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Generation 1: A Pound of Flesh (Mothership 1e)

Look at blog! This will be entirely unnecessary stuff about adventure and mystery games (RPGs, etc.). I'm starting off with a series of posts on setting and location generation in published books, modules, pamphlets, etc. 

The Basics

I just received physical copies of the long-awaited Mothership 1e boxed set. There was much wailing in the Kickstarter comments, but the end result is pretty handsome for all the delays. Among the offerings is an updated pamphlet of A Pound of Flesh by Sean McCoy, Donn Stroud, and Luke Gearing. It's a guide to the enormous (and complicated) space station Prospero's Dream. Tucked in the back of the text is a short section with prompts and tables for the creation of your own space station. Let's see what it came up with.

Gorgon's Cross

There are two options for your space station: Corespace or Rimspace. Presumably, you should pick which of them works better for your campaign. I generated one of each, the first being a Corespace station. A fill-in-the-blank prompt with a d10 table for each of the blanks produced this description:

Gorgon's Cross is a marine battle school orbiting a giant asteroid cluster. It's run by a reformed criminal outcast backed by the Principality of Christian XII. Docking costs 800cr and a cheap room is 126cr/night. There's a 5% chance the station is currently undergoing a food shortage, otherwise everything is fine and you can buy supplies and fuel as per normal, though at a hefty markup of 21%. They also buy asteroid ore at 56% off and local free-traders have a line on where to find asteroid mining machinery.

It was chance that made this such an asteroid-focused setting, but I thought that it all went together nicely. I'm immediately intrigued by this anachronistic-sounding Principality. 21% doesn't sound like much of a markup, but that's a quibble. I can see this shaping up as a functional basic starting location or waypoint.

Beyond the prompt, we also get generators for the station's shape (sphere), issue (no artificial gravity), and layout. The layout sets up simple point-crawls with 1-10 important locations, but the text urges the warden to ignore and/or supplement the particulars of the generation in favor of playability. I rolled two important locations based on this station's military character: a drop-tank hangar and a master computer. These wouldn't be the only locations, just the highlights.

Bridle-8

The results of the process for the Rimspace generator:

Out on the rim, near an uninhabitable desert planet, an abandoned derelict station (call-sign Bridle-8) spins. It's outwardly controlled by the "Opera" fleet of mercenary raiders, though is subtly undermined by violent return-earthers led by a charismatic revivalist. There's a 20% chance the station is dealing with a disaster, otherwise everything is fine and you can buy fuel as per normal, but they are currently only offering scrap metal for sale and there's a rumor going around that the station is in dire need of oxygen reserves. 

Right away I can see difficulties in running this location, almost entirely because of one roll: "abandoned derelict station." I'm excited to run a spooky space-crawl through a derelict, but this abandoned station is selling fuel and scrap metal and has competing factions! I could play this a few ways, mostly by shifting the conflicting pieces of the description in space, time, or both. For instance, perhaps it was abandoned until recently but the factions have moved in, or maybe the conflict between the factions came to a head in a disaster and the now-abandoned facility holds the mystery of its former inhabitants. I could also swap out or reroll for abandoned derelict station (a quick reroll gives me: "run-down factory"—an immediate improvement). 

The structure is more complex than Gorgon's Cross with 8 significant locations on the surface of an asteroid. The issue they face is poor water treatment facilities. The originals, based on the mercenaries' predominance here, were:

  1. Drop-tank hangar.
  2. Drop station.
  3. Weapon testing.
  4. Troopship carrier.
  5. Command center.
  6. Officer's quarters.
  7. Drop-tank hangar.
  8. Barracks.
If we shift it to a run-down factory, the locations would be:
  1. Corp. conference room.
  2. Geology lab.
  3. Dry dock.
  4. Sleeping pods.
  5. Metal refinery.
  6. Fighting ring.
  7. Air scrubber.
  8. Corp. conference room.
In both cases we have a repeat, though if variety is desired there's no reason to be beholden to that. I much prefer the second option here and would go that way. Seems like rare metals are mined on the desert planet below and a gritty forge hosts bored (and violent) laborers amongst which an earth cult recruits followers for a showdown with the mercenary regime.

Thoughts

This was a fast and evocative setting generation process. I think I'd be more comfortable running either of these stations than Prospero's Dream. I really liked the short paragraph format, despite the awkwardness I ran into with the Rimspace station. 

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