Mothership – Instruments of Darkness

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.

It was supposed to be a simple run. Drop supplies, pick up ore, ferry a Compliance Officer out to the Banquo Mining Facility. Standard work. Then something goes wrong at the docking bay, and suddenly you and your crew are tangled in a web of corporate malfeasance, spreading secrets and encroaching madness. Oh, and there’s also a Plague of Lizards threatening millions with starvation. Compliance Officer Aasha Kumari is here to find the source. Lucky you.

Instruments of Darkness is a 32-page half-size module for Mothership 1E by Charles Macdonald. The cosmic horror at the heart of the adventure is a deliberate homage to the Hellboy comics, and the illustrations are crafted to match. Inside you’ll find 12 fully illustrated NPCs, 8 optional Survive/Solve/Save events, optional integration with the Ship Builder’s Toolkit, and a d10 table of recurring visions called Murdered Sleep. There’s also a villain monologue. There is always a villain monologue.

Works equally well as a one-shot or as a chapter in an ongoing campaign, with end-of-adventure consequences tuned to both.