The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 - After Action Report
This past weekend, I DM'ed The Haunting of Ypsilon 14, widely regarded as one of the best one-shots for Mothership. Not only that, but it is also often recommended as a good module to run if you're a newbie DM (like I am ^[1]), so suffice it to say I was pretty excited to run this one. There is a ton of material available for this module, so I exploited that and brought to our table a laptop with an interactive terminal, and manila folders with hidden agendas for everyone.
The hidden agendas were strongly inspired by this post on Reddit. In our session, they basically were:
- The android has received a firmware update to steal Dr. Giovanni's research.
- The scientist has received instructions to eliminate all of Dr. Giovanni's research.
- The marine has been tasked with finding the supposed union leader (Mike, who disappeared).
- The teamster is involved with drug smuggling and needs to find and eliminate the drugs in the base before they become evidence.
This was my first time doing hidden agendas and I learned a lot, as we'll see in the sessions below.
What happened?
- PCs arrive at the docking bay. No one is there to receive them. They struggle for a bit, banging on the door and such, until Sonya comes in with Kantaro and apologizes -- Mike was the one supposed to do the reception but he's missing. Kantaro starts loading the ship with ore.
- In the workspace, PCs see Rosa and Dana in a heated discussion. It appears Mike has been missing since last night, when he broke the shower and then went down to the tunnels to check something out.
- While Sonya, Dana and Rosa go to the lodgings to search for Mike, PCs interact with the terminal and learn a bunch of stuff. They meet Jerome, who is scared after hearing some strange noises in the bathroom.
- The Teamster is convinced that the drug is in the cargo area, so they go there, find Ashraf, and fake a story that the ore is toxic and that they must destroy it all.
- Scientist and android decide to check out Dr. Giovanni's ship, and the marine follows them. The teamster keeps trying to convince Ashraf to destroy the ore. Behind the screen, Morgan disappears.
- The android hacks into Dr. Giovanni's ship after succeeding a Hacking test and spending 10 minutes doing it. Inside, they find Dr. Giovanni, subdue him, and get into a discussion about what they should do: the marine wants to kill him, but the android prefers to retrieve him alive because of his knowledge. In the most heated point of the discussion, the marine tries to shoot Dr. Giovanni in the head at point-blank, but the android pulls the scientist from the way, getting some goo in their skin. Marine and android agree in a compromise and simply knock the doctor out. Meanwhile the scientist pockets everything they find.
- Teamster joins Dana in exploring some quarters and the bathrooms. While they find and fiddle with the boombox, Dana disappears in the bathroom. Teamster goes back to the workspace and convinces Ashraf to keep watch while they explore the area above the ceiling tiles. Teamster finds a pile of drugs and hears Ashraf screaming on the radio. When they come back to ground level, Ashraf is gone.
- The party rendezvous at the workspace. The elevator arrives, revealing Rie and Sonya, who appear to be the only souls in the station at this point. Everyone goes to check on Kantaro in the docking bay.
- Kantaro is sitting on the PC's ship cargo bay, coughing a lot and looking deeply sick. Rie (which I ruled is in love with him) starts to cry and runs over to his side. Marine and teamster try to stop her but fail their rolls. They then convince her to take Kantaro out of their ship and into the medbay. When lifting him, teamster gets some goo on her skin.
- Every player is in the workspace at this point, with Kantaro in the medbay convulsing and gurgling yellow goo. Marine follows Rie as she goes to her quarters to "fetch something", which turns out to be a reefer. Rie offers a smoke to the marine, and as he slaps it out of her hand, they both get in a fight which ends up with a knocked-out Rie.
- Sonya has a panic attack, and the teamster calms and convinces her for them all to leave the station immediately, which she agrees to.
- Sonya and the rest of the PCs carry a KO'd Rie to the ship, leaving Kantaro in the medbay. The ship sets sail.
- On the ship, the PCs find a scared Jerome in one of the bathrooms. The three Ypsilon 14 survivors hole up in the mess hall. Rie wakes up and tells Sonya about the altercation with the marine -- they start believing that the PCs had something to do with the disappearances.
- The teamster tries to open the cargo airlock to dump all of the loaded ore, thinking that a part of it may be infected. The android disapproves since it's company property, and remotely locks the controls without telling anyone. The teamster goes to the cargo area to open it manually. They get devoured by the monster. End of session.
What worked?
- Players loved the hidden agendas, they felt it helped differ their characters.
- They also loved the ambience material (hidden agenda handouts, the terminal interface, the OST I put on the background, etc).
- I'm always apprehensive about one-shots that become two- or three-shots, and this time, there was a hard limit imposed by one of the players (they had to go to a concert after the session). Thankfully, everything was concluded on time.
- Players had fun! Everyone went home asking to be invited to the next session, and that's all I can ask for.
What didn't work?
Hidden agendas did not work out that well! Even though the players liked it, they also complained that the agendas felt too disconnected with the mystery of the station, and in some cases, actually conflicted with what they wanted to do -- for example, the scientist wanted to solve the mystery of what was happening with the monster, but her hidden agenda actually told her to eliminate any evidence that the PCs found. I believe this could be fixed by making each hidden agenda a vector with a different origin but pointing in the same direction.
The most common complaint was that players felt they didn't solve even a single part of the mystery. They left the station not quite knowing anything about what was happening -- only that people were disappearing and that a malicious agent was afoot. They didn't listen to any of the cassette tapes (scientist destroyed the one by Giovanni) and didn't go down into the tunnels (no in-game reason to do so). I blame the hidden agendas and the initial motivation (just wait while ore is loaded) for doing a poor job of giving a good vector of action for the players, I will definitely change this if I run it again.
There are too many NPCs (9, to be exact), and I struggled with making them interesting and different from one another. I actually tripped over myself while DMing as I mistook two of them (Dana and Rosa). I know that the adventure is a pamphlet, but I'm not entirely convinced that this couldn't be better handled given the available space. Scenario 2 from Another Bug Hunt features even more NPCs, but their descriptions are much more helpful (and the fact that they have a wider spread of classes and factions).
There are some weird decisions in the module that I can't understand very well: for instance, the yellow goo turns PCs into a puddle of yellow goo, but it turned Dr. Giovanni into a zombie, and it simply made Mike disappear? Or was Mike eaten? If he was, why is his vaccsuit empty? When did his cassette tape find itself on one of the vents? I found it all very confusing.
Overall, I don't feel this module is a very good example of the Mothership mechanics? I don't know. Another Bug Hunt's Greta Base was absolutely great, because at every corner the PCs found something strange that deserved a Fear Save or something similar, and the fight with the carc guaranteed at least one Panic Check for every player. Here in Ypsilon 14, I felt there were less opportunities to put Fear Saves, since people simply disappear and the monster can't be seen or heard -- in other words, it's less Fear and more Unease. Thinking back, it's interesting how this largely mirrors the experience that Dwiz had with Mothership -- and not coincidentally, 2 out of the 3 games they ran were Ypsilon 14.
In conclusion
The session was good and people had fun! However, I don't think I liked the module very much, for the reasons pointed above. The main lesson I learned was that players like to solve mysteries and they need the motivation to point them towards that. I also learned that hidden agendas are cool but you need to be careful with them. On to the next one!
^[1]: This was my 6th time running an RPG, and my 3rd time running the system (I ran Another Bug Hunt scenarios 1 and 2 last month).