12 Apostles in the Garden

Way back when I was running GREAT SCREAMING HELL, there were a few glimpses of antagonistic NPCs working on things in the background. They were never able to be properly fleshed out, and this is barely more than what I had then, but it is a good jumping off point for adaptation into other games. Drop these NPCs into scenarios as actors doing their own things, intersecting for whatever reason with the scenario that the players are dealing with. If they survive, maybe they can pull on that thread.

The Apostles

I. The Beast

An enormous naked man, flayed head to toe. All raw steak muscle and capelike strips of scabby skin. His skull has bloomed outwards like a chrysanthemum. It hurts to look at the folded point of golden light in the center of those ivory petals. Stands in silence when there is a handler present. Only left alone when there is violence to be done.

II. Origami Android

Glossy white sufaces fold and unfold noiselessly in an ever-shifting dance of polygons. There is the impression of a face when it is in the shape of a person, a form it takes rarely outside of meetings with the Apostles. Both form and self are infinitely malleable. You see a cat down the alley, pure white; it leaps onto the embankment wall, folds into a crane, and flies away.

III. Pallid Man

Microgravity tall, corpse-pallor pale. Brittle translucent hair down to his waist. Clothing was once white, now stained and stained and stained again. A face that one cannot imagine ever expressing joy or anger, only faint and distant resigned melancholy. Smells of formaldehyde and pond scum.

IV. DEVIL

Projection of a tall man in a suit sharp enough to cut. His head is a horse's skull aflame. Wears a noose like a necktie. A charmer, a flatterer, a liar. Casual, friendly condescension to everyone, like you're already old friends, like he already knows you. He does. He already knows the worst about you. It's okay. He understands.

V. Sage

An orangutan with silvering fur. Scars on his knuckles, a betel-leaf habit. Antique rifle; bolt action, ammo cast by hand. A yellowing book clutched in his foot. Speaks like a tenured professor who checked out a long time ago, but still feels a glimmer of hope for the future, if only these goddamn zygotes showing up in composition shut up, did some drugs, and started actually asking the right questions.

VI. The Magistrate

A fat dolphin, pointlessly re-engineered for limbs not seen since ambulocetus, as he's dependent on a walker to carry him around.. Resplendent silk robes, purple and gold. Phallic staff of office. Barely tolerated. Obscenely rich - he can afford to have fingers to put rings on. Always accompanied by some consort or another or three.

VII. Knife-Child

Filthy rags and matted hair. A knife dancing between fingers, never stopping. Implant ports along the temples and spine. No telling if the mind inside the cyberbrain is the original or a passenger. Cunning, rage-simmering, impatient.

VIII. Badgerstripe

A short, stocky, dark-skinned woman. A bleached stripe runs front to back through her close-shorn hair. She stands out from the crowd for a moment before she vanishes back into the anonymity. Talk to her and she's reassuringly ordinary; practical, stubborn, working-class. She'll put two bullets through a skull with a lone terse warning and no hesitation afterwards.

IX. Standard Model

A off-the-shelf android model. Cheap, bland, anonymous. Remote operated. The voice remains the same, but sometimes the vocabulary changes. Sometimes it seems to forget things it should remember. It tries to be neutral, tries to balance the others. Fails often.

X. Gold Eyes

An androgyne in officer's garb, medals pinned on their chest. No pupil, no iris, just gold like coins. Detached from all but the glory of victory by well-executed tactics, the pursuit they chase with the obsession of an artist.

XI. Frozen

An old cryopod, two generations out of date, set up on treads. The fluid within is so murky with sediment that the inhabitant cannot be made out past a blurred shadow. An ancient vocoder croaks short, near-unintelligible sentences as if the machine is in pain.

XII. The Mask

Wears a grimacing red demon mask, the kind used to scare away lesser spirits. Carries a sword, an honest antique kept sharp. Speaks slowly, cautiously, rarely. Occasionally trips over malapropisms. A hyena sleeps at their feet, sliver collar implant on its neck.

 

The Tree of Life

Translucent blue trunk spiralling up from pseudopod roots, splitting into thousands of fractal branches with orange-gold leaves and heavy blue-gold-pink fruit glittering in the sunsetlight. Wherever it is, it makes itself the center. Remove the sandals from your feet, for this is holy ground.

The Tree is a surviving bud of ancient alien biotech - essentially a "biosphere in a box". It can grow just about anything with sufficient raw foodstock and energy. If it really started to take off, it would grow to the size of a small continent by the time it was done. It can write the code for neogenic species in a few hours.

It's intelligent in its own way, and can be can be communicated with after a fashion, but seems to be closer to a gorilla than Solaris. It's neither hostile nor malicious. It's actually somewhat fond of humans (who knows why), going as far as to adjust its output to be more or less human appropriate, at least in terms of biochemistry. In other ways, not so much.

The Apostles want to get the Tree or one of its buds offworld, so that it can spread across human space. On paper, this is a great idea, considering how much more effective it is than traditional terraforming.

Here's the issue. Five issues, actually.

Issue one: Terraforming hypercorps are, naturally, not going to be pleased with a device that does their job faster, better, and for free.

Issue two: The Apostles are trapped planetside.

Issue three: The Tree is damaged and missing components all of which are both ancient and alien.

Issue four: The Apostles are only unified in terms of restoring and exporting the Tree. The means of both are points of contention as are end result. Rivalries brew. Other aims weave in and out.

Issue five: If the Tree were able to take root on a suitable world, it would form an environment of itself, and this environment would self-replicate. That would put any humans on that world (and its later seed worlds) as inhabitants of an ecosystem they would have little to no control over. A return - in essence if not in specifics - to the days on the savanna, at the mercy of the world.

Organically-Grown Investigations

Take all this with a salt block: however good a game I might talk, I have never seen an investigative game to conclusion. But I think I have gotten the knack of beginnings for sandboxy investigation games after four sessions of Great Screaming Hell, (and a first aborted attempt at Esoteric Enterprises). If not a knack, at least a decent enough starting point to start refining. My own brand of mind goblins tends to burn out campaigns after a half dozen sessions or sooner so I don't know how viable it is for long-term investigations - I also tend to plan far too big and so folks never get to a proper answer.

Those caveats out of the way, here are some of my thoughts on the matter and how I set up the components of an investigation. I'll be diving into my notes for this one, so expect to see behind the curtain of GREAT SCREAMING HELL.

Avoiding the Mystery Box

You can throw all sorts of stuff into an investigative sandbox with no plan. That's cool, go wild. It helps to have a couple big picture movers-and-shakers out there but they can be buried under layers of other aspects.

In the aftermath of that initial burst it becomes necessary to do a bit of retroactive tissue connection. If X person did action A, whatever motivation they are revealed to have later on should be consistent with that action.

Inciting Event

Something has to kick off the investigation. Whether the players are proper investigators or just folks caught up in things, the best way to kick off the investigation is something big, mysterious, and in-your face.

Example: The players are ambushed by a monster while transporting a strange cargo.

Seeds and Threads

The core of an investigation. Seeds are the clues found during play, and Threads are the things that connect or expand upon those seeds. Simple enough. To ease up on work for the referee's end of things, the inciting event should open the door (If the players are birds, dump a bucket of suet on them), and further sessions can focus, connect, refine, and tie in new stuff. It's okay to come up with answers after the fact - I actually really like the mind game of tying together disparate parts into a whole. It's also okay that the players don't get those answers handed to them.

Basically, when prepping for your next session, make a bullet list of your available seeds and see where they might connect and lead, which ones might interfere with the players, and how thread (especially ones involving factions) will act and react to changes in the world.

Example: The first session of GSH contains a truckload (har) of seed questions.

• Who is FRIEND? Why are they shipping the Box?
• Who is Scipio? Why did they want the Box?
• What was in the Box? Where did it come from?
• [Behind the Veil: The box contained a Navigator, and thus the only remaining functional warp interface in the system. It was presumed lost or destroyed during the aftermath of the Zaibatsu's departure. FRIEND was apparently trying to get it out of Colony Central.] 
• What was and what was up with the Beast?
• What was up with the radio station?

I don't need to come up with all the answers to these at session 1 - but I do need to remember that the questions exist.

For the second session the players ended up investigating the radio tower. (As a strike against myself, this was not under their investigative power but me guiding things as referee), and moved right on in the third to the abandoned Weather Station. This brought with it its own seeds.

• Dess Kartz' testimony  
• He and his companions were attempting to recover the "Holy Interface" (IE, the cargo)
• The android cult of the Church of Skin 
• Had its own Interface (the  horrible thing in the garage)
• Under investigation by both the tecnavi ship-mother in orbit around the moon, and by a couple of mercenaries of the Legio Africanus (Scipio's boys)
• [Behind the Veil: I never decided if the Legio Africanus guys were killed by the tecnavi agent or by Lady Badgerlock.]

In session 4 the logic core is cracked open, revealing that the Church of Skin began after the androids were gifted with a carapace of some unknown creature by a man who came down from the High Desert, and that this was the origination of the cult and the breaking of the androids' programming.

[Behind the Veil: The carapace is actually from what would have been the central, overarching threat of GSH. Had this campaign continued, there would have been a thread pointing north to the Redoubts and beyond to the High Desert to find out the truth.]

[Behind the Veil: The radio tower was essentially a last-ditch effort by the Church to get the Interface. Something spooked them (a visitation by Lady Badgerlock) and in their panic they attempted to bootstrap themselves into their own Interface, hoping that they could grab the Navigator and use it to patch over the crippling flaws of their own and help them ascend to divinity]

[Behind the Veil: The Beast, Lady Badgerlock, and the Third Man are all members of the same group. Their plans and rivalries were not yet developed by the time things fell apart, though I had some imaginings that the Third Man had his own agenda.]

So you see the basic pattern. Scatter seeds, a thread or two become major developments, others are weaved in where they might make sense. Don't let new elements overpower learning more about what's going on with the current thread. Make sure new developments are consistent with what happened previously.

Taking it Forward

I hope to be running Esoteric Enterprises soon, and that'll be a good opportunity to put this all into practice once again. Perhaps get better at converting my own notes into usable-for-other formats - seeds and threads lend themselves well to flowcharts (or if I wanted to get really out there, something like a Twine story with hyperlinks all over...wait...wait a god damn minute)

BRB that Twine idea is taking off you are witnessing the creative process in real time. 

Mothership Play Report: 4:33 Intermission

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

A short intermediary session, featuring

• Manny the scientist (JOZO)
• Jes, the tecnavi (Zelda)
• Zach, permanently drunk biker gang member (thatotherguy)

Several weeks after the events at the weather station and dealing with the Church of Skin, the gang has collected their payment from FRIEND and returned to life in Wasteland Park (generated via Michael Raston's Infinigrad tables).

Wasteland Park was one of Colony Central's public parks, but over the course of the war has turned into a kowloonlike warren of shipping containers, groundcars, cargohaulers, tents, lean-tos, and clapboard sheds. The warren is so tightly packed that most passages are single-file. Disease is rampant and it is one of the poorest districts in Colony Central. Paradoxically, it is also among one of the safest, due to the actions of the Trollgarden, the dominant gang. These malfomed folks (signified by the exotic flowers always on their person) are led by a notorious glutton, but have managed to maintain the stability and safety of Wasteland Park against threats both outward and inward.

Using Humza K's community rules , Wasteland Park has Identity 6, Prosperity 4, Safety 11, Governance 7, Legitimacy 10, Sustainability: 8

Manny takes the plunge and, using some of the funds gained through the job for FRIEND and some support from the Trollgarden, establishes a small clinic to treat the sick in the community, increasing Identity by 1. In the weeks since the clinic started he has made friends with the local drunk Zach, and now has run into the tecnavi Jes, carrying a message from Shipmother Talibiri.

It seems that the tecnavi the group found at the weather station put in a good word for them, as Talibiri is offering a bit of aid. She is willing to help crack open Dess Kartz' logic core, in exchange for access to the information. The trio take up this offer, as while beaming it to lunar orbit is a bit slower than trying it in the clinic, it is safer.

A few hours pass before the cracked monitor in the clinic switches to a public newsfeed - hundreds of Lamplighters, more than anyone has seen in the years since Lantern Boy's presumed death, are marching against Zaibatsu riot cops near the space elevator. Violence is already breaking out and looks like it only going to get worse.

Manny takes charge, whipping up a plan to run to the front and helping injured civilians - neither the militant Lamplighters nor the Zaibatsu are particularly friendly towards those outside their respective factions. They sneak out of Wasteland Park to where Zach is keeping his delivery van, and book it downtown.

There's tear gas and molotovs in the air when they get there, rubble and wounded in the streets. Taking care to stick to the sidelines, the crew are able to pick up the wounded and set up a makeshift clinic in an abandoned cafe. By the time the violence lulls, six folks who would otherwise be dead aren't. Talibiri had finished cracking the core by this point, and had the information ready for them when they made it back to the clinic.

The logic core contents are as follows: the androids had gathered at the weather station as part of typical android behavior - non-emancipated androids will, in the absence of direct command, gather together in herds at the nearest place of authority. So they were standing around exchanging minor bits of data for months until someone - a tall, gaunt man with lank blond hair and the disheveled appearence of the truly apathetic - arrived and presented the herd with what appeared to be a sizable fragment of carapace.

There are no insects or crustaceans of that size known to live on Maha Raurava.

After that, it was a swift course in the establishment of the Church of Skin. Dogmas are set down and debated in gigabytes of raw text files. Sermons are recorded, as are the murders and skinnings. This continues for some time, until Dess Kartz is sent off by truck to the radio tower he was found and killed in. Of note is that the man never returns, and that the garage has no horrific amalgam of flesh and metal in it when he leaves (and the core has no mention of plans to build such a thing), which is only shortly before the events of Episode 1 and less than a week before the events of Episodes 2 and 3.

Manny grabs his phone and calls FRIEND. The line rings for abnormally long before FRIEND's cheery voice comes over.

"I'm sorry I missed you, but I'm dead!"

Mothership Play Report: Weather Report

MY INTERNET IS BACK. Episode 1! Episode 2! Let's go!

• Berkeley, karaoke gynoid (Michael Kennedy)
• Manny, scientist (JOZO)
• Rob Nixon, teamster (CWBunny)

The crew wake up to the sound of gunshots in the street beyond their cheap hotel. Fearing the worst, the crew creeps to the window and peers outside to get a glimpse of the balcony.

The heavyworlder Manny spoke to at Amarpreet's the night before is there, and in no-nonsense fashion tells the scientist off for blabbing about his alliance with FRIEND so openly. But, it seems that Manny has a stroke of luck in his drunkenness and managed to find a friend of FRIEND.

The heavyworlder offers to take care of Hank (who is still unconscious and trapped in bee-themed drug dreams), as Berkeley and Manny creep out of the motel and into the street.

In the morning light they are able to clearly see the graffiti on the façade opposite their roach motel: "LANTERN BOY LIVES". Lamplighters this far east is definitely a new development.

In the alleyway across the street, they find a pair of legs sticking out of a trash can. These legs are attached to a man in filthy robes with a cheap Rottweiler mask on his head and a sword on his belt - a Dog Knight. There is a short exchange that lasts only until the Dog Knight hears the battle sounds from down the road, after which he excitedly clambers up the wall and begins running across the rooftops, eager to kill some space fascists.

The pair are finally able to get a line through to FRIEND, who is uncharacteristically agitated and antsy-sounding. He tells them to head to the junkyard (thankfully in the opposite direction of most of the fighting), and to pick up a ride there. The pair hoof it, and in doing so stumble across Rob Nixon, a dockworker looking to join the riots, smash some heads, and make off with some loot scrap.

The junkyard is close when the air is broken by the unmistakable BOOM of an artillery cannon going off behind them, and close. At a dead sprint they run through the gate, catching a glimpse of the junkyard owner barricaded in the main office, loading his shotgun. They find a groundcar with a smiley-face sticker on the windshield, keys already in the ignition. Rob floors the gas and they tear out into the street, wheels screaming.

The only proper way out of town and back onto the highway is via the main thoroughfare, which is right where the fighting was and is.

And there's a fucking tank there sitting right in the intersection, bedecked in Front colors. The rioters are in disarray, covering their retreat with molotovs and homemade tear gas grenades as the riot-suited Fronters open up with machine guns. There's a flash-impression image of the rooster-and-cat insignia of the Interstellar Sex Worker's Union.

The luckiest thing in the world happens, then: Rob guns the engine, pulping two Front stormtroopers. Berkeley rolls down the window and fires her rigging gun at a building. By some absolute miracle, the cable holds AND the tank misses with its main cannon, and the absolute madmen make a perfect quarter-circle turn. As they tear out of town towards the highway, they toss the shattered remains of the rigging gun out of the window and glance back to see the tiny form of the Dog Knight approaching the tank all on his lonesome.

With all that excitement out of the way, the group heads back to the radio tower pull-off, and continues along the northwards road they saw in Session 2.

Of this part there's nothing really of note, except when they passed by an automated refueling station - they drove on by without stopping, but while watching out the window Manny locked eyes with a short, stocky Afro-Sino woman with a buzz cut and a white badgerstripe, standing next to a fancy groundcar.

They go a short distance further down the road before deciding to turn around and investigate. The station is empty when they return - all that's left of Ms. Badgerstripe and her car is a cluster of a couple hours worth of cigarette butts where she had been standing. The crew return to the road and head towards the weather monitoring station.

They pull off near the base of the hill, where the road ends. The truck tires from the radio station are clear in the dirt, heading up the path to the station. A quick bio and thermal scan reveals nothing out of the ordinary besides a pair of human corpses - soldiers of the Legio Africanus. Their gear is intact and undamaged, and there are no wounds present save a tiny pinprick on each neck. Berkeley is able to identify it as the end result of a needle gun, most likely poisoned.

Their armor and SMGs are stripped and repossessed.

Through all of the ascent, the crew notes that they don't seem to have been noticed by the androids. Berkeley, the group's social cover, tries pinging them but gets nothing but a flurry of "I'm busy" notices.

Through the station's main entrance, they step into the Church of Skin.

Homemade pews form a hemicircle around a pulpit made from the receptionist's desk. Out-of-the-box manniquindroids pose in their own bloody stations of the cross, draped intapestries of human hide. AR tags scroll through prayers and stories of their mythos.

Berkeley takes it worse than the others and freezes up, her eyes going traditional bluescreen. Manny attempts the therapy-hack, but is too shaken up to succeed.

And then, noise. Guns go up, and a tiny, child-sized person in an environment suit -a tecnavi- emerges from behind the choir pews, hands up.

They aren't saying anything discernable, but clearly don't want any trouble. They sidle over to the door and back out. With some effort, they manage to say "I leave, you also" before making their way out of sight down the hill.

There's still no sign of the androids, but everyone feels a thrumming, humming, pulse emanating from the garage. It feels as if space is contracting and expanding, as if breathing. Manny is the one to brave the door.

The androids are there, and what's left of the humans, piled up in a tantric knot on the back of a cargo-hauler truck. Metal and meat and knitted together with zealous enthusiasm, throbbing in pain as it draws on the inadequate power supply of the station.

But Manny manages to resist panicking. With deadly clarity, he warns away Berkeley and Rob, grabs some cans of gasoline, and sets the entire place ablaze. The crew leaves immediately - they are able to find the tecnavi's tracks for a while, but not the tecnavi.

It's a long, quiet ride back to Colony Central.

As they drive through downtown, they see a short, stocky woman with a white badgerstripe, smoking a cigarette.

Great Screaming Hell

Space Engine

Maha Raurava

• Parent Star: HIP 90881 - G3V (250 LY from Sol)
• Gravity: 0.92 G
• Atmosphere: Breathable at lower altitudes near ocean. High desert regions lack sufficient pressure, requiring the use of equipment.
• Temperature: Hot, averaging between 25 and 35 C year round. Low seasonal variance.
• Overall Climate: Dry desert and badlands. Single ocean surrounded by terraformed regions.
• Biosphere: Seedship-modified, Earth-derived. Clustered around primary ocean and surrounding lowlands: high desert remains almost completely lifeless. Most is either non-nutritious or mildly poisonous to most nonmodified humans.
• Moons: 1
• Other Bodies in System: Besides asteroids and small rocky / ice worlds, two gas giants and a superterran are present. All have been surveyed by remote probe, no permanent settlements made.
• Orbital Infrastructure: 3 cylinder O'Neill cluster Seraph and space elevator connected to Colony Central. Communication and weather monitoring satellite grid.

Initial Terraforming: Maha Raurava had liquid water, a decent magnetosphere, and some microbial life already when the seedship arrived. The resulting terraforming was, like in so many other cases, marginal - a few decades of rushed atmospheric alteration and introduction of tailored organisms. The particular seedship (believed to be the Celestial 10 Beads of  Electrum Suspended Above the Event Horizon) left behind life that, while using Terran building blocks, was developed whole-cloth - as alien as one can find while retaining the same biochemistry and still using DNA. (Use Barlowe's Expedition for quick visual inspiration, here). 

Human Settlement: Colonization rights for Maha Raurava were bought on the cheap by the Watanabi Group (henceforth referred to as "The Zaibatsu") for use as a debt forgiveness penal colony. Settlers seeking to escape their creditor companies and those forced to relocate immigrated in large numbers. This has lead to a higher-than-average diversity in the population for a marginal world.

Colony Collapse: Precisely why the Zaibatsu pulled out of Maha Raurava remains unknown, at least to the people on the ground. Rumors that the Group Chair's death kicked off an inheritance crisis are widespread, and seem the most sound option for why 80% of the company's personnel boarded the lone warp-capable vessel and took off to parts unknown, leaving a single family scion behind. The rest of the population is trapped.

The Current Situation: The Zaibatsu currently controls Seraph, the elevator, and a small amount of territory at its base in Colony Central. The rest of Maha Raurava has been carved up between dozens of factions vying for control. None of the original factions have remained intact, having dissolved and reformed over and over again.

The Easy-to-Digest Blurb: Borderlands in the Sengoku Period.

Fun Facts about Great Screaming Hell

• There's a small population of uplifted whales in the ocean - most came here for political asylum.
• Three Redoubter arcologies sit at the far north of inhabited territory.
• Tecnavi shipmother Talabiri was stranded here during the Collapse. They spend most of their time in orbit around the moon.
• A Zaibatsu climate-observation station in Northeast Quarter has been overtaken by rogue androids that have developed a religion glitch. They seek their true creators, believing inferior humans to be the offspring of some mad demiurge.
• The area around Colony Central is home to a sizable Hasidic population who have taken to ranching, and some rumors of cows a bit smarter than they have any right to be.
• One of the few lifeforms capable of surviving the high desert is something like a large turtle. More notable is that its eggs possess leathery shells so thick that they must be pierced by an outside force - those separated from their mother might remain in there for quite some time, and emerge near-berserk with hunger if they have not starved to death.
• A Fixer by the name of Calamity Jean has emerged among the thelychroma population. She has managed to carve out a sizeable and stable territory through alliance, tactical brilliance, and complete ruthlessness.
• The Dog Knights have been moving eastward from their normal territory west of Colony Central.
• The United Planetary Front has managed to bisect Highway 1 between Colony Central and Colony East, bridging their territory on the south coast with their possessions in Northeast Quarter. This is bad news for everyone.
• There's graffiti on the walls: "LANTERN BOY LIVES".

Further updates for adventures upon Great Screaming Hell may be found here: Episode 1, Episode 2

Mothership Play Report: Weekend at Amarpreet's

Previously on Mothership...

Today on Mothership...

• Berkeley, karaoke gynoid (Michael Kennedy)
• Manny, scientist (JOZO)
• Hank Price, marine (Max Cantor)

Berkeley wakes up in an exaggeratedly-inoffensive hospital room. There is a TV on the wall and a door, though she knows that the door leads nowhere: this is a retrieval simulation.

The ancient television clicks on, revealing the scanlined smiley face icon of Friend. They say that they've reviewed the footage from the crash and have put together a response to the event. They already have all the information they can glean from Berkeley, and so they offer her a choice: they will delete her current  version and restore her from a backup prior to the event, or she may remain part of the investigation and retain her memories. She chooses the latter.

Friend's smiley face, burned into the screen, is the last thing she sees before waking up.

The simulation dissolves and Berkeley finds herself waking up in a new body (actually a better model than she had started out with) and swiftly brought up to speed with the other two hires, Manny and Hank. Neither had been told of what actually happened, having been informed by Friend that they are invesigating the radio tower for signs of the Ground Beef Bois (named so for what they do to their faces) pushing southward. Berkeley, at the behest of Friend, does not tell them about the monster, the crash, or the man in the box.

The three are flown out this time on a VTOL, hitching a ride with some mercenaries of another faction Friend has influence in, who are headed off to the open warfare north of Highway 1.

There is little of note on the switchback up the hill, besides the buzzard-bats circling on thermals in the distance and some traces of machine oil on the trail that winds around the hill and heads off to the north. Here they find a broken logic core, but are unable to get any information from it.

The station at the top of the hill is little more than the tower and a single prefab building surrounded by a chain link fence. The grounds have been overgrown with desert brush, recently torn up by wide tire tracks.

The door is unlocked.

Inside it is dark. Hank's thermal HUD reads a form scrambling out of the room and down the hall, and in the light pouring in from the door they find the room to be coated in a drying visceral slurry. Five human skins hang from the ceiling by strings woven of their hair.

Pursuing the figure leads them to the generator room - the scrabbling of shoes on dirt can be heard. Hank opens up and sprays bullets through the door and kicking it in. Inside, the generator appears to have been disassembled, many components removed. A hole has been dug into the concrete floor, leading to a long sloping tunnel of reddish dirt. The walls are honeycombed with smaller burrows. At the mouth is an android wearing a ill-fitting human skin, seams splitting open.

Manny loses control at this point and ineffectually begins punching the android, who screams "Deliver us O Lord I think therefore I think therefore!" and sends a private message to Berkeley begging her to "call off her bruteish servant." She manages to restrain Manny and pulls him off and manages to get some information from the android.

The android (his name was Dess Katrz in my notes but they never asked in the game) had been left behind by others of his cabal. They had set up here in an attempt to "retrieve the Blessed Interface", so that they might combine it with their own [Interface]. Hank knows enough about esoteric theology to figure out that Dess is talking about some means of communicating with the divine. Berkeley plays the game well enough to get the location of the rest of the androids: an old Zaibatsu climate monitoring station north of their current location. Hank and Manny successfully remove Dess' logic core without damaging it.

The trio contacts Friend, who gives them the same option as before - take the money now, or extend their contract. They won't be able to get a ride north until tomorrow, when  Friend sends the cleanup crew in.

The three decide to stay on the job and get a rideshare into town (the very same that had appeared abandoned the first time through). The woman driving them there seems a bit perplexed at their choice to go there, as the town has recently come under the control of the United Planetary Front (the local band of jackbooted space fascists). The team is obviously not very pleased at this, but they decide to stick it out for one night. They get through the checkpoint, papers all in order, and rent a room at a cheap motel for the night. There are banners on facades and thugs on the street corners, and people are going about their business with heads down.

The fact that the local ISWU (Interstellar sex workers' Union chapterhouse, (one of the oldest and toughest union orgs in human space) has clearly been burnt to the ground does not go without worry. If the Front is willing to pick a fight with ISWU, they mean to commit some serious violence.

With tensions high, the group looks for a local watering hole and settle on Amarpreet's, which has good reviews. It's run by a friendly fellow all the way from Earth, who allows Berkeley to take to the stage before the night's scheduled performers arrive. Everyone gets drunk on feni and rice wine, Hank tries to access higher dimensions because he's kind of a quack who believes in psychic meditation (4th and 5th dimensions are empty, 17th is filled with bees). Manny approaches a heavyworlder and hands them a contact card for Friend. Talk around the town is mostly about who nearby could kick out the Front - rumors of Dog Knights moving in from the west are everywhere.

And so they drink into the night, as the world continues its collapsing dance around them.

Mothership Play Report: Gospel of the Throttle

Yeah lets go! Space! Horror!

The Players

Luciamandis "Lucy" Delillo - Teamster (Slantio Pink)
Ilse Lopez - Debtboy (Volkavoy)
Zint Tchoxo - Teamster (Oblidisideryptch)
Lizana Gadora - Thelychroma chaplain (Zelda)
Solid Squid - Uplifted octopus (JOZO)
Berkeley - Liberated karaoke idol gynoid (Mike K.)

The Setup

The planet I set this on (and plan to set games on for the forseeable future) does not yet have a name. I'll get to that later It's a shithole, one of hundreds of marginal worlds bought on the cheap, terraformed to the border of habitability, and used as a dumping ground for the unwanted poor.

The CEO of the company running the colony died a few years ago, setting off a succession crisis that boiled over into a civil war when the company pulled out with the sole warp-capable starship.

The one company scion that remained controls the space elevator and primary orbital habitat. The rest is carved up among dozens of competing factions.

It's Borderlands meets the Sengoku period, basically.

The Job

The Phreak Police (for that is the name of the group) are called up by a repeat client: an anonymous benefactor who just goes by "Friend". Voice changes every time they call, no one trusts them an inch, but they pay well.

The job Friend is paying for is simple. Move a crate from Central to a city a few hundred miles eastward. Straight shot down the highway. Go to the given address, ask for Scipio. He'll take it off your hands. Do not open the box.

They load it up into the truck and with Lucy at the wheel, head out onto the highway. It's looking to be an all-night job and the sun is setting.

Solid Squid, letting cephalopodic curiosity get the best of him, investigates the box with tentacles and a thermal scanner. While he can't see the contents inside, he can clearly see that the crate is giving off heat from a web of fractal threads covering its entire surface.

Metamaterials. A payday far bigger than what Friend is offering if it can be fenced properly. Lucy brings up an occasional associate, one Thimble Slim, but the group decides that the risk is too high until they learn more - Slim's got connections with some of the more stable zaibatsus, but he's a pustulent little ratass and has let them down before.

This conversation is interrupted by the swift appearance of a sizable animal corpse in the road. Lucy's not able to brake or swerve out of the way and runs right into it. The engine is making not-great sounds.

The crew pile out of the truck to investigate. It's one of the native lifeforms - a large grazer with two legs and a stiff counterbalancing tail. Lucy and Zint grab the jack from the truck and start working on repairs. Squid, Ilse, and Berkeley investigate the creature - the body is fresh, within an hour or two, and from the blood on the ground looks like it was dragged onto the road. It smells sweet even in death, a quirk of native biochemistry.

When they return to the truck the radio's gone to static and, more worrisome, the cargo compartment is filled with handprints - all left, all is sticky black grease, trailing across the floor and up the walls from the crate.

Berkeley tries to sing a song to calm everyone down, and fails. Her logic core is not handling this well. The box is slightly hotter under the thermal. They decide to get back on the road as fast as they can, Lisana driving now.

The static on the radio shifts to a modulated voice as the red blinker of a transmission tower appears on the distant horizon.

"Deliver us, O Lord", followed by a string of numbers.

[Aside] I messed up the cipher here, but the moment was still pretty good. I'll mark puzzle improvement down on the list.[/Aside]

Lucy ends up running a program on Berkeley's logic core to get the solution: TO US TO ME BRING IT.

It's well past dark now and they haven't seen a single vehicle the entire trip. There's no change when they pass by a tiny truckstop town - no lights at all. In the beam of the headlights they catch a humanish shape leap off a decaying billboard into the darkness beside the road.

Thirty long seconds pass, and there is a thump from the crate. Then another. A steady thump of rising tempo, coming to rest at a breakneck pace. Solid Squid looks out a slot at the back of the truck with his thermal goggles.

There is a red smear behind them. Squid screams. Lisana floors it. The rest open up the back doors and start dumping whatever junk is still in there - the runner leaps over the obstacles handily.

Ilse grabs her laser cutter and sets the beam in a broad wash, illuminating the road with pale, sickly red.

Seen there, running after the truck, is something that looks like a man. Ten feet tall and clearly not meant to be that big, with mottled, wrinkled skin. The jaw and head are at an obtuse angle. Something, a new head, is emerging from the torn hole that was a mouth.

Panic grips the crew, hitting Squid and Lisana the worst. Squid gnaws off an arm in a moment of stress atavism, and the cephalopod sociopathy that sits underneath his more superficial emotions rises to the surface.

Lisana's player request that, instead of the Death Drive panic result, that she be allowed to crash the truck and die, for the kind of isolation that result would bring would be unbearable for a thelychroma (it was getting late to boot). I said sure, and the truck crashed.

No one lived. The entire party died, even the ones who only took half damage. A true and proper TPK.

Berkeley remains active long enough to pull her head up from the road. She watches as the creature slows to a walk, and ignores the fresh bodies of the Phreak Police. It strides over to the box and rips it open. From within it pulls a limp, naked man, emaciated, cybernetics on his cranium and spine. There is a glow and a distortion of space around his head like a halo. The creature bites it off, and that is all Berkeley sees.

Berkeley's player elected to not use a backup and will begin the next session with full robo-trauma.

Some thoughts now that I actually ran Mothership properly

• Folks really got into choosing character options that sounded fun, though I still need to streamline my house rules.
• Don't use a cipher generator website ten minutes before the game when you need a puzzle.
• I had to houserule a default check of 30+skill for Berkeley's singing, as it didn't fit intelligence.
• Intelligence governs a whole lot of skills, not sure my feelings on that but I think there's room to fiddle. Social attribute, possibly.
• I liked handing out stress rather than halting the flow of action to call for a save. Multiple times I got so caught up in making sure the horror was amped up that calling for a roll would basically have been in retrospect.
• 2d10  is a shit-ton of a damage.
• I feel like Mothership is strangely really good at campaigns. Or not really campaigns, but living worlds. Like there are consequences from this I can spin out in later sessions without worrying about levels and continuity of player group or burning out on a single dungeon.