Warped Beyond Recognition
Warped Beyond Recognition is a 32-page adventure (and psionics supplement) for Mothership 1E, written, illustrated and laid out by Quadra, with editing by Fiona Maeve Geist. The module centres around investigating the research vessel RSV Fidanza which was lost following some particularly inhumane experiments on six teenage test subjects. The crew are mostly dead, the insane and in some cases now inhuman test subjects have extraordinary powers, and the Tannhäuser corporation wants their investment back. Spoilers follow.
To begin with, my bona fides: I've read this module cover to cover and run it for a group of 4 players. I enjoyed the experience as a Warden and my players loved it.
I'll not tease you by withholding my overall impression of it – I think this is the gold standard for Mothership modules. It aims to be three things: a possible campaign springboard, a horror adventure that embodies the holy trinity of Mothership adventures (Save, Solve, Survive – pick one) and to provide a useable psionics supplement for your poor, poor Mothership players. It nails all these goals and it does it with such polished flair that it's sickening.
The module presentation is very slick. The scarlet cover with the anguished, half melted face absolutely tells you what you are getting into. The information inside is extremely well organised. There's a detailed contents page and internal referencing is used throughout with page numbers and working hyperlinks in the pdf. Navigating this thing is a breeze. The text inside is all well laid out using a dual column format and excellent use of a palate of orange, grey and black. There are three detailed maps of the Command, Research and Habitation decks with strong visual representation of the space the players will explore. The ship itself is attractively presented. Each deck occupies a spread, with room descriptions arranged around its map and connecting lines identifying locations. When running it, I found the map imagery useful when informing my verbal descriptions and in understanding the complex vent systems (these are vital for 1 NPC - more on that later.) Elsewhere, the orange references pop, and the subject spreads gather portraits, statistics, behaviour and research logs into quickly digestible packages. Miriam’s illustration sprawling across her spread is particularly effective: you get a grasp of her absolute body horror schtick immediately.
Each of the 6 test subject NPCs is given a half page illustration and all of them make excellent props to show to the players – this art is provided as part of the digital support of the module, as well as maps, a soundtrack, handouts and even a mock ship terminal to display personnel files, animated maps and play sound files (did I mention the polished flair?)
But what about the meat of the module, the adventure itself? The abandoned research ship is familiar territory for Mothership players, but the six test subjects aboard give this adventure a unique identity. Each has developed powers through traumatic exposure to hyperspace without the benefit of cryo-sleep. Further, some have been mutilated (poor Miriam) to such a sadistic degree that it is noted that the Tannhäuser fitted the lead scientist with a morality inhibitor so that she'd be ruthless enough to finish the experiments. Corporate evil at its finest! The test subjects are a gruesome rogues gallery of body horror and cyberpunk grotesquery. Machinery, other people, severed limbs and the ship itself have become extensions of their bodies.
Miriam Rios is the most visually striking example. The researchers amputated her legs before testing her near prosthetic limbs. Now she moves through the ventilation shafts as a crawling a mass of artificial and stolen arms, sending individual limbs scuttling through the ship. She is a truly horrible thing for the players to encounter for the first time and dishes out fear saves and stress aplenty. But discovering what happened to her changes how the players think about her. She's a terrifying monster, but the researchers’ treatment of her makes her compelling, and like all the test subjects the genius of this module is that she can be reached with the right approach.
Each subject has a six-step Sanity and Behaviour table, an initial rating and an underlying driving goal. I loved this – that the antagonists were being driven by a similar stress mechanic to the players. The test subject goals are very focused. Miriam wants safety; Evander wants purpose; Sonia wants autonomy. Confrontation and violence can worsen their condition, while attempts to reassure them or assist in their goals can improve it. Warped Beyond Recognition telegraphs this to the players both in the way the subjects behave and in the information from the research logs they can discover. I thought this approach was clever and satisfying for a player - rewarding careful investigation and diplomacy. Following this approach provides the levers players need to weight encounters with the test subjects in their favour. Puzzle NPCs are a genius conceit. I wish more modules would do this.
For me as the Warden, the tracks were also excellent in making the test subjects feel dynamic when I ran them. The tracks aren't simple win conditions either. Not every test subject is harmless at the top of their track: Billy, the theatre enthusiast who puppets the brains of hapless marines into performing Shakespeare, still controls those he considers beneath him. Boosting Jonesy’s confidence can result in him imposing his own utopia. To me, this is nailing the Save/Solve/Survive dilemma – "solving" the test subject isn't necessarily going to lead to a happy ending, and that's a great horror game revelation too.
Other than the NPCs, the other key highlight for me was the escalating encounter procedure. You roll whenever the crew passes through a new doorway, and then add the number of doorways visited to the total. Early results include silence and ominous noises; but these soon escalate to telekinetic attacks, doors crushing ribcages and roaming disembodied limbs. The table reaches a crescendo result where the nearest test subject acts against the crew. It created a great horror movie cadence and really felt like tension was building to a big horror beat when I used it.
I do have the odd nit-pick. The cadence Warped Beyond Recognition recommends information reaches the players is too slow if you follow it. Each subject’s log tells you to roll for one entry per hour of study. The log entries are great – useful, informative and horrific – but an hour feels expensive aboard a vessel where one surviving scientist suffocates two hours after arrival. The logs also do not explicitly tell you to reroll repeated results. I decided to rule that an hour gave all the log results for a subject and allowed players to carry on exploring (the conceit being, whenever they rested, waited or weren't explicitly taking an action, they were reading). The adventure sings when the players have information to attempt solutions other than violence or when they understand more about the risks the test subjects pose.
For anyone running this for the first time, I would recommend reading the subjects carefully as you will need to connect the deck descriptions to the subject entries. The references help, but I would make careful note of the techopath Sonia’s awareness through cameras and Miriam’s movement through the vent systems. The different behavioural states matter too much to how the scenario plays overall to simply jump to them and read from the room keys alone.
I would also note that Jonesy in particular, introduces a much larger preparation demand than the other NPCs. Under sufficient distress, he can pull the crew into an imagined reality, for which the book suggests using another adventure in an entirely different setting. I didn't use this, but I prepped a few locations from Brad Kerr's excellent Dream Shrine in advance. It's a very cool power and potentially a memorable set piece but it provides no real support for this eventuality. A short example dream environment would make this ability much easier to use, especially during a one-shot. This is quibbling, however. A couple of locations from any Mothership pamphlet would be fine as an imagined reality.
Quibbles aside, the book provides great support for tying off the scenario, either as a one shot or a campaign, with plenty of advice on how to incorporate it with follow up plots and consequences or what the denouement of a one shot might be.
The final sections of the book explore one of the more gonzo outcomes of the adventure. The player characters can undergo the same process that created the subjects and the module provides a compact set of psionics rules to support this. Powers develop from environments and personalities (I love how it advises that patches and trinkets can inform this). Their use costs Stress, with the Warden and player negotiating the scale of an effect.
I do think these rules would also change the flavour and tone of a campaign considerably. Players would gain many more ways to manipulate situations, but would likely burn out quickly from Stress. Psionics require a lot of adjudication and collaborative creativity – it may not be every Warden's cup of tea.
A final highlight of the book is the back cover – a couple of d100 tables for searching rooms and bodies. A lot of Mothership zines have these, but these ones are hard to beat – Quadra has a great grasp of genre and Mothership's influences and it really shines through with these. My players found a lost ships cat, the BRAIN DRAIN suit patch, a tentacle porn bandanna and some stress reducing narcotic lipstick.
Warped Beyond Recognition delivers on all three of its professed goals. It's a great starter adventure and would be my go-to for beginning a Mothership campaign. The psionics package is great. A really sweet little bolt-on if you want brain blasts in your Mothership. Finally, above all, Warped Beyond Recognition gets it. It's a slick piece of horror that's full of the juicy tensions between save/solve/survive. The puzzle NPCs have the potential to be terrifying as all hell and utterly lethal. Solving them all doesn't necessarily mean you can achieve the mission goals or even survive and that's a great minefield to navigate.
You can find it at:
or on the: