Diminishing Returns (Mothership Module) Review

Diminishing Returns is a 16 page Mothership 0e adventure by Josh Dixon, made as a stretch goal for their ZQ2 project Black Pyramid - and the fact that this was an afterthought attached to a larger project is clear. DR presents an exciting premise for a couple sessions of action-oriented gameplay, but none of the tools needed to bring this premise to the table.

Premise

Namtar (or Nergal, the adventure disagrees) Station was overtaken by pirates 5 years ago - and is now torn apart by the death of the pirates' Captain Blackheart and the ensuing succession crisis. Except the captain isn't dead; in the depths of Namtar Station, a cloning machine has clicked on, and Blackheart returns to life, again and again. 

Structure

DR is around Namtar Station - one central 23-room floor with 4 single-room subfloors. However, the main floor is essentially empty, not keyed with traps, NPCs, or hostile pirates. For example, the five Labs simply say they contain lab equipment, and have a 1d6 table of the drugs being produced with this equipment.

Instead, a d20 table is meant to be rolled on for every room, declaring them "trapped with frag grenade" or containing "5 armed pirates" - pirate locations are also suggested in the Factions page at the end of the zine, but these are vague statements of territory (Billy Blood, one of the contenders for Captain, holds "the central labs, engineering, the armory, and the garden/Hydroponics") which are unmentioned in the map key for said rooms.

Random generation at this fine room-by-room detail, especially when done at the table (as DR recommends) makes the adventure almost incoherent. Why are specific rooms trapped? Where are the pirate forces? Your players can't intuit information (for example, in a generic D&D crawl you may suspect that an immense locked door that shoots deadly needles at you probably hides some pretty cool loot) because there is no connection between rooms and room features. All they can do is walk from room to room and take events as they come. You can't connect room concepts together, spread encounters between them, or really interact with the dungeon as a whole.  

the d20 table, not counting repeats, has 12 entries - one of which is "empty", and two of which are varying numbers of corpses

The subfloors essentially escape notice. One is the empty dock the players land in, and the last three form an epilogue to the adventure - one with an NPC who never leaves, doesn't do anything unless he's forced to at gunpoint, and is neutral in the faction conflict, one big fight with a security system and armed android as a finale, and the cloning chamber itself. They only connect to the body of the adventure through the Captain.

The War

DR may be based on the map of Namtar Station, but it isn't a dungeon crawl, per se - it has no interest in navigation, logistics, time, or other dungeoncrawling components. Instead, the map is used to manage a room-by-room gunfight between its paired factions.

However, the tools needed for this are absent. DR does not say how many pirates there are on the station. It provides stats for three varieties of pirate, identical except for extreme increases in numerical ability, but these statblocks are never mentioned in the random room contents/encounters. 

Running the fight over Namtar Station falls entirely to the GM. In my own sessions I went for an adversary roster to replace the encounter table, with teams of pirates moving through the station as the PCs did, fighting when they ended up running into the same room. In DR's case I chose this because of the adventure's focus on tactical combat - it makes it easier to handle bottlenecks, regrouping of enemy forces, flanking actions, and so on.

Organization

I know why DR is organized the way it is - it starts with the map of the first floor of Namtar Station, keys it, then maps and keys the sub-floors (including their security systems and two pages about cloning) before moving on to its NPCs and factions.

This seems, at first, like a reasonable way to organize the book, but in practice it has no relation to when parts of itself appear in play. Running the main floor of the Station requires, simultaneously, the room contents table on page three and the pirate factions information on page fourteen.

A floor-by-floor system would have been preferable: everything you need for the first floor, then the single-room subfloors. Space in the zine is also poorly prioritized - an entire page is spent on the contents of a vending machine and another page is spent on solely the cosmetic mutations suffered by Captain Blackheart as he continues to be cloned, as opposed to the gameplay-affecting mutations, which are shoved into the bottom-left corner of Blackheart's own page.

Conclusion

Running DR requires you to reorganize the zine, stock Namtar Station yourself, stat the NPCs, and find a way to handle the wider gunfight, at which point you have nothing left except for a map and a concept. Perhaps the concept interests you - but in all honesty you would be best served writing the adventure yourself.