Into the Unknown
Mothership is a TTRPG set in the deadliest corners of space. Aliens, synthetics, and corporate greed are pushing you into the inky blackness of death. Will you survive the worst day of your life? Or will you discover the dark secrets lurking just beyond the corner. More often than not, these decisions are mutually exclusive.
This is not a review of Mothership, but a review of the adventure module: Another Bug Hunt (ABH), the module intended to introduce new players to the game of Mothership. Despite this, I am going to spend the next little bit explaining how Mothership as a system differs from other RPG’s like Dungeons and Dragons.
Under the Hood
Mothership is a Sci-Fi horror game inspired by works such as Alien and The Thing. A Warden, the word used for Dungeon Master, guides the players through a horror scenario– one which the players characters are not expected to survive. The “high score” at the top of your character sheet marks how many sessions your character survived.
The odds are not with the players as dice rolls are rarely in their favor. Mothership goes to great effort to make sure it never feels “unfair” however. The game rules tell the warden to be sure your players know the consequences before they commit to the action. Whether it is a jump that could lead to a great fall, or rushing a repair on a generator that has a chance to shock you, the warden is expected to tell the players beforehand just how bad the consequence could be. This keeps the warden from feeling like an antagonistic force and more like a referee.
All of these factors generate a gameplay loop for the players that is more about thinking their way around a problem rather than fighting. Combat is most often the worst choice a player can make, so instead the players run, hide, and plot their way through the story, just like horror protagonists. It is a very smart system.
From Mothership
Another Bug Hunt takes this system and gives you what you’re expecting: a scenario where the players need to survive aliens on a hostile planet. While it’s not the most “out there” premise, like some of the other Mothership modules can be, it knows exactly what it is. And it delivers on its initial promise of being “Another Bug Hunt” very well, though unfortunately there are a few glaring issues dragging the module down.
In ABH, the player’s character’s dropship touches down in the middle of a cataclysmic storm on the jungle world Samsa VI. Their mission: rendezvous with 2ndLt Kaplan, re-establish satellite communication, and retrieve the Dr. Edem and their synthetic partner Hinton for The Company. Before them is Greta Base, the main base of operations for the core personnel tasked with terraforming Samsa VI. It becomes very clear, very quickly, that something has gone horribly wrong. Wrecked furniture, dead bodies, and a birthday party gone bad greet the players as they enter Greta Base, as well as a growing dread that something else is there.
Greta Base is a great starting area that doubles as a tutorial for Mothership. This is a ten-room area with items to scavenge, secret paths to explore, a monster to flee or fight, and another looming threat hurrying the players along. The storm raging outside isn’t just for flavor, instead being the best, and simultaneously most polarizing aspect of Another Bug Hunt.
Rain on Metal
Beginning Another Bug Hunt, you are told to place a ten-sided countdown die in view of all the players. Every hour that passes in the game, the countdown progresses and the storm worsens. As the storm worsens there are many changes that take place in the module. There are some cool changes, like the increasing threat of carcanids and the inability to evacuate if the storm gets too bad. And some confusing changes.
The book never tells you how to handle flooding, even though flooding is very prominent. Is the area inaccessible? Do the players need hazard suits to navigate them? Areas that get flooded have no description of how flooding changes the environment. I wish that the effects of flooding were clearer. For my purposes I used the zero-g rules, as zero-g has rules where water does not. A bandaid solution but it worked.
Perfect Evolution
The enemies of ABH, the Carcanids, take the form of crustacean parasites. Similar to the xenomorphs from Alien, these creatures infect humans and synthetics. The infection is spread through the carcanids’ auditory shriek, meaning infection is easy, and some of the players are very likely to be infected before the end of the adventure. Infected individuals show physical and mental signs of infection before hatching a carcanid out of their chest.
The infection has five stages to it, the first three change how a character is played leading to some fun roleplay situations, while the last two are essentially the characters death as the warden takes control of them. It is a really cool system, though the infection progresses a bit too slowly. It is unlikely a character will get to the latter stages within the scope of the module, usually escaping or dying before reaching stage two or even three. If you plan to play this module isolated from any other adventure, you should consider speeding up the timeline of the infection so it is more of a pressing threat.
As for the carcanids themselves, as they are born from infected humans each one is supposed to be unique. The table on the back of the module has twenty possible random traits for you to use on your carcanids. Some of these include: a foaming mouth that they can use as a spit gun, wooden prosthetic legs, or saws in the place of claws. These additions are really neat and make each carcanid uniquely memorable, but for the larger scale encounters where you’re facing up to ten carcanids it is impossible to keep these traits straight. New players to TTRPG’s will likely skip this system entirely as it adds more complication to an already complicated game.
Moving Parts
And Another Bug Hunt is a complicated game, in reading the module it couldn’t seem more straightforward, but in practice a lot of the heavy lifting is placed on the warden. How do you handle a roaming carcanid? What does the foam spit gun do? How do you determine if an hour has passed? (That last one was my biggest issue). There are many moving parts to ABH. For a beginner module for both players and the warden it can fall apart if you don’t have the ability to improvise well.
I have been the DM of my group for well over a year now with roughly twenty-five sessions under my belt. I’ve created my own RPG, ran the Lost Mine of Phandelver DND module, and ran about three one-shots for various groups. I would consider myself an intermediate DM, where most of my sessions are fun for everyone instead of just some. Running ABH was not easy. If this was my first time DMing I would have crumbled.
For my group it turned out to be really fun, people got attached to and lost their characters. (RIP Morta Gheist and Rook) Those who survived had to plan and scheme their way through, climbing off the backs of the fallen to reach safety. There were a few hiccups: some misunderstanding between what I had said and what my players heard that led to frustrating moments. But that has more to do with my inexperience with the system than the module.
Another Bug Hunt
Another Bug Hunt was a good time for everybody involved. It was difficult to run, but with clear communication and asking my experienced players for their input I was able to get through it just fine. To end off, I asked one of my players for their quick review of Another Bug Hunt. He wrote a lot so feel free to stop here, but I often find myself disagreeing with him which is a good reason to check it out:
Rook
Hello, Geekwave readers! I’m Ethan. I’ve been playing TTRPG’s with Kaden for about 4 years now. I have been a player in various TTRPG’s and I have run games of Dungeons and Dragons as a DM. Here is a review of my experience as Rook in Another Bug Hunt!
Another Bug Hunt is a quick paced and thrilling rabbit hole of a module for the Mothership TTRPG. The character creation and skills mechanics allows players to be creative with how they fight or flee against the horrifying enemies and the suspense of running and hiding in a powerless terraforming facility from armored crab monsters that just hatched from your allies’ abdomens creates a feeling even experienced TTRPG players won’t soon forget. However, the module and the rulebook aren’t without their flaws. My fellow players and myself found ourselves repeatedly frustrated with the lack of tools, resources, plot hooks, or really anything in many of the explorable rooms throughout the module. The rulebook itself is also missing mechanics that feel not only important, but vital to a survival horror game.
Get Your Boots on the Ground
The briefing and setup to Another Bug Hunt uses military style language and references advanced sci-fi technologies to make the players feel like they are equipped to tackle whatever deadly threat lies ahead, only to run into their first terrifying carcanid enemy and feel extremely lucky if they manage to desperately escape with their lives. I played as the marine class and took it upon myself to be a fighter and protector for the rest of the group, so I will long remember watching the first carcanid I encountered shrug off the SMG rounds I fired at it, and then rush at me as I realized fighting this thing head on was impossible. Despite being so weak compared to our enemies, each player character still had skillsets that were useful and allowed the players a lot of agency on how to use them.
Pressing Buttons
One of our PC’s, BONGO, was a synthetic computer scientist who was able to repeatedly open electric doors for us and get information from hacked computers. Another PC was a technician who was able to create stronger armor and bullets for us so we stood more of a chance against the threats that lay ahead. Each action has its possible consequences though. Even healing with a stimpak has a 10% chance of giving your PC a heart attack, a chance that goes up the more you use them.
These risks make the game all the more challenging as well as forces the players to think and discuss carefully what risks are worth it. My character made a fatal error when he confidently turned on a radio to communicate with a neighboring terraforming station only for the radio to transmit the ear piercing, reproducing shriek of the carcanids which infected half of our party. Yeah, they weren’t too happy with me about that one.
One Wrong Move…
Unfortunately, for all the creativity and challenges Another Bug Hunt throws at you, the module still often felt empty or unfair. The different locations inside the module have many rooms and spaces for the players to explore, but it seemed like at least half of the rooms had literally nothing inside of them. Not so much as ammunition or a bit of worldbuilding lore. At one point, two other characters and I explored a wing of the base that had four rooms in it, we found nothing in each room, and then the carcanid monster showed up by a matter of chance and cornered us there, making the whole misadventure a potentially lethal waste of time.
In the second base of the module the players meet a lot of new faces in the forms of NPC’s, unfortunately these NPC’s are very bland in both personality and ability and don’t add much to the module other than objective markers (Warden note: Kinda my fault, but to be fair the game throws all nine NPC’s at the players at the same time, slightly overwhelming). Some of the NPCs even accidentally got some of our valuable equipment destroyed when we weren’t in the room, which could either be a very frustrating or a funny and interesting obstacle for the party to overcome, depending on the players I suppose. I will say though, in a game where resources are limited, something like that can be devastating.
Stare into the Dark
The Mothership rulebook is also missing important mechanics for its genre and at times even breaks its own guidelines. Mothership is a survival horror game where players should fight as a last possible option if they mean to survive. The rulebook itself says “if you’re fighting, you’re losing”. So what other options are there? The two options I think of the most are running and hiding. Both of those are either very easy or very hard in Mothership considering that there is no stealth or chase mechanic to be found. Hiding from carcanids became a lot less suspenseful when I realized I just had to describe to the Warden how I was hiding and he had to allow it to be successful considering there was no roll for me to fail.
And take a Step
Choosing to run from carcanids created a similar problem. When we got to an exciting moment on a bridge where we were running from several carcanid monsters, the Warden realized there was no chase mechanic. So we just moved our max default distance every turn, and so did the carcanids, and we were either guaranteed to escape with our lives or die on that bridge depending on where we and the carcanids started the chase.
Now, Mothership does have a dash/sprinting action but that adds little variety to a drawn out chase sequence. Essentially, players go from saying “I move my max distance” every time it’s their turn to saying, “I dash” every time it’s their turn. They technically could choose to shoot the carcanids instead of dash, but that would be entirely futile against such an overwhelming threat. Our Warden for the game has since admitted to me that he wishes he ran that scene differently by improving his home-brewed chase mechanic. Even if he’s right I still think the lack of that sort of mechanic leaves a hole in the rulebook. I’m sure other Wardens running games of Mothership will feel tempted to have a chase sequence throughout their campaigns and be left with the same issue.
Bullets Fly
Finally, for a rulebook that says itself, “if you’re fighting, you’re losing”, it forces the players to fight a lot. For example, our chase on the bridge started because we had to get to the other side of it, there was no way around, and the carcanids were swarming in the middle of it. There was no way to get to the objective except to fight our way through the carcanids, a fight that would be impossible. (Wardens note: There was an alternate path across the bridge in the form of a sneaky catwalk, but my players decided to save that for the return trip).
Another objective requires players to delve into the dark and power-shortened basement levels of the terraforming facility. A scary and memorable mission to be sure, but again, one that would inevitably lead to a fight that is entirely unfair to the players. Even with upgraded gear and weapons, the module and rulebook stay true to their message that fights are very much in the enemy’s favor.
Another Bug Hunt has a simple and memorable premise that will prove exciting, challenging, and at times hilariously terrifying to both new and experienced TTRPG players. Unfortunately, missing key mechanics make certain scenes frustrating to navigate, and a lack of items and content make exploring and taking risks feel unrewarding and frustrating. I would recommend playing Another Bug Hunt with experienced players and having a thorough discussion with the party on how to handle certain mechanics before playing. Also, consider sprinkling in some homebrew lore or items to scatter through the module to keep the game feeling fresh throughout the entire playthrough.
Get Another Bug Hunt on PDF or Print Here!
Also check out Ella’s article on KPop Demon Hunters!
