It is our patriotic duty to buy Canadian Mothership modules. Emergence is a funnel adventure—like you remember playing in DCCRPG. Emergence takes place Henko Acquisitions Correctional Complex. Players play inmates who wake up after some unknown accident has damaged the facilities. They must try and escape to the surface. There is a whole lot more going on, some of which I’ll discuss below, so if you are thinking of playing stop reading now!

The game was written by Carson Brown, with art by the always excellent Brandon Yu. This is one of the books I grabbed at this years Breakout Con, which was honestly mostly me shopping. Brandon’s cover is amazing. You can almost always judge a book by its cover.

The prison complex is quite dynamic. Carson has done a lot to make prison an interesting space to explore. To start, it’s flooding! The rooms in the prison will fill with water as the players explore the space, eventually ending up mostly submerged. Every 30 minutes of game time the players will roll a d10 and increase the flood level of the location by 1. (There are 10 locations that can flood within the subterranean portion of the prison.) The power in the complex is also fluctuating. The adventure begins with the power barely functioning. Certain locations and actions by the player can move the power level up or down, which also impacts what the players can do in various locations.

The prison map is presented abstractly. Because of the flooding and damage, the route the players took to get to the starting location of the module, at the bottom of the facility, isn’t one they can follow back out. To model the confusion and unknown, each path between two locations passes through an additional location, which is determined randomly. Once determined this new location is fixed. Four of the locations in the prison are cell blocks, and a random table is used to determine what are two notable locations with the cell block. You would likely roll up these cell block locations before play, so you can figure out what’s up and which factions control them. The map in the book is nicely put together, with space to track the connection locations, cell blocks, and the the flood levels of the rooms.

The descriptions of the connections and cellblocks are more my speed, a handful of sentences, easy to quickly read. The descriptions of the ‘proper’ locations in the prison are longer: not walls of text, but also not the quickest to parse. Some room descriptions talk about the geometry of the space, where entrances and exists are located, or how one location relates to the others in the physical space of the prison. I personally don’t love this when the maps are all abstract. In this module you don’t even know what new location players will find while travelling between the spaces.

There are 6 factions described in the module, each highlighting one aspect of the prison. They are flavourful, but as presented it’s not often obvious how each would feel about one another, or about the players. To my mind, the descriptions would also be better if they focused on how the factions are reacting to current drama at the prison. Before running I would probably flesh this out more.

The rules for creating simpler funnel characters for Mothership are featured early in the module, after introducing the DM to the events taking place and the nature of the prison. Each of the characters a player creates is a prisoner. You roll 3 sets of d100 to determine their 6 digit serial number. These numbers will be used to help determine stats, and also tell the DM the truth behind a characters crime (eg: they did it, they were framed, they had a sham trial, etc). There is a new “Cohesion” stat specific to these funnel characters that begins at 3 and moves up and down during play. Players won’t know what this stat is actually for initially. The adventure includes your classic 4-up funnel character sheet.

Cohesion is tied to the underlying secret of the module, a fun twist that will help make this funnel feel like a funnel. The players are all clones! They will turn into mindless fungus monsters if they don’t find stabilizer drugs. These drugs are littered throughout the complex here and there, but certainly not enough to keep all the characters alive. The players may end up having to run away from the fungus zombie monster version of themselves. A character that reaches 20 cohesion is free of the curse.

The module ends with some suggestions on what concluding the adventure may look like, and possible future adventures. The back interior cover page is a search the room table. Something the players might do often so it’s handy to have there. The front interior cover page has stats for all the monsters, and sums up what the flooding and power levels mean. The map of the adventure is found dead centre in the module, so it’s also easy to find. Good job team!

I really liked this module. It seems like a great way to get introduced to Mothership: it’s kind of bleak, there are weird monsters, corporations being dirt bags, etc. There will be lots of chances to sacrifice one of your characters to save the rest. Also lots of chances for ignoble deaths. That’s what you want in a funnel adventure.

Is Luke Gearing too powerful? Joined by Johan Nohr and Jarrett Crader, Luke has written a hex crawl adventure for Mork Borg, Tephrotic Nightmares. That’s a solid posse of RPG people. I had impossibly high expectations for this book.

Tephrotic Nightmares is about the sea of ash, a region that was ruined by The Arsonist. Dark Sun had a Sea of Silt, so perhaps I am already biased towards liking this book. The very first thing we learn about this place is water is the currency of note, letting us know what is important and valuable up front. (I was reminded of light in Veins of the Earth.)

The order elements of an adventure are presented in is something I find intriguing. After the introductory page explaining you are exploring a sea of ash, we jump straight to rules for sailing this silt sea in Mork Borg. Luke writes about the various modes of transport available to the players, Mad Max like boats, and the various weapons and defences available to trick them out. The book came with a map and chits so you can play a wargame. Hells yeah!

Factions come next. There are several. Their bases are placed on the hex map of the region. Each faction is described briefly, with a goal, their current challenges, offerings and rituals. These are a sentence or two, and hint at how players may end up interacting them. None are presented in a way that they are explicitly in conflict with one another. The typical units that make up the faction are described, with stats for Mork Borg, along with the vessels each faction uses for travel. Between Luke’s writing and Johan’s art, we get a vivid picture of these groups without too much faffing about.

A bestiary follows. Everything is flavourful, starting with a small and vicious dog, the ash mink. Luke lets you know people are harvesting bodies for water, like Dune. Johan draws some cool witches.

The back half of this book are locations of varying sizes found in the ash sea. There are 22 places in all, starting with the headquarters of 5 of the 6 factions. The region is fairly large, most hexes aren’t described. As this is a sea, that makes sense. Ships move 1-3 hexes per days, so there will be a fair bit of multi-day travel to get from location to location. There are random encounter tables, but I think a GM would want to think about how they want to run the parts of the game that are sailing between locations.

The Bloodhunter Fortress has NPCs who can let the PCs know where to find various monsters. Perhaps the campaign becomes a monster hunter game for a while? The Urniversity will pay PCs to go map a region of the sea. Perhaps the its a game of exploration for a while. The Pyromancers of the Cold Hearth, home of the Burnt Offering faction, will reward players if they find the holy book secreted away within the hidden fortress of the Arsonist, the person who created the ash sea. The Necromancers of the same faction want that book as well. More adventure for the PCs. Locations can feel a bit disconnected from one another, but I found them cool all the same.

The first big dungeon detailed is the faction headquarters of the Cannibal Count. His mount-manse is detailed over 12 pages, with art and maps by Johan. Maps are repeated so you don’t need to flip pages when running, a nice touch. Room descriptions are short and punchy, as I like them. Luke informs the reader that unless the players are hostile encounters should be social, but these people are cannibals: there’s gonna be tension there. These are strange bureaucratic cannibals. Lots of departments and assistants to assistants, working despite their boss seemingly being long gone.

Hex 11 describes a shipwreck, a creature within may take a character hostage and demand the captain of the boat return. But where is the captain? I thought this might be an exercise for the reader. The GM will make something up, maybe some random NPC in one of the faction bases is the captain. Reading ahead, we learn he is a prisoner in Hex 18, The Grinding. So this is still an exercise, just not the one I thought: make note of where they are!

The book concludes with another big dungeon, which takes up 20 pages of the book. The “big boss”, the Arsonist, is found here. As with most everything in this book, there is nothing pushing the players here, though I imagine through the course of play they may find their own reasons.

I was reminded of a False Machine joint based solely on the amount of cannibalism in this book. It feels like every other group you meet eats people.

Tephrotic Nightmares is interesting object: the spine is exposed: you can see the stitched binding and it will lie perfectly flat. The other pages aren’t cut, you need to peel them apart as you read. Your first encounter with the book is a bit of an experience. The hardcover book is genuinely lovely, and if you can afford its price I would recommend it wholeheartedly over a boring PDF. Johan has done an incredible job with the art and graphic design—unsurprisingly.

It was interesting to read this book after reading His Majesty the Worm. In contrast to the exposition and support in HMtW, Tephrotic Nightmares really doesn’t hold your hand. Here are rules for sailing around, here are a bunch of weirdo factions, here are some monsters, here are some places. How you thread it all together is left up to you. Proper OSR nonsense! I really love books like this. A sandbox of stuff. The writing is strong. The art is great. It’s all very atmospheric. But is it too static? If there is criticism to be had, I suspect it will fall here. I think this sort of adventure is perfectly fine. The GM will figure out what’s up, along with the players, through play. From running adventures like this, stuff gets messy when the players get involved.

My friend moved to New York City for work. A weird time to head South, I suspect most people want to travel in the opposite direction. I’d rather he was still here, but there is one perk from his being away: I can mail books to him. On his last trip back he brought with him a copy of His Majesty the Worm (HMtW), by Josh McCrowell. HMtW is an OSR game designed for dungeon crawling. The expectation for the game is you’ll create a megadungeon that your players will explore over many sessions. Unlike most dungeon crawlers, it borrows very little from D&D. Grab a tarot deck, because this game doesn’t use any dice. Wild!

There is probably no world where His Majesty the Worm is someone’s first game, but the book does all the work of introducing itself to a reader new to RPGs all the same. A little later in the book Josh presents a player’s manifesto, which serves as advice to the players for how to approach the game. I love RPG books that approach teaching their game without making assumptions about the audience and their past experience and competency. The books has the games principles up front, setting expectations for the reader. I have lots of experience playing OSR games, but HMtW is quite different, so I believe these sorts of first principles introductions can still be broadly useful.

Character creation feels far heavier your typical OSR game, there is a bit more to do, and Josh encourages you work through the process during a Session 0.¹ As part of session 0 players will flesh out characters together, narrating snippets of their past to settle on scores for their character’s attributes, and fill out other parts of their character sheet. I kind of hate anything that feels like it’s adjacent to backstory, but at least this time you’re coming up with it together with your friends. I also find more involved character creation can put players at odds with the “your character can die at any time we will make a new quickly” ethos of OSR play. I think part of the social contract when it comes to killing player characters is that if it takes a long ass time to make a character it’s a little impolite to kill them. Josh does provide a new adventurer checklist for players to use to jump back into the game after a character dies, or if a new player joins. I haven’t actually tried making a character, so me imaging how fast or slow it might be is all you get.

Characters have Bonds tying them together, charged when acted upon, those charges spent for benefits in play. Bonds feed into the mechanics for camping. This is a part of Torchbearer that I thought was interesting, but I am not that big a fan of how Torchbearer actually works in play. It’s nice to see other games try and do something meaningful with this activity that feels like it should be a bigger part of play.

Moving past character creation we get to an explanation of the crawl phase of the game, where you go adventuring in dungeons. Josh does a great job of breaking down tropes for the unfamiliar. Another example of building something that’s broadly accessible. There are rules for social encounters, and far more involved rules for combat. There is lots going on with how combat works. It seems like bluffing would be a big part of the game since it’s card based, everyone has a random set of 4 to work with, some cards are played face down, etc. There is advice for playing online, but I suspect the game would be far more fun in person, with physical cards. (I suppose all RPGs are more fun in person.)

Shopping, the scourge of all RPGs, is handled in a nice way in HMTW. You pay for upkeep when you return from the underworld, deciding on an impoverished, common, or luxurious lifestyle. To buy new gear you select anything from gear lists that match each lifestyle, limited only by what you can carry. I love this idea, something easy to steal for other games.

HMtW is a very procedure heavy game. Play is structured into 4 phases: the City phase, the Crawl Phase, the Camp Phase, and the Challenge Phase. During the City phase you’ll make preparations for your dungeon crawling, deal with any events that may be taking place, and perform any downtime actions. The Crawl phase is your typical dungeon crawling session, moving through the dungeon in search of adventure. The Challenge phase is this games name for combat: you’ll fight monsters of the underworld. Finally the Camp phase is where you will rest and recuperate in the dungeon, bonding with your fellow adventurers.

The game’s structured play loop (city, crawl, camp, challenge) will likely feel familiar to those of you who have read Torchbearer. Of course, Torchbearer itself was modelling the play loop of old-school D&D, so there is some about of the snake eating its own tail here. Both camping and downtime in the city are given some mechanical heft uncommon in many OSR games. When I asked Josh if he was inspired by Torchbearer he said not really, he was far more inspired by OSR blogposts. My theory is that a lot of the OSR’s obsession with procedures around the time Brendan wrote his seminal post on the topic is all from people borrowing ideas from Torchbearer, but I have no real evidence to back any of this up.² There is perhaps a layer of distorted inspiration?

We get GM’ing advice at the midway point of this chonky book. Like Apocalypse World, time is spent articulating what the GM is even supposed to do, what doing a good job will look like. It’s funny this feels like an obvious section to include in an RPG, but it is one that is often glossed over. Josh covers most everything a GM will need to know to run the game effectively. It’s a well written GM section. There is practical advice for each phase of play. That’s what I like to see in these sorts of GM guides.

The book ends with some fantastic appendices. I really like the city creation rules and sample districts that are Appendix D of His Majesty the Worm. (Appendix C was Dungeon Denizens. Josh could have swapped those two: a real missed opportunity.) Each Tarot card details a district ready to be used. Another things you can steal for other games. The next appendix is advice on how to create a megadungeon: again, eminently stealable. The book concludes with some dungeon seeds and a sample dungeon to put everything you have learned along the way together. Everyone should include an adventure in their game.

It’s interesting to read a game that is trying to hit the same notes as other OSR dungeon crawling games, but that is coming at it from a totally different place. You can’t carry forward assumptions from other games when it comes to the rules, there is no d20 roll high to fall back on. That said, a carousing table is included so no one will question the game’s OSR bonafides. HMtW isn’t the sort of game I typically play nowadays. I often reach for games with almost no rules, and then struggle to run them all the same. This is a game I do want to run or play, though. It’s so unusual and different. It’s also clearly the option if you want to run a Delicious in the Dungeon game.