The Dissident Maze, Part 6: The Incident at Muto Station

It's been a while since the last entry in this series, and will likely be quite a while before the next entry in this series. The group I've been running these with wants to return to our prior Scum and Villainy game, which I'm excited for but means I will have to convince some other group of people to play a year's worth of one shots.

If anyone is curious, the modules that were next up in the hopper were Grace Dynamics, The Dream of Nia Wen, and The Tomb of the Last Tyrant.

I'll get through all of Dissident Whispers, by hell or high water!

Rather than try to find a new way to phrase this each time, I'm going to copy and paste the intro from the prior entry:

Some background on this whole thing: I'm attempting to play through every module in Dissident Whispers with the same players, and the same characters (or at least alternate universe versions of them). I don't really expect to actually accomplish this, but I think it'll be fun to see how far I can get. Dissident Whispers is a community created collection of one page RPG adventures to raise money for Black Lives Matter, I personally wrote a Troika! adventure, and a Mausritter adventure location for the project.

See Week 1 for more background on Dissident Whispers, as well as the setup for how I'm running a single party of adventurers through wildly different modules and systems. I will admit, now that we're 5 sessions in, my original framework of an interplanar maze, with soul points and such, has almost entirely been tossed by the wayside. As I very often do, I underestimated how much players will self motivate to explore modules and find their own fun, so I really didn't need to set up an elaborate system to encourage them.

Last week the players were beating the odds and exacting an improbable revenge against Flails Akimbo in MÖRK BORK. This week they're investigating what went wrong on a black market research station, in The Incident at Muto Station.

Disclaimer: I contributed to Dissident Whispers. I realized I didn't explicitly say that in this post, although I have in all the prior ones.

The Module

The Incident at Muto Station is a module for Mothership written by Brian Stauffer (website). The layout was done by Sean McCoy (the creator of Mothership himself), the spooky monster artwork is by David Hoskins, and editing by Matthew Getch, Jarrett Crader and Sam Zeigler.

The System

The system used was for Muto Station was (as designed) used Mothership RPG, created by Sean McCoy. I have a decent amount of experience with Mothership, I've run a bunch of one shots and one lengthier campaign with my players attempting to escape the Dead Planet.

The Characters

Seven of Nine, the naive Android.

Red Washburn, the opportunistic Teamster.

Tenzin Smith-Glaxo-Kline-Monsanto, a corporate Scientist with some regrets.

Play Report

I used the terminal and map screens created by the module's author (linked from his own play report)  to visual aids during this game.

I also tweaked the intro to the module to give the players a specific goal inside the station (beyond simply not dying).

Instead of the station being a mystery, the players were aware that it was a Xeno Poacher dropoff station, and (being xeno smugglers themselves) they'd done business with Muto Station in the past. In this case, they were hired to transport the head Xenobiologist Dr. Gallagher from Muto Station to Prospero's Dream, with maybe a little side smuggling gig from their contact.

Being very careful of their location, Muto Station sent encrypted jump coordinates, so the Crew wouldn't know where they were jumping to. Then, to leave, they had to get a second set encrypted jump coordinates since they didn't know where they were jumping from.

This meant that when they arrived, and picked up a distress beacon from a station that ostensibly runs dark, they knew they couldn't just turn around and leave. Random warp jumps tend to go badly.

After failing to raise anyone on the comms, they initially decided to try and enter through the Xeno Dropoff docking bay, rather than the standard one. They docked their ship (the Leaky Pete) at the Xeno Dropoff Bay, but found the airlock refused to cycle as long as their ship was docked. 

A halfhearted attempt to hack through the door's terminal failed, and after a discussion they decided that they probably shouldn't start bashing/cutting down doors until they knew for certain what was going on. So they undocked, flew the 100 or so feet to the other bay, and redocked.

They get through the proper airlock without issue and find a hallway filled with blood, smashed lights, bullet holes and hear a noise akin to flesh dragging on metal although it almost immediately disappears. Tenzin runs a scan on the blood, and finds it to be human. Very on edge, they move forward into the station and into the first room they find: the Mess Hall. Inside the tables and chairs are smashed and thrown about, while streaks of blood lead to and from various doors.

While Red is poking behind a pile of tables and chairs with a flashlight, the players suddenly hear the sounds of muffled voices from somewhere outside the room. Spooked, Red startles and knocks over the chairs making an enormous clattering noise, and by the time the racket stops the strange muffled voices are nowhere to be heard.

They leave the Mess Hall trying to find the source of the noise. Seeing nothing they head into the Crew Quarters. Seven of Nine and Tenzin start digging through Gallagher's quarters, while Red rapidly looks through the other rooms looking for a map of the station which he eventually finds in the maintenance man's room.

Tenzin finds a locked datapad in Gallagher's quarters, and with Seven of Nine's help is able to bypass the password revealing a set of notes about a xeno life form recently brought to the station. It seemed to be a mass of different creatures mashed together, with some sort of biomass connecting the brains. With this new information Tenzin resamples the blood and, knowing what to look for, finds that although it's human blood it contains nine different DNA patterns.

The three meet back up in the common area of the crew quarters, but are interrupted by Dr. Gallagher herself appearing in the doorway, begging them to run before screaming and disappearing from sight!

Seven of Nine has a minor breakdown and sprints after her, but upon turning the corner finds no trace of the Xenobiologist. The android doesn't stop sprinting and runs all the way to the Science Lab, where upon opening the door she sees something wriggling on the ground and immediately closes the door again. At this point the other two have caught up and together they manage to break into the Control Room despite not having the access key card.

Inside the Control Room the scientist manages to extract the station's location data, meaning they can actually warp out of this place! Seven of Nine notices someone had entered half of the self destruct sequence before being interrupted by something that left blood and brains on the keyboard, but just wipes the keys clean in order to hack the computers to transfer all funds the station had on hand to their ship. Red finds a surveillance video of Dr. Nedry carelessly handling the xeno life form mentioned in the notes, and the three watch as the video captures the xeno's leap into the doctor's head. On video Nedry then turns to attack a nearby scientist, before screams and gunfire erupt as the action moves off screen.

Thoroughly stressed, but with a way out, they exit the Control Room to make their way back to their ship.  Unfortunately Dr. Gallagher waiting for them at the end of a hallway. She alternates between begging them to save her and imploring them to run, but Seven of Nine is no longer having any of this and immediately shoots her with a rigging gun, pinning her to a wall. 

Tenzin walks down the hallway to her to point blank tranq her, and put her out of her pain and misery, but while doing so notices too late the thin tendril leading from the back of her skull around the corner of the hallway. Looking in that direction, Tenzin has time to see the Amalgam only a fraction of a second before it grabs him.

The Amalgam is a horrible conglomeration of the entire crew of Muto Station, melted and molded together with faces still visible and trying to communicate. With a tendril it keeps Dr. Gallagher separate, but controlled, acting as a lure like some sort of eldritch angler fish.

All three characters immediately panic. 

Tenzin completely loses his mind and welcomes the Amalgam as it begins to absorb him into the mass. Red panics and feels his heart being to beat erratically, and knows that if he takes any damage or fails any save before he gets medical attention his heart will stop (using a slightly altered panic table to avoid the common and instant "death by heart attack result). Seven of Nine's circuits begin to act erratically, and if any player fails a save nearby she will panic again.

It is at this point that I give Tenzin's player control of the Amalgam as his character is consumed.

Seven of Nine, realizing their only hope of escape lies in the set of coordinates sitting in Tenzin's pocket, dashes forward and manages to grab the datapad. She sprints past the Amalgam which tries to grab her and misses by inches.

GM's Note: If you've read other entries in this series, you'll know I often poke fun at how unreasonably lucky this group of players is. Well, what follows is the Amalgam's player (formally of Tenzin) losing a coin flip roll 6 times in a row. The one time a player's luck fails, it's when that player is working against the others. There is no hope against such monstrous fortune.

A chase ensues, as the Amalgam lurches after Seven of Nine who desperately sprints through the hallways to make it back to the ship.

Red, meanwhile, is running in the opposite direction with the plan to bust through the Science Lab and make his way to the Xeno Drop-Off Bay.

Willfully ignoring the wriggling tendril in the Science Lab, he uses his laser cutter to smash through the glass barrier and clambers through into the Clean room. Not stopping for anything, he runs through the Clean Room, then Specimen Storage, and into the Xeno Drop-Off Bay before realizing he doesn't have a space suit. Luckily (I do 50% luck rolls to see if something plausible falls in the player's favor) he finds a sealed hazmat suit, which he over-inflates with a tank of oxygen before yeeting himself into space.

Simultaneously Seven of Nine reaches the docking bay, and cycles through the airlock into the ship just ahead of the Amalgam (the Amalgam's player got one extra secret roll to try and sneak the parasite onto the ship, but sadly failed that as well).

Seven of Nine quickly undocks and heads out into space and, seeing Red floating towards the ship, through space tries to open the cargo doors to catch him. After a very close miss, Red vents the remainder of his oxygen tank to send himself tumbling into the Leaky Pete. Finally safe, and only missing one crew member, they enter the jump coordinates and leave Muto Station behind.

Unbeknownst to them, as they enter warp space the station's distress beacon turns back on, hoping to lure any future visitors.

Thoughts on the Module

First of all, this module was run by TheBardCommunityCollege/TheDnDMom and streamed on twitch, so if you want to see another run through of this check out the VOD on youtube. A very different crew and some different decisions made by the GM made for a pretty different experience, so it's interesting to see how flexible the module is.

My players and I all had a really good time in this module. A black site xeno smuggling outpost is an excellent location for things to go wrong in a sci fi universe, and lends itself really well to a sort of built in story. The premise of the location makes enough intrinsic sense that it's easy to fill in details, or invent new things as needed. An evocative setting is much preferred to one packed with specific details I need to remember while running.

The monster at the core of the module, the Amalgam, is a horrifying and unpleasant creature; the conglomeration of the crew who are still alive and conscious, but far beyond saving. The crew's good regard for their leader means Dr. Gallagher was "spared" absorption, but in return she has the probably more horrifying role of being the lure to bring more beings into the mass. It's technically possible for Dr. Gallagher to be freed from the Amalgam and rescued, but I honestly cannot imagine the band of Mothership characters who would be both inclined to make the attempt and capable of pulling it off. 

An upshot of all this horror is that the Amalgam is specifically said to have all the knowledge and skills of anyone it has subsumed, so this isn't some mindless monster. It knows the station inside and out, and can likely predict what the players are going to do next. A smart monster that can actually operate station controls, doors, and computers isn't something the players are likely to expect right off the bat.

The Amalgam, up until open conflict breaks out, is controlled by a behavior table not totally dissimilar to the one used for the Alpha Gaunt in the Screaming of the Alexis (from Dead Planet), but with one significant difference. This encounter table is rolled with a 1d5 + the number of rooms visited. That means the behavior will continue to escalate as the players spend more time in the station, eventually leading to the Amalgam being all but guaranteed to lay an ambush for the players and force a confrontation. This is a really cool way to keep the behavior somewhat random, but slowly crank up the dial until all hell breaks loose.

Muto Station lays down a reasonable path for the players to take (learning about the xeno, finding the video, getting a keycard, figuring out the self destruct sequence) but as evidenced by my table it's flexible enough for players to forge their own path. There are also a handful of small details I think are really fun even if they're not likely to make a big impact on your game, like how the items left in each crew member's bunk tell a tiny story about who they were.

There are a few places I think the module could use a little bit of work. First, unless your players are naturally inquisitive, it is left to the GM to find a good reason to force the players onto the station in the first place. This is by no means unique to Muto Station, and is something I often find to be a problem in the first party modules as well, but it's worth pointing out.

Second, the layout of the ship combined with the amalgam behavior sometimes requires some creative interpretation by the GM to make things make sense. Particularly where this comes up is when the Amalgam needs to move around, there's often no immediately obvious way for it to move from place to place without being immediately found by the players. An easy fix for this is to add ventilation shafts, and to time encounters such that the Amalgam shows up behind players to ensure movement makes sense, but it's still something the GM needs to keep in mind while running the system.

The layout is as excellent as you'd expect from Sean McCoy himself, and I can't finish this section without mentioning the bone chilling, almost psychedelic rendering of the Amalgam by David Hoskins prominently featured in the spread.

Thoughts on the System

I'd be very surprised if this blog post were anyone's first exposure to it so I won't give an overview of Mothership RPG, and instead I'll just give my nitpicky issues with the system. I've run a 10 session Dead Planet campaign, and a handful of one shots prior to Muto Station so the system was a known quantity to me going in. I really like Mothership and I keep running more games with it for a reason, so take my complaints with a grain of salt.

The stress system is functional at providing a building tension and pressure for the players, without dictating behavior from them until things get very bad. However, I dislike that panic rolls are 2d10 roll under, and not percentile like everything else in the game. Mothership is extremely straightforward and easy to teach, so having one system that works entirely unlike everything else is a speed bump that requires re-explaining almost every time it comes up.

Mothership stats feel largely arbitrary to me. Creatures don't feel appreciably different from one another based on stats, and looking at the laconic stat block doesn't give me a good feel for what a given monster is really capable of. This isn't a huge problem, since much of the time players will try as hard as possible to not interact with a monster's stats, and monster description carries the majority of the weight, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

I also both like, and dislike the hit/hp system. By design it prevents massive damage from immediately wiping out enemies, but that also runs directly counter to my intuition for how something should react to massive damage. It didn't come up in Muto Station at all (the players made no attempt to fight the Amalgam) but when running Dead Planet I often found myself letting a single attack burn away several hits, particularly when explosives were used against relatively small and soft targets. My preference would be for multiple hits to be reserved only for the beefiest, most durable creatures. I understand rulings over rules so I can run the game how I like, but I don't believe the system as currently implemented carries enough weight on its own (although, technically it's not currently in the rulebook, so who knows).

Mothership is still a fantastic system, and I don't think there's anything better around for this particular brand of sci fi horror roleplaying.

Final Thoughts

Muto Station is an excellent Mothership adventure with a great layout, a really cool escalating monster behavior table, and a monster that's horrifying on both practical and existential levels. It takes a bit of extra work from the GM to really make it sing, but as shown by TheDnDMom's playthrough it can serve as an excellent introduction to Mothership RPG.

As mentioned at the top, I'm unfortunately going to be putting the series on hold for a bit. The playgroup I was doing this with wants to pick up our older Scum and Villainy campaign, so until we switch it up from that or I find another group to keep this going this is on hiatus.

In the mean time, please go pick up the book and try out some of these modules yourself! Dissident Whispers is full of fantastic modules like this; no matter if you're looking for one shots, places to populate a hex crawl with, or just great ideas to pillage for your campaign you'll find it within these pages.