Prep and Play Report: A Pound of Flesh – Into the Choke – Mothership RPG
I want to keep experimenting with the format to present these “play reports.” Originally, my play reports were simply to document what happened as a reference for future play, but increasingly I see them as a way to simply document the fun I had playing a game with my friends. I think it is easy to lose sight of why we do this and for running a game to start to feel like a chore - which it should not be. I find simply looking back and rereading these reports brings it back to that place of joy that happens in the moment of a game. A game session is truly a machine that cannot be understood until you turn it on. So, this time I want to try to capture that process of assembling the machine and seeing how it runs.
Part 0: The Theory…
To that end I’m starting right now – prepping for a game that will happen tonight. I’ve done a bit of prep already, enough that I could probably run a decent session now. I think… That’s always the catch, isn’t it? How much prep is enough and how much is too much? So here I want to document the prep and then be honest about the gaps or less useful bits later, after the game, when the machine has had a chance to run hot and then cool down.
I’m going into this with permission for myself to be a little unprepared, to improvise in play, maybe even to ask the guys to take a break for me to hash something out if we head in a new direction. In my mind this is really the only way to preserve player agency without going full over-prep. If we insist on always keeping the action moving, we need to have more prepped or gently steer the player into what we have prepped. This often isn’t too much of a problem, as players are often willing to engage with the adventure for tonight, but I don’t want them to feel like they must. They should be able to make a spontaneous decision without fearing they are putting the GM in a bad spot. The flip side is they may need to take five to let the GM order the presentation of the world to accommodate. I will be upfront about this. All my players are GMs too, so I’m not worried. They will get it.
Part 1: The Prep
So, what am I doing tonight? If you’ve read any of my previous play reports, you will know that the crew of the Ghost has successfully taken over a small warship and are on their way back to Prospero’s Dream with a possible location of the Stratemeyer hideout in the Tempest System. This was a blast of a session, and the PCs are getting powerful by possessing not just one, but two ships. This is great and doesn’t concern me much, there is plenty of nastiness to strain them and their growing resources. However this crew is seemingly orienting outward into the larger sandbox, I want a chance to dial things down into the local. I always intended to run a bit of an “anthology” or “ensemble” campaign (see Warden’s Operation Manual) and a make a game that runs a bit like an open table in that my regular players can switch between different crews, doing different stuff, in different parts of the map. I’ve done a “one-shot vignette” with Moonbase Blues when one player couldn’t make the game, and this was fun. That stuff happened in the campaign world and might come into play again. Then in the lead up to the game this week we had another scheduling conflict which ended up resolving that we can all make the game tonight but was tenuous enough I started thinking up another vignette session. This time really leaning into A Pound of Flesh.
The idea is to engage with Prospero’s Dream, not as a port or base for the larger campaign, but as Home. The players will be making local teens looking the become Droogs in the Novos crime syndicate and maybe impress Yandee along the way. This will all be happening while the crew of the Ghost is taking the two or three weeks of travel time from the outer system to get back to the station. I’m really looking forward to introducing more or the NPCs, agendas, and sinister events happening on the Dream. This seems like a great way to build that and let the main crew get on with big things out in The Black.
I told everyone to make new PCs and shared the cybermod and slickware rules with them. I want part of their motivation to be the debt they might be in from having themselves modded up. Initially I thought to put a 10kcr cap on that but later decided the more desperate the better and upped the cap to 250krc. Which is a lot but will make the PCs pretty capable and them to take more dangerous jobs.
For the actual prep, I already have to Miro board for the Dream built and just need to flesh out a new sector a bit with a smattering of establishments and a new contact in the Novos for the crew to interact with. I rolled up five establishments in the area of the “Chop Shop” as I decided to use the Novo/Yandee job of shaking down the Babushka for her monthly payment as the starting job. It pays next to nothing (500cr) but gets the crew a foot in the door and will open up a few avenues for continued jobs and play.
For a contact I just reviewed the “Denizens of the Dream” table for a likely candidate. I could have rolled too, but the perfect NPC is right there: Kleyman, a Novo Informant, who is also laying the groundwork for countering a possible Teamster strike and looking for scabs to continue to work. This is great since I had already read through the Chop Shop portion of the module and knew that Reidmar would likely be at the shop to conspire with the Babushka to get leverage on Yandee. These will tie together nicely and potentially motivate a player decision later.
Since the job to get payment from the Babushka is likely to go smoothly, she really doesn’t have a good reason to not try to pay up, I’ll need a couple possible ways for the session to escalate. One will come with the presence of Reidmar and what could be overheard, possibly leading to advancing the “Strike” Timeline, or to have the Babushka herself offer another job to the crew. I’ve selected running down rumors of Dr. Bancali in the Choke for information about the AMCD outbreak. The other crew has already found a husk in this area so the players will have a bit of metaknowledge that might pique their interest. This will pull that timeline a bit and get the new players embroiled in the politics of the Choke and Doptown – maybe deciding the become revolutionaries in the process. I just don’t know, but I think all that is enough to go on for tonight. Anything can happen, but I’ve got the bones to run a number of different ways. If I hit a snag, I’ll just ask for a break to roll up something on the awesome tables in this booklet and take it from there. Beyond the initial set up I really want to let the players decide where to go and play to find out what happens. All I think I will do at this point is just review the portions of the module that might come into play and add a couple bookmarks to be able to find things when I need them. It’s worth noting that every section of the module has its own set of random tables and events. I will lean on those and let the chaos flow…
Part 2: The Session
Jason, Jack and Matt showed up with new characters and surprising to me decided to essentially max out their cybermods and slickware either to the available budget of 250krc or to the max implants possible by their stats. I was concerned that this would make them a bit overpowered but all the cyber stuff in A Pound of Flesh is actually quite well balanced with some risk to use or other drawback. One kind of fun realization is that cybermods allow a much greater depth of character development and customization that really rounds out the original character classes. I already feel that through skill selection and such you can make just about any character, with a little imagination and not tying yourself too much to the archetypal key words. I did a quick review of their characters but basically left it up to them to recall their new augmented abilities when it mattered.
I started the game with the crew heading to the Clocktower opium den to meet their contact Kleyman. Dulcie (Jack) finds out what he is drinking from the bartender and brings over a fresh drink. Nice touch, that will predispose Kleyman to a good interaction if that comes into play. Kleyman lays out their “milk run” to pick up payment from the Babushka at the Chop Shop, and that she is behind 20krc this month. I missed an opportunity to drop the hint that Kleyman is also looking for scabs to break the impending teamster strike, but that will almost certainly come up again for another chance. The crew decides to go straight to the Chop Shop to collect.
I roll for a random encounter on the way and the result is “no encounter” so nothing of note happens.
When the characters get to the “Chop Shop” they are greeted by the holographic boy, Zhenya, who informs them the Babushka is busy meeting with another client in private. They are invited to wait in the next room and Dulcie uses their “tattletale” detachable listening bug. We decided it was an actual robotic insect that scuttles over to the door to listen. They overhear that Babushka is meeting with Reidmar the union rep for Teamster Local 32819L. The players know him, and the PCs probably know of him, so this is kind of a nice reveal and connection back to the other crew.
Of note, I am not worried about metaknowledge drifting between the various sessions and crews here. I actually want to flesh out the world and that is sort of the point of this whole thing, to give the players more information about what is happening on Prospero’s Dream without forcing that information through the single conduit of one party of PCs.
Anyway, the crew, through Dulcie’s bug hear that Reidmar is losing patience with Yandee for not taking more aggressive action to find the missing teamster crews. He thinks that he might be able to use his knowledge that Yandee is actually an android as leverage. Babushka cautions him against this. Reidmar leaves and the crew confronts Babushka about her payment to Yandee.
The Babushka admits she is a little short, only having 19kcr out the required payment of 20krc. She tells them that she has been spending more money to try to figure out what is going on with the ACMD disease that is afflicting more and more people. She also shows them those she has quarantined in one of her operating theaters. She asks if the crew will make up the difference, out of their share/payment for collecting. And she asks that the crew help her investigate ACMD. She has heard of a Dr. Bancali down in the Choke that may know more. If they will go down there and get information from him, she will absolve the debt for one of the more expensive cybermods they already have installed. Note, we decided that they were already familiar with Babushka and that she had installed at least some of their upgrades. She also has some good counterfeit passes that should get them back through security from the Choke and rebreathers and O2 tanks that she will provide (these things are in themselves a pretty good payment and worth more than the 500cr each they were getting for the shakedown job).
The crew head to the central section of the station and the entrance to the Choke. Along the way they find three beggars coughing and apparently suffering from ACMD. The outbreak appears the be getting worse. They are careful to keep their distance.
At the entrance to the Choke they meet Col. Antonio, who leads the Tempest Co. detail that guards the entrance. They see the bunkers used to cover the elevator entrance and poorly cleaned up remnants of the people that have to tried to escape the Choke in the past. He advises them to cover up their valuable O2 and mask before they go down. The crew uses some long coats and scarves to conceal their stuff and start the long ride down to Doptown.
In the “auction” area of Doptown they witness a patrol of armored Tempest troopers murder a woman desperate enough to try to steal an O2 tank from them, and one trooper severely beats a man who witnessed it – just to make the point. The crew does their best to not get involved and move along. They know they need to get down the “falls” a 20-story cascade of toxic slop to get down into the sink, or the lower parts of the Choke.
They move along to the “lottery” where the find Imogen Kane distributing scavenged O2 tanks. They notice that Imogen and her assistants all have a tattoo on their forearms of a circled “A” superimposed over a set of diseased lungs. She will let them use her gear and climbing route to get down the falls if they will agree to help her infiltrate some of her people through “Caliban’s heart” into the Ice Box to be uploaded into clean sleeves. The crew is unclear just what this might entail but agree for the time being to get the assist down the falls. Imogen also gives them directions to find Dr. Bancali’s hidden clinic once they get to the bottom.
They are able to get down with no issue however their exposure to potential ACMD particles is increasing. At the bottom in the near total darkness, they are surprised by a Chokespawn that emerges from the pooling muck at the bottom of the falls. This is a randomly generated horror that I created on the fly. The result was a human hybrid creature with tentacle-like arms and legs, dragging a huge egg sack behind it. Here we all realized that Dulcie doesn’t really have a weapon beyond her cybernetic fang implants. Still the crew is able to kill the creature in a couple rounds which causes its egg sack to burst, releasing eight baby sized versions of the thing. The crew runs for it and Utah tosses a grenade that kills most of them. One does make it through and leaps at Dulcie, forcing her to bite it to kill it. Everyone makes body saves against ACMD infection and Dulcie fails, getting disadvantage on all future body saves.
The crew locates the culvert leading the Bancali’s clinic, but just as they are about the enter it, they hear a strange sound behind them in the ruined city of the Sink. In the dim light they are able to discern the outline of a 10-story tall humanoid figure searching the streets for something. It doesn’t notice them, and they are able to slip into the piping behind the falls.
They find Bancali furiously working to install a set of cybernetic gills on another person with the same tattoo they saw earlier. He admits that he doesn’t know what is causing the ACMD outbreak but has been collecting data on patients. He hands it over and offers to install gills on the characters. At this point it would push them into overclock territory, but Dulcie goes ahead and agrees. Now overclocked to level one she will have her minimum stress increased to three rather than two. Not a bad trade at this point to be able to breathe in the Choke without assistance. It also frees a mostly full tank for the other PCs.
We stopped the session here for the night and will likely continue their explorations of the Choke the next time we get together.
Part 3: After Action Report
All in all, I felt the session went very smoothly. I think part of this was the players being accommodating to follow the pretty obvious breadcrumbs, so not sure if this was a session that I would put up as a great example of player agency. If they had gone a different direction though I think I could have easily adjusted based on how nice this module is to use in play.
My very minimal prep proved more than adequate though there were a couple things that caught me a bit off guard. For instance, I hadn’t really thought through why the Babushka was behind on payments, but that was pretty easy to infer from the other clues to I ran with expenses to help ACMD victims. Also, I missed that Imogen would be present in the lottery and had not really accounted for that part of the mission opening up. It was actually great since I think that hook grabbed the players more than just collecting the data and heading back up to cash in with the Babushka. The Wireman giant was another possibility I missed but also a cool and really weird encounter.
The fact they will likely head to Caliban’s Heart in the next session will be great as it advances some of the more interesting clocks and honestly forces me to deal with these new and worsening situations. I have been slow rolling the timeline clocks a bit in the campaign for fear of just overwhelming the players, and myself, with too many shit situations. However, I think this will work great as now there is effectively two parties to deal with it. Also, it opens up some cool synergies as each crew will start to the see the fallout from the other’s activities.
When the crew of the Ghost gets back in a week or two of game time, they could find a very different Prospero’s Dream than the one they left!
