Owe My Soul to the Company Store, out now on itch.io

 My ZQ project from this year is out in PDF - a 28 page Mothership social adventure in Isotelus Complex, a Jovian colony-in-progress.

Bug offices, forge rumors, assassinate officials, and wrangle competing factions under the shadow of Callisto as the Complex's first wave of colonists approaches, radical ideologies spread among the workers, provocateurs sabotage the colony for political gain, and a months-long takeover scheme finally comes to fruition. It contains:

• 16 major NPCs (and about half a dozen minor), split between baseline humans and "labor bodies" - licensed human minds downloaded into 11-foot-tall cyborg bugs. Each one with their own set of missions, goals, and rewards.
• A 72-room map of the Complex's surface half and orbital space elevator.
• 5 overarching factions, a 7-day timeline of the future, and a set of final moves the Complex's rival owners keep in reserve to throw both at a labor body revolt and each other.
• A whole lot of the color yellow.  

 

Mothership Month - Ghost Ship

(for the month, i'm going to throw together a couple short, unedited posts. no scope-crept regional hexcrawls, no 1d20 character classes, no nothing. just sitting in front of an intentionally-uncomfortable setup and hammering out some text)

Back when you could hold orbit over Mars, instead of getting shredded by Kessler or blinded by the ring-sun, back in the days of the intendencies, Colcom wanted to do something about the secessionists. We'd made a couple lucky hits on ground sites, on low-orbits, started a riot or two on the moons, and they decided they needed a show of force. 

So, they took this old destroyer, CCMS something-or-other, rechristened it the CCMS Olympus Mons - a threat, get it? We still own you. Loaded it up with high-altitude neutron bombs, so the infrastructure'd still be around for them to retake. Wanted to make sure we knew about it - staged some photos of the payload bay and then let them leak. Knew they wouldn't have to pull the trigger, just hang the sword over our heads. Didn't want to use them, anyway - things were tense enough between them and... what, they weren't the Leaden Conference yet, they were the... were they still flying that old banner of Fleet Kadzkadzat? 

Doesn't matter, just know that the LC, under whatever name, would've had a tantrum if their rivals made it rain hard neutrons over Noctis Labyrinthus. 

source

Of course, it didn't get that far - the Mons missed its braking burn, sailed right past us. Never closed its orbit. A few days later it popped, in clear view of everybody and God. All hands lost, reactor solidified. Drifted through the Jovians, but the LC wouldn't touch it - didn't want the implication that they did anything, so they just made a couple mocking press releases and painted any Colcom ship who tried to go after it with a targeting laser. 

By now it's dead-cold. Could be anywhere. Every once in a while some out-system tinpot tyrant says they picked it up, but they've always been bad fakes; hauler with a couple PD guns and a hold full of kinetic bombardment rods with "neutron bomb" stenciled on them, you get the idea. 

Colcom and the LC are in a god-forsaken court case about the thing - Colcom's trying to get them strung up on public-endangerment-via-loss-of-radioactive-materials, ignoring distress calls, et cetera. Never tried to blame them for the wreck, though - never said anything about enemy action. I'll choose to believe it was us, somehow. Engine sabotage and a field of magnetic limpets, or something. A bright spot in our history to look back on.

A Computer Can Never Be Held Accountable (Mothership Drones)

Mars is possessed by its namesake. First it bought its independence with blood, and now competing visions of the future prowl the algae fields bearing rifles and haloes - coteries of hovering drones used by Centralist regulars and Symmetrist militiamen alike. 

All but the most impoverished soldiers wear a halo-controller as part of their uniform, with six plug-sockets in a row on their chest like bullet holes. The halo turns the infantryman into a fireteam, and the infantryman's LoS laser-comms protect the halo from omnipresent electronic warfare. When tanks couldn't stray from their warehouses for fear of orbital strikes, the halo was there; when those orbital strike platforms were laid low by Kessler syndrome, the halo was there; and when you are dead, your halo will hover over you like a loyal dog.

PCs with a halo-controller can command one member of their halo every turn, without requiring an action.

WhaleOil2

 

One-Plug

Scout - a folding ornithopter with a night-vision camera and a laser designator. Probably worth more to you than the rest of your halo put together.

Seeker - a grenade with wings. Pathfinds effortlessly, driven by image-recognition neural nets and LIDAR rangefinding. 

• Fragmentation - 3d10 damage (fire/explosives), attacks as Combat 50. A packed cone of flechettes, able to go off right next to your head without scratching you. Shame about your hearing, though. 
• Flashbang - Body Save versus blindness and deafness. Each drone comes with two charges.
• Smoke - contains micro-flares and radio-reflective dust to throw off thermals and radar along with eyesight.

Up-ranged seekers have not been used for assassinations, nor have they been detonated among civilian populations, nor have they been filled with lab-grown smallpox.  

Interceptor - watches for incoming projectiles and then explodes into a tight grid of EFPs to set them off at a distance. When you or someone standing next to you would be hit by a seeker, recoilless rifle round, et cetera, expend an interceptor to simply not be.

Two-Plugs

Dazzler - a hovering countermeasure that blinks infrared light into enemy sensors. Roll 1d10 every round the dazzler fires - on a 1, the sensor is blinded permanently. Otherwise, it is blinded as long as the dazzler continues to fire on it.

Loitering Munition - circles above you like a vulture. Built to crack light armored vehicles - everyone in Close Range must make a Body Save or take a Wound (explosive). Can't hit anywhere that doesn't have line-of-sight to the sky, and is utterly undiscerning.

Engineer - a wheeled earthmoving machine small enough to wear like a backpack. Digs as well as a man with a shovel, and never tires.

Three-Plugs

Breacher - a legged drone with a lock-shattering captive bolt gun, manipulator arm, and shotgun (4d10, 1d10 at long range or greater). Hits 1(10), A7, C35, I15, grants Cover to anyone behind it.  

Spotter - a skittering, spidery drone with a cantilevered laser designator. Marks a target for your preferred side's artillery, burning itself out to shove through EW countermeasures. There is a delay of 1d10+3 minutes, then everything within a 1d10x10 meter radius of the designated point (or close enough - keep your distance) is destroyed utterly.

Sniper - a quadcopter (Hits 1(10), C35, I25) with an inbuilt railgun (4d10 anti-armor, 3-round rotating magazine, [-] at Close Range). Can and will fire through unarmored walls.

Isotelus Complex (Mothership? Eclipse Phase?)

Isotelus Complex is an in-progress bipartite colony on/over the Jovian moon Callisto, under the purview of the "Regional Authority" (RA), manager/holders of a variety of habitats in the area. Isotelus is largely paid for by a public/private partnership with the Yosef Industrial Concern, who offered startup capital in exchange for a substantial cut of the expected mining profits.

The Complex comprises a orbital habitat, a space elevator, and a groundside colony, currently in progress. The majority of the population lives on the orbital habitat and the surface colony. Simultaneously.

After a 6/5 vote by RA/determination (and months of discussion between RA/consensus and RA/dissent), it was decided that all working citizens of Isotelus would be uploaded and forked. Most work both in orbit (operating their baseline bodies for maintenance, shipping, loading, and administrative tasks) and groundside, loaded into chitinous, bear-sized labor forms.

These labor forms are built to survive the hostile conditions of the Callisto surface; defense against radiation, a hardened exoskeleton to maintain internal pressure, and a set of grown or implanted tools and communication devices. In optimal conditions, a labor form breathes exactly once every 29 hours.

Wide, low homes of labor forms line the northern edge of the planned colony, where construction efforts are at their peak. This subcommunity ("the Bucket", either in reference to its various craters or because "that's where you put crabs") also maintains a minor population of baselines, for supporting tasks - a variety of derogatory terms exist for this population among those in orbit.

Once a year, the orbital habitat doubles in population as the groundsiders are given their vacation hours. Office workers ride to parties on the back of themselves, play a variety of asymmetrical sports, and try not to think about what it means if your counterpart doesn't show up.

Crime, and the Other Thing

Nothing should go up or down the space elevator except for workers and parts for the surface. Of course, there is a booming trade in smuggling absolutely anything else - people creep up or down in boxes to meet their counterpart outside the allotted vacation, send (deeply confused) doctors, (barely helpful) medicine, and (stolen) organs down to provide illicit healthcare to labor bodies, hide illegal drugs in the walls of boxes, and all the other things you'd expect them to do.

Mismanagement of company-provided infrastructure, attempted escape from contracted work, assault, and all other crimes are handled not by the Regional Authority, but directly by ComSec (a franchise of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of the Yosef Industrial Concern), who are free from the upload requirements, and thus nearly all baseline and nearly all wandering the halls of the orbital station in their yellow raincoats.

They are explicitly, entirely, focused on the success of the Concern's investment, and nothing else.

The Ways This Will Go Wrong

Officially, the Regional Authority's 33-person administrative body is entirely in control of the Complex, ensuring measured, representative governance with quotaed sortition and adversarial decisionmaking. In practice, the Concern owns the police, owns the labor bodies, owns the materials used to build the station, and is starting to get nervous about exceeding the budget.

So, despite their required placement in administration, the place of the labor bodies on an inhabited Callisto is, to put it lightly, in flux. It is a common refrain in the literature of dissident groups that every single one of them is certain to have a captive bolt pistol pressed to the back of their shelled heads when the job is done.

That might not be true; it's inefficient, after all. It's more likely that the Concern will treat them like anyone else unemployed - a simple choice of "leave now, or sign another contract". The fact the labor forms couldn't fit on any ship out, don't know anyone who isn't working onboard Isotelus, and have only now paid off their fees for upload is not the Concern's problem. Sign, or leave.

The first wave of groundside colonists is coming soon. Positions from doctrinaire Marxism-Palladeism to leaving the surface purely for labor bodies are sprouting in orbit. The space elevator is hitting its maximum safe stress level with every launch. Six ComSec men spaced a dock worker. The impression contracts are ending soon and not a single person knows how the Concern plans to keep the station staffed.

And it's only going to get worse.

Edit 12/25/2024: Isotelus Complex has become a 28 page zine adventure for Mothership 1e.