Adventure Calls - A Pound of Flesh

I'm back with another month's worth of adventure! For March, we read A Pound of Flesh, the Mothership module by by Donn Stroud, Sean McCoy, and Luke Gearing, with illustrations by McCoy and Jan Buragay. The text has two primary modes; one for establishing the setting, and one for running the three scenarios in the setting. I think both valences of the text are really good! So, once again, I'll be digging a little into the text to talk about what works for me and what didn't.

Scene II: A Room in the Castle: The City is a Prison.

My sense is that there's demand for really great "city modules." I'm not well versed enough in the literature to know if there are any texts that are ascendant, or have captured the market position of "the good one" but it kind of seems to me like the idea of a city module remains attractive to people. I'm spinning this out a little because I don't know that it's ever personally been something I've desired. Several of my favorite games that I've run have been centered in weird cities, and I did have a nice time the very last time I played 5e D&D in Dragon Heist, largely because of the city setting. But for all that, I don't know that I've felt a big lack of or need for specialized tools for city stuff.

Happily, A Pound of Flesh is here with more to teach me. The city/station of Prospero's Dream ties together its various parts and people in some really exciting ways that I think are illuminating about what the possibility of "city play" can be.

Take, for example, Pound's very first page of text (titled even "The Basics"). It details a bunch of stuff that's easy to handwave away, like "how do you get in?" and "what's the entry procedure like?" but here those things are meaningful. Part of that is the literal setting - a space station has a lot more constraints on entry than a terrestrial city. But a big part is also just great setting writing; in the Dream, your money is also your Oxygen ration. Run out of creds, and you get thrown into the open air prison slums. Then, you get to read about how much everyday services will cost - you'll be charged a docking fee, more if you're also refueling, a daily oxygen tax, you'll have to buy a special license to sell things, and you'll have to pay to keep your weapons locked up.

I've read a few takes on this idea (a city with rules against which players will experience friction), but this is far and away the most successful of them. I think it's because this captures more closely what city living is like for people like me - it's expensive! All the time I'm making choices and wondering if I'm getting a good deal, or how much longer I can keep this up before I run out of cash. The rules are also patently unfair, enriching the powerful and immiserating the disenfranchised. And, importantly, they're also pretty simple. It's easy to read a lot into "oxygen tax" but the important detail for play is just that it's a flat fee per day. If your player characters don't want to asphyxiate, they had better get to work.

The other standout feature of the city for me is the tangled web of relations between people, with those grounded really solidly in the materiality of living in the space station. The city is run by a drug-running criminal gang; what does that mean? Well, it means that they have the most guns and money on the station, so if you get in trouble with them, they can make you regret it. But it also means they're dependent on the city for the flow of their product. In fact, they're beholden to the religious institution, which maintains the oxygen-recycling trees of the station that are necessary for synthesizing the drug. They're also tightly connected to the labor union, which distributes the drug in exchange for a cut of the profits, which go back to fighting interstellar corporate lobbying. You don't just have three factions situated in a city ecosystem, the text gives you a strong but straightforward throughline to each of them. We know how they have to relate to each other, because we understand the underlying material substrate of the situation.

It isn't quite perfect - I don't, for example, really understand how the labor union is organized or why; what's the corpo presence like on the Dream? Do they have a contract with the gang, Golyanovo

II Bratva (ie, does this criminal organization operate like a corp)? Or, another example, how does the church acquire the other component for the drug manufacturing, which is hidden in the horrible and monster-filled undercity? If it's as deadly as the text suggests, wouldn't people wonder why priests are disappearing? If the priests are sufficiently well armed to make the trek, wouldn't people notice? These are questions that I can invent answers to; I mention it not to be pointing out plot holes or complaining about my suspension of disbelief, but instead to point out that I think having really solid answers to the fundamental questions of material and how it moves basically does the important work for you. These little quirks suggest to me that you shouldn't try to muck around or get to clever with it. Just let the priests have the cursed fruit for the drug production! Just have the criminal gang be a corp (they're the same thing anyway, really).

Act III: Mine Enemies are All Knit Up in Their Scenarios

The city is the standout to me, but it's closely interwoven with three scenarios. I'd characterize the text as that there are two minor plot threads kind of subservient to the third big one. Those are: an impending teamster strike, as the labor union demands support from the gang against an awful corpo syndicate, an uprising of the dispossessed who want their debt erased, and the spreading infection of cybernetic body horror disease that threatens to turn the entire station into a biomechanical nightmare.

One of those is more eye-catching than the other two, and so I can't fault the text for centering it. It's probably more accurate to say that it appears to me that the cybernetic body horror disease is the central idea for the setting, and the other plots just kind of grew out of fleshing out the location. That's not to say that the strike and the uprising aren't interesting - I actually think they're great fodder for a game here and probably at least as useful, especially since you can fold them in without totally warping the status quo.

The text does a few things to support GMs in running the scenarios. Largely, these take the form of short sidebars in the various locations around the station, keyed either to a specific thread's progress (eg, Strike 2) or, slightly less commonly, to the abstract level of chaos on the station (denoted by the general term Phase and a number; more practically, the text only ever does this for endgame stuff, Phase 3). There's a table at the front that details the gradual descent of each of the three scenarios and provides some indicative events to help the station feel like it's changing over time. I'm trying not to sound like a guy who's only watched Boss Baby here, but I'm getting huge Dungeon World vibes from this - this is pretty exactly how I've always imagined DW's Fronts! Especially worth stealing here though is the layout. I think putting the events in a chain like this all together is really useful for seeing at a glance how the station might change, as well as how the scenarios might impact each other. The sidebar style in the locations I think is also very useful. The specific language I think is definitely useful for quick glances, but I think my personal taste would be to key those developments a little more granularly.

The last thing I want to say is that I think each location is really well done. Each feels like a little "mini-dungeon" (ala the "dungeons" in Against the Cult of the Reptile God). Different kinds of spaces get different degrees of detail; the nightclub is only minimally sketched, with three distinct levels, but the cybermod shop gets the full isometric treatment with 9 individual rooms laid out. The variety works for me, and I can appreciate the logic (the cybernetics surgeon has specialized info useful to the real story), but it is a little like watching an old cartoon and being able to tell which props will be stationary and which are about to dance. Plus I think a fight scene in the bar sounds cool and it'd be fun to support that with a floorplan.

Funnily enough, it's the final area which is meant to be a dungeon, Caliban's Heart, that doesn't really inspire me - it's a perfectly serviceable deathtrap with lots of gross flesh & metal, but that's about it. There isn't a theme or particularly shocking revelation. I think the other thing the other locations have that Caliban's Heart doesn't is that they can sell me on the fiction of being real spaces made for a purpose and inhabited by people; the Heart is instead nightmarish in a dream-logic-y sort of way. There's maybe something interesting in that to dig out - contrasting the cold, rational realism of the station with gonzo and inexplicable science fantasy horror. And frankly I imagine delving the dungeon to be the least important and probably least likely outcome in a game like Mothership - way more time is going to be spent living with the weirdness as it crescendos and trying to figure out what's going on. But it does feel a little like a let-down!

Exit, Pursued by Bear

Three adventures in, I think my tastes are becoming pretty clear to myself - the adventure writing that I'm most excited to use are those texts that have a strong idea about the shape of the material condition on the ground. Ie, who's there and what are they doing and why are they in that place doing those things. A Pound of Flesh not only has some really excellent stuff in this vein, but also communicates a lot of it really clearly! I think those are the two things going in my toolbox - thinking about ways to make scenarios speak to readers such that their development is easy to imagine and cross reference, and thinking about ways to make the locations meaningful, characterful, and part of play by relating the players to the material conditions there. That's it for this month! I don't know what we're reading for April yet... Check back later for that!