Another Bug Hunt Review, Part 2: Heron Terraforming Station
See the rest of the review and some of my prep here.
Scenario 2 has some high highs and some throw-you-in-the-deep-end stuff.
Shipbreaker’s Toolkit and the APC
It feels a little weird that in the absence of a description of the APC, the module doesn’t call out something like, “details on the APC are available in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, or feel free to make it up yourself.” Because the toolkit is inessential for running most adventures, and an APC isn’t a ship, it’s easy to miss that the APC is in there, even if you have it. I realized it was there during our one-shot, which is bad timing, but I was appreciative of not needing to improvise it.
Ride of the Valkyries
Scenario 2 opens with the suggestion of an encounter while your friends travel from Greta Base to the Heron Terraforming Station, with the explicit instruction to flesh it out as much or as little as you want.
This leans into play report territory, but I am getting to a point, I swear…
The situation I came up with is that there’s a bend in the path along the river, and just beyond the bend, bugs have downed trees, and dug hidden pits in the jungle. I had already decided that the jungle was majority bamboo, but I did some research on invasive trees that might be used for terraforming in thin soil. Taking elements from Black Locust and Honey Locust felt appropriate: black bark, long thorns, sparse leaves, and big pods. Alien-sounding, but purely terrestrial.
On the ride, the player in the turret spotted a glimpse of a carc in a tree. I used trait 73 from the random table, but that wasn’t rolled randomly. I decided to progressively ramp up the weirdness of traits. That paid off as players developed competing theories about them, and gradually had elements of those theories confirmed or (more often) contradicted.
The players decided that rather than ramming the trees, firing the APC’s mortar, or going off-road, two of them would get out and investigate, which is terrific horror movie logic. They got ambushed, one of their backup marines was dismembered and left comatose, before the carcs were drawn away by Valdez.
It is amazing that with around a hundred words the authors set up such a fertile but well-bounded prompt to get new Wardens to stretch their legs. Masterful, economical pedagogy.
Running NPCs
Heron Station’s NPCs are… daunting. You’re given more than enough information to do a good job with Valdez, Brookman, and especially Edem, but damn, running a situation where three NPCs are in the same spot and all trying to get you to go along with their competing plans is intense.
This was intimidating, and in my pursuit of guidance I came across a couple reviews of the module that called this out as a difficult spot to put a novice GM in, which was reassuring. The warden’s manual focuses on the roles of NPCs in an adventure, more than the front-line work of playing an NPC, so wasn’t much help. I will come back to the interaction between the warden’s guide and published modules in a later post, because I think that dynamic is interesting.
I mitigated the issue by having Valdez give her spiel to the players outside the base before you’ve met anyone else, but it still felt like a juggling act.
I liked having Sobol as the voice of god to answer questions about the base and technology. They’re enriched past being an info-dump by their suspicions about Hinton, which Valdez can dismiss as prejudice.
Edem’s secret is a great opportunity to stress-test the lack of social abilities, and frankly, it just works. It works for players to ask, “can I get a read on this?” and be told that she seems like she’s hiding something, and let them pick at it. I didn’t feel like it lost anything at all by not being hidden behind a roll.
I think I under-developed Brookman, but my friends decided they would go to the lab and then the tower, which feels like the default path a lot of groups will take, although I’m sure that my bias leaked in.
Hinton’s Whereabouts and the Logic Core
One bit of timeline-breaking is that if the players find the long-range scanner in Greta Base and then speak to Valdez in Heron Station, you get two tough-to-reconcile reports on Hinton’s location: he’s already up in the mountains, but he just went down to the reactor. Not impossible, but I thought it was more interesting to lean into the weirdness.
Meanwhile, what is there to stop you from calling down a dropship and just waiting for it to arrive without ever engaging with the later material?
My solution was:
- Hinton managed to either clone or surgically remove his logic core (yes, hand-wavey sci-fi), and it is in the mothership, which is what is being picked up by the scanner. He really did go down to the reactor. Sobol can speak to android technology, and that he doesn’t have an answer for how he could be in two places.
- When you restore comms, Maas is enthusiastic and then asks for the identification number off the logic core, which would require either physically having it or getting that information from Hinton. He does not respond in any way after requesting it.
- When you get to Hinton at the end of part 3, he has already deduced everything, and is more than happy to hand over his logic core, for his own nefarious reasons.
I was happy with how all of this played out. The downside was that spending time on this siphoned time away from other prep that I should have done, like writing evocative descriptions that I’m not good at improvising.
The Laboratory
The laboratory was pleasantly self-contained, but I made a mistake. The party was extremely cautious going in and engaging with Ziegler, and I let them get the jump on him and had him less far along in his infection, because I just didn’t think another fight with a carc would be fun in the moment. The issue was that it made the whole laboratory feel very minor. That was the wrong call, and the module doesn’t bear any blame for that.
The Dam and the Tower
Without getting into play-by-play, the dam and the tower went better than I could have expected. I’ve heard of prepping situations instead of props, and loading them up with potential energy, and this was an incredible demonstration of that power. The players’ actions, the complications, and the consequences flowed naturally, and ended up cinematic and exciting. I think it hinges on the attack ending with the death of the carc as a release valve, because otherwise the situation would be doomed. There’s lots I bet I can learn by studying this section, and this was the highlight of the whole adventure. The only snag was that the players who got into the control room didn’t understand that they could kill the carc, and I’m not sure how I could’ve communicated it better. One of the others was on the roof (the fourth was hiding in the storage room at the base of the tower with a broken collarbone after being knocked down when Brookman slipped on the ladder), and he did get it and eventually asked, “why aren’t you killing it?”
The Reactor
My friends did decide to go to the reactor after the tower. It felt awkward having them run into the wall (not a literal wall) of the flooded reactor, and I ended up just saying outright that they should stop trying because the only option would be to swim down the staircase, which would be extremely dangerous. Not the module’s fault, just my inexperience at running dead-ends. The cleanest option in retrospect is to move Franco from the hydroreactor to the top of the stairs.