d have known every move. If I were the player, I’d have the sense that the DM did a good job coming up with tonight’s events. That style of play grew taxing and empty for me. The outcome may have looked a little similar tonight, but the process was completely different.
For the next session, I need to decide what their captive might reveal. It’s also a good opportunity to think about how her faction will respond to her capture. It’ll be an illustrative moment for a faction that’s still a little blurry in my mind.