Another Bug Hunt Review, Part 1: Greta Base
See the rest of the review and some of my prep here.
I've seen lots of reviews of Another Bug Hunt, some of them by people who've played it. Fewer by people who've played the whole thing, and none by the target audience: people who haven't run RPGs before.
Well, I had never run RPGs before, but now I've run Another Bug Hunt, both as a one-shot and a full adventure.
My history with RPGs
I’m a nerd in my thirties, so I’m in the weird spot of having played way more RPGs than gen-pop, but way way less than someone who is “into” RPGs. In the past fifteen years, I’ve played Pathfinder 1E, D&D 5E, Invisible Sun, Candela Obscura, and a handful of rules-light systems. All together, I had probably played around 30 sessions of RPGs, and never run any except the game I made for my (at the time) three-year-old last year.
I came across Mothership because I’d been kicking around an adventure idea for a few years and was trying to find a system that would fit. I watched the Quinns Quest review and bought the Core Set from a local store. Thank you Sword & Board for stocking cool games so that I will give you money!
Greta Base
I ran the first scenario once as a one-shot, before playing through the whole adventure with another group.
The first act is completely self-contained. There's stuff you can pull in from elsewhere, but it was a joy to prep: eat the book and then fill in any details you want to add. I didn't feel like there was extra work I had to do just to make it run, so I could focus on tweaking and adding stuff to make it my own.
Some considerations:
- If your party has been lucky with their load-outs (especially getting a laser cutter) they have a good chance to kill the bug, and there's no backup threat. This caught me off-guard in the one-shot. That said, the game didn't need more violence to stay tense.
- Both my parties considered either blowing up the bandolier of grenades, or the fuel in the garage. Because those are so predictable, I would’ve loved a WES (Warden Education System) blurb on making those rulings.
The illustration of the base and the mini-map gently contradict each other (where exactly are the ducts supposed to be in the picture?), so I made a few changes.
- More extensive ducts connecting the barracks, control room, and commissary, with an egg inside if I wanted to spring a newborn on the group.
- A retrofit after-market duct attaching the showers to the garage. This made my group super paranoid, which was great.
- Having the medbay and the freezer back onto each other, connected by a duct with roof access. I put a ladder on the east side of the base, with an AC box you could smash to get in. My players didn’t do that, but a carc did.
Backup Characters
Once you get to the Heron Terraforming Station in Scenario 2 there are excess NPCs to use as backup characters. I had a player take over Dr. Kawaguchi, because you’re probably going to be heavy on marines.
Back in Greta Base, you don’t have that option. The module does suggest having extra marines, but the module and the Warden’s Operations Manual didn’t make me feel confident running them.
Unless you’re okay with your friends sitting around dead, any Mothership session needs a strategy for backup characters. If I run Greta base again, I’ll have everyone roll a backup and run them as contractors. That’s an extra rules ask, but I think it’s a worthwhile upfront investment.
The Option of Running
I’ve had one out of nine players flee from the garage. With how small the base is and how aggressive the bug is, I think its hard for players to see running as anything other than the shortest-term solution.
The ideal outcome of the encounter is that the bug is injured, flees, and begins stalking the players. Unfortunately, my two groups just killed it.
I would try (in the most OSR-way) to weigh the situation and rulings towards a wound being the most likely outcome. It might be heavy handed, but treating both the fuel and the bandolier of grenades as the explosives in the equipment list (Body Save or take a wound) is probably the cleanest solution.
Let me run this again and again
The first act of the game is incredible. It feels like a repertoire piece: it’s living in my head and I would happily run this as a one-shot again and again.
Another Bug Hunt (2023). DG Chapman, Lukle Gearing, Alan Gearing, Tyler Kimball. Tuesday Knight Games.