I’ve always been interested in dipping my toes into the world of D&D. Since I was young, the thought of escaping into a completely fictional world of endless opportunities has sounded awesome.
At the same time, I’ve always been a weird dude. I love the creepier side of things. If it bleeds, screams, is eerie, or flat out weird, I’m probably into it. When I heard about the TTRPG Mothership, I was instantly intrigued. It’s basically right up my ally; it’s got weird monsters, spooky settings, and most importantly, according to many reviews of the RPG, is one of the best TTRPGs to run as a first time DM.
Like pretty much every other DM that starts out with Mothership, I subjected my friends to my very first game of Ypsilon-14.
I won’t lie, it was rough, and entirely my own fault.
The pamphlet for Ypsilon-14 lays things out very well. It keeps the game contained to just a few rooms, doesn’t allow for the players to escape the area very easily before they would be expected to escape per the ending guidelines, the mystery should be very obvious to the players, and the pamphlet basically tells the DM that they should make the players run away from the monster.
There’s a reason everybody recommends running Ypsilon-14 as their first game. You almost can’t go wrong.
Except when you don’t know what in the world you’re supposed to be doing as a DM, like me.
To spare the details, by characters were barely even one dimensional and in my stress from running a game for the first time, I missed a lot of DM rules that I should have been following. This made the experience for my group of friends just ok. They haven’t asked to play again lol.
I’ve since ran Ypsilon-14 2 more times, each with a different group with much greater success than that first time. The last time I played was at a family reunion, out in a forest, and we used Skittles as character markers. It was such a fun game; loose and fast.
This last weekend I ran another game of Mothership, but using the module So, You’ve Been Chump Dumped.
It was ok.
This is most likely due to my newbie-ness of DMing still, but I immediately noticed the difference in quality of Ypsilon-14 and this new module when prepping a few days beforehand. Ypsilon-14 does a great job at giving the DM ways to bring the environment into the story telling. It describes what is in each room, if there are things that make noise, if something smells, if something looks like it’s been left to rot. With So, You’ve Been Chump Dumped, each room is basically left up to interpretation except for what is immediately needed for the players. This isn’t bad, but with my low low low level of DMing, I struggled. This is absolutely a me issue and not something against the module itself.
Like the module describes, my players were on their way to a remote vacation colony, but wanted to save some money getting there, which led to the events of the module. They were dumped out in space and just-so-happen to be pulled into the research ship, the Blacklens.
When running this game, I didn’t even think about telling my players they could have seen this name on the side of the ship as they were pulled in, so I had to just tell them the name of the ship later in the session. Super rookie move on my part.
After they were pulled into the ship, they immediately split up. I struggle a bit with groups splitting up because I have a hard time keeping track of what’s happening where, and what to do with players as they sit there waiting their turn for. I’m sure there’s ways to handle this situation, I’ll just have to figure that out.
They found different members of the crew, talked to them, and complained that these crew members didn’t know very much. The module explicitly states these NPCs don’t know anything about the research that was happening on the ship, so I wasn’t sure what else to do in this situation other than to agree with my players.
They all continued to move through the ship, and I made sure to keep rolling to see if animal experiments would show up in the proceeding room, with no avail. The 20% chance for an animal to be in each room seems to be too low, at least for my tastes, especially when the animals are basically just minor roadblocks in the progression of the story. If they’re going to be there, and get an entire page of the module to describe these things, I’d expect to see them more often. Especially with their different death states, which were fun to have my players experience.
Eventually, my players made their way into the engine room, dispatched of the module specified animal, and decided to turn of the gravity to the ship and make their way back to the VIP escape vessels that were now being powered on. On their way back from the engine room, they inadvertently called for the Liquidation Team, which with a 1d10 roll, would be to the ship in more time than it would take for the pods to be ready to escape in. So the pressure to get off the ship was basically 0 since they could now just hand out in the pods, run down the clock, and escape the ship without exploring the whole thing (or even half of it), and well before the liquidation team arrived.
In my prep for this game I drew up a cabbage and the Morningstar on little cardboard stands for the players to see. I really wanted them to see these, so as they all waiting in their pods, I loosed the Morningstar and Cabbage, forcing them to interact with the players.
Another complaint I have with this module is the Morningstar, as far as I can tell, isn’t sentient at all. It’s just a gravity well that also happens to somehow meld animals together, but turn humans into human pâté. My players questioned how this was possible, but I just figured the animals were somehow different than the people.
With the cabbage and Morningstar now in the players vicinity, I created a binary system of cabbage and pink floating human pulsing goo. The players really loved this, and naturally tried to attack the system to get it to go away. With some crazy lucky rolls, they managed to move the Morningstar out of the way, and force the cabbage/Morningstar combo to become one, creating a supernova in the ship.
After these two went supernova, the players escaped in their pods, bringing along every NPC they met (they didn’t meet all of them, RIP), and watched as the liquidation team flew towards the Blacklens.
All in all, this was an ok module. There are absolutely things I will change if I run this one again, and there will be liberties I will take to cover some gaps in the module (like the chance for an animal to be in a room).
A link to the Module can be found here: https://atypicalfaux.itch.io/chump-dumped
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