Random Ape Encounter

Thoughts and Experiences with Another Bug Hunt

Here we go, an inaugural blog post and my first module review/play report:

To be brief, Another Bug Hunt is the starting adventure of the much-acclaimed, very-in-the-zeitgeist sci-fi horror RPG Mothership.

I’ll be keeping my overall notes on the system short; I don’t have the language to describe the workings of a system very well, and I will assume anyone deep enough in RPG blog spaces to discover this little neophyte blog already has their opinions: Mothership is a wonderful exercise in minimalism, allowing the creativity of its excellent modules and community to thrive. The core principles GMs and players should follow are laid out excellently, but due to its reliance on those principles over hard-and-fast rules I could see a GM well-accustomed to traditional rules-heavy games really struggle here. Despite all my time furious reading blogs and systems, this was my first time really running an OSR-adjacent rules-light experience and I definitely struggled to walk the tightrope between impartiality, fairness, and just making sure everyone had a good time at the table. Enough about that, let’s get into the module.

First Impressions

Another Bug Hunt is a 4-part module, meant to be played in 4 brief (2-3 hour) sessions:

Part 1: Explore an abandoned research outpost to find out why their communications have seized, find many many dead bodies, and encounter a horrifying chest-bursting crab monster that could serve as either a final boss or a lingering threat, depending on how the players choose to explore.

Part 2: Proceed to a larger terraforming station under siege by these crabs (the players will likely have discovered their name, the carcinids, at this point), juggling the desires of three factions of survivors to either save some lost marines, re-establish communications, or recover data on the carcinids from a laboratory. Only two out of these three are possible before heavy flooding from the oncoming storm makes the final task impossible.

Part 3: Find the alien...wait for it...Mothership (1e designed by Sean McCoy)... to locate, neutralize, and retrieve a rogue android.

Part 4: Escape.

While the book lays out this ideal 4-part structure, it not only allows but encourages breaks in the module. The players can go right from the research outpost to the...wait for it...Mothership... skipping the terraforming station entirely. They can choose to forego exploring the...humor me one last time, please...Mothership...entirely and instead get the hell out ASAP, retaining (or even worsening, depending on how little they achieved prior) their debt with their employer, hell the module is even open to the players following carcinid footprints straight to the Mothership, skipping the first 2 parts of the module to begin with. This rocks. Another Bug Hunt is a module that not only teaches you how to run a good game of Mothership, but how to prepare one. It encourages flexibility and on-the-spot judgment, and makes it damn-near impossible to just follow a script and railroad the players from points A-B-C-D, providing all the tools needed to make any bizarre combination of actions into a satisfying adventure.

Play Report

There were five players in my group: a Teamster, Scientist, Marine, and two Androids. I’ll be distinguishing the two androids as the Research Android and Combat Android, based on the players’ skill investments and character backstories.

The party touches down on the outpost and immediately walks around to the garage entrance. I describe to them a piece of graffiti reading “COMMS OFF”, clearly written in blood. “No shit it’s off, that’s why we’re here,” they remark. I describe to them the sound of a carcinid-possessed marine on the inside of the garage attempting to dig his way out. Not sure what’s making the noise inside, they attempt to communicate to no avail. The party is unable to lift the barricaded door, so the Marine tries to chip away at the door with his axe. I decide that that likely wouldn’t work, but reward the player with a small opening in the garage door they could peer through to get a look at what’s inside; I must not have been clear enough as to what this opening looked like, as nobody chooses to look inside.

The party walks around to enter through the airlock (come to think of it, why does the garage not have an airlock then? Does that really matter if I only thought of that a month after running this part?), rolling fear saves and taking stress as they explore the carnage. They figure out what’s going on immediately when they see a headless corpse with a hollowed-out chest cavity. The Scientist finds an unidentified genetic pattern on a body ridden with paper-cuts. They’re paranoid, but not paranoid enough to disable their short-range comms when they decide to split up. I decide to be merciful and give them a Speed check to disable the comms before the effects of the carcinid’s reproductive Shriek can reach them, only then rolling a sanity save. The Marine is the only one to reach Stage 1 of the carcinid infection, but now everybody knows what’s up, and realizes that they were very clearly warned of this.

They shrug off whatever the hell that was with the short-range comms and proceed straight to the garage. They see the infected marine digging a hole to escape the garage, as well as the engineer hiding in the armored personnel carrier, clutching a grenade. Of course the carcinid bursts out of the infected marine, it’s a classic moment, something you feel like you’ve seen hundreds of thousands of times, but it’s still a thrill to see it happen in play. The Research Android decides to shoot at the engineer, hoping to prevent a carcinid from sprouting out of his neck. The damage roll was low, but enough to wake the engineer from his terrified trance. Everyone runs away from the carcinid as the engineer jumps onto the carcinid in a grisly explosion, the party pelted with shrapnel and chunks of carcinid hide. The carcinid is dead, but not before the party could hear its deadly shriek. Everyone is now at Stage 1, our marine at Stage 2.

The party turns the generator back on (I gave them coin-flip odds of it being destroyed in the explosion, it went in their favor) and listen to some Rock Lobster from the jukebox. They clear the entire research station, taking everything they can carry and absorbing all of the information. This makes me wonder if I should have run it differently, maybe just had the engineer throw the grenade, wound the carcinid and have it flee into the vents, as the tension was mostly absent throughout this section. The party enjoyed picking up all of the clues and piecing together the events of this outpost, but wouldn’t it have been better with a carcinid crawling through the vents, prowling the station, forcing them to hide wherever they could and weigh the potential cost of every room they visited?

Nevertheless, the party proceeded to Part 2 (i guess we doin past tense now). A swarm of carcinids in the jungle introduced them to Sgt. Valdez, the second-most obvious Alien expy in the campaign, who saved their hides from a swarm of carcinids and led them inside the terraforming station. They encountered Dr. Edem, who wanted to go with the party to retrieve their research from the lab, HM3 Brookman, who just wanted to get the hell out, and heard out Sgt. Valdez’s request to save her comrades in the reactor. They thought Dr. Edem was a slimy piece of shit, Brookman was a coward, and Sgt. Valdez was an idealistic idiot. They were about to leave when Dr. Edem pointed out there may be some hydrofluoric acid, which can melt right through a carcinid’s hide, in the laboratory.

The party snatched Dr. Edem’s security clearance and went by themselves to the lab. They encountered Dr. Ziegler, who was nearing the final stages of carcinid infection, and in one of the more disturbing moments of the campaign, explained to him that there was no cure, and the only way to stop his transformation was death. They handed him a pistol and he swiftly “cured” himself. More lore was uncovered, the hydrofluoric acid was retrieved.

After jury-rigging the Marine’s flame-thrower to shoot the hydrofluoric acid, the party swiftly rode out to Part 3. Taking route B, they futzed around with the airlock’s strange unlocking mechanism before deciding to cut off a chunk of the dead carcinid below the main thruster. This opened the door for them.

The party proceeded into the first hallway. I described a set of 8 carcinid statues, and here is where I made a big mistake. The module tells you to telegraph 4 carcinids in hiding, pretending to be statues. I did not do that enough. I warned them the statues were incredibly life-like, perfectly true-to-size, but that was the only clue I gave until it was too late. I should have described a few of them having a slightly different hue, more brown-ish than gray stone. Maybe some drops of slime or blood on the floor. Anything to make it so they could’ve known something was up before the carcinids were right in their face. Everybody failed their Shriek saves. All players were on Stage 2, the marine on Stage 3. I had a TPK on my hands. Thinking that was a hell of a lame way to end the adventure (we were about 40 minutes into our second long weekend session at this point), I took it easy on the party. They all woke from their trance, but their Marine was missing.

The players took the safe way through the route, and learned the ability of The Armory to turn players into carcinid mutants. The only problem was that I had taken it way too easy on the players at this point, and only the Combat Android had taken any damage. The Combat Android had a meager 2 armor points and a few carcinid chunks on them once making it through The Armory. The airlock puzzle was a good bit of fun, a good opportunity for me to re-read ahead and prepare for the next room while they worked out the solution together.

They made too much noise yelling at each other through the airlock doors, so I had the android Hinton meet them in the stairway, flanked by two carcinid guards. He explained his plan to hijack the mind of a carcinid noble and offered the party a procedure to allow them to maintain their consciousness as carcinids (a lie, of course). I littered this explanation with some obvious AI allegories in replacing fallible human workers with these passionless, hive-mind drones. The party attempted some negotiations, convincing him that the company wouldn’t like what he’s doing. At this point, I decided to break character a bit and tell the party their characters have picked up on the fact that Hinton is completely mad, and won’t listen or tell anything to anyone but the tip-top leadership of the company, since his superiors already seemed too hostile to the carcinids for his liking.

The Research Android managed to convince Hinton that he could get in contact with the company CEO; Hinton opened the comms and gave him 5 minutes to do so before losing patience and restraining them. He had his unwilling cohort Dr. Jensen watch over the android to make sure he did nothing suspicious. Of course, the android immediately knocked Dr. Jensen’s hat off to distract him and hacked the computer to wake the sleeping nobles within his chamber. The nobles let out their piercing, brain-rattling shrieks. Saves at disadvantage; all but our Scientist failed their saves and entered a catatonic state. The Marine was braindead. Utter chaos broke out as the Scientist lit a bomb they had jury-rigged prior to entering the ship, and cut the Cronenbergian umbilical cord that connected Hinton’s brainstem to the mind of the Noble (a bit of extra flair I added that I was happy to see enter play in such a dramatic fashion). The Scientist’s throat was cut open by a carcinid, and they rolled a death save just outside of the radius of the bomb. The bomb dealt 1 wound to everyone in the vicinity, broke the armor of the surrounding carcinids, killed Dr. Jensen, and lit our Teamster on fire. Our two Androids dragged the Scientists’ body out of the fray just in time to watch Hinton torn apart by angry carcinids.

Everyone healed up to full health in the Armory, as our surviving party of three mutants made it back to the terraforming station, helped fend off some carcinids, and made it out of the mothership. They reconvened with the marines, and had a very-very-zoomed out handful of combat rolls to see how well they assisted in fighting off the remaining carcinids before extraction. The Combat Android lost their arm fighting off carcinids, so that was cool. Their corporate agent, Maas, turned into a carcinid but was quickly gunned down by all of the surviving marines that evacuated with them. I skipped over the ship combat as I could really feel the energy dying down. The players decided to still rendezvous with the company to collect their payments despite their mutations, where I quickly made a flash-forward cut to the surviving party members touching down on the X-Class port of Prospero’s Dream as fugitives.

What Worked

What Didn’t Work

Conclusion

Another Bug Hunt fuckin’ rocks. An absolute joy to run, and if my players aren’t lying to me a joy to play as well. If I ever wanted to introduce another group to Mothership, there’s a damn good chance I’m starting here once again, with just a few small changes to polish up the experience.